Post by SPL on Nov 7, 2014 16:36:01 GMT -6
I thought I would put together a little article on my first article my first impressions and thoughts of playing fast break in this league.
First off, sim style leagues are something I am used to, in the past I have played Mogul Baseball and Out of the park baseball. As well as college football through Bowl Bound college football. The college football game was made by the same developer as this game. This is my first try at a basketball on-line league.
The first major change for me was not having a file to work through or the game to plug the file into. With the other games, you needed the game, the admin would release the file, you would plug the file into the game and than you would look at the results of the sim. From there you would make the changes to your lineup and each game had a different way that you would be able to release a team specific file. You would upload it to the website and the admin would take your file and plug it into the game. So the simplicity of this along with the ease of not having to own the game and just observe the results and numbers are nice.
At first glance, look at prospects is very straight to the point and numbers wise there is not a lot of information to take into account. Mogul Baseball I have played consistently over the past 8 years on-line in leagues. In that game you have different means of being able to obtain information to make a decision. You have to utilize a lot of projection of the path you think a player will increase his ratings. For example, you are giving a number for a player between 0 and 100 for his current rating. Than you are given another number that is his projected Peak. So you can look at a prospect that is a 68 overall rated player with a peak of 90 and know that he has a possible upside of an increase of 32 in his rating. Not a guarantee he will hit that but it is giving you an idea of what his projected talent could be. Which in my eyes is comparable to the potential grade of the player. Obviously the better the grade, better the chance he is someone that performs. Next thing we looked at with prospects are the individual categories along with going through the stats of his college or high school. This is where in mogul, you get different opinions and people that follow different stats. There are people that strictly follow the category ratings. As I said before, a player will have a rating overall and that rating overall is based off of his skill ratings. For a hitter you have contact, power, speed, eye, health, fielding/handling, range and arm strength. Everyone looks for something different with players based off of their positions for their preference (power hitting 1B and 3B, Speedy CF, etc), then there is also a sub section that takes that provides more detailed information and gives ratings on vs right/left contact and power and other situational stuff. Pretty similar to this how this game works with the grade system, the big difference is in this game, you just see the final grade and is much more general in terms of identifying the strength or weakness of a prospect. About the biggest thing I would like to see when preparing for the draft is I would like to know college stats. In Mogul I use that to spot an outlier. Take for example that I see a high number in a eye, that could be inflating his overall and his lower contact number might mean he is a low strikeout guy but not a high on base guy. When I started to explore the draft, I was given his grades, height, weight and position. Taking that information as a final decision just did not give the information that I would hope for in making a decision.
Free agency I found to be easier because I was able to look at the ratings with past statistics of the player to determine the quality of the player. Also a big thanks to Odin in this phase for assuring me that I was on the right track. Just the ease of having more information helped identify targets and players to go after in this phase.
The next challenge going further in this league is identifying the proper value on players. It seams that draft picks are a high commodity but obviously the value is in teams that are going to be in the lottery. Little by little, I hope to get it.
