[Syd Thrift]

Sorry to revive a dead thread (okay, no I'm not)...

I use aging of 80/80 and development of 100/100 and then bump up talent randomness to 110. I'm considering pushing it up even higher to 120 but it works pretty well at the level it's at. I do this for a couple reasons:

- I don't think real life models aging quite correctly. Um, what do I mean by that? There was a recent study that showed that roughly half of an NFL QB's age drop-off occurred in his final season. Now, that *could* mean that players are awesome until the second that they aren't but it's just as likely that a 36 year old guy coming off an unlucky-bad year doesn't get another job. Sports execs don't have little green and blue bars next to their guys that say they're done or not (and even if they did they can't rely on them).

- Given two equally talented players to fill a position, the AI *should* choose the younger guy. Not saying it does, but it should. This could maybe be cut into by contending teams preferring players with established major league records but the reality is that the only thing that ought to block a 23 year old with 6/6/6/6 is a 35 year old with 7/7/7/7 (and even then, if the guy's that good, the AI really ought to go out of its way to either figure out how to get both players into the lineup or get good value back from one of them in trade).

- Talent changes should really be more random and not as injury-derived as they are. I know that that was Markus' original plan and he only moved away from it when people complained, but still... this way there are, I'm sure, more injury-based negative hits but also more just-plain-random negative hits.

This has actually worked really well for me, even into 13. I have a 40 year old on one team who just fell off last year but who is still just good enough to hang on as a 4th/5th OFer for his club. IRL I really think that very often the reason a team won't keep a 45 year old on the club isn't because the guy can't compete but because they're afraid he won't be able to. We've seen several guys in recent years compete into their 40s and this wasn't actually that rare of an occurrence in the past either if they were used effectively. See: Satchel Paige, Wilbur Wood, Carlton Fisk, (here I looked up 1930 more or less at random)... Jack Quinn, who played in the majors until he was 49, Grover Alexander, Choo Choo Collins, and Cy Williams at 43 that year, and then the immortal Grover Hartley, Red Faber, Ray "in the HOF because he was the Clean Sox of 1919" Schalk, Wally Schang, Curt Gowdy, Sam Rice, and Dolph Luque. That's 10 +40 players in a 16 team league. Some of those guys were HOFers and all of them were at least in the Hall of Very Good (maybe not Gowdy or Hartley), but you aren't necessarily seeing super-awesome guys decay into merely pretty good ones as much as you're seeing guys hanging on to a pretty decent amount of their talent.

That being said, I present this with one huge caveat: I play my dynasty in God Mode. That is, at least on the ML level I set every lineup, pitching rotation and bullpen, carry out every single trade, release any player I want to release, have fun with the waivers system (basically, I open up bbref's transaction page and approximate each and every one for every single day - I ignore amateur signings but everything else, even deals between major league clubs and indie minor leagues, I do). I used to play out every game too from the 7th inning on but with v13 have decided that the GameCast thingie is cool enough and the AI smart enough that I can step away from this. This is a crap-ton of work and although I enjoy the amount of immersion I get into my league I realize this is definitely not the way everyone or even a lot of people prefer to play.

Really, though, I think the longer-term answer is to continue to improve the transaction and player eval AI while at the same time getting those default aging settings flatter and flatter.