Madden 17 Ratings

[Goodell]

Just wanted to make sure we are aware there are changes in other players grades not listed under big movers.

Yup, I'm aware it's much harder to update grades this year. But we'll continue to update them as best we can.

[Fish]

Sorry if this is already posted somewhere, but what is the typical weekly schedule for my reference?

Sims seem Wed PM / Thu AM of the following week. When do player rating and injury status updates get finalized?

I ask because I see some practice squad guys without ratings even though I believe they were added in the week 2 update. Obviously that has no impact on the sim, but since it is easy to miss an update with how EA is publishing their weekly ratings it would be helpful to know when this is finalized incase we wanted to do a quick once over for some crowdsourcing efforts.

Thanks in advance, much appreciated.

[Goodell]

Sorry if this is already posted somewhere, but what is the typical weekly schedule for my reference?

Sims seem Wed PM / Thu AM of the following week. When do player rating and injury status updates get finalized?

I ask because I see some practice squad guys without ratings even though I believe they were added in the week 2 update. Obviously that has no impact on the sim, but since it is easy to miss an update with how EA is publishing their weekly ratings it would be helpful to know when this is finalized incase we wanted to do a quick once over for some crowdsourcing efforts.

Thanks in advance, much appreciated.

"Typical" isn't always typical because it really depends a lot upon my personal schedule and when I can knock things out in this free, for fun game. Grades are MUCH, MUCH more difficult to update this year versus past years so that's complicated things early on. We'll definitely get the guys with changes noted from week to week with a focus there, and when time will try to do a complete grade update of thousands of players some weeks when time allows. If someone brand new gets added and aren't part of our update and it's important to your team depth chart grades or otherwise, feel free to send a PM for me to check into that. Otherwise most of the time we try to set it up where we can do the most important things in the most efficient way we can.

I cannot commit to particular days for sure for every step. Workload changes, hour+ long commute daily, daughter's activities, varying weekend plans, etc. So things will not always stick to this, but here's an idea of the weekly steps and times.

INJURIES/SUSPENSIONS
Usually the full NFL injury list for all games has been available on Fridays (doubtful, questionable, out labels). I try to update injuries over the weekend as they aren't dependent upon the game stats. I have to do another injury check for each NFL team's stats once they're collected and uploaded days later, to make sure that players out or doubtful who had 0 stats are marked for injury here in the sim also. Also try to catch key skill position contributors who were hurt in the first half of NFL games that week and didn't return for in-game sim injury here to limit their action here also if limited in reality. Injuries are also then reset and removed once game sims are completed, before they are updated again the next weekend for next week's injury report.

GRADES
Grade updates are also usually available on Fridays I believe. I also try to knock those out on the weekend since they don't depend upon game action either. Whether I can or not depends a lot on what's happening in life on particular weekends. Love the league (sometimes at least!), but family more. Completed that for this week last night. I have a method now that does take longer than past years but doable, focusing mostly on players with grade changes noted, and will try to do a complete update of thousands of players in the entire list at least monthly. If a player is playing, though, they'll likely have some updates from week to week if they matter. If they are new without a grade before they probably have a low grade that's pretty insignificant here in most cases, so those aren't high priorities with everything else needed each week, but people can contact me via PM if need something updated that isn't and I can check on it. In past years spreadsheets were posted in the forum and I would often respond when done, and I can post more like that if it's important to most, but with things different things different this year I just knock it out as best I can prior to the games simmed. Another way to see if grades updated is just to see EA Sports list and find a player with a grade update noted there, and see if same player updated here. If so, grades updated. They'll be updated for sure before we sim, usually on Wednesdays.

GAME STATS
I cannot complete game stats uploads until all the NFL games have been played for the week. I was hopeful for a new stat gathering option this year from a different resource, but it was missing some of the info we needed, so we're going from box score to box score still. In that case, I do try to get a head start getting the Thursday night game collected early, and the Sunday games on Monday, but usually just end up doing all of them on either Tuesday or Wednesday.

DEPTH CHART CHECKS
I have a script that goes through each sim depth chart and gives me an alert on teams that have players on their depth chart that are no longer on their team. I go in and manually fix those cases (so we don't have the same player in two different depth charts) before we sim. I don't make any subjective calls. I just replace invalid player with the next highest by grade. In case of invalid returners, I try to select a real returner if I notice one (don't know all the returners by heart) or otherwise just a random backup WR/RB as the system will also bring in a real returner into game action if real return stats.

GAME SIM
I'll aim for simming games on Wednesdays each week, after collecting stats on Tuesday. Some weeks it'll be earlier, some weeks later. Especially in the early weeks of the season, I recognize teams still may want to be making trades, etc. and try to get the games simmed as best I can by Wednesday so Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings depth charts unlocked and trades available for more time. Once we get past the NFL trade deadline, it's less critical for depth charts to be unlocked early as trades no longer allowed and if a team needs to make a depth chart change but depth charts unlocked, they can just send me a quick PM.

I still have some to do today, but hoping for a sim tonight.

[Fish]

How many people help update ratings? Could divide by division if we had 8 volunteers.

[Goodell]

How many people help update ratings? Could divide by division if we had 8 volunteers.

I appreciate the thoughts. We have these types of discussions most years and it's appreciated. Some years we've actually done some of that when I got way behind to finish up a season. But overall I find it more problematic. More effort to manage than just knock it out in consistent manner. It can be less predictable with more people involved, with more chances for issues. When we've done it at times, there can be lots of differences in what I get from different people on different systems with different programs each sometimes doing it a little differently. Maybe grabbing the wrong thing, or missing part of the info where I have to do more double-checking of everything that ends up taking longer. Opens up possibilities for corruption and cheating possibly if the very important data is subject to lots of different people with their hands on it. It's possible I'll make a mistake every now and then too, but at least it's from the league itself without bias and by someone very trained in the methods used over and over for higher odds of consistency of results.

Someday years from now I may stop and just turn it all over to someone else or do things differently under different circumstances, but until then I have it setup in a way that I think is best overall.

I know many of you here now come from other leagues with more community management. Small group of players setting rules for others or voting on things in small ruling committees and splitting up work to manage the league, etc. I love lots of things about those leagues but dislike lots of things about them too, and for a decade this was intentionally designed by me from scratch as something DIFFERENT from what those other leagues do. It's not meant for lots of people manually doing manual work to keep things going. It's built on automation. It's not a group of 5 guys running things. It's not me running things. It's the systems running things fairly for all.

That approach of a select group of league managers splitting up work and managing other players isn't really what I want here. I designed it exactly the opposite of that. It's largely an automated system. If you want to manage a team in the most realistic way possible, you come here to play. Emphasis on the play -- not share the work or have other GMs playing with you managing things.

It's setup here where all GMs on the same playing field, and the league management completely independent from the players (at least for the most part, I play too in one league so I can ensure things working properly and playing allows me to see how things work from player perspective to improve things).

Appreciate it, but things are just intended to be different here than some of the other leagues some of the new members are coming from, and I kind of like it that way. Thanks for the offer, though, and sometimes I may need it and I'll let people know. Thanks

[Fish]

Alright, fair enough. I knew most was automated, but not to what degree and perhaps misunderstood your comments about how updating ratings was more difficult and time consuming this year than previous years.

Thanks for the explanation.

[Goodell]

Just FYI, grades updated for week 4.

[Goodell]

A reminder, now that we're past week 4 we'll do a summer grade adjustment for those out of the league. If a player is no longer in the NFL (not on a current NFL roster) and doesn't currently have a grade in the online published list at EA Sports, we no longer rely upon what their grade was months ago since they'll no longer have their grade updated. We cut grades for players out of the league by 25% after our sim week 4. If those players get back into the NFL at some point, they'll likely have their grade updated again and we'll pick up the newly updated grade as published in the future. I'll do those as part of the grade update for next week.

Another thing that happens after week 4 is that a lot of suspensions expire, so check your rosters and depth charts if you had suspended players.

[Goodell]

A reminder, now that we're past week 4 we'll do a summer grade adjustment for those out of the league. If a player is no longer in the NFL (not on a current NFL roster) and doesn't currently have a grade in the online published list at EA Sports, we no longer rely upon what their grade was months ago since they'll no longer have their grade updated. We cut grades for players out of the league by 25% after our sim week 4. If those players get back into the NFL at some point, they'll likely have their grade updated again and we'll pick up the newly updated grade as published in the future. I'll do those as part of the grade update for next week.

Another thing that happens after week 4 is that a lot of suspensions expire, so check your rosters and depth charts if you had suspended players.

Grades are updated.

[Fish]

How do player ratings work in the playoffs? Does EA continue to publish updated rankings or is there like a final end-of-the-season update heading into the playoffs?