Potential Ability (year after year)

SI, when are you going to come up with something original for young players and regens.... you can't just cap a young players future ability before the game even starts.

On my first game Jack Wilshire had a PA of 156, i know he has a negative PA so the next time i start a new game he could have a higher PA. (Correct me if i'm wrong about any of this pls) but i'd have to start a new game.

I think what should determine a players future ability is how well he trains and plays in the game over the years.... there are lots of players in my youth team who have no future of playing football at any decent level... and not much i can do in the game to help them.

If i find a wonderkid in the game he was always going to be a wonderkid... how boring is that!

funny enough, I just posted this: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/237141-A-rethinking-of-potential-training-and-scouting while you were posting your message

If you forget all about the CA / PA system that is being used by the game engine, and just focus on the attributes, you'll find that it is a very good working system.

Some players will never make it, some will not improve by much, and some will grow out to be great players.

If everything was decided by training and first team experience, then everyone, even myself would have a chance to become the next christiano ronaldo, but this just isn't the case. Some are more gifted then others, and if those are trained well, their ability will hopefully once match their potential.

If you forget all about the CA / PA system that is being used by the game engine, and just focus on the attributes, you'll find that it is a very good working system.

Some players will never make it, some will not improve by much, and some will grow out to be great players.

If everything was decided by training and first team experience, then everyone, even myself would have a chance to become the next christiano ronaldo, but this just isn't the case. Some are more gifted then others, and if those are trained well, their ability will hopefully once match their potential.

You'd also have to forget about scouting, which works off PA and CA. You'd also have to forget about coaching, which is limited by PA and thus largely pointless (since coaching a player who has hit his PA is worthless).

So as long as you ignore two major features of the game, then this works ok...

You'd also have to forget about scouting, which works off PA and CA. You'd also have to forget about coaching, which is limited by PA and thus largely pointless (since coaching a player who has hit his PA is worthless).

So as long as you ignore two major features of the game, then this works ok...

No, I don't forget about scouting, cause scouting tells me a player is still likely to improve or not.

I don't forget about coaching, because they will improve my players as the scouts or manager reports tell me.

I mean you don't have to look at players and only look at his PA or CA. You shouldn't even have those numbers as they are only used by the game engine. If you look at their attributes only, and go by what staff / scouts tell you (he can still grow / he's pretty much as good as he'll get / ...) , I think you have a very normal system which resembles life pretty well.

SI, when are you going to come up with something original for young players and regens.... you can't just cap a young players future ability before the game even starts.

In RL your ability in anything is capped the moment you are born. PA works the same way in FM.

No, I don't forget about scouting, cause scouting tells me a player is still likely to improve or not.

I don't forget about coaching, because they will improve my players as the scouts or manager reports tell me.

I mean you don't have to look at players and only look at his PA or CA. You shouldn't even have those numbers as they are only used by the game engine. If you look at their attributes only, and go by what staff / scouts tell you (he can still grow / he's pretty much as good as he'll get / ...) , I think you have a very normal system which resembles life pretty well.

I agree with this and every time this is mentioned, say pretty much the same thing. We aren't supposed to see PA/CA so I don't worry about it. If a player has the right attributes and does the job for me why should I worry if he's got a rubbish CA or PA.

In RL your ability in anything is capped the moment you are born. PA works the same way in FM.

Either you are joking or you are basically making an argument for %100 genetic determinism, which is neither an accepted nor credible theory.

I'm one of the people who would prefer PA not being a complete limit, but rather means that's the best they can become with above standard training and experience (basically, you can go above it, but the more above you go the slower you can improve)

But, Re: scouting and coaching... nah you still need them

Scouting is actually more based on attribute distribution, after-all, if a ST has a CA of 170 (which is actually an excellent player), but his finishing, first touch, composure, etc are all 1 he isn't going to be a goal-scorer, therefore a scout shouldn't recommend him that highly, infact I often see my coaches and scouts say player X is better than player Y even though player Y has 20 more points in his CA... again attribute distribution

As for coaching, you can still train them... for starters they'll decline if you don't, and second, for attribute redistribution, which allows you (via the right training) to increase certain attribute as the cost of lowering others

I can't remember the exact number, but I think it's around 150(-ish) in which if properly trained the player will have 18-20 in every stat needed to excel in their playing position, higher than that just means they can more adaptive outside of their position

Of course, the higher the PA, the more "wiggle" room you have

Please check out my post here: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/237141-A-rethinking-of-potential-training-and-scouting I wrote a long breakdown of how I think PA could be re-imagined.

do not use db editors, and everything will bejust fine. i kinda like the way it is, imo i still think that players PA should increase/decrease, i.e. 17yo player 20 games in senior squad should have their PA increased or something along those lines

I think we need all new PA, CA and reputation system. All players should have "-" PAs(-1 to -10 or 1 to 10 etc) and their PAs should increase in advance(like a -8 PA player PA might increase up to 160) if he has a good training schedule, or plays with better team-mates and finding first team chances.

PA should be determined, but given leeway for 'right conditions' if you have a young player coming through at a conference side with poor facilities and they don't give him game time - he should be handicapped. If a player is at Man Utd but not given gametime it shouldn't really improve much at all despite the astounding facilities, but players who are at clubs with great facilities and gametime whilst not pushed too hard should be able to get an extra few points of PA somewhere down the line.

PA should not be entirely fixed but instead of having someone fixed at 165 i feel it should be 160-170, which can change throughout the game depending on coaching, mentoring, game experience and injuries

Either you are joking or you are basically making an argument for %100 genetic determinism, which is neither an accepted nor credible theory.

He doesn't need to say that things are 100% genetic, just that genetic weakness limits us. So, if I'm born with cystic fibrosis, there's no way I'll ever be a Premier League footballer. No thalidomide babies became top class footballers due to limb deformation. Unless I am very much mistaken, no blind people have played football at the highest level.

Obviously, those are extreme examples, but if Jack Wilshire's sense of balance is much worse than Lionel Messi's, he'll never be a tricky dribbler of Messi's standard because he doesn't have a centre of gravity that makes him hard to knock off the ball. Someone who won't grow beyond 5'6 isn't going to be considered as a footballer by most academies.

I could suggest that all PA's could be ranges but that may leave to too much to randomess. It's hard to suggest a solution, it can't really be that flexible.

There's no valid attributes to boost PA's it as they're all tied up anywhere else. Determination, ambition and work rate are possibly all tied up with reaching potential. Form is already factored in to performances...

PA is the maximum upper limit a player can possibly achieve. There's alot of players dumped out of successful youth teams who will have to work their way back up the football league and then turn out to be pretty good players. In the game however this doesn't seem to be a regular occurance, most clubs seem to magically sense potential as it's so absolute and players seem to slot in where they need to be.

Maybe there could be some sort of PA "re-alignment" PA could be boosted, cut, depending on various factors like CA's in the game. The game could shuffle PA's around slightly to make sure there's only so many world class players around and there's always a decent amount of players who'll be strugglers and end up in the lower leagues. The way people are boosted and cut would be quite random but slightly biased towards youth academies, training and who's tutored them. It seems like too much work for a video game though.

There's no fair, easy or clear solution it seems.

Rather than me retype everything...

http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/225973-Training-format-Dynamic-player-potential

Key point: Just because it means we don't define a limit at the start, doesn't mean there's no such limit. I know there will exist some number defining how big my bank balance will ever be (because I will never have an infinite amount of money) - but it doesn't mean that a simulation of my life needs to hard-code a limit in at the start.

So I think it's a misnomer to argue that we need PA because every player has a limit. We know every player has a limit, but like my bank balance, doesn't need to be hard-coded in. Instead, SI should look to model the circumstances governing how players reach their limit. This is akin to the simulation of my life becoming more and more detailed, modelling the circumstances of my income and expenses more closely to produce a more accurate simulation.

Questions I get asked a lot in these threads:

1) How will you stop players from getting CA 200? This is clearly possible for every single player, and hence I can make an army of elite CA 200 players out of rubbish amateur players.

In the same way that in-game right now, no player is guaranteed to hit their PA. Some may spectacularly fail for whatever reason. The game must include some form of limitation (not necessarily hard-coded). For example there might be some feature that reveals that a player can actually only gain 120 CA over the course of his career - as defined by taking the absolute upper limit of every single part of the simulation with all luck falling on the benefit of the player (i.e. 7* coaching with the best-possible coaching staff, best personality attributes, best training facilities, the optimum number of games throughout his lifetime getting a 10.00 rating in every single game, and no injuries). So this immediately rules out anyone with less than 80 CA reaching CA 200.

And in reality, every player will get something below these maxima, meaning the development is essentially capped at 120 CA.

The important thing to note is that the 120 CA boundary isn't aimed for nor pre-coded - it's just something that happens as a result of all the analysis and implementation.

2) But that means I can still take rubbish players and get good players?

In theory yes, but as always, you will always prefer working with better players! The better players to begin with need less work and are more likely to reach higher limits - period. You could work with a very talented youngster or slog and cross your fingers that some rubbish thug makes it - he somehow needs to find a way of performing well in the first-team despite being a thug and rubbish in technique.

This is akin to a lazy and unintelligent student scoring straight As in all his exams - possible, but the student would need to work incredibly hard to acheive this. The school genius probably wouldn't need to do as much work to score straight As.

If you were a teacher, which student would you prefer to teach? You could teach the lazy one, but you would have to work much harder to help him. You would always prefer the school genius as he requires less work and is more likely to reach a higher limit.

3) But you have a limit!

The school genius has a limit, and in all likelihood it will be higher than the lazy student in terms of intelligence. Do we actually need to know the limit, though? Or is it simply sufficient that the most likely case is that the intelligence of the genius will be higher than the intelligence of the lazy one? Do you really need a "number" assigned to them to prove it?

In addition, it leaves open the ability for the lazy student to surpass the school genius. Unlikely perhaps, but it leaves that opportunity open. You will probably not see it happen very often if you could replay their lives again and again, of course, but it's still possible. You might see it, say, once every 1000 "simulations", and would probably require a lot of bad luck on the part of the school genius (i.e. he dies young).

4) So how will you define the simulation?

The "recipe" for becoming a world-class player is talent + personality + ability + good training facilities + good coaches + first-team football at a young age + luck with injuries + more luck. Strictly speaking there could be more ingredients (i.e. adaptability and youth football), but let's just say there's a recipe. A player's limit is defined by all of these "ingredients". No talent? Tough luck - you probably won't become the next Lionel Messi. More injury-prone than Ledley King? Flawed talent perhaps - someone who never reaches their limit because they suffer too many injuries as a youngster. No first-team football? Talent will get you somewhere but you will regularly fall into newspaper columns describing "talents who could have been...".

Clearly, some ingredients have more of an effect than others. For example, talent could arguably be the biggest factor - nothing replaces this innate ability. However, less-talented players can still become good players - Darren Fletcher and Lucas Leiva, for example - although there is unlikely to be a Darren Fletcher on the level of Lionel Messi. But talent is probably one of, if not the, most important "ingredients" you can have.

So as a player moves along his career path, these ingredients may change. If a player gets lots of first-team football but then moves to a team whose manager suddenly gets sacked and replaced by a new manager who hates this player, his first-team football "ingredient" drops to 0. This impacts his "limit" as the recipe is now of lower quality. If a player moves from amateur level to professional level, the ingredients "training facilities" and "coaching quality" increase, hence his "limit" increases. In a sense moving to a professional scene has opened up his boundaries hugely - maybe he has a future at a professional level after all. Maybe he simply will never drop back down to amateur levels. But without the move, he could well have been stuck in amateur territory.

That's all there is to it, really - players simply move along their career and their ingredients change over time. Eventually it gets to the point where at his peak, his development can no longer continue. At this point, he might be able to load up an editor and discover his CA is 150 (or whatever). Does this number actually matter, though? Did we really need to know this number when he was in the database at 16?

The answer is no: All we needed to know are the "ingredients" when he was 16. Of reasonable talent, good training facilities at his Championship club, good coaches, a rubbish attitude (that was quickly ironed out by mentoring), and a reasonable amount of first-team football thanks to the fact his club was skint and he was forced into the first-team early. Then he got lucky (another ingredient) and was snapped up by a Premier League side and he went on to become a solid Premier League top-half player.

Simulate the game again. The AI fails to fix his attitude and the player crashes and burns, quickly ending up in semi-professional territory. At 29, he loads up an editor and discovers his CA is 90.

You are looking for wonderkids. You put away your editor and tell your scouts to search for players who are likely to turn out brilliant. Your scouts find lots of players - most of them are very talented, yet flawed (maybe they have poor attitudes; maybe they have injury problems). All of them require the ingredient "first-team football". But all your scouts can do is look for the players most likely to succeed - i.e. they look for the best-quality ingredients to begin with. They could go out and find the worst players possible and say, "Hi boss, these players can turn out brilliant. You might need all the luck in the world, though." You would fire these scouts!

We get excited when a young talent plays in the first-team frequently for our favourite club and has a grounded, professional personality. We are hopeful he suffers as few injuries as possible and keeps up his good performances. We don't actually care that "he has a higher potential ceiling than the rest of the academy squad" - just that he has better ingredients. But of course, like Darren Fletcher proves, you can get by with one or two bad ingredients, compensating with quality in other ingredients - even the ingredients (talent) we sometimes pay so much attention to.

Alright, I have not read all the posts but anyway.. OP, do you think you could be as good as Ronaldo or Messi if you would have gotten the proper training? Thought not, and that is exactly what PA is and what it does.

Alright, I have not read all the posts but anyway.. OP, do you think you could be as good as Ronaldo or Messi if you would have gotten the proper training? Thought not, and that is exactly what PA is and what it does.

There are clearly physical constraints here, but I fail to see why we need a limit to show this. If we took the limits off, we could be thrown into FM12 and no matter how hard we try, we aren't going to come close to them. Let the simulation prove this!

the limit is hidden, if you would have never visited this forum you would have never figured out there was a number defining the PA and everything would have been fine. I'd say the PA would have to be set higher but a lot harder to reach, since PA is the absolute best someone can get under ideal conditions. So in real life hardly any person will ever get to their absolute PA due to conditions inevitably not being perfect.

Rather than me retype everything...

http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/225973-Training-format-Dynamic-player-potential

LOL I remember that thread.

I'm still against unlocked PA.

Rather than me retype everything...

http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/225973-Training-format-Dynamic-player-potential

This is my favourite post of the year, all years. The game would be so, so awesome if this were to be implemented. One can always hope I guess.

the limit is hidden, if you would have never visited this forum you would have never figured out there was a number defining the PA and everything would have been fine. I'd say the PA would have to be set higher but a lot harder to reach, since PA is the absolute best someone can get under ideal conditions. So in real life hardly any person will ever get to their absolute PA due to conditions inevitably not being perfect.

Agree with this post. Players reach their PA too soon in FM.