It changed based on some discussions in MFN-1 forum and other places about how Speed and Acceleration work together. Ray has a good breakdown of this somewhere based on his observations.

Updating this thread based on continued development since 0.4.1. This is more of a philosophy change post than it is a full set of weights although I'll include those too.

In the beta leagues, JDB has been experimenting with obfuscating certain attributes from players during the draft. This experiment made me go back to some previous thoughts I had on weights and see if I could turn them into a workable system.

This weighting system focuses on the two different types of attributes - Nonimprovable and Improvable - and the concept that some attributes are more important than others.

The majority of a player's core skills are in the Nonimprovable attributes - Speed, Acceleration, Strength, Intelligence, Discipline, Pass Reception Courage, Arm Strength, Passing Release, and Scramble. This weighting philosophy places heavy emphasis on those attributes because they will never improve, and players without one or more of these attributes will be at a disadvantage for their entire career.

Here's how the weighting system breaks down.

Primary Nonimprovable Attribute - 100
Primary Improvable Attribute - 70
Secondary Nonimprovable Attribute - 50
Secondary Improvable Attribute - 35
All Tertiary Attributes - 15

Once the tiers were set, it was a matter of deciding what attributes were most important for each position and weighting them accordingly. Rather than type all of that out here, here's a link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_aU-a7wlLr8Z0VOV3FVSGRHS3c/view?usp=sharing

Some notes on why things are weighted where they are:

QBs - I ignored Release until 0.4.1. Now, I see it as becoming more important. You need your QB to make quicker decisions. Intelligence helps dictate how often Hot Reads get called.

WRs - I went back-and-forth about Intelligence. I throw a lot, so having smart WRs is useful for learning plays and finding first downs. Courage is probably the most important WR attribute though since high Courage cancels out most DB advantages.

LDE/RDE - Pro tip: most effective runs go to the weak side. Your RDE should be your run defender and not your pass rusher. This is reversed from the NFL.

LB-DBs - Don't waste any point weighting Zone Coverage until it is fixed. You should not be running any zone. Put 1 there if you want to know how good your player is at using an attribute that will never be used effectively.

Feel free to PM me with specific questions about why I put things where.

[Boring math part you can skip: I went with a 10:7 ratio as opposed to a 5:3 because I wanted the Nonimprovable Attributes to be roughly 1.5 times more important than the Improvable one when compared one-to-one. This is more or less the strategy that I used before with the 100:66:33 breakdown. However, 100:66:50:33 skews things more heavily to the Nonimprovable attributes than I thought was important or necessary.]

Interesting read.

FYI, your sheet shows Run D as non-improvable for LBs.

Does it? Oops. That's a typo. I'll re-upload it later.

Updated: Copy and paste error.

I see all LBs have same weightings - how do you then decide which would be best in such position?

Ideally you should look at what plays you call and use overrides for formations. If you blitz a lot from the MLB slot in the 4-3 Under, but mostly call coverage from the SLB and WLB, then you obviously put your best blitzer at MLB and then look to see which slot (SLB or WLB) pulls which coverage (i.e. WR-3, WR-4, WR-5, etc) and put your best coverage backer at the one that consistently pulls the harder coverage assignment.

Here's why I have LBs weighted the way I do.

Primary Nonimprovable - Speed, Acceleration, Strength
-- These are pretty self explanatory. Speed and Acceleration allow the LB to move around the field quickly and Strength allows them to come up and take on blockers.

Primary Improvable - Tackle
-- Why not Run Defense or Pass Rush here? In general, you don't need much of either to be an effective LB. With how the code works, your LBs are not crashing every running play anymore and getting swallowed by the OL. Instead, they are moving laterally and advancing on the RB when they have an opening. This is where Speed, Acceleration, and Tackle are more important. You also don't need Pass Rush because rarely does the OL engage a blitzing LB, and the RB/FB often misses them as well. It's better to have Speed, Acceleration, and Tackle here as well. It doesn't matter from what spot they are blitzing from.

Secondary Nonimprovable - Intelligence and Discipline
You can probably drop DI to 1. I will probably do so when I go back to revise since it doesn't seem to do anything. Intelligence is good for play knowledge.

Secondary Nonimprovable - Run Defense
Your LBs are only going to use this maybe 20% of the time if that. Why weight it higher?

Tertiary - M2M, Punish, Pass Rush
M2M and Punish should probably be higher, but Pass Rush could probably be a 1 for the reasons listed above. I've noticed that low M2M LBs are "falling down" against TEs and RBs. If you play a lot of "zone" with your RBs, then Punish is more important since it completely wrecks the "short QBs throw the ball way to low" code.

Now, the reason why all three LBs are weighted the same is that in my system, they all basically do the same tasks. Also, LBs still kind of **** in the code, so why worry about more than Speed, Acceleration, Strength, and Tackle?

EDIT: I realized I didn't fully answer jhart's question.

The most important LB in any system is the WLB. Your best LB should always go here. Always.

Here's why. Most of the effective running plays go to the weak side of the line. You need your WLB to be fast, strong, and have good enough tackle to shut those plays down one-on-one.

Your MLB should be your second best. This is where you probably want to put your best cover LB - other than your WLB - since the WLB and MLB stay in the Nickle.

I often use overrides to get what LBs I want on the field.

I want to return to this post for a moment. Here was how I was breaking down my weights for primary and secondary attributes.



I don't know how many of you follow MFN-1 or JDB's posts there, but I wanted to pass along this bit that we found out yesterday, which I'm breaking out into bullets for easier analysis.



Based on this comment, I've revised my weights for RBs, WRs, TEs, LBs, and DBs to the following:

Speed - 100
All other Primary Non-Improvable - 40
All other Primary Improvable - 28
All other Secondary Non-Improvable - 20
All other Secondary Improvable - 14

Here's the reason why I'm making this change for these positions only. These are the positions most likely involved in the passing game (I throw to my TEs a lot).

M2M - This skill is virtually useless. It allows the DB to stay close when a receiver cuts, but here's why that doesn't really matter. Receivers only make one cut when running routes. There are no routes that contain double moves, none.

Because of how QBs take forever to throw the ball, even if your DB has ****** bad coverage in a M2M situation, he's more likely to recover before the QB throws the ball to the open WR.

When a WR is free running, DBs don't really know what to do. At this point, speed is more important anyway.

Fly Routes - Most of the good passing offenses rely on passing plays that utilize go routes. This makes a lot of sense since WRs are typically faster than DBs unless the DBs are elite. This means a fast DB with bad cover is better than a slow DB with great cover.

If you take this to a logical conclusion, a 90+ SP and AC Punter is a better defender than a 70 SP and AC DB with 100 M2M cover on the go routes, which are dominating the game right now. Think about that for a second. Let it sink in.

JDB's comment basically validates a previous post I had about DBs not really covering anyone. But at least we know now.

Wow, that was revelatory. Route-running has no effect on fly patterns which I kind of considered when I set up my receivers on over-rides since it's a straight line!

Also, explains so much more on the offensive plays I see working with my receivers making very sharp cuts and exploding.

That was great stuff. Thanks for sharing, Seth!

It makes a lot of sense why the slant routes work so well. The receiver hits the end of the route right after the cut, so he has full benefit of Route Running and Speed.