Currently I’m running an NBA 2K12 dynasty with the unlockable Charlotte Hornets, moving the Boats players over, though within the first year I’ve traded practically the entire roster.
My starting PF, however, is real-life Bobcats player Tyrus Thomas, who’s probably the third-most-valuable player on my team, averaging about 16 points and 10 rebounds a game. Having little real-life knowledge of him, I was rather startled to learn that outside of video games, he’s rather a dismal, highly-overpaid failure.
I’ve also got Paul George (with boosted stats so he’s as good as in my glitched My Player mode) playing like LeBron James, and the Hornets thus far are running away with a league-best 53-8 record.
In older games I’ve had Jermaine O’Neal, Roy Hibbert and Jonathan Bender in the midst of the MAP race, and in football games I deliberately seek out quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo, as I like the name.
Anyone else have players like this, who play much better in your dynasties than in real-life?
In Madden '10, the computer chose from a few pre-generated draft classes. If you played enough to distinguish them, you’d start knowing who was good and who was bad and who would bust, even before you made a selection. I sold the farm and ended up with the first 13 picks in the draft. Super Bowl after Super Bowl came for me, until the contracts came up. This was pre-CBA, so I was about 47 or so million over the cap before I even resigned anyone.
Back in the 60s, I put together my own league, using my extra baseball cards as the players and a deck of results cards I picked up in the five and dime. I started with a four-team league that eventually became eight, in two divisions so there could be a championship after a 20-game regular season. Due to the nature of the game, results varied wildly from that in real life (the cards also were very strongly biased toward hitters, so you had to hit over .300 to stay in the league, and there were always a couple of .400 hitters each season). Thus Pete Rose was a notable flop, while Bob Aspromonte played the entire history of the league (13 years, IIRC) and was a perennial all star. The best single-season pitching performance was that of Chuck Estrada, and the greatest single-season – batting over .500 – was recorded by Bill Mazerowski. Other greats included Gene Alley, Curt Simmons, and Dean Chance (good in IRL, but a hall of famer in my league.
I liked the fact that the performance of the players did not match their performance on the field except by coincidence.
RealityChuck, how’d the randomized stat system work, exactly? You’ve got me curious.
ETA: Ah: Are you saying that because your seasons ran 20 games, as opposed to the 162-game real-life baseball seasons, the stats varied wildly from real life due to the much smaller sample size?
The cards had a list of all nine positions and a result for each position; they were like this:
1B: single
2B: fly out
3B: ground out
SS: strike out
LF: double
CF: strike out
RF: single
C: home run
P: fly out
You chose the result that corresponded to the position the batter played in the field. This, with this hypothetical card, if your left fielder was at bat, he’d double. If it was your shortstop, he’d strike out.
There were about 52 cards, so the factors created plenty of variation, and I’d shuffle them after I went through all the cards. I also added injuries to certain cards to add that as a factor.
The sample size was small, but they clearly favored the hitters overall; league BAs were around .280 over the course of the league (I still have the records, so I might be able to check), which was well over 240 games overall.
The statistics were relatively random in any case; it was pure luck that made on player a star, something I knew from the start. But I liked that the results bore no relation to reality and actually made up stories about the players and their history.
This was long before Robert Coover wrote about the same thing.
One that comes to mind for me personally is Elmer Dessens. He was nothing more than a journeyman spot starter/long reliever during his MLB career, but he was an absolute stud for me in MVP 2005. I was doing a dynasty with the Phillies and about a month or two into the first year, Randy Wolf went down with a season-ending injury. At first, I tried to fill the void in the starting rotation internally, giving a couple of long relievers a chance to start and calling up some pitchers from the minors. None were very effective. Around the All-Star break, I acquired Dessens (I think he was with the Dodgers at that point) for a generic minor leaguer. Dessens ended up going something like 11-1 with an ERA of around 2 the rest of the season. I re-signed him to a two-year deal and he won 18 games the next season (the real-life Elmer Dessens never won more than 11 games in any MLB season) before abruptly retiring with a year left on his contract.
When I was in high school in the early 1980s, I played an awful lot of APBA Football. Some of my friends and I had a league, in which we drafted our own players (with only 4 or 5 of us, all of our teams were essentially all-star teams), and played a head-to-head schedule every year.
But, that wasn’t enough for me, and so, I created a solitaire league. I took the player cards and drafted an 8-team league, then played an entire 16-game schedule every year for those teams.
One of the teams in that solitaire league had, as its backup running back, a middling player from the Packers named Eric Torkelson. This was using player cards based on the 1979 NFL season; Torkelson had a reasonable 4.1 average yards per carry that year, but with no long runs, which meant that his APBA card was extremely consistent.
When that team’s starting RB got injured, I had to put in Torkelson, and he had a good game, so I kept playing him. Over the course of that simulated season, Torkelson wound up rushing for ~1500 yards, averaging something like 5.5 yards per carry…not bad for a guy whose career rushing total was 1307 yards.
As a teen in the early 80’s I created a Strat-o-matic type baseball card game and fictional league from cards, dice and several reams of paper. Greg Pryor was the three-time United States Baseball League MVP hitting over .400 twice for the Norfolk Cavaliers.
I have Madden 13 and after a season or so the QB, RB, #1 WR, and O linemen all get significant upswing on their numbers. The #2 WR, FB, and anyone who gets sacks sees a decent upswing as well. I play with the Chicago Bears so Gabe Carimi, Devin Hester, and Jay Cutler all got to 99 fairly quickly. My 3rd corner usually gets pretty good as well as I blitz with him a lot out of the nickle formation so he gets 8 sacks a season (I try to spread the wealth) as does the left DE because of the 4-3 over blitzing the outside backers gets frequent sacks from one of those three. I don’t do to great with intercepting, but my defense in this last season did better than I typically get.
When I get new players, I typically look for speed and size. I have a few undersized players because I liked the speed, but speed is king. The only drawback is that my defense ends up getting fewer tackles per game.
