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+---- Thread: *Adding Injury to Insult (/showthread.php?tid=23402)
*Adding Injury to Insult - KoltClassic - 07-07-2020
If you’ve been in this league long enough to check out the index ( located here: https://index.sim-football.com/ ), you may have come across a section of each team’s summary page subtitled ‘Injuries’. Upon coming across that section, you’ll soon discover that that section is currently empty for the team that you’re viewing. As a matter of fact, that section is empty for every team that you’ll view, as injuries are not currently part of the league’s weekly operations. Injuries are not mentioned in the official NSFL rulebook. As far as I can tell, injuries have never been a part of the league.
It isn’t difficult to understand why that is. One of the most difficult tasks in a sim league is user retention and activity. I don’t know the exact statistics, but I’d assume that a large majority of people who sign up as a member of the league do not go on to be active members of the league, with an even smaller percentage of those users being highly active. And even amongst those highly active players are players who take a hiatus from the league or choose to recreate due to their player not reaching the potential that they had originally hoped for when they initially created.
As I see it, there are three primary factors that impact a community members willingness to remain active in the league. The first and easiest objective factor to measure is statistics. Watching your player participate in games every week in order to record stats, win games, earn awards and trophies, and hopefully reach the hall of fame motivates players stay active in the league to make their players the best that they can be statistically. It is plainly obvious how large of an impact adding in injuries to the sim process would have. If your player gets a concussion and is out for a week or two, would you still watch your team’s games? What if your player tears their ACL and is out for the year? Adding injuries to the league would need to take into account the negative impact of player statistics and the resulting negative emotions from that.
The second factor is community. Whether you discovered the league through a subreddit or some other form of social media and made friendships upon joining the league, or were specifically recruited through a relationship you already had, many people in this league use the platform as a way to stay in communication with others. I personally don’t think that adding an injury mechanic to the league would impact this facet of player activity much. There are users in our Discord and on our forums who aren’t active earners with a player participating in the sim. If you already have a solid integration into the community, whether or not you have a stake in games that are happening may not impact your willingness to stay active in the league.
The last and likely least considered factor is the role-playing aspect of the league. This part of the league is very vague and is thus tougher to truly quantify, but I think this is where an injury mechanic would have a positive impact on the league. What happens inside of the NSFL “world” so to speak is an important aspect for many people in truly playing a role in the context of a traditional RPG. The high-level concept is that we are emulating professional football players. In an ideal world, all of our backstories, friendships, rivalries, and achievements would coincide with all of the other decisions that people are making about their players. Wiki summaries would align for college awards, point task stories could be referenced for player and team narratives, and a true league history could be created that would be logical and sensible. But this isn’t a four player game of Dungeons and Dragons with a Dungeon Master that has built a world for you and arbitrates your backstory decisions. This is a forum with 500 people who for the most part don’t really care about whether or not 10 other players in their draft class also wrote that they won the Heisman award in the same year that they did.
But for some folks, the realism of their character’s storyline is important to them. This manifests itself in many ways throughout the league. Players write narrative media, make graphics, and to a lesser extent attempt to role-play a persona ( though I’ve yet to see that work out well ). Players attempt to negotiate contracts that match their level of activity and implied skill. Twitter is your daily opportunity to ghost-write as your player. And if you’ve followed the world of professional football, or any professional sport for that matter, you’ll find that injuries are an important aspect to a player, team, league, or community as a whole. So how do we add injuries to this league in a way to allow storylines to become more dynamic, while also being mindful of their impact on player retention?
I’ve been able to come up with the following approaches for adding injuries to the league:
1. Add sim-controlled injuries to the league.
This implementation is the easiest approach to having injuries in the league, but would also be one of the most frustrating. Many users already have a vendetta with the sim. Imagine the amount of rage-quitting that would occur if a person tore their ACL in the first week of the season and wouldn’t see their player participate in another game for a real life month or more. This would be the best approach from a pure role-playing perspective, but I doubt that even the most RPG-focused of users would like to see this implemented.
2. Add cosmetic injuries to the league. ( not performance-impacting )
This approach would mean that all injuries would be retroactively user-assigned and would therefore have no impact on a player’s actual performance. This approach would likely be the most feasible in that it would not upset any stat-focused users while also providing some aspect of injuries to appeal to more role-playing focused users.
One main issue I see here is the lack of realism that is already apparent in the league. In the “present” state of the daily happening in the league injuries wouldn’t exist. That being said, there could be some implication of performance being affected from past injuries. An example of this would be that a user goes inactive for a season, not earning any additional TPE for their player. We could retroactively say something like “Otis Allen broke his leg in the offseason, an injury which would continually bother him in his next year of play.” One immediate problem with this is the randomized nature of the sim league in general. Otis Allen could have two wildly different seasons with the same stat block. Though in thinking through this more it isn’t necessarily a huge issue, as this happens often in real life. One example I can think of off-hand is Cooper Kupp coming back from tearing his ACL to be a top receiver in the NFL a couple years ago.
The other problem here can be seen in the example sentence that I wrote. “Otis Allen broke his leg in the _offseason_”. You’d have to assign major injuries to the offseason in order to retain a semblance of realism. I don’t have any examples of players tearing their ACL one week and retaining an elite level of play the next.
3. Add activity-controlled injuries to the league.
This is the third option that I came up with that I think might actually have some merit to it. In this case, injuries would be assigned to a user as a result of inactivity, with the severity of the injury being retroactively assigned at either the end of the period of inactivity or the end of the player’s career. A team could only start players that were active users for the week, with all inactive users being assigned a generic injury and therefore being unable to play. If that inactive user came back the next week, a minor injury like “illness” or “thigh bruise” would be given to assigned to that user. If a user became inactive long-term, a more serious injury like “torn ACL” or “broken leg” could be assigned, and the long-term impacts of that on their performance could be better assumed.
But how would this impact player perception and retention? This likely wouldn’t have much of an impact on highly active users as they are expected to be active weekly and therefore would never be injured ( at least not in a performance-impacting way ). That isn’t to say that it would be accepted with open arms, though. My first thought is of a race for an end-of-season position award. If you are in the race to earn a player of the year award and an emergency keeps you from being active for a week, the added negative effect of being rendered ineligible would greatly outweigh the addition of a minor aspect of realism in my opinion.
This would likely have a very negative impact for more moderately-active players. If you can only check in from time to time, why would you keep checking if your player never plays? The implication that you have to be highly active in order to be competitive in the league would probably be quite overwhelming for many players who are just looking for a casual outlet that meets some of their interests. This also brings up the thought of league parity. For struggling teams that are reliant on veteran inactive to remain competitive this would be a huge hit. Teams that have built up a locker room of consistently active players would become even better, which would negatively impact teams in more of a rebuilding phase.
Another consideration would be that of the new player experience on a team that has a high TPE inactive player higher up than them on the depth chart. I don’t know how common of an occurrence this actually is, but if you are drafted to a team as a future piece for a position that isn’t entirely in need currently adding in this extra incentive for activity might add to the competition? Who knows, I’m just spitballing here.
All this to say that I don’t necessarily know if there is a perfect system of implementing injuries that would appeal to everyone. I think that while the NSFL is based on the professional American football experience, it benefits from aspects of fantasy that real life can’t. Maybe using the player render concept as a model for this is a good approach in keeping things purely cosmetic. If you want to be Julio Jones, go for it. If you want to be Baby Yoda or Guy Fieri, that’s fine too. It doesn’t impact you negatively to be those things, and the positive impact is purely what you want it to be through the story that you create for your character. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well. I think that translations from the NFL -> NSFL offer a ton of opportunities for analysis, and this media was much more thought-provoking than I’d originally expected.
*Adding Injury to Insult - ScorpXCracker - 07-07-2020
the third option might be good tbh but if you add any other kind of injuries then youd have to start dealing with backups and who really wants to be a career backup in a sim league league
*Adding Injury to Insult - HalfEatenOnionBagel - 07-07-2020
What are you some kind of masochist?
*Adding Injury to Insult - SchwarzNarr - 07-07-2020
Add injuries to league punishments
*Adding Injury to Insult - juniped - 07-07-2020
(07-07-2020, 03:00 PM)ScorpXCracker Wrote:the third option might be good tbh but if you add any other kind of injuries then youd have to start dealing with backups and who really wants to be a career backup in a sim league leagueme