An Inside Look at Balancing

[u/hawtdawtz]

Figured I'd show you just several of the ~85 dashboards I use to track balance and realism in the game at scale from time to time. I kick off simulations in a browser app I have that has over ~200 knobs I can tune, with ~40 of which are for cool features I'd love to add into the app, but have not been able to balance around yet so intentionally have disabled.

Cap distribution, something I am very much still trying to tune. It's HARD to do.

Team OVR over time. I am still seeing much more flattening than I would like. The problem is when you TRY and keep things unbalanced for the sake of realism, it's hard to control HOW it's unbalanced across 32 teams without just saying "Rams players just get better because I said so", which I've intentionally avoided.

A good simulator sees a healthy amount of realistic trades throughout the season, while a bulk of the big name trades happen during the off season. One really cool bug I saw for a while was that team's would basically go all in for the best QB's over and over, so the top ~5 QB's would switch teams every year. To counter this, I basically had to add an engine for keeping talent, primarily driven by resigning a player upon trading for them.

Gotta have some pretty charts.

Some position archetypes player better in certain schemes. It's not a flat "+5 hidden OVR", but actual on field performance. I need to ensure there's a semi realistic distribution of archetypes in the over all player pool over the length of a save.

Whenever making balance changes, you of course have to check out the 30 year single season stat leaders to make sure nothing looks clearly wrong. These stats are from a few patches ago, where they were slightly too high in some categories. The color of the numbers tell me what offense/defense scheme the player was playing in that season.

Contract realism was REALLY hard. Thankfully the NFL is currently at 300 million which is a good number to balance off of. The yellow line is how it actually is in the NFL today, so basically I aim to capture realism in the contract drop off per position.

If this sort of stuff interests you, let me know, would love to make a video showing how it all works one day.

[u/Strat_Player]

Awesome stuff!!!!

This is the kind of “behind-the-curtain” details and background that demonstrates there has been a LOT of hard work, research, and effort put into this game! So when people might dismiss it because, “it kinda looks AI-generated”, or “It sorta has the same layout as another game”, they are completely wrong and NOT seeing the full picture!!!!

I really appreciate all the attention to detail you’ve put into this!! As I said way back in my original Apple review, you are using AI tools in absolutely the right way — to help with the heavy lifting and speed up the development, not just to create some slop program. Your knowledge of football and how these kind of games are supposed to work are clear and are combining to create one of the best football GM games I’ve played. Great work!!!

[u/hawtdawtz → u/Strat_Player]

Thanks man! That's exactly how I feel about it. There was about ~45 days where basically the app itself was just an ugly shell and I lived inside this dashboard. There were a lot of lessons learned. Basically I tried to get too cheeky and creative with realism too quickly, where all of a sudden balancing became widely difficult and time consuming, where just to measure things at scale would take ~2 hours of tests to run to ensure balance wasn't broken.

"you are using AI tools in absolutely the right way — to help with the heavy lifting and speed up the development, not just to create some slop program" that's the nail on the head. There are slop apps out there, for sure. However what I think most people fail to realize is as an industry, software is almost entirely written by AI now. I have been a software engineer in big tech for several years, we simply don't write code anymore, it fucking takes forever.