Update on Potential Sim Transfer

[Pat]

Greetings!


As mentioned in a hiring post I made a while back (here), we in the Sim Balance Team had begun the process of investigating the new version of Draft Day Sports Pro Football (DDSPF23) to see if it is a viable option for us as a future version of the sim and league. We wanted to give ourselves a chance to really dig into the game, especially after it had gone through most of its patch life cycle (typically ends by March of the year following its release), in the hopes that we could discover any potential issues and determine if the changes to the game engine made up for the cost (time and money) for the league to swap.


DDSPF23 has some very nice features that we were very excited to learn about and work with.

• Endurance completely being reworked as an attribute and having a great impact on gameplay
  
• Hurries and Knockdowns as new stats for defense; Missed Blocks as a new stat for offenses
  
• Improvements to the gameplay engine
  

It does, however, have some negatives.

• Endurance's impact in some aspects of the game are so drastic that a player can quickly go from being invisible to absolutely broken, and sorting out where to draw the line has proven to be a much larger task than we had imagined
  
• The game engine added some new code and formulas that in the right situations make offenses impossible to stop, and also completely tank all defensive players' stats, and we would need to not only rebuild all of our playbooks from the ground up, but also would potentially need to re-think how we build offensive players
  
• Energy settings create auto-substitutions which you have no control over (these can not be turned off - only lessened)
  
• Running back by committee does not work and according to Wolverine Studios development team there is no intention of making it work, and to implement it we would need to bring back some form of the Heavy/Light formations, limiting team creativity in setting offensive depth charts
  

Through our research and testing, we have determined that despite the positives switching would give us, we feel that there are too many new pitfalls and quirks that we'd need to navigate to make it worth it, it is not the best course of action for the league to swap to a new version of the game.


What the Sim Balance Team will be doing instead of working on a sim swap is to take the user feedback to the Sim Balance Survey, and put our energy into refining the current version of the game - deploying a balance patch in the next few seasons.

[Sebster]

ddspf24 full send?

[unconfident]

Of course the devs couldn’t make something good without making the rest of the game 10 times worse

[negs]

Dubble U work on improving what we got!

[Pvtpenne]

my reaction to the pros of 23: huh okay that's cool
my reaction to the cons of 23: oh dear god what is this

[Pat]

Of course the devs couldn’t make something good without making the rest of the game 10 times worse

I honestly hope I didn't give this impression! From an objective point of view there is a lot of goodness in the new version. However, a lot of these new features at best do not really mesh well with our league and how we use the sim and at worst completely ruin some things for us.

[PugWalrus]

Wolverine Studios try not to code a dogshit game challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

For real though, we've gotta be responsible for like 80% of their game sales. DDSPF23 only has 7 user reviews right now. They need to stop shrugging off sim leagues and just work with them to create a worthwhile game. They could have a very easily sustainable community if they were just willing to cooperate with sim leagues on what would constitute a balanced sim. They'd make bank off us since we'd get constant new creates wanting to try sim testing for the first time.

No one just plays this shit alone for fun lmao

[domffl]

this_close.gif

[Pat]

Wolverine Studios try not to code a dogshit game challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

For real though, we've gotta be responsible for like 80% of their game sales. DDSPF23 only has 7 user reviews right now. They need to stop shrugging off sim leagues and just work with them to create a worthwhile game. They could have a very easily sustainable community if they were just willing to cooperate with sim leagues on what would constitute a balanced sim. They'd make bank off us since we'd get constant new creates wanting to try sim testing for the first time.

No one just plays this shit alone for fun lmao

I'd say read back to my response to UC. It's not that it's a bad game by any means. It's just got some quirks that don't work well for our purposes. I've spoken directly with developers on occasion about some of these, and had to accept that as much as I would like to hope we're the big fish, catering specifically to our needs probably isn't the wisest business decision for them.

[Ephenssta]

Seeing those extra stats would have been really nice. Shame it wouldn't mesh well in other areas, but thanks for doing due diligence and filling us in!