Awesome!
Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
#42Consider doing this "Moneyball" experiment using Football Manager [1] games. Those games are made for soccer/football management simulation. And your "Moneyball" kind of playthrough is called LLM (Lower League Management) in the FM community. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Manager
This is the ultimate simulation game. This is the one game that taught me so much about simulations and my current job and interest in simulators. The number of ways I could affect a match was insane. It was great to understand the game and second guess how to beat the opponent (which meant studying the opponent's form, tactics, key players, injuries besides your own). I created excel sheets of players that I would s…
In my teens, I used to play the original 80's Football Manager [0] on my BBC Micro for hours, in fact days on end....and I can't stand football :)
I know it's not the same game, and was never as sophisticated as modern FM, but damn it was addictive, even for a non-footy fan. I might have to take a look at modern era FM.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_Manager_(1982_series)
Re: Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
#43Good work; I suggest you apply for the Newcastle job pronto.
(reference: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/02/you-were-of-course-outs... )
Re: Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a good concept, but like all games, it just succumbs to exploiting imbalances. In Football Manager, its just finding all the Uber Wunderkids who can easily be bought for less than the lowest rated players in their prime. Then you just invest all of your money in coaching/facilities who can also be bought for significantly cheaper than adult players and in a few years, once the players hit like 18-19,…
If a real football team did this I think it would work. Why don't they? Which step is the unrealistic one in the game?
> Which step is the unrealistic one in the game?
In real life, "finding all the Uber Wunderkids who can easily be bought" is actually extremely hard, as there are too many external factors that could determine if a wunderkid becomes a Ronaldo, as demonstrated by several talented athletes that achieved nothing.
Plus, a lot of those factors are hard for an algorithm to "handle", e.g. luck in finding/identifying a wunderkid, getting him motivated and committed, him having enough maturity to work on improving and the psychological resilience to withstand what comes with the job, etc etc...
Re: Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
#45Never seen it taken this far, but I do the same thing in Pro Evolution. I've had a few players with bad ratings that suit my gameplay, players with unused skills (fast defenders who can shoot), etc. My biggest gripe with any of these games is that they don't do more with their own data in terms of immersion. I'd trade the recorded commentary for generated text fed through a TTS engine.
Re: Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
#46As interesting as it is to run a few regressions... in all honesty, it's pretty easy to take the shittiest team in the game to win the CL in a few seasons. It's pretty much my standard playthrough every year, when losing 0 games in a few seasons in a row on the top difficulty gets boring. Multiplayer is where the challenge is at, the AI is tons of fun but if you've played football games for a while they're not too ha…
he simulated all of the games, this was all about management
Ah I didn't even catch that, thanks. Makes it a lot more interesting, although again these games are geared towards winning, like most games are. If you simulate every pokemon matchup and let them take random actions, eventually your pokemon level up such that they can beat anyone. There's no real way to lose, the only way for your pokemon is to get better.
Fifa is much like it, buy any young player who shows potential (for which you really don't need to run these regressions), let them play, and they become amazing a lot of the time, even completely unknown players. The game's built like that, you don't need to do anything fancy.
I'd be most interested if he ran a control group experiment, i.e. just pick players himself instead of letting the model pick em, or hell even pick random players, and compare how much better he does with his model. He'll surely do better with the model, but he'll also surely win the CL with the control group in a few seasons, which in and of itself is not much of an achievement.
As others have mentioned, doing this in FM would be a lot more fun.
Re: Playing “Moneyball” on EA FIFA 16
#47In case anyone is wondering why the goal was to "win the Champions League with Accrington Stanley" in particular, it's because they've been a byword for being complete nobodies since this milk advert came out in 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pieK7b4KLL4
I'd completely forgotten about this - saying "Accrington Stanley?!" in a fake scouse accent was a meme back in the day