A minor change to the training system (13/03/2009 14:51)

After a few seasons playing ML I have grown steadily more and more bored by the way the players are developed. Today it is recommendable to you play the maximum amount of friendlies each season while putting your players on rest during the training sessions. For me, and I do believe it is the same for a number of ML managers, this has become a routine action between match and training: set up team based on fitness, send out / accept challenges, change line-up according to fitness, send out / accept challenges and so on until fitness is down to 89-92. What is the achievement? Gains are randomly (or at least they seem very random, chosen attribute to train does not seem to have an impact), fitness loss is based upon your own and not least your opponents tackles. For each home game you earn 250K, and you pay one credit. An away game doesn’t give you anything except the random gains. One positive effect of this system is the possibility for those who are playing the game for free to develop their players as well, or as SRXPsycho said: they feel they play in the same ballpark as those who buy credits. I am not going to focus on the differences between paying customers and free-riders here, I’ll leave that up to those with more in-depth knowledge of the financial models of ML. What I will suggest here is quite simply to create a new system for development of players, and I’ll try to give pros and cons to both today’s system and the system I’m proposing.
I’ll split the suggestion up in different parts, but remember that they are very much affected by each other, so try to look at it with a holistic view.

(Thanks for input goes to Charlie, Thales, Manny Calavera, Mycroft SRXPsycho and more.)

Trainers
Today you can choose trainers based on level up to ‘Excellent’. My suggestion is that instead of these levels, coaches are given attributes visible to the manager. These attributes influences the possibility for players to develop better. So the higher trainers attribute in Shooting, the easier a striker would develop in that attribute. “Well” you say, “this would only create alot of players with 99 in certain attributes and Q95 at the age of 25!” This is not correct as the development of an attribute would slow down as it climbs higher towards maximum. And when a player’s attribute surpasses the attribute of the trainer, it would become very hard to further develop it. And don’t forget that the Q is based on more than one attribute, and a trainer for attackers will be in charge for developing all the attributes, both main and the others, of an attacker.

Training
Today the training sessions is mostly used for resting your players. In my opinion training should be the main source of development of the players, and resting should be done between matches and training. So my suggestion is that we use the trainings to train and that fitness is regained after training. I believe that a manager should be able to decide how hard the training should be, perhaps on 4 different levels ranging from soft through medium and hard to Extreme. The fitness loss will increase in proportion to how hard the players train, but the gains will also increase proportionally. (This might be a good place to introduce an extra credit cost...but I’m not going to focus on that). Say that you have a League game at 1500 and a MLCL match at 1800, some of your players might have lost up to 6-8 fitness points. It might then be a good idea to have a soft training, just running around and play some 5 a side. This would cost an additional 1-2 fitness points, and your players would be fully fit again until the 0300 match (regain fitness/10 after training).    


Gains
Gains are probably the most talked-about issue in ML, perhaps even more than league placement and match-results. As it is today, most gains come from friendly games and it is random on which attribute a player gains. Why do we then have coaches? To bring them to a fancy hotel on Ibiza for our training camp? I’m not saying that the gains should be removed from the friendly-matches, I’m saying that the trainings should be the main source of the development of players. So during a training session, a player should gain in all attributes, and the amount gained should be based on a number of parameters: The attributes of the coach, the current attribute level of the player, the intensity of the training, the current fitness of the player, hidden stats like potential and (in lack of a better word) ability to learn. It should still be focus on one attribute at a time per player, making the player develop faster in that attribute compared to the others. “Wow” you say, “the players will gain in every attribute on every training?” Yes they will. However, you will not notice it every training as they only gain fractions in every attribute. The one that you focus on can give i.e. 0.178, while those you do not focus on might give 0.009 (please do not argue: those amounts can never be implemented! I know, they are examples only). The higher a players attribute is, the lower the amount of the gain each training. And if the players attribute is higher than the trainers, it will dramatically decrease. I do not have the solution for the formula, there are many people out there with better prerequisites than me for calculating that

Friendlies and teamstats
The amount of friendlies should be reduced to a much lower number. Perhaps maximum 25 during the season. These 25 matches should be used mainly to drill new formations and tactics, and they should have an influence on teamstats. “Why?” you scream, “they are only friendlies, the result doesn’t count”. No it doesn’t, but as you play friendlies and your team becomes more accustomed to the new tactics and formations, the team play and understanding will become better, and so will also your corner kicks and free kicks and offside trap etc etc. Friendlies are the way to go to train your defending tactics, and also your brilliant new attack plan  (the credit cost of a friendly could be the same or even increased, but I’m not focusing on that part here ) Even the trainer’s attributes should influence the Teamstats.

I think I’ll stop there and let this melt for a while. The main pros of this suggestion would be that the manager is more in control and that the boredom of 250 repetitive friendlies each season, be it you are a contributor of matches or the one waiting 5 minutes between the open challenges. The main cons are of course the complexity of the game; will new managers be able to understand the gameplay and will ‘older’ managers adopt to the changes? Also the issue of payment is a challenge, how should Fifth season be compensated and how should people playing the game for free be able to compete on fairly the same level as those who pay for the game? To give a quick answer: I don’t know! But I can give me initial thoughts here as well:

Game play complexity
Initially I do not believe that the new players will find the game more complex, the focus has just been changed from friendlies to trainings and for anybody not used to ML but to real football or many other manager games, trainings is the more logical place to develop players and teams. And the complexity around gains and how that is calculated, well most managers do not know that today and that will be the case with my suggestion as well. All you need to know is that the better the trainer, the better the development of the players (a bit simplified...).  Another Idea when it comes to trainers is to let those who pay have the possibility of an ‘advanced’ training, while those who do not pay, or do not wish for the extra complexity, will have the same UI as today with trainers at different levels only, no attributes shown.

Credit costs
For every open challenge accepted today there is a credit cost. This means that if we only have 10% of the friendly games left, the other 90% of the credits must be replaced by something else. And even those who only accept opens should have a possibility to train and develop their players. Trainers (the better the more expensive), intensity of training, physios, increased cost of training camps, increased cost of friendlies, and many more possibilities exists to make up for the loss of friendly credits. I’m quite certain that there are many managers out there capable of coming up with some very clever and creative ideas for how to replace the loss of income for Spinner & Co. I do not have a good solution to this, and I honestly do think that those paying should have advantages compared to those who do not. Manny Calevera came up with some ideas for how to distribute some credits amongst those not buying yesterday, I’m not sure if he has translated it to English as he wrote the initial thread in the Norwegian forum.
I am quite certain that this is the issue that will create the most havoc in here with thumbs up and down in all sorts of colours, but please: if you do not have anything to say, don’t say it! I would very much appreciate a discussion around these issues, but look at the whole, not just the details.

Feel free to leave your comments below, however try to be constructive, I hate the thumbs up or thumbs down or 'I didn't read it all but others leave a thump up, so I'll do that too' comments! Follow the discussion here:
http://www.managerleague.com/ml/showthread.pl?thread_id=50170
(THREAD: 50170)