#Experience-Junkies

I understand that injuries happen in real life and that players not being available for game day would force managers to keep deeper rosters but since we can't do anything to prevent injuries I feel like this is simply going to increase the luck factor. I.e: I might win a game not because I have a better playbook but because my opponent's star players were missing that day. I don't really see how that's adding more fun to the game.

A few other aspects we should think of if we're going to increase injuries. How will this affect the economy?
More injuries mean teams will need deeper rosters so this would favor old teams that have a lot of cash saved up and would therefore have no problem paying a few extra players.

Should we have insurance for injured players? How much would it cost? If my $500K a week player is at risk of missing an entire season I want to be able to buy insurance like real teams do and not have to spend $12M a season on a guy not playing.

What about game plan? When a key player gets hurt the game plan usually changes. The Broncos don't call the same plays when Peyton's on the field or not. We can't do that in RZA, if my star QB's out for the game I want to run the ball more, not have my backup throw it like crazy. Same if my speedy LB's hurt I don't want to blitz as much anymore.

Also, if we include injuries we should include suspensions and early retirements too, no reason to have one without the others. In 2015 the NFL suspended players for a total of 255 games or an average of one player suspended per game. Source

Early retirements have started to happen more and more with awareness of CTE problems increasing. Borland retired at 24, Davis at 25, Locker at 26 now Mayo and Lynch have just retired at 29. So it'd also be very realistic to have a few young players retire every now and then but I'm not sure many of us would find it fun to train a player for 2 years in real life to then lose him for nothing at 25/26 before he even starts to make a real impact on the field. NFL Early Retirements

So yes, this would increase realism and force us to have more depth on the roster but since we can't control any of it this would just drastically increase the luck factor in RZA which I'm not really in favor of.

If we could control injuries somewhat by players having an "injury proneness" stat, picking the field we play on (turf or not), the training intensity or the medical staff players have access to then maybe I'd change my mind but if injuries/suspensions/retirements are simply going to be based on luck of the draw I don't really want any more of them in RZA. Luck's a big enough factor as is.

It was proposed, that players with a high workload have a higher risk to get injured during practice.
for expample:
160 snaps during the week= high injury risk
(The snap count would be reset after every practice)
Therefore every coach could a little bit to reduce injury risk.



We are not talking about more ingame injuries. If a player is hurt during practice for several weeks, you can adapt your game settings if needed.



This would be clearly luck factor without any skill like: player moral. In reality teams mostly know the red flags of players and can decide to take the risk of suspensions or not.



Retirements are often related to major injuries. If players at RZA have a medical record, we could think of early retirements. If managers ignore many injuries of players and still play them 80+ snaps every game, the next heavy injury could lead to an early retirement. But the manager could still influence this.

More injuries are painful for managers, early retirements could kill the moral of managers totally.

Additionally to more injuries we could discuss about moral and PC loss after heavy injuries. Thus the players can't perform at 100% directly after the injury and need longer to recover.

Man I've been holding back an epic long post about this for a long time. Injuries are 100% needed in this game and it isn't only about realism, its also about making the game more interesting and fun. All that said, i'm talking about injuries that are sustained IN A MATCH. Practice injuries are stupid. I'll go over that later.

Here are some reasons why I believe that injuries will be beneficial to the game:

1. Forces top manages to spend money - With an increased emphasis for added depth, a manager will need to spend more money on players. Will this be more beneficial to top teams? I say yes and no. Top teams with more money can certainly buy more players, but with other top teams competing for these players the cost of single players will go up.

With more players needed on a team and with more players getting hurt the overall talent of players in a match will decrease. Draft quality players will become more valuable as they will start to see playing time quicker. This will help newer teams catch up to the older teams much quicker. It'll also help with YA players becoming more valuable in a much quicker time-span.

So while yes purchasing players will become more expensive (and selling becomes more valuable), developing your own players becomes more viable as they become more useful quicker and are much cheaper. In the long run I believe this will help newer teams rather than hurt them by making development a better alternative to purchasing.

2. Hiring medical staff - They're utterly useless right now. Does anyone even hire them? Mine have been level 1 since I started playing. I don't sustain enough injuries to justify the cost.

3. Increasing parity - Some teams rely on only a handful of players to really support their team. Teams without depth on their roster can see injuries hurting their season, while teams that do have strong depth will win more games.

4. More Strategy - A lot of this game is automated and there really isn't a whole lot of decision making going on. That would change with injuries. Every match will have the question of whether or not you should play your starters or rest them to prevent injuries.

For example. You're already in the play-offs but you have an important divisional game this week. Winner of the match will get a bye. Do you take the risk and play your starters or rest them so they're fresh for the play-offs?

This goes hand-in-hand with more parity as well. With starters being rested more often, top teams will be handed more losses.

5. Rewards Managerial Activity - You know that team that barely logs into RZA but still wins due to having played so long they have a much superior roster? Well, with injuries, you wont be able to do that anymore. Managers will constantly have to make decisions, replace players and keep up with development on youngsters. In turn, this makes the game more fun and appealing as well. We're all here cause we like the roster management and game planning... so this is all just more fun for us!!

Also, more manager activity = more page views = more ad revenue for pete.

6. Realism - Okay this had to make the list at some point. Football has always been a game about injuries. The best teams in football are ones that have the proper depth to support them and mitigate any damage an injury could cause to a team.

Just look at the Bronco's this season. Manning got hurt but they had a fine backup in Osweiler show up to spell him for a few weeks. They still won the Superbowl thanks to having proper depth and roster management.

And no, i'm not saying that everything in RZA needs to be as close to reality as possible. However, having a football sim without injuries is like having a cat with no fur.

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No. Injuries are only painful because of the current state of the game lends them to be. Injuries are not part of the current metagame in RZA. When a MAJOR injury happens its only annoying cause they only happen once every 5 or 6 seasons, we don't have the roster depth built up to support it, they are seemingly random and they happen during training which is the most annoying place for them to happen. No one should get hurt during training, that's just aggravating.

If injuries were embraced by the game they would simply be another aspect of Roster Management which we all love to do. Its a management game, we all like doing this stuff. If injuries were sustained DURING A MATCH and frequent enough that every team felt them every season they wouldn't be a chore like they are now. They would be part of the game itself and we all would be planning and developing our team around them.

To spice up this thread:
Install injuries on game day

I'll respond to your points in order Buffalo instead of having a giant quote.

1 - high number of snaps increasing risk of injury.
Fair enough, but then we might want to change the way EXP works. It's already hard to get players to gain experience as is, if we have to reduce their playing time to avoid injuries maybe EXP should increase faster to compensate for the loss of playing time.

2 - game plan changing due to injuries.
So no more in-game injuries but more training injuries? Seems unrealistic so if we're going for realism that's a bit weird.

3 - suspensions
Maybe this could be linked to INT and/or TW? But if we're going to include players missing time due to injuries we should also include players missing time due to suspensions. If the goal is to force managers to play a realistic number of back-ups then I see no reason to include injuries but not suspensions.

4 - early retirements
They're not related to your typical injury (like a player tearing his ACL and never getting his knee back where it was) anymore. They're related to players learning more about CTE and not being willing to play football anymore even though they are still perfectly capable of doing it from a physical perspective. See Borland retiring when perfectly healthy at 24 years old and listen to what he has to say about football here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/video/how-afraid-should-the-nfl-be-of-chris-borland/



Also, training and the economy might need to be changed quite a bit if the injury rate in RZA becomes similar to the NFL. The economy is currently based on your players being available to you, should we pay them less each week if they're more likely to be injured? Should we keep paying them when they are injured? Players starting skills are also based on the idea that they'll be able to train pretty much every week, if they now miss a significant number of training sessions players will become much worse across the board or we'd have to make each training session improve more.


So to do this in a fair way we might have to change the way experience, training and the economy work else it might completely change the dynamics of RZA. Not sure Pete's willing to change all of this just to increase the number of injuries.

Just another idea to deal with this issue:

How about capping the amount of Experience a player
can get per season ?

So, if you play a guy every snap, after a set number
of snaps in "real" games in a season, the player
hits a limit for Experience for the season.

A way to deal with not having more injuries, but
also not rewarding players for playing the same
players all the time, which really is unrealistic.

Of course there will be still in-game injuries. Bur I think we discussing here about more injuries during practice and not during games.

I don't believe training injuries should happen at all. All injuries should be in-game injuries and training should just be training. In-game injuries would change the whole dynamics of the game and make it 10x more interesting and fun. Training injuries are unavoidable, random and annoying. See my post earlier in the thread for more of my rant.