[luckymann]

First and foremost a huge shout out to the man, the legend LansdowneSt who did all the heavy lifting on this research project.

I had since beginning the introduction of NeL players into this save in sim year 1909 been seeing some odd phenomena with position players in which they would constantly lose contact ratings and have their power ratings go through the roof. As LSt put it, making a Rob Deer out of every hitter.

My first thought was that it had to do with these guys being cloned and the game not knowing how to treat them when it came time for the yearly recalc. But then I started seeing this happen within seasons as well, and with Draft-eligible players before they'd even entered the league properly.

And so I felt less sure recalc was to blame. This was where LSt's work kicked off. He ran various sims using derivations of the same player to try and see what was causing this to happen.

His findings confirm what I have long suspected - that players come not only with stats upon import, but a preordained career path as well. Which means for most (almost all) NeL players that - in a recalc environment - no workaround is effective in subverting their crappy statistical data in the game to enable them to perform even broadly within their historical reference point. Not cloning, not editing. Even adding a fictional player and impregnating them with all of a particular NeLer's bio and stat data means that you have a guy whose name and info is that of the desired NeLer, but whose preordained career path leads to inevitable divergence from that of the NeLer you have impregnated him with.

Disappointing but, as I said, unsurprising to me.

The only way this can be controlled to a certain degree is to re-edit each player at the start of every season. This would involve either entering the raw NeL stats for him during that age-season or creating some form of specific trajectory with stat points at every season along the way.

This is OK for a limited number of players with fairly well-maintained stats that you can feel confident in the provenance of. But on a wide-scale basis it is simply not something I am interested in doing here, given the high chance of spuriousness ensuing.

And so, from 1925 onward (until "integration" in 1947) I will only be adding the elite NeLers to this save and editing them in the manner above on OD each year until they turn 32, then just letting them go as they will.

The other NeL guys who miss out here will get their turn in the Eclipse League, in which being a non-recalc environment seems to minimise this problem.

I don't like it at all, but that's how it has to be until the devs decide to fix this problem properly.

We live in hope and learn through disappointment.

G