Toward A Uniform (Quantitative) Worldwide Rating System: A Plea To The Community

[mrliioadin]

Toward a uniform (quantitative) worldwide rating system: A plea to the community to develop standards​

At present, player ability ratings are highly subjective and highly variable. Each individual creator selects their preferred values while denigrating all other's ratings. These ratings are heavily painted by their own biases and preferences. But, the process of assigning a value to a player is and should be as statistical problem. I want to outline a possible statistical approach, define some of the problems with this approach, clarify methods for evaluating the effectiveness of a rating system, and encourage disagreement about specific facets of the approach. Much of my professional training is in applied statistical techniques for evaluating performance and testing hypotheses about behavioral health. I hope to apply some of this in the current endeavor. That is not an argument from authority, however. If you have specific knowledge or even a hunch that there may be a problem with a given decision or approach, voice it. Even if we ultimately disagree, it is better to explore alternatives than to assume they are incorrect at the onset. I'm not a mathematician. If you spot something wrong with the math. Point it out and propose a fix.

What would a good rating system do?

You cannot expect a good approach to accurately identify all players, nor indeed all attributes for a specific player. A statistical approach is a heuristic. It is not a gospel. That means that you must expect good statistical approaches to be wrong in isolated situations. They may even be wrong a lot. The point is for the systems to be right more often than they are wrong and to be close enough to believable values for most players that fixing the other values doesn't take the community much time.

A good approach will develop a guide that roughly works for most players in the world using as little information as possible (occam's razor). The values which it derives should be mostly believable within a margin of error. If we're talking about less than about 5 Overall points, I think we're splitting hairs.

A good approach needs to be pliable. That means that others can make subtle changes and test the impact of those changes quantitatively and subjectively.

A good approach should mirror reality to an extent. But, do not be fooled into believing that it will be perfect.

A good approach will prioritize data that is available for most of the world's teams, leagues, and national teams rather than opting for data available only for the elite clubs.

What is a valid way to critique a good rating system?

It is not valid to pick a single player or a set of single players and ridicule the system for not accurately predicting their breakout performance. For instance, the system I will propose would have undervalued a player like Joevin Jones by quite a lot. It also would value someone like Harry Kane very little in a relative sense. These individual's are exceptions. We talk about them and they stand out in our mind because they are so unique. A good system may accurately predict most players in a given league, but it may miss a few hidden gems.

Most of the professional systems have this problem. It is the purview of many scouting departments for professional clubs and independent firms to predict gems in an otherwise average pool. We can't expect to be better at this than they are. And, they miss often.

A statistical rating system will have parameters and sets of decisions. A parameter is like a variable (often entered into an equation) whose value one hopes to either set or estimate. If a parameter is entered into the system, it is valid to critique it's inclusion or estimated value. It is also valid to critique the behavior of that parameter. For instance, say that a we estimate a population mean is x. If you find that when we apply x to a team in the game they tend to dramatically and consistently over-perform, we need to reevaluate that parameter estimate. Perhaps our estimate for x is too high. Perhaps that parameter shouldn't be included in the way we include it. Perhaps it should be moderated (a multiplicative relationship) by another parameter.

Decisions should also be critiqued. Most statistical systems have arbitrary or biased decisions built into them. This one is no different. An eventual goal is to reduce those or at least reduce the impact of them. If a decision is made and is found to have little basis or is dramatically and consistently impacting the behavior of certain teams and/or players, that decision should be criticized and alternatives should be explored.

The take home message for critiquing a statistical system is that your gut matters, but evidence matters more. Instead of stating your opinion that a given team, league or player is overrated or underrated, run a simulation in-game and test whether it supports your position.

Also remember that this is a world-wide system, not an elite western european system. I expect it to be off when it comes to some of the elite leagues and players. But these have been extensively scouted by many football experts. The values are at least fairly representative of most of the community's beliefs about a player's value. Extensive scouting can trump mathematical heuristics. This is a system for the teams, leagues and players that EA didn't include (though it may work well for some of the one's that it did include).

A baseline proposal​

This is a system I have been developing and feel comfortable releasing with the caveat that it is not perfect, is not finished, and is deserving of specific critiques and readjustments. When critiquing, be specific about your concerns, provide evidence, discuss mathematical alternatives.

The overall approach

In previous iterations I attempted to base league ratings on performance in intercontinental club competitions. A good system needs to find some common way of measuring performance relative to all other countries. The problem, however, is that very few matches are played in these competitions and fewer matches means greater uncertainty. When using this approach, leagues and teams which are well thought of globally and which consistently produce players which perform well on the international level, would be so lowly rated that a massive disagreement occurred when trying to apply these players to national teams. One would expect that the best domestic players from a national team should be filling out a national team roster. The best foreign players picked up by better foreign leagues would usually constitute most of the starters and best players on a national team roster. The wide disagreement was just unacceptable.

What uniform measure can be used as a global basis for comparison?

Instead of basing comparisons on international cup competitions, I instead base them on Elo Rankings of National Teams. Every team is rated by the elo system. It is better accepted than the FIFA system. I doubt it is as good as the fivethirtyeight system, but they don't publish their full list. It's the best we have. That does not mean that it is perfect or even ideal. It's just the best we have.

Levels of analysis

The process I use drills down to a player value for a specific player in a club from a league in a country with a national team of a given Elo rank. That means the levels of analysis proceed as follows:

National Team Best Player (assuming no significant outliers or foreign players). If foreign players are in the national team, their value is either estimated by that league's parameter estimates or by EA's scouts/process.

League best player (assuming no significant outliers)

Club team best player (assuming no significant outliers)

individual overall value estimate (assuming he/she is not an outlier).

National Team Best Player

When estimating the national team best player, the following parameters are used:

let y-hat will denote the outcome value for the best player on the national team (assuming they aren't a superstar that has been independently professionally scouted and shown to be an outlier... e.g., Messi, Ronaldo).

x = the nation's Elo ranking
a = first polynomial term
f = second polynomial term
g = third polynomial term
b = Polynomial y-intercept

I use a polynomial to describe national team best player abilities. As with most equations, it is meant to describe most players, not outliers. When a player is already in the FIFA game, I defer to EA trusting that they scouted or have a larger more elaborate system. I could be wrong about that.

The parameter values in this equation can and should be tested and critiqued (but you should suggest an alternative value or equation instead of only criticizing).

let:

a=0.000005
f=0.0011
g=0.3343

y-hat = (a*x^3)-(f*x^2)-(g*x)+b
y-hat = (0.000005*x^3)-(0.0011*x^2)-(0.3343*x)+83

League best player

Now, let's assume that the best domestic player is the best domestic player on the national team (not a big leap). Again, ignoring foreign players, let the value obtained above for y-hat also represent the best player in a domestic league.

y-hat = the best player in a league = international best domestic player

Let us also suggest that soccer talent within a country can be understood via a normal distribution. Apply this normal distribution to the entire population, not just professionals or professionals in the first division. Now, let us say that the best player from a given league is approximately q standard deviations above the mean.

Use q to represent the exact number of standard deviations above the mean a best player is.

Therefore y-hat should also equal q*σ where:

σ = standard deviation of the population of soccer players in a given country
q = The standard deviations above the mean of best player in a league.
μ = population mean. Can be attained by taking (y-hat)-q*σ

In my system I assume (all assumptions can be challenged):
σ = 5
q = 3

Estimating best players on other teams

For a given league select the largest number of points available in the league table for a specific evaluation period. Call this t. Remember that the fewer the number of observations, the more uncertain your estimates will be. If the team only played 6 matches, there is a high degree of uncertainty about their relative ability. If they have played 46 matches, you can better estimate their relative ability.

t = highest number of points attained in league table
u = a specific team's number of points attained in league table during the same evaluation period.
v-hat = a given team's best player's z-score

v-hat = q-((t-u)*.01)

I have played with alternative calculations for v-hat such as using a log of the (t-u) term, but I am concerned that the drop off in talent is far too steep from the best team to the next few. It gives a huge advantage for the team at the top of the table. You can see an example of what I mean in the TT Pro League and Jamaican Red Stripe Leagues that I released (v0.1).

EDIT--- The calculation for v-hat is proving especially difficult. When using a logarithmic relationship with (t-u), there are very few top notch players in the league. Maybe that is okay, but it felt like there were perhaps too few (Subjective). Using the calculation above (and included in the released files, I think there is almost no separation between the best teams in the league and the worst. The old calculation was:

v-hat = 3-(log((t+1)-u)). I think I may revert to that calculation.

Getting an individual player's rating

The final step is to attain a value for an individual player. To do this, put the players in order of best to worst (at least as far as you can tell based on the data you have available). You may not know exactly which player is 7th versus 8th for example, but, you should be able to get enough information to take an educated guess.

r = player rank in squad.
z = z-score for player in population
o-hat = estimated Overall value for the player

z = (v-hat)-(log(r))

I tried some other formula's for z but each had fundamental flaws. One thing to avoid here is using another arbitrarily selected constant. We want to minimize how many constants we're adding.


o-hat = z*σ+μ

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So there is a preliminary system for the community to play with. It is statistical. It is uniform. And I have included several specific points where the system can be modified and debated. I encourage using simulations in game to drive your decisions about modifications to different parameters. Feel free to discuss, but make sure this is a positive experience for all.

Goals moving forward should be fewer arbitrarily selected values and more calculated values as well as fewer predictors if possible. Also, I haven't figured out a quantitative way to drop down to second division teams, yet. I'm not sure if they should simply start at a z-score of something like 10% above the lowest in the table above. This is another good point for the community to discuss.

Do not try to chase outliers. It is a waste of our time. No one has been effective at identifying extreme outliers.

Remember, nothing is perfect. We're not aiming for perfect. We're aiming for a decent standardized heuristic. Once this system spits out values for every player on the planet, you can change the 5-10 values you want to change by hand.

Here is a worksheet which you can use to calculate one player (first sheet) or an array of players (second sheet) where you can get some estimated values and begin to play with the system.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Og4XiyxzmqLwU2YaWYIdMyIoxYHjDB-6xr5azrRDpl0/edit?usp=sharing

Here is a downloadable version which you can use to modify the formula's, change certain parameter values and complete offline calculations:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7r70DklaZ0fU0huS2xYME5rRW8/view?usp=sharing

Enjoy!

 

[bangus]

Heh. Every other year someone comes up with one of these threads. Months later it's buried several pages deep beneath all the graphics improvement and "How do I create a tattoo?" threads. Sad but true.

Creating a "ratings" system for FIFA... FIFA doesn't have ratings, it has values that are used to boost a player's overall so that Messi "looks like" he's a 95 player versus some third-tier schmoe who's rated 57. But it makes zero difference to the gameplay. This isn't quantum physics and a math degree isn't required to figure out the quantitative or qualitative nuances of FIFA player ratings. Here, everything one needs to understand: CPU needs goal = players suddenly all turn into Messi.

So then what does it really matter what players are rated?

FIFA is a toy. Play it and have fun with it. And actually, the majority of people around here who treat it like The Sims - assigning the latest kits, shoes, hairdos and other fashion items - have it about right. It's a pretty dress-up game that also sort of and sometimes plays like football.

No man, we don't need 100 new leagues with 50,000 more players who play the same as the 20,000 players already in the game. That's just The Sims all over again: looks cool, looks realistic, but means nothing and offers no improvement gameplay-wise.

Re-coding the game engine isn't going to happen. Therefore the one option is to overhaul the player ratings system so that it (properly) interacts with the game engine in such a way as to create something resembling a football simulation. A few here have already been working on that over the past several years, with some good results.

Anyway, do you want a ratings system that looks good but means very little? Or a ratings system that looks a bit different than we’re all used to, but that offers actual gameplay improvements? Those are the two choices.

 

[mrliioadin]

Heh. Every other year someone comes up with one of these threads. Months later it's buried several pages deep beneath all the graphics improvement and "How do I create a tattoo?" threads. Sad but true.

Creating a "ratings" system for FIFA... FIFA doesn't have ratings, it has values that are used to boost a player's overall so that Messi "looks like" he's a 95 player versus some third-tier schmoe who's rated 57. But it makes zero difference to the gameplay. This isn't quantum physics and a math degree isn't required to figure out the quantitative or qualitative nuances of FIFA player ratings. Here, everything one needs to understand: CPU needs goal = players suddenly all turn into Messi.

So then what does it really matter what players are rated?

FIFA is a toy. Play it and have fun with it. And actually, the majority of people around here who treat it like The Sims - assigning the latest kits, shoes, hairdos and other fashion items - have it about right. It's a pretty dress-up game that also sort of and sometimes plays like football.

No man, we don't need 100 new leagues with 50,000 more players who play the same as the 20,000 players already in the game. That's just The Sims all over again: looks cool, looks realistic, but means nothing and offers no improvement gameplay-wise.

Re-coding the game engine isn't going to happen. Therefore the one option is to overhaul the player ratings system so that it (properly) interacts with the game engine in such a way as to create something resembling a football simulation. A few here have already been working on that over the past several years, with some good results.

Anyway, do you want a ratings system that looks good but means very little? Or a ratings system that looks a bit different than we’re all used to, but that offers actual gameplay improvements? Those are the two choices.

This is fun. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean others don't. And I didn't say everyone should make everyone of these players. It's a guide for consistency among patches. Link me one other thread like this.

So you have no mathematical argument against using this. Your argument is... I don't feel like it. Helpful. Thanks!

 

[bangus]

So you have no mathematical argument against using this.

Mathematical argument? That's my point. It doesn't require a doctorate and a 10,000 word thesis to figure out how to rate players according to the way EA does it:

Messi 99
Ronaldo 98
Joe Schmoe 57

But I understand, you just want to create dozens of leagues with 1000s of players ala EA, and not have to think too deeply about gameplay. So quantitative rather than qualitative, got it.

 

[mrliioadin]

Mathematical argument? That's my point. It doesn't require a doctorate and a 10,000 word thesis to figure out how to rate players according to the way EA does it:

Messi 99
Ronaldo 98
Joe Schmoe 57

But I understand, you just want to create dozens of leagues with 1000s of players ala EA, and not have to think too deeply about gameplay. So quantitative rather than qualitative, got it.

You clearly didn't read the system. I am not trying to predict what ea does. I'm trying to calculate what they didn't. And I spoke about nine times in the original post about outliers. Try again. Maybe read first this time.

And again, nothing about this is about creating many new leagues. You can if you want. Or you can create one. Or you can just evaluate roughly how good a team might be in a given competition. This works outside of FIFA15 as well as a means for calculating expected levels of talent from a given pool of players. It just happens to be scaled for FIFA use too.

Also, I asked for a link to another system like this.

New mathematical formula based on Bangus' feedback.

o-hat = whatever bangus thinks because math are stoopid.

 

[ouma]

Tone down guys...it's not always that serious. Let everyone create whatever he likes..so long as there's someone who find it worth downloading.

 

[mrliioadin]

Tone down guys...it's not always that serious. Let everyone create whatever he likes..so long as there's someone who find it worth downloading.

It's just another example of the rigid negativity that runs rampant on these forums. Nearly any time someone posts asking for help or expressing an idea they are shot down with bloviated reasoning. It's exhausting. In this case, it was so blatantly obvious that the aggressor hadn't even bothered to read the actual post it was simply ridiculous.

 

[klear]

You've clearly spent a lot of time devising this formula so it seems like it could be quite a steadfast system.

I'd love nothing more than for FIFA patch makers to start using an accepted and universal ratings calculator such as this. It would even the playing field and allow users to instantly load up a career after installing a patch without feeling the need to open up CM to tweak stats.

Nothing worse when you realise that the Estonian Meistriliga that you've just installed contains players comparable to the Bundesliga.

 

[mrliioadin]

You've clearly spent a lot of time devising this formula so it seems like it could be quite a steadfast system.

I'd love nothing more than for FIFA patch makers to start using an accepted and universal ratings calculator such as this. It would even the playing field and allow users to instantly load up a career after installing a patch without feeling the need to open up CM to tweak stats.

Nothing worse when you realise that the Estonian Meistriliga that you've just installed contains players comparable to the Bundesliga.

Thanks for the support! I do think it will continue to need work. One aspect I battle with is how to treat the very very very poor teams. The rag-tag amateurs in some island in the South Pacific or Caribbean. I found that if I use the entire scale (all the way down to overall values of about 1, the results are much more realistic in simulations.

People are often shocked when they see a player with an overall value of 2, though. There are also some gameplay problems below about 20. Lots of injuries occur. Players just have abysmal stamina. This could be countered by simply raising all stamina values by about 20 points, but it would impact some overall ratings.

 

[mrliioadin]

I'm playing with a little tweak to this system because of something that came up with the Cote d'Iviore league. Obviously their national team is very very good. But almost none of their national team players play in the domestic league. So using the national team elo rank at face value is necessarily going to overestimate the strength of the club teams. I'm playing with the idea of applying an adjustment to the estimated mean (&#956 that is something like this:

p = approximate proportion of players on the national team that come from the domestic league (using the latest roster call-ups, for example).

Remember that a proportion is on a scale from 0-1 whereas a percentage is on a scale from 0-100.

The calculation is made up of a few parts.

(μ*(μ*p)) scales with the proportion of players. But, it is in the opposite of the preferred direction. So we subtract it from μ to flip the relationship.

μ-(μ*(μ*p))

Then we divide that by 10 to minimize the impact. Before, it was dramatically changing the μ. This helps temper that particular behavior.

(μ-(μ*(μ*p)))/10 : this term is the amount that μ will be adjusted by.

So the final adjustment is this:

adjusted μ = μ-(μ-(μ*(μ*p)))/10

It's pretty complicated and should probably be temporary until we come up with something better.

One benefit to this approach is that when μ is low, this calculation has almost no effect. It basically means that it assumes that even if most of your players are playing abroad, it's clearly not helping your national team very much. Therefore, we can assume that μ is a fairly accurate assessment of the country's ability.

 

[regularcat]

What Bangus was trying to say was that regardless of how you universally modify attributes or whichever system your devise will not change the way the game plays.

The attributes do nothing other than look like they stand for something.

It used to be for example short passing attribute the higher the rating the more the player would pass.

If you took Messi and set his passing to 20 and his dribbling to 99 all he would do was run around never passing the ball.

EA has reduced that down over the years to were it basically does nothing.

What you will do in the end will only result in a cosmetic look and nothing else, sad but true.

It is your game and your world, have at it.

As far as your post, your math and how you came about your plan is just too much for me to read right now.

 

[mrliioadin]

What Bangus was trying to say was that regardless of how you universally modify attributes or whichever system your devise will not change the way the game plays.

The attributes do nothing other than look like they stand for something.

It used to be for example short passing attribute the higher the rating the more the player would pass.

If you took Messi and set his passing to 20 and his dribbling to 99 all he would do was run around never passing the ball.

EA has reduced that down over the years to were it basically does nothing.

What you will do in the end will only result in a cosmetic look and nothing else, sad but true.

It is your game and your world, have at it.

As far as your post, your math and how you came about your plan is just too much for me to read right now.

I disagree. I've done extensive testing for the national team's project and found sizable differences. I think the ratings mean more now than they used to. In past editions, I would agree. In this edition I don't.

But, two additional things. The OVR values definitely do impact how the simulations proceed. If you overrate certain teams/players, you will see them winning simulated matches. No one wants a team from Finland to be their opponent in a Champions League Semifinal.

Lastly, in manager mode, the overall predicts who gets picked up by which teams. If you overrate players (as most users tend to do), suddenly English Championship teams are overrun with players from lower leagues that have no business in that league.

Keep in mind when evaluating how much the OVR matters that not all settings are equal. The game behaves very differently depending on how you use your sliders and difficulty settings. I suspect that one reason we perceive little difference is because of the ways they coded the world class and legendary difficulty levels (which I'm guessing you mostly use). I found the gameplay far more believable if you drop it down to professional then tune up the CPU's sliders.

Does it matter? Absolutely yes. Does it make all of the difference in the world, of course not. But it will, at the very least, make transfers dramatically more believable.

 

[mrliioadin]

Also, keep in mind that I don't believe any patch maker has created a league where players have an average overall value of, say, 30. 20. They are almost always in the 50s at minimum. We're using half of the scale! Of course the ability is going to look very similar. This means that the worst teams in the game are always about the quality of Football League 2 team. These teams, in reality, consistently perform well against premier league squads. The premier league teams tend to win. But, often these matches are quite tight.

We're treating the game like everyone in the world is that good. And we're getting similar results.

We have to stretch these overalls out. Create more variance and you'll notice more differences.

 

[bangus]

Also, keep in mind that I don't believe any patch maker has created a league where players have an average overall value of, say, 30. 20. They are almost always in the 50s at minimum. We're using half of the scale!

I'm impressed, not many see or understand that. That's what I was trying to say in my own cranky way. The best gameplay results I've had with FIFA have always come about after lowing player ratings way down. Generally speaking, 90% of the players in FIFA are rated 50-99 in most categories. It should be the exact opposite: 90% of players should be rated 1-50.

The thing that needs to be understood is that the game engine interacts differently with different ratings. Take speed and agility. The #1 issue most people have with FIFA is that the pace is too fast. But 99 speed for some players is actually fine and even realistic. The real problem is that too many players are too agile, and 99 agility for any player is completely unrealistic. It's ridiculous and farcical. No player in the world is as agile as a 99-agility player in FIFA.

It is possible to apply realistic ratings to players AND improve the gameplay. But what's required is an entirely separate rating system for each individual rating, depending on how that specific rating interacts with the game engine.

With speed, 1-99 works well, although anything below 50 or so can create other issues (trot animation).
With agility, there are a couple of options as I see it:
1. Rate the top 100(?) players in the world 50-99. Rate everyone else 1-49, with maybe 90% of those players rated 1-10.
2. Max out agility so that every player in the game is rated 1-49, or 1-69, or...?

regularcat is also correct, and I said it as well: there are times when the boost coding effect overwrites player ratings, slider settings, etc. In that regard FIFA 15 is no better than past versions of the game. I personally developed my ratings system to specifically combat the boost coding and that's all I care about. Lowering agility into the single digits is one way to help eliminate the boosts. And you're right, once ratings are lowered like that, the gameplay differences and improvements are noticeable.

 

[mrliioadin]

I'm impressed, not many see or understand that. That's what I was trying to say in my own cranky way. The best gameplay results I've had with FIFA have always come about after lowing player ratings way down. Generally speaking, 90% of the players in FIFA are rated 50-99 in most categories. It should be the exact opposite: 90% of players should be rated 1-50.

The thing that needs to be understood is that the game engine interacts differently with different ratings. Take speed and agility. The #1 issue most people have with FIFA is that the pace is too fast. But 99 speed for some players is actually fine and even realistic. The real problem is that too many players are too agile, and 99 agility for any player is completely unrealistic. It's ridiculous and farcical. No player in the world is as agile as a 99-agility player in FIFA.

It is possible to apply realistic ratings to players AND improve the gameplay. But what's required is an entirely separate rating system for each individual rating, depending on how that specific rating interacts with the game engine.

With speed, 1-99 works well, although anything below 50 or so can create other issues (trot animation).
With agility, there are a couple of options as I see it:
1. Rate the top 100(?) players in the world 50-99. Rate everyone else 1-49, with maybe 90% of those players rated 1-10.
2. Max out agility so that every player in the game is rated 1-49, or 1-69, or...?

regularcat is also correct, and I said it as well: there are times when the boost coding effect overwrites player ratings, slider settings, etc. In that regard FIFA 15 is no better than past versions of the game. I personally developed my ratings system to specifically combat the boost coding and that's all I care about. Lowering agility into the single digits is one way to help eliminate the boosts. And you're right, once ratings are lowered like that, the gameplay differences and improvements are noticeable.

So this is exactly what a ratings system like this can accomplish. No, the OVR values aren't the be all/end all. But, it's a starting point. A good rating system like this could be included in CM15 or my own RM15 and automatically take things like this into account.

For instance, player potential should depend on player age and should be asymptotic to the player's overall value. If we just develop that formula, we can make the computer do that for us and remove loads of additional bias.

As for the percentage of players that should be rating 1-50, that is exactly the kind of debate we should have about a rating system like this. That is one of the things that is determined by using the normal distribution as the basis for all ratings. In my case, I chose to generate formulas which use half a normal distribution because it behaves exactly like you're describing. Within a given league, there are very few players at the very top end. There are tons of players who are closer to a much lower mean.

Everything you're describing can be approximated mathematically. Additionally, if you dislike something about the way that my system works, it is simple to apply your own tweaks and fixes to it to account for things I didn't think of.

This is a starting point. Now let's examine where and how it specifically goes wrong (because it will, necessarily) and start to figure out how to quantify what it is doing wrong (because we always can).

 

[regularcat]

What I had done for my AI patch for FIFA 11 was reduce all attributes across the board between 50 and 1.

Messi was the highest and many were 8 and below overall.

You want to test something test this I have and it is the best the game will ever be.

Allow no overall higher than 20 and play a few matches, mind blowing to say the least.

I would take the players table and break it down by position because overall are calculated differently for all positions.

Then I would reduce by a percentage all attributes skill related and get what I wanted and the outcome was always incredible paired with my ini file.

Unfortunately not many members could see past the overalls to give it a shot, I only play tournament and kick off modes so I never had to
worry about player growth destroying my edits.

 

[mrliioadin]

What I had done for my AI patch for FIFA 11 was reduce all attributes across the board between 50 and 1.

Messi was the highest and many were 8 and below overall.

You want to test something test this I have and it is the best the game will ever be.

Allow no overall higher than 20 and play a few matches, mind blowing to say the least.

I would take the players table and break it down by position because overall are calculated differently for all positions.

Then I would reduce by a percentage all attributes skill related and get what I wanted and the outcome was always incredible paired with my ini file.

Unfortunately not many members could see past the overalls to give it a shot, I only play tournament and kick off modes so I never had to
worry about player growth destroying my edits.

That's actually a really clever idea. I do wonder, though, if you tried this with 15? The lower ends of the spectrum act dramatically differently now than in 11. Mostly around stamina issues and injuries. But, I think I perceive some differences in missed touches and sprint speed as well as AI marking.

The simulations are much better now than in 11 as well.

 

[regularcat]

That's actually a really clever idea. I do wonder, though, if you tried this with 15? The lower ends of the spectrum act dramatically differently now than in 11. Mostly around stamina issues and injuries. But, I think I perceive some differences in missed touches and sprint speed as well as AI marking.

The simulations are much better now than in 11 as well.

I have not tried it yet, I have a huge players table and don't have the time to
break it down and edit everything.

 

[mrliioadin]

I have not tried it yet, I have a huge players table and don't have the time to
break it down and edit everything.

If you get a chance sometime, import a couple of the shite national teams from my patch. Northern Mariana islands and the like. Throw like 6 in a custom tournament and try playing with a great team like Brazil, a mediocre one like Slovenia, and then something like Nepal. It's quite a different experience. Not nearly different enough in my opinion, but better than in the past.

 

[regularcat]

If I have time this weekend I'll do what I did for 11 and let you test it.