Talent Reductions Again! from somebody else's mouth

[AndyP]

I'll say it simply again - what is our objective?

In the past you have fought ridiculously hard to ensure "parity" while at the same time declaring the house was on fire because of "too much talent". And you were highly resistant to seeing how the two go hand-in-hand. You at least appear to have changed that tune, but it has long been your tune. The two aren't separate.

Let me break this down:

1) The posted plan is only superficial. As Peter says (hell, it's his selling point!) - the stats won't be affected. This is simply going to make it appear as though we have less talent than we actually do. It won't actually change anything unless we change the farm settings as well. All it does it change the locus of our talent concentration. How it spreads out around the locus and the subsequent production will be unaffected because we haven't changed anything in the recipe, only changed the appearance.

If we want to do this to make it less intimidating for some GMs.....then let's discuss it under those pretenses. The objective clearly matters here.

If, on the other hand, our issue is stats:

2) I'm also going to need to see some evidence of a lack of variance, parity, and randomness. I certainly don't see it - players are dying off, dropping down, bumping up, etc. - all the time. This is a significant claim and one which requires a lot more than what is presented if you want to justify messing with the file's talent balances. As far as I'm concerned....things play out pretty close to real life, or at least not that wildly out of character as suggested.

If the issue is the amount of talent:

3) Then we have to drop farm first, a small drop in the talent caps, and then subsequent cap drops slowly until we reach what we want. If we don't do it that way, what we'll see is a wave of injuries to established players until the file has time to reset. At that point (essentially burning the talent base down to start again) we might as well just restart.

If the issue is career paths"

4) Then you slow down draft and farm rates. This will also cut down on major injuries and provide a more realistic set of playing careers.

Lastly, and a point that absolutely has to be kept in mind: TALENT IS RELATIVE. Shifting the upper end of talent to the 80s with a few rare 90s doesn't solve anything. It doesn't narrow the disparity between good and bad teams, it doesn't change the stats, it doesn't change anything. What is painted on the overall is not what we should use to judge any changes that are necessary. If FA has a bunch of 80s inseason....who cares? You still judge them relative to the players that have jobs. the same issue will exist whether the unsigned guys are 99, 89, or 49. They'll be unsigned because they aren't as good relative to the players that ARE signed. We have a free market based FA, we determine value. That the in-season free agents have spiffy overalls (again, getting caught up in this trap!!!!!) - I ask again - WHO CARES? As a league of teams, crappy and great alike, we determined they sucked worse than our other options. Messing with overalls will not change this reality of the league, please stop pretending it will.

So let's get straight what we want or what our objective is. Someone tell me what is wrong, show me why it is wrong, and express what you want to see different. Then we can talk about whether it is actually a problem and, if so, how best to fix it.