Players Progression (When & How)

[Triumphdog]

I am playing a Dynasty mode right now. And I have been playing as my AAA team with a bunch of five star potential prospects. When do you start to see increases in their attributes? Is it at the end of the season based upon season stats? And do they progress better in owner mode more so than dynasty? Thanks fellas.

[Edtench]

Player progression is determined after spring training. Once you have completed spring training, the game automatically changes the player attributes and retires some players. Older players tend to see some of their attributes decline and younger, especially highly rated players will tend to see their attributes increase. There is some degree of randomness involved in the determination since you will get different results each time you have it determine player progression. My advice is to save your game, allow progression, view the results, and if you're not satisfied, perhaps because your favorite player took a hit to some key attributes or was retired, then go back and try it again until you're happy. Or, you can just go with what you get the first time.

Edited June 14, 2013 by Edtench

[Triumphdog]

Player progression is determined after spring training. Once you have completed spring training, the game automatically changes the player attributes and retires some players. Older players tend to see some of their attributes decline and younger, especially highly rated players will tend to see their attributes increase. There is some degree of randomness involved in the determination since you will get different results each time you have it determine player progression. My advice is to save your game, allow progression, view the results, and if you're not satisfied, perhaps because your favorite player took a hit to some key attributes or was retired, then go back and try it again until you're happy. Or, you can just go with what you get the first time.

Thanks man. Makes sense!

[RHMVNovus]

This is interesting.

I'm using the MVP 2013 Mod (meaning that, unless you fix the calendar, you have a lot of 11-year-old players playing) and just progressed through my first season in owner mode and got through player progression. I noticed very little correlation between the Career Potential Star Rating on the 'Edit Player' page and actual progression. In fact, almost all of the 12-year-old prospects (19 in 2013 age) regressed slightly, regardless of their Career Potential rating. Well, that shouldn't be happening.

Given that the game, under factory settings, would not have had 12-year-olds playing, I decided to tinker around with his age, using a 12-year-old 5-Star shortstop (Elpidio Cox, one of those fictional players sitting around in the free agent pool at the beginning of year 1 whom I signed) as a control. Since age is a factor in player progression, most obviously in players' 30s and 40s, when they're declining, I wondered whether the extreme youth of 13-year-old prospects was also a cause of decline.

My method of testing is totally unscientific and inconclusive, but what I did was save *just* before player progression, edit his birth year (hence, his age), and run the player progression for that age. I repeat this six times by quitting and reloading the save point to minimize (but not eliminate, granted) the randomness. I ran ages 12-19, stopping at 19 because I assume that once a player reaches 20, things start working as expected.

Each run, I recorded and totaled the change in vLHP Power, vLHP Contact, vRHP Power, vRHP Contact, and Speed. The data is in an attached .rtf file. Below are the summaries of each age's total points gained or lost, listing mean and median of each age's six runs.

Age 12:

Mean: -2.16

Median: -2.5

Age 13:

Mean: 8.3

Median: 9

Age 14:

Mean: 29.3

Median: 29

Age 15:

Mean: -8.16

Median: -10.5

Age 16:

Mean: 6.3

Median: 3

Age 17:

Mean: 0.83

Median: 2

Age 18:

Mean: 38.3

Median: 37.5

Age 19:

Mean: 32.6

Median: 31.5

I figure that 18-and-older is normal gameplay. 16-and-17-year-old players exist in real life, of course - mostly International Signings - but it seems that the game keeps their improvement near zero until they hit 18 - if I were to guess, to prevent the super youngsters and fictional signings from taking over the game.

But the most striking thing about this is the massive weirdness that occurs at ages 12, 13, 14, and 15. I have absolutely no idea how that works. I don't actually expect an answer, of course (though if someone's familiar with the coding of the progress files, I'd listen). I don't think I'm wrong, however, to say that this makes year updating *really* important for realistic gameplay - not just 'haha Pujols is still improving !!' but to actually ensure that prospects are entering the majors at a reasonable rate.

If you did look at the data .rtf, the randomness can be huge. So if you *do* want to re-roll to get a 'good' draw for your favorite player, be sure that you know what a 'good' draw is. Sometimes a net gain of one can be a huge dice roll in your favor, and sometimes a net gain of 30 might be a bad roll.

tl;dr: Year Updater + RNG!!1!one!

Addendum: I don't know if this post will be useful or interesting to anyone here, of course. If the mods decide it contributes too little for its size, feel free to delete.

Hail The Glorious RNG.rtf

[RedbeardMtn]

It's interesting to see how progression works with players ages below 18, but I don't understand why you would want to play the game this way. The Schedule Updater/Year Changer tool does work, and if it is not working for you, something else needs to be corrected, most likely running MVP from the desktop. I tried to play the game and disregard the incorrect ages, but got tired of it and wanted it to be correct, so I figured out how to fix the problem. In going to the lengths in updating that we go to in order to keep the game current and realistic, it seems as though playing the game with player ages of 13 and 14, etc. is kinda silly. Thanks for you research, though.

[RHMVNovus]

It's interesting to see how progression works with players ages below 18, but I don't understand why you would want to play the game this way. The Schedule Updater/Year Changer tool does work, and if it is not working for you, something else needs to be corrected, most likely running MVP from the desktop. I tried to play the game and disregard the incorrect ages, but got tired of it and wanted it to be correct, so I figured out how to fix the problem. In going to the lengths in updating that we go to in order to keep the game current and realistic, it seems as though playing the game with player ages of 13 and 14, etc. is kinda silly. Thanks for you research, though.

Believe me, I bear no delusions about the usefulness of this for people who play MVP. I just enjoy documenting a game's fault lines, because every once in a great while, you can learn something cool about the game.

It's also partly because I didn't know you could run Schedule Updater on an ongoing Owner Mode file. The instructions - the link to which I don't recall - make reference to 'once you start a dynasty/owner mode' as the time to run Schedule Updater, so from there, I gleaned that running schedule updater on an ongoing dynasty/owner mode wouldn't work. Is that wrong? Very well, it may be wrong; it is not, however, totally unreasonable.

Also, if I could update the schedule, it would create a massive deficit of eight years of bills with no income, which is a thread I've seen somebody make while panicked. This wouldn't be a problem, but I don't know how to use Artmoney or TyWiggins Money Changer. The former is frustrating even using the tutorials on this board or the help files in the program, and the latter, while it may have existed a year ago for public download, seems to have vanished in the past year.

So not the most realistic, it is conceded. Nevertheless.

[Gordo]

I think the problem with the Schedule Updater is that it is pulling from the MVP08 (my documents) folder and not the default 2005 folder. If you move your season of interest into the 2005 folder and call it up in game from an install other than 08 or 13 (i.e., copy and paste into the MVP2005/mydocuments folder), you may be able to use the S.U., and then transfer it back to the MVP08/mydocs folder to see the effect.