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if they are JS freaks with barely enough ID and reb, then that is because managers create them that way.

That's an excuse I often read(saying it's the manager mistake or fault), but it's not only about JS, it's also about what passing skill the SF has to play on the PG position, and ofc what OD has.

even IF there would be a single position training available for SF, then they STILL would be the least on the national teams.

Well i dont really know what exactly you want to say there, but you can't compare the global situation of teams with NT's since only the best join the NT's, but the most importing position on a NT is the SF(at least for me).

Anyway, on a NT a center can play as a PF or a SG can play as a SF(depending on secundary skills), because the performance is more ore less the same(changing the position doesn't affect a lot), but if you have a SF playing on the PF or on the SG position there's a huge difference on the performance( on the negative way)

If people wheren't so focussed on trying to improve (or make it easier) the training part, they might have noticed SFs playing at PG (for instance, and I also think playing at C, but didn't test that yet,) DO perform well when the right tactics are chosen. So in fact that already is an improvement in the direction that is being asked here, it just needs to be discovered. :)

Well, going to disagree again. If you have trained a SF you might have noticied that you have to sacrifice a lot and this sacrifice means playing the SF most of the times out of position. The most affected position when this kind of changes come, it's always playing the SF on the PG position that's all we are saying.

We don't need to discover America xD, even if you play one tactic or another the low performance of the SF on the PG it's still the same.


PD: From my pov, you can't always say it's the manager mistake, i've read that excuse in a lot of suggestions threads and it's not true, but it's really easy to say it as an 'argument'.

Last edited by Marot at 3/3/2011 3:11:16 PM

you say it yourself: as if he would have trained 2 seasons outside and 2 seasons inside.

so, the guards will have trained 4 seasons outside, and the inside men 4 seasons inside, so both groups would have had double the amount of training, where it matters most... which was exactly what I was saying.

There won't be double the training, in case there is something in the algorithm of training which makes 50/50 split such that it won't make it equal to overall progress of training to SF because say the algorithm is exponential, then whatever you do set it such that the calculations in the algorithm will ultimately result in equal progress to the example I mentioned 2 seasons guard & 2 seasons center if trained 4 years at SF. Not saying change the algorithm but place the right coefficient that will make it equal.

Also consider that for example since it takes more to train a player from colossal to legendery compared to pitful from atrocious, if you train for example for 4 full seasons to get a player from atrocious to legendary(20), because its not linear calculation in 4 seasons with the SF his training will not reach half of legendary(20) which would be Prominent(10) it will reach in one guard skill perhaps Tremendous(13) and the other center skill Tremendous(13) also if the player is 6'7. This assumption is based as if you trained 2 seasons guard & 2 seasons center and instead of getting legendary by being 4 seasons in one area you get tremendous in 2 of them.

This would not be any more or less the impact with splitting the training one week at guard and one week at center as far as skill progress goes, except you can place them in just SF opposed to having to start at PG then C then PG then C it's just absurd and it changes nothing except for now allowing the reasonable way of training at SF be possible.

PD: From my pov, you can't always say it's the manager mistake, i've read that excuse in a lot of suggestions threads and it's not true, but it's really easy to say it as an 'argument'.

don't twist my words, I never said it's anyone's fault, I said it is the managers choice. And yes, I know a lot of managers do like to train JS. Somethimes I even get the impressing managers think it's the only important skill every player should have, luckely this has improved very well over the seasons. It's not a fault, it's a choice.

I have played my SFs on the PG quite a lot of games this season, and experimented with tactics and for 1 tactic this has worked realy well, and devastating on my opponent, it even worked so well, that my SF entered the table on the leagues page, something even my best players in my best period seldom achieved. At that time my SF was even the top scorer in my team...
All I try to say here is: having to play him out of position isn't SO sacrifysing as everyone is claiming here, you can turn it into a usefull positionswitch if you want. Don't forget that defensivewise there should be no problem either, as you can easely take along 2 guards in your game and make your SF defend on SF and the guards in the guard position.

Ah, yes, nice! but, doesn't it make you realy predictable, having only 1 tactic working for your SF playing on PG?
Only if you make it so. By switching the SF to the C or PF spot to train ID or Reb for example, at odd times, your opponent can gamble you will play your working tactic, but if he is wrong, he will be sorry, so many won't risk that, and still be sorry.

There realy isn't much I can do to convince anyone, as everyone needs to experience for themselves. But I have no problem playing my PG out of position, and winning games...
(and to get ahead of those who will now claim I dropped a league: yes, but that is because the SF was a new player, and by no means good enough to perform at ANY spot in my team back then, and afterwards I sold my best players, because I had/have no ambition to get back up. IF I wanted to, I could by new players and get back up, but I don't feel like proving something to myself, and for the rest, they can do with my info as they wish, either believe it, or not,... )

okay, you are clearly missing what I am saying. I'm not talking about double training.

let me put an example, maybe that will be more clear:

let's say we have 3 players, a guard, make that a PG, a C and an SF.

they all start out training at the same time.
Let's say we focus on defense only, as that is what you use in your example too.

then this is what happens:

after season 1:
PG: 1 full season of OD
SF: 1 full season of D resulting in 1/2 season OD and 1/2 season ID as result (your 50/50 rule)
C: 1 full season of ID

after four seasons:
PG: 4 x OD
SF: 2xOD and 2x ID
C: 4x ID

or to put it in skills: when your guard will have an OD of 15 and your C also 15, your guards will be 11 on both defenses, so clearly less good in either defense then the other guys. the result would be the same as it is now. The only difference would be that you don't need to play him out of position.
So if that is your only argument , fine, you are right, but that was not what I was reacting on in my post. I was reacting on the comment the SF is the least player in the NT teams, and with this proposed new system, it will be the same, so it's no valid argument.

I think the reason why we don't see SF on NT teams is because there is scarce amount of users who try to train SF since you have to play them PG & C. If there were equal amount of guys who train SF as PG or C i think it would make more difference. Right now NT managers lineup a guard or center at the SF position, a SF good enough should be able to exploit their weakness like in real life if you put Yao in SF and had him guard Lebron.

I am also a strong believer that a ral SF on the SFspot would benefit a NT on overall performance.

et there often is a reason why the managers select PF or SGs for that spot, even when they get a real SF available, yes even a C somethime, because they opt for an inside or outside attack, and just want to get an extra strong man for that tactic rather then putting the more versatile SF on that spot.

So on 1 side , yes, the real SFs are scarse, but on the other hand, some managers still prefer SG or PF/C for their team.

I'm training an SF and getting him 100% training each week since I bought him at his early 18, yet I am unsure that he will even see any playing in the NT. I'm almost positive he won't get in the U21, because his defenses might be 10, but the U21 manager might prefer a defense 12 or 13 on OD when he will be playing a strong outside team, or Id when he plays a strong inside team, or when he is expecting those offenses from his opponent...
So it's also the NT managers choice.
I somethimes have put PFs on the SF spot, even though I always had 2 splendid Sfs, to surprise my opponents with it, and it has worked well, so I realy can't blame managers for choosing 1 inside SF (read PF) and 1 outside SF (read SG) over 2 real SFs, for the NT.
It's just how that manager feel, and what he thinks would work best.

So I, and others can be convinced a real SFs will benefit an NT more then playing SG and PFs out of position, if the NT manager feels diffrent, our players won't even reach the NT team.

But to get back on tpoic. Would this be enough reason the simplyfy, or even improve SF training? I don't realy think so. At first sight it might look like that, but I think that if they improve it, so the SFs actually get better then what they become now, I think the teams might get imbalanced, and the SF players might show op on 2 spots on the field. We would get PG-SF-SF-SF-C formations all over BB, and I don't think BBs would prefer that over PG-SG-SG-PF-C or PG-SG-PF-PF-C.

There is a delicate balance, which I feel is about right in this game right now, and to tweak it might improve it, but there's equal or more chance it will disturb it.

That being said I am still pro working out new training. Mostly because some skills are only trained in 1 trainingstype (passing) and some are showing up in far too many (handling or driving), but then best revise the whole thing. Not just adding some single SFspot training.
The system is good, they just need to tweak the options.

There is also huge issues with how players get labeled their positions. I had a player once who was atrocious in IS & REB and was labeled as SF when he clearly was a guard. Whenever I see that rare player who is all around skilled at every single one they are labeled as PF, so the labeling can also be misleading.

The thing is that I also think needs improvement is the fact that JS seems to only work for short players, while many of the greatest outside shooters such as Ray Allen happen to be 6'6 - 6'9.

I noticed that for a player labeled at SF, the IS skill has no factor whatsoever in the salary calculation for SF. So there are all those other things that's happening in BB that shouldn't happen. Those things not only need to be tweaking so we can see more Ray Allen like players out there, but also because they will help solidify the SF training as well.

Whenever I see that rare player who is all around skilled at every single one they are labeled as PF, so the labeling can also be misleading.

1 of my trainees has been switching between PF and SG a lot of times, and he is prety balanced. The reason why he never gets tagged as SF is because his JS it to low for that.
I can be wrong, but I could bet money on it that the player you mention had high JS, and not so high defense. Players which clearly have higher JS then other skills are mostly tagged as SF players. On the other hand I also have some players in my team that my own formulas tag as PF and that the game tags as SF, while their JS isn't THAT high.
So I don't thnik I can agree there. The game does label SFs correctly too. Often it's a narrow line between the tagged positions, and the sublevels in the skills often decide, and as such it is possible a player with visually the same skills is tagged as SG, or as PF, I had it! (when my player changed his tag with getting a pop).

I you are too focused on advantages/disadvantages of training an SF thinking in his performance as a hight level player in the NT. I train SFs because THE ARE CHEAPER TO MANTAIN and with the strong econmy dificulties that whe have to live whith, i think it is an important reason to tren SFs.
I have discovered that to train a SF and have good results, you need a trained SF to play in SF spot, because your trainees will not play in this spot as titular until the last years of their training, so when i got an SF trained, I continued training SFs and now i have 4 players (one is not training) that can play in SF spot. As a result, my team have not very hight salaries and performs quite well in games. Economy is very important in this game, specially for teams in lower divisions of countries like spain, with lots of teams. You have to wait your turn to rise up between very good teams that could play in the inmediatly superior division with any problem and make good results. Waiting with an eficient preformance/salary team it is much better than doing it with an effective but too expensive team becouse no team can have the rise up guaranteed.

Throughout any of my arguments one thing I want to make sure that I point out is that I'm all about balance and equality. As far as players impact the player ratings is probably best indicator of how the player impact the game and the ratings are clearly lower for SF than the rest. I was thinking if by the algorithm of BB if splitting C/PG training would make that player overall not as worthy then considering maybe 60% improvement on both sides instead of 50/50 like I mentioned could balance it more. It seems that the difference in impact from 100% to 75% (48+ compared to 36 min) is superior to difference from 75% to 50%. Even if that's not the case, its really the shortest or tallest that have easiest time to improve, so while it may sound that doing 60% improvement on both sides makes SF unfair, the shortest or tallest would only get 60% of it still opposed to 100% training in their natural position. the once with average height at 6'7 cannot drastically improve so 60% training on both sides would bring more equality for the average height players without it creating any inequality that now training SF is superior to C or PG because of how height impact the difference.

All I'm saying is that this is good way to perhaps at least experiment and check in coding debugs if it does bring equality without creating any advantage/disadvantage situations.

Let's add some more fuel to the debate...

I train SFs because THE ARE CHEAPER TO MANTAIN
i have 4 players (one is not training) that can play in SF spot. As a result, my team have not very hight salaries and performs quite well in games.

Let me know how this goes when you get to higher divisions when a player who is a jack of all trades but master of none can't guard a player with a tremendous JS and prolific JR and turns the ball over more than twice per game against superior defenders.

My experience was that versatile players were extremely helpful in the lower divisions since my team had flexibility in lineups making training go smoothly and GS stayed high, and as you point out my payroll never go too high. I burned through the lower divisions, evidence that I understood the system. But once I hit D.II, it took about three weeks to figure out that this formula wasn't working against superstar lineups and that get a pure SF who wasn't beaten badly either inside or out was a extremely hard find, and these players typically sell for quite a lot from teams that sacrificed a lot to get these players to higher levels.

I have a theory that when the game engine went away from rigid one-on-one defense many seasons back and allowed for players to be guarded by any defender depending on the situation that this helped to take the edge off of potential SF mismatches (such as playing a JS/JR freak or IS monster at SF) since sometimes guards with better OD or the C/PF defenders will temper an offensive advantage at SF. But this is just a theory, and what this does to the value of well-rounded SFs is debatable.