FOF2K4: Mentors & Player Development - have we been assuming too much?
 

After reading a remark someone made about being disappointed that they hadn't really seen any concrete test results on mentors, I decided to give it a try.

Here were my general assumptions going in:

1. Mentors help a player (who is receiving playing time) develop more quickly
2. It does not matter whether a mentor is active or inactive
3. Player development is more or less at a set rate, based on playing time (basically, i'd expect it to be pretty easy to replicate results)

Here is QB Kendrick Ortiz of the 2113 Salt Lake City Raiders. This is him on the eve of the first pre-season game. He is rookie, selected in the 4th round out of Nebraska-Omaha:



He's rated 17/51 overall. At this point I decided to sim 1 season a number of times to see how he developed.

- Every player around him was the same in all seasons except for the backup QB in the case of the mentor being active/inactive.
- Kendrick's playing time was set to "9" in every season
- Injuries were OFF, so as to not interfere with anything
- Kendrick started all 20 games (pre and regular season)
- All "end" ratings are taken at the end of the regular season, so no additional playoff games have come into play in any of these years.

NO MENTOR
26/51
27/51
28/51
28/51
30/51

total gain: 54


MENTOR (INACTIVE)
24/51
27/51
29/51
30/51
31/51

total gain: 56


MENTOR (ACTIVE)
30/51
30/51
30/51
33/51
32/51

total gain: 70


Some observations:

1. The results weren't as straight-forward as I was expecting. The variance was pretty large (7 points in one group).

2. Either there are other factors at play in player development, or player growth is more random than I had assumed.

3. Mentors being on the active roster apparently greatly increases their effect. At this stage I don't think I can even definitely say if the mentorship works when a player is not on the active roster.

Some questions:

1. Is my sample size way too small? One player, run 5 times in each fashion probably isn't enough to draw definitive conclusions, although I think it may give us a general idea.

2. Have we been completely wrong about mentors not needing to be on the active roster? (that's definitely the accepted thought around here)


I have screen shots of every season-ending player ratings if anyone wants to see them.

Something that really has me thinking that a mentor may need to be active is the fact that Kendrick had his very worst season of development with an inactive mentor (even worse than ANY of the seasons with NO mentor!)

Also, the consistency shown with an active mentor says something to me.

Mentors have been somewhat of a mystery since the beginning. The active vs. inactive issue is news to me and could offset some of my own thinking on mentors. I think we all know the basic premise that mentors will bring a young players actual ratings up quicker, but what other factors define this?

I have a sneaky suspicion that playing time or playing well has an effect. While watching the development of Michael Prescott of IHOF in "slow motion", I tended to start guessing if he would gain a point or not based whether the Knights won or lost (I *felt* like he was gaining points more often if the Knights won or if he did well.) Maybe gamestats play a role. (Edit: Prescott did not have a mentor, but he was the guy who was developing the most. I had a DE mentor and my young DE's who did not play would gain nothing. I had a K mentor and my young K who kicked almost every game nearly maxed out in one season. Maybe not the end-all of litmus tests, but simple observations.)
Also, I noticed some mentors have zero effect on players. That could be an early indicator that a young player won't develop anymore because he's a bust. Or perhaps longer experience as a player enhances the mentor's ability to help a young player. Or, as stated earlier, I may be noticing this stagnation because I had the mentor inactive.

This was an excellent study. Well done and very interesting!

I added this thread to the FOF2K4 Codex.

where on FOF, i see if i have a mentor?

can you have more than one mentor on roster?

thanks

It'll show that a particular player is a mentor on his player card, where it shows all his biographical info, agent name, etc.

I believe you can only have one mentor per position set, but you can have multiple mentors across different positions.

You can have multiple mentors at a position, but we have no idea if having 2 helps more than having 1. Again, seemingly no one has tested it.

I have the same suspicion. It looks like a winning or 200yd throwing QB makes more developement, but it's not always the case.

Maybe we're ignoring the 'intelligence' factor? Could it be that only intelligent players are 'vulnerable' to being mentored? Or maybe personality, leadership and/or chemistry come into play?

Looking at the end of regular season overall ratings, the one figure jumping out is the 24/51. When taken out, the inactive mentor clearly was better than the non-mentor.

As I wrote in the strategy forum, resimming a single shows there can be differences in the progress of players, even when the same lineup is used. I remember a pre-season sim in the IHOF (f-ing elitist!) that had different progress outcomes as I always check player progress before narrowing down why my team lost.

I think that not only do you need a bit larger sample size than 5 seasons (something like 10 seasons throwing out the best and worst), but you also need more than one year. QBs especially need 3 or 4 seasons to really develop. Run this guy through 4 seasons 10 times under each condition to get a better picture.

Maybe the value of a mentor applies only if the young player is not getting playing time?

Mentors seem pretty useless. His kickholding ability never improved, why would you want a qb good at anything other than that? :p

Why do we need to have this mistery in FOF? won't be better to have at least some of this basic game features documented somewhere? I find fun to find what tactics help my team to win, trying to sign the best draftees, etc but not guessing how the game works, i still don't underestand lots of parts from FOF2k4 and only have read guesses about it after some members doing tons of studies that i bet aren't so fun for them either.

Icy,

I just go by the documentation the NFL has on mentor's. Obviously, without that, the NFL would be just as frustrated. ;)

Interesting thought. Wish I'd thought to track the other QBs during this test.

I plan on running another later today, so I'll try to include a few more things during that one.

Ok, I've started on another test. I've got 3 rookie QBs and 1 mentor. I'm going to skip the screenshots since not doing them will make things about 20 times faster.

Ok, After just the first phase of the trial I think I'm ready to say that an inactive mentor has zero effect on a player who is not receiving playing time. My #2 and #3 QBs (who i don't believe attempted a single pass in any of the 10 seasons) gained nothing in any of the 10 trials.



Columns B and C are the current and future ratings, with those in row 7 being the preseason numbers. Columns E and F represent the Qb rating he had and the number of wins the team had (remember, i take these numbers from the end of the regular season, so playoffs never come into play).

I didn't think to chart the QB rating or wins until after the first run, and then simply forgot to check the QB rating in trial #8.

Phase 2 - no mentor at all.

Results are so close that I'm really beginning to think that an inactive mentor is completely worthless.

Well, seems pretty damned straight-forward to me. The Mentor is active, and we see far more consistent growth, a statistically significant difference over the course of 10 trials, and growth from the non-playing backup QBs for the first time ever. The inactive backup still gains nothing here.

great work, ct..

GRASSY KNOLL ALERT!!! GRASSY KNOLL ALERT!!! GRASSY KNOLL ALERT!!!

I'm almost certain that I recall someone doing an observation in an early version of FOF that an inactive backup gained current ability points in the presence of a mentor. Could this be a potential "under-the-hood" change done in one of the patches/updates?

I've swapped the starter and backup here, and kept the mentor (Rich Gannon's alter-ego) at #3.

I think it's clear that LeTendresse is just going to mature at a faster rate than Jenkins. I mean, look at some of that development he receives for just sitting there holding a clipboard! I'm wondering if the real value in mentors is for developing the backups on the active roster. This whole test has been an eye-opener.

I wonder if affinities/birthdays factor into this somehow.

It makes sense to me, usually you will have as backup your future prospect QB and the mentor should try to teach him, the starting QB can learn more from playing time and doesn't need anybody teaching him.

Why does the Phase 2 no mentor test show the 3rd QB as Bruce?

Not an issue among QBs though. They don't interact with each other, just other position leaders.

For the record, Jenkins has 1 affinity with a leader, LaTendresse has none.

LaTendresse's intelligence is 60 to Jenkins' 15, so it's possibly MIJB's theory holds some merit, although i don't know if we can isolate that sort of thing.

Well, i just have those 3 listed because they're the 3 rookie QBs. The mentor is the 3rd QB and Bruce is inactive (as stated in the 2-3 lines above the data).

gotcha.

Jenkins starting with no mentor. Again, the reserves gain absolutely nothing. On a % basis, looks like the mentor is more important to Jenkins than LaTendresse.

Just to humor me, what are their birthdays? (LaTendresse, Jenkins, mentor)

mentor = 1/20
Jenkins = 1/28
LaTendresse = 11/8
Bruce = 11/1

Do players even have to be on the depth chart to receive mentoring? NO!

Bruce is an active #4 QB here, but appears nowhere on the depth chart (not even as holder).

cthomer5000

great test.

so what your conclusion summary on mentors.

thanks

Using wade's chart from the IHOF Board, I get this:

Player Role	Birthday	Month	Day	Combined	Zod Number	Affinity 1	Affinity 2	Conflict
Leader Birthday	20-Jan	1	20	120	10
Follower Birthday	28-Jan	1	28	128	11	No Affinity	Affinity	No Conflict
Follower Birthday	8-Nov	11	8	1108	8	No Affinity	No Affinity	No Conflict
Follower Birthday	1-Nov	11	1	1101	8	No Affinity	No Affinity	No Conflict

Coincidence?

Also, you can have a seemingly endles number of guys active but not on the depth chart receive mentoring. I just ran a season with 6 active QBs. All 3 that were not even on the depth chart showed solid growth over the course of the year.

Just one last test with the QBs for now. I just wanted to make sure the Mentor didn't need to be on the depth chart, and i confirmed that. As long as he's active, it doesn't matter whether he's on the depth chart or not. The two guys on the right are two scrub UDFA 1st year QBs i added.

edit: Also, having LaTendresse be the holder didn't appear to give him any sort of extra playing time bonus.

Have you looked at all at what the QB's ratings are the next year?

are we talking off-season growth? no, i haven't checked that.

I plan on eventually checking to see if they have any effect in training camp as well.

I guess this means it could be useful / benificial to hire injured mentors who are going cheap - providing you can spare a roster spot for an active - but unable to get on the field player

Tought to say if this is conclusive. My gut feeling is that multiple mentors have no more effect than 1 mentor. I think i'll need to repeat this trial sometime later with a player with more future potential.

Interesting study, Corey.

Have you tried comparing the difference between rookies and older players who aren't fully developed yet? Like R, 5, 10, and see how they benefit from mentors?

nope. this has been a lot of work, and for now i'm tired of it. If someone else would like to test some other elements, please feel free!

This is the sort of work that seems to have only been rarely undertaken with FOF2k4 and is terrific stuff. Thanks CT.

my conclusions:

• A Mentor has to be active to have any effect
• A player must be active (but not necessarily on the depth chart) to receive any benefit from a mentor
• Active backups will progress even without playing time in the presence of a mentor.
• Without a mentor, players do not progress at all without playing time.
• There doesn't appear to be a limit to the number of active players who can receive the benfits of a mentor

my thoughts:

The effects of mentors on starters have probably been vastly overrated. The more trials i ran, the more confident I became that the rate at which a player develops is largely specific to that individual player. One glance at the two different starting QBs in the major examples here shows us that one progressed faster whenever in the same role (be that starter or backup). Some players are simply going to develop faster than others - mentor or no mentor.

The primarily value in mentors may actually be in developing your backup players. It allows you to give them the effect of playing time (thought not at a 100% rate apparently), without them actually having to be in a game.

Fixed it for you.

Now that you bring this up, I can say that I've had a QB mentor on my FOFL team since the start, and last year I had 3 relatively young QB's. Besides the guy who has started for 3 years, none have shown much improvement at all. I never bothered to think it could be because my mentor is usually inactive.

I drafted another QB project (the former starter is gone) and have the other two guys...it's a bit of a lost season, so I might just go with 4 active QB to a) have the mentor actually *do* something, and b) have a possible effect on all three.

Yeah, you'd better believe this is going to change how i do business. I'm going to try to keep as many guys active as possible in positions where I have a mentor.

I weep for all the lost mentoring in my past seasons.

Questions that need answering:

• Does mentoring effect veterans differently? (different rate or effect?)
• Does intelligence have anything to do with how strongly a mentor effects a players?
• Do affinities/conflicts have anything to do with how strongly a mentor effects a players?
• Are two mentors better than one? (early returns say "no" FWIW).

Yep. I had a wasted TE mentor in FOF as well, and I think an OG that was inactive half of the time.

No more trying to injure these guys to get them on IR either.

I think this is the biggest impact, particularly with MP Leagues.. in fact, you have to consider if you 'protect' your mentors a bit, just like you do your starters.. Plus, perhaps if you have say 3 QB's, a starter who is a rookie, and 2 developed QB's.. you may be less inclined to fight for a mentor?

I think this will also decrease the number of 'worthless' mentors on teams? The fact that you need them to be active, may make folks less inclined to sign mentors that have no business seeing the field... (in theory, if they are on your active roster, they may see the field even if not on your depth chart - particularly with like WR, CB, etc rather than RB and QB)....


Oh, and nice to see VPI use my spreadsheet ;)... I have to really wonder about the affinity/conflict factor... and again whether it matter if they are inactive... i'd be curious, if corey is up for it, to have this run with a different mentor that has an affinity with Jenkins...

Jenkins would have the affinity now (accorind to what VPI posted), so i'm inclined to think affiniteis don't matter.

Maybe one day i'll test it, but it's unlikely.

Corey - any feel on how this compares with a mentor starting as opposed to on the bench and active?

The "Aaron Rodgers will sit on the bench and learn from Favre for two years..." type of thing.

Yay! (I always hated that strategy.)

I haven't tested it but would imagine a player would progress like he normally would with an active mentor and no playing time.

I was just looking back through another old thread and I think I may have been the first person to publicly disclose/advocate that strategy.

Of course, I've yet to test what happens if a mentor is on IR, so who knows... maybe they're somehow considered "active" while on IR.

Does a player's general ratings improve better with a mentor, or just the overall ability? Overall ability is occasionally misleading.

Could you be a little more clear, i'm not following?

Something that I wonder, especially now, is if you get any of the affinity benefits from a positional leader if he is inactive...

Don't know about that, considering players on IR don't get rings. :)

Another thing we may want to consider with the starting QBs (maybe seperate from the mentor study) is Pass Attempts in the case of the QB, or more accurately, plays in the game.. so for DE's it would be RPlays + PPlays... maybe the 24 early in the study is because for some reason the offense ran significantly fewer plays? Just a thought..

I ran some of my own tests to help Corey's study. With the use of 2 mentor's on a team. The results are very limited, but the damage (I mean data) was done, so here are the results.

The Players (M=Mentor; R=Rookie; V=Veteran)

K. Galloway (M) (34/39) - Ldr 69 Int 99 - 12 year vet
G Carello (M) (26/57) - Ldr 100 Int 88 - young 5 year vet
D Maloney (R) (14/41)
V Hawkins (R) (30/49)
H Rondeau (V)

All tests sim the exhibition and regular season (I then reload and run each test 3 times)

Test #1 (testing the effect of K Galloway (M) as the lone mentor in QB slot #3)

QB1 Hawkins (R) (30/49) improved by 11 pts; 10 pts; 14 pts -- 35 points total
QB2 Maloney (R) 14/41) improved 5 pts; 3 pts; 3 pts -- 11 points total
QB3 Galloway (M) No change

Test #2 (testing the effect of G Carello (M) as the lone mentor in QB slot 3)

QB1 Hawkins (R) (30/49) improved 13 pts; 13 pts; 14 pts -- 40 pts total
QB2 Maloney (R) (14/41) improved 5 pts; 5 pts; 4 pts -- 14 pts total
QB3 Galloway (M) No change

Test #3 (testing the effect of two mentors in active slots #2 and #3)

QB1 Hawkins (R) (30/49) improved 15 pts; 14 pts; 14 pts -- 43 total pts
QB2 Galloway (M) No Change
QB3 Carello (M) No change

Test #4 (testing the effect of two mentors with the young mentor in #2 slot)

QB1 Hawkins (R) (30/49) improved 14 pts; 13 pts; 11 pts -- 38 pts
QB2 Carello (M) 26/57) improved 1 pt; 0 pts; 1 pt -- 2 pts
QB3 Galloway (M) No change

Test #5 (testing the effect with mentor in QB1 and QB3 slots)

QB1 Carello (M) (26/57) improved 12 pts; 12 pts; 12 pts -- 36 pts
QB2 Hawkins (R) (30/49) improved 5 pts; 5 pts; 7 pts -- 17 pts
QB3 Galloway (M) No change

Test #6 (testing with no mentors)

QB1 Hawkins (R) (30/49) improved 8 pts; 7 pts; 7 pts -- 22 pts
QB2 Rondeau (V) (34/44) improved 0 pts; 0 pts; -1 pt -- -1 pts
QB3 Maloney (R) (14/44) No change

Dutch, did you run any tests with a lone mentor as the #2 QB?

I think this is a meaningful subtext to all this.

I suspect that most of the FOFC community just tends to shrug this sort of thing off -- "we don't want to have stuff spoon fed to us." And over time (maybe even a long time) things like this get unearthed -- and it's kind of exciting, in an odd way. The learning process continued.

At the same time, though -- would we stand for this in most software? It seems to me that the FOF game woudl, at the very least, benefit from having some reference in its documentation explaining how this works -- even if it pulls up short of a full explanation ans says (in this instance) something like: "The effects of the position mentor will vary based on several factors, and it is up to you to determine the best way to tap into their skills for improved player development."

As it stands, here's what we get on mentoring in the in-game documentation:


Heh... I actually created the quote tags before doing my search, fully intending to find the reference(s) to mentors in there and to post the full text. Alas, as nearly as I can tell, mentors are not even mentioned in the documentation for FOF 2004 at all, not even in a word search (buried under some other heading).


While this specific study seems to have revealed something contrary to what had been posted before (which is nice), I think Icy has a point here. As much as I personally enjoy the sort of spelunking that we sometimes do around here at FOFC, I'm not sure that's really fair to the many other customers out there who don't frequent this site, and might completely miss a lot of the underlying functionality of the game.

Just a thought... I don't have a torch and pitchfork in hand or anything, just musing about some of the secondary issues this raises. I don't think Icy ought to be dismissed completely, just because he may be in the minority within the FOFC cadre.

I did a thread a good while back on undocumented features in FOF2K4.

http://dynamic2.gamespy.com/~fof/for...threadid=16787

I wouldn't disagree with you there.



Another part of the subtext worth considering, given that I don't think you're alone in that enjoyment, is probably something along the lines of: "How much fun would FOF be without the spelunking?"

Yes, FOFC has done its share in getting the word out about the game -- but all we can reach are the people who come here.

Plus, all we can do is speculate and sometimes test things -- that's a far cry from having the game developer explain things. I'm sure there are plenty of people who bought the game, played it to some extent, and shelved it long before they ever discovered many fo the little quirks in there that have been itemized in your previous thread. I think that's too bad.

I'm a little worried about the combination of "hidden, undocumented features" and "multiplayer play" and how they interact. SkyDog has made no secret that he believes people are doing their own research and not sharing it, in order to gain a MP advantage. There's no way to know how true this is... but if it is true, who knows how many people out there in my MP leagues or yours have already known about mentoring function (maybe even more than is in this thread) and have been beating us at this for seasons and seasons?

On one level, maybe that's fine -- they deserve payoff for their sweat equity. On another level, maybe it's granting a competitive advantage that exists somewhere outside thefour corners of the game itself... and perhaps that isn't the kind of competition that most people want to engage in.

2/3, Jon, the answer is always 2/3.

I think you missed my intent. I agree with you wholeheartedly that there needs to be more documentation. I was just confirming for you that there is no documentation on mentors.

My thoughts:

I think that many of these features should be mentioned in the documentation, but there are at least pieces that I do not want to be fully spelled out. As mentioned I would not mind something like, "Veteran players have the chance of being mentors. When a player is a mentor, he has the chance of increasing the current ability of both starters and non-starters." I would not want it to say, "A veteran player becomes a mentor when their intelligence + Leadership are XXX, they increase the ability of a player to develop by XX%... etc etc"....

So, there is still much to be unearthed that would help someone in an MP game..

Quik asked if we would take this in another game... I think we would, particularly if it was documented like above.. I take other sports games, even non text games..

Madden does not tell you what the chances of missing a tackle are if you use the "hot stick' button or whatever it is called.. ncaa college basketball does not tell you how much affect changing the focus during "practice" will have on shooting, etc, etc..

I agree with you. The fact is that i don't enjoy simming a season multiple times and comparing the results. So likely, I am at a competitive disadvantage at this game. For the most part, I play the game the way that I intuitively think it should be played until I read a thread like this. So my experience and knowledge (or lack thereof) of real football comes into play.

I already know that I don't understand the way "double team top receiver" works. I had been playing thinking that was used to actually double team the top receiver. But evidently I am wrong about that. :)

Unfortunately, I don't feel like spending my time doing this kind of testing to figure this kind of thing out.

You just summed up how I play this game to a T.

The only time I'd remotelty done any "testing" prior was running 2-3 preference drafts to deteremine how to set my sliders for IHOF.

Reading through another thread inspired me to do this (with the intent of making the results public). I think it'd be nice if we could sort of spur some more public discussion, analysis, and testing of features we're not really certain about.

So I'm glad for the people that do these tests and share the results.

Thanks, Corey.

I agree that I don't want to see percentages, but if the game docs would at least say "mentors must be active to have any effect, and will not have much of an effect on players getting a lot of playing time", there would be much less incentive to go digging to find exact numbers. You have to do the digging just to find out the basics.

Also, I didn't get a chance to post it but I had some extremely confusing results about some DT mentors I tested.

I drafted two DTs 1 and 2 overall specifically for the test. They actually showed more progress with NO mentors than with two. I'm hoping it was just an abberation that managed to hold over the course of 10 trials of each kind.

Heh, it would be interesting if it turned out that there were bad mentors...

I found another comment I made about this issue in general. My feelings haven't changed.


Of course, when so many posts like several in this thread and this thread show up, I can't imagine that they help the cause for more documentation. :(

It would be an awesome feature if two mentors keep guys from learning anything because the two mentors tell different things, confuse the young prospects and waste their potential in the end. ;)

Hey, I need to give the competetion some help if I want IHOF to be interesting.

Heh. Can you do some tests to help me figure out how to keep my QB from getting hurt going into a playoff game against the defending champs?


;)

I did notice how IHOF heavy this thread is ;)...

Very simple - bench him in the preceding playoff game.

That piece of advice is free, I charge for the next consultation.

I was waiting for that.

I took a very quick look at this, and didn't see any off-season growth at all. Their ratings at the beginning of next year were the same as the end of the previous year in all the instances i saw.



Also, i ran some tests on veteran QBs and they showed no mentor benefit. For example the starter stayed 51/51 (or whatever it was), and the veteran backups (5+ years) didn't budge, even if they still had potential to be fulfilled (41/45 for example).

I don't think the "end season" routine is a pivot point for player ratings. Nobody's ratings change there... except perhaps the veterans who are seeing some gradual declin in their ratings for age-related purposes. But I don't think there is any growth for your players at that point, under any circumstances.

I believe you may have to go to the point where you begin free agency and generate/import the draft class to see the next potential increment.

You're probably right. Of course this will make each trial that much longer and an even larger pain in the ass. Perhaps once I'm satisfied all of my own curiousity on rookie/single-season testing, i'll get into some more complex testing.

Didn't mean to point fingers or accuse you of slacking, just trying to let you know that the next important juncture is probably a stage or three into thefollowing season, if there's anything to be found that far out.

I understand. I'll have to plan out a two-year study where I look at guys across two seasons, dropping the mentor for year two in some instances.

Totaly agree with you. Don't confusse things guys, i don't want to know that setting running % to 75 i will win all games, but at least i want to know if having a mentor active or inactive matters for his positive effect, that kind of things are not related to real football so we can't apply any real football experience to guess it. I want to feel like a real GM that needs to guess the best startegies to beat their rivals, not that i'm playing wrong a game because i don't know how it works. To the ones that can't see this and think i beg because i want to know it all about the game mechanics, you could try to play the game with the screen off and you will see how challenging it is even to click on sim next game but that doesn't mean that you're enjoying a real GM experience that is what we are looking for when buying text sims. I'm glad to see that some veterans like Skydog and Qwiksand agree with me and underestand what i said.

What were the coaching ratings in this test? Both the postional and "Youth" ratings should have a major impact on player development. Even if you kept the same coaches (and I assume you did) the impact of mentor could depend on the coaching skill level. Coaches have major impact on player development, so leaving that part out seems a huge omission to me.

I've always had the gut feeling that a Mentor didn't 't do much to help an Excellent positional coach improve my players. that is, my guys seemed to get to where I expected them to be anyway. OTOH, a Mentor helped "Average" coaches quite a bit. I've gotten into the habit of only picking a Mentor for those positions where my coaches are less than stellar and it does seem to work. No stats, thought, just impressions that it worked.

So if you had an Excellent QB coach, the differential between Mentor and non-Mentor results would be diminished, IMO.

That's probably true, but it wasn't my goal. My goal was to simply determine how they work from a technical standpoint.
I haven't gotten into measuring the specific effect of a mentor, but just a simple "yes/no" to find out in which situations mentors have any effect.

I missed it the first time i read this thread, but you're DT experiment is what I was driving at. That is, the coaching effect overwhelms the Mentor effect in many cases. Thus you can't detect the Mentor effect becasue the random flux in the regular development is much greater than the Mentor effect. That's what you saw with the DTs, IMO.

Just to pick numbers, If player development swings range from +1 to +15 in a season, and the Mentor adds 0 to +3, you're not going to be able to pick out the Mentor portion of the change in an experiment.

If you had enough tests, you'd be able to. The average in your example would be let's say +7.5 without a mentor and +9.0 (7.5+1.5) with a mentor. Without a mentor you would also see ranges of 1-15, and with a mentor ranges of 1-18.

By the way, I feel I can confidently state that:

-Mentors on injured reserve have NO effect on the development of other players.
-Players on injured reserve cannot receive any mentoring.

I actually thought it was common knowledge that only mentors among the 46 active affect players and that the affected players also have to be among the 46. Perhaps it is because I've been doing most of my playing on the latter updates I've never gotten the other misconception.

I've never done any tests but I use the Change Tracker after every season and have deduced from that.

Another thing I'm fairly certain about is that if you change your rookie WLB to SLB he will not receive mentoring that season even though you have an OLB mentor and both are active.

Nice contribution Plundun. Thanks for sharing.

Yes, if you knew it was a straight forward two variable function, and you could also isolate the effects playing time, the postion curve, the specific player's development curve, and god knows what else had on the development. And you'd have to know that it was an arithmetic, not a geometric function. But we don't know any of that, and that's why we can't be sure of any of this.

Excellent stuff, Pludun. Thanks a lot.

One question on the LB posiiton switch, do you know if leaving a WLB listed as WLB but playing SLB will get mentoring or not?

We can always spy on how the all mighty Jim plays the game to figure out how it should be played...;)