PCMs- What changed?

jcard · 07-01-2022, 07:43 AM

If you open the database folder and the era_modifiers file, you will see each year listed with its player creation modifier values. Each year has a year-specific set through 2004. Beginning with 2005, however, all of the values are 1 for each year. Some questions:
1) There is no detrimental effect to this, even though the 2005 real-life game differs markedly from the current version (league batting average twenty points lower, etc.)? [On a related point, I will note that the player editor seems to have been calibrated to 2005, given that entering a 50 for each rating will result in an expected batting line equal to the 2005 league average. I do wonder if this has any effect on the ability of the game to create collective sets of players who will produce target individual totals and league-wide distributions in the current MLB environment, particularly when working with ZIPS projections created by a third party unconcerned with the OOTP engine. Anyway, different conversation.]

2) I know that 2005 marks the beginning of the Modern Era in the OOTP universe and that all subsequent seasons belong to that era (a fact that is itself perhaps worthy of examination), but that does not explain why all of these years have the same PCMs when intra-era years in prior eras have unique PCMs. What is the reason for this change?

I will just add that a similar situation exists in the total_modifiers_neutralized file, only the homogeneity begins four years later with every subsequent year having the 2009 values.

Pelican · 07-01-2022, 11:19 AM

I am clueless on PCM and have nothing to add; but I eagerly await some guidance from those who have experience with this. Please remember there are those of us who will need some basic explanations, before you plunge too far into the really esoteric stuff.

jcard · 08-23-2022, 07:08 PM

An answer as to why PCMs have been fixed at 1.000 beginning with 2005 whereas they vary by year for every prior season would be appreciated. It would seem that there would be implications for modern era fictional or and current year saved. For example, given the changes in MLB statistics over the last fifteen years, do these fixed modifiers really serve a 2022 season save (specifically, the creation of fictional players as the save moves forward) as well as a season using 2005 settings? If they do, then why were season-specific PCMs necessary through 2004?

I fear bumping my own thread even once may be poor form, so I will not repeat this attempt. Obviously, there is no obligation to respond. I will, however, take a continued silence to indicate the absence of any worthy justification.

locuspc · 08-23-2022, 08:17 PM

Players can be as young as 16 years old when they're created. A player who was 16 in 2005 would be 33 today, many players are still solidly in their mid-career at that point. It might be hard to get enough data on completed careers to generate fair PCMs.

Do you have the PCM file from previous versions? It would be interesting to see if the file simply hasn't been updated in a decade or if it's being regularly updated with PCMs that stay a constant distance from the present day.

md40022 · 08-24-2022, 09:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by locuspc

It would be interesting to see if the file simply hasn't been updated in a decade or if it's being regularly updated with PCMs that stay a constant distance from the present day.

Yes.

quillenl · 08-24-2022, 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pelican

I am clueless on PCM and have nothing to add; but I eagerly await some guidance from those who have experience with this. Please remember there are those of us who will need some basic explanations, before you plunge too far into the really esoteric stuff.

[From the Manual:
Traditional OOTP PCMs affect the strength of major leagues relative to each other, in terms of the current and potential ratings of their players. For instance, if you have two major leagues in your universe, and one has the default Traditional OOTP PCM value of 1.000 for Home Run Power, while the other has a Traditional OOTP PCM value of 0.500 for Home Run Power, then Home Run Power potential and ratings in the second league will be roughly half that of the first. Traditional OOTP PCMs affect both the quality of players generated when the league is first created and the quality of new players created for that league's draft or college and high school feeder leagues.

Traditional OOTP PCMs cascade down through a league system, so that a parent league and all affiliated leagues rolling up to it share the same player creation modifiers.

See the images below for Chris Chambliss. As you can see, the effect of doubling the PCM for Eye had no effect in newly generated players upon league creation. I ran the same test manually adjusting all Batter PCMs to 2.0, then to 0.5, and the ratings of batters in both pools were identical.

Maybe this works for Fictional, but I haven't seen it have an effect on Historical Leagues. The historical modifiers haven't been adjusted in the database since at least 2017, and I'm not really sure it matters. Personally, I always assumed the developers realized this had almost zero bang for the buck and programmed it out for historical (if it ever worked for historical).

Short Version for Pelican: If you want to know how this impacts your Historical games... it does not.

Reed · 08-24-2022, 07:53 PM

I have always wondered what effect this has and have decided it has no effect on my league.
I play historical, random and use 1975 every year to set league modifiers. No minors.

kidd_05_u2 · 08-24-2022, 09:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by quillenl

Short Version for Pelican: If you want to know how this impacts your Historical games... it does not.

PCMs affect fictional players. If you play fictional historical, the PCMs do have an impact.

kidd_05_u2 · 08-24-2022, 11:30 PM

As for the answer to the original question, you may want player ratings to be different for a period when baseball was radically different than in the modern game. If you start a league with 1890 stats output and modern PCMs, you will see players with high stuff ratings that don't strike anybody out and pitchers with below-average movement that don't give up any home runs. The historical PCMs give you the option to align ratings and results better.

My guess is the devs relied on some sort of algorithm to link the PCMs to the stats output of an era while maintaining the overall talent broadly unchanged (without this last part you lose cross-historical play as a fun feature). The decision to apply PCMs for each year is to achieve smoothing in how ratings change over time, which is obviously desirable. If you take a close look, you will find there aren't abrupt year-to-year changes back and forth in the PCMs. PCM changes for a given year don’t necessarily have to be aligned to how the stats output changed in that same year. PCM changes should reflect trends and they do.

The decision to stop changing PCMs after 2004 and not earlier or later is probably arbitrary. Note that since the 90s, PCMs barely deviate from 1.000. Also, 2005-2021 PCMs being the same is reasonable, just as it would be reasonable to keep PCMs unchanged for any 15-year period. It could be argued that the stats output changed in that time because of ball manipulation and how the approach to player usage strategy changed, which is reflected in the stats total and stats modifiers, and not because there have been fundamental changes in player talent levels that need to show up in the ratings.

For example, how should the PCM for home runs change over the last 15 years? Should PCMs show a downtrend in the middle that reflects the low home runs of 2012-15 and then rise to reflect 2019-21? Nobody would argue that players got fundamentally weaker with the bat early in the 2010s and suddenly got stronger in the second half of the decade. At that point, you leave the PCM unchanged or barely unchanged and let the league totals modifiers do their work to adapt the stats output. An 80 HR rating may get you 40 homers under 2008-2012 LTMs and 50 homers under 2019-21 LTMs, it’s fine.

TL;DR league totals and modifiers adapt the stats output for any set of ratings, but historical PCMs provide a set of ratings that make it easier for the user to know better what he will get in different eras. There are historical PCMs for each year to allow for smoothing in how ratings change across different eras. But it is reasonable to keep PCMs unchanged for a given period of 20-30 years and let the different stats outputs be reflected entirely through LTMs instead of through ratings.

Pelican · 08-25-2022, 10:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kidd_05_u2

PCMs affect fictional players. If you play fictional historical, the PCMs do have an impact.

Many thanks Quillen and Kidd. Short version always appreciated. I play historical years with real players and historical rookies (but not historical trades or injuries), so this should be of no concern. Going forward, I am using my sim stats rather than actual stats for each season, so I guess it gradually becomes fictional (in terms of results, if not players) as a result of the way I play. My favorites examples are Ted Williams not going to Korea, and Lou Gehrig avoiding ALS. What if?

07-01-2022, 07:43 AM	#1
jcard All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2015 Posts: 616 Infractions: 0/1 (1)	PCMs- What changed? If you open the database folder and the era_modifiers file, you will see each year listed with its player creation modifier values. Each year has a year-specific set through 2004. Beginning with 2005, however, all of the values are 1 for each year. Some questions: 1) There is no detrimental effect to this, even though the 2005 real-life game differs markedly from the current version (league batting average twenty points lower, etc.)? [On a related point, I will note that the player editor seems to have been calibrated to 2005, given that entering a 50 for each rating will result in an expected batting line equal to the 2005 league average. I do wonder if this has any effect on the ability of the game to create collective sets of players who will produce target individual totals and league-wide distributions in the current MLB environment, particularly when working with ZIPS projections created by a third party unconcerned with the OOTP engine. Anyway, different conversation.] 2) I know that 2005 marks the beginning of the Modern Era in the OOTP universe and that all subsequent seasons belong to that era (a fact that is itself perhaps worthy of examination), but that does not explain why all of these years have the same PCMs when intra-era years in prior eras have unique PCMs. What is the reason for this change? I will just add that a similar situation exists in the total_modifiers_neutralized file, only the homogeneity begins four years later with every subsequent year having the 2009 values.

07-01-2022, 11:19 AM	#2
Pelican Hall Of Famer Join Date: Mar 2021 Location: Wilmington, Delaware Posts: 3,295	I am clueless on PCM and have nothing to add; but I eagerly await some guidance from those who have experience with this. Please remember there are those of us who will need some basic explanations, before you plunge too far into the really esoteric stuff.

08-23-2022, 07:08 PM	#3
jcard All Star Reserve Join Date: Oct 2015 Posts: 616 Infractions: 0/1 (1)	An answer as to why PCMs have been fixed at 1.000 beginning with 2005 whereas they vary by year for every prior season would be appreciated. It would seem that there would be implications for modern era fictional or and current year saved. For example, given the changes in MLB statistics over the last fifteen years, do these fixed modifiers really serve a 2022 season save (specifically, the creation of fictional players as the save moves forward) as well as a season using 2005 settings? If they do, then why were season-specific PCMs necessary through 2004? I fear bumping my own thread even once may be poor form, so I will not repeat this attempt. Obviously, there is no obligation to respond. I will, however, take a continued silence to indicate the absence of any worthy justification.

08-23-2022, 08:17 PM	#4
locuspc Major Leagues Join Date: Apr 2022 Posts: 349	Players can be as young as 16 years old when they're created. A player who was 16 in 2005 would be 33 today, many players are still solidly in their mid-career at that point. It might be hard to get enough data on completed careers to generate fair PCMs. Do you have the PCM file from previous versions? It would be interesting to see if the file simply hasn't been updated in a decade or if it's being regularly updated with PCMs that stay a constant distance from the present day.

08-24-2022, 07:53 PM	#7
Reed Hall Of Famer Join Date: Oct 2013 Posts: 2,752	I have always wondered what effect this has and have decided it has no effect on my league. I play historical, random and use 1975 every year to set league modifiers. No minors.

08-24-2022, 11:30 PM	#9
kidd_05_u2 All Star Reserve Join Date: Aug 2016 Posts: 628	As for the answer to the original question, you may want player ratings to be different for a period when baseball was radically different than in the modern game. If you start a league with 1890 stats output and modern PCMs, you will see players with high stuff ratings that don't strike anybody out and pitchers with below-average movement that don't give up any home runs. The historical PCMs give you the option to align ratings and results better. My guess is the devs relied on some sort of algorithm to link the PCMs to the stats output of an era while maintaining the overall talent broadly unchanged (without this last part you lose cross-historical play as a fun feature). The decision to apply PCMs for each year is to achieve smoothing in how ratings change over time, which is obviously desirable. If you take a close look, you will find there aren't abrupt year-to-year changes back and forth in the PCMs. PCM changes for a given year don’t necessarily have to be aligned to how the stats output changed in that same year. PCM changes should reflect trends and they do. The decision to stop changing PCMs after 2004 and not earlier or later is probably arbitrary. Note that since the 90s, PCMs barely deviate from 1.000. Also, 2005-2021 PCMs being the same is reasonable, just as it would be reasonable to keep PCMs unchanged for any 15-year period. It could be argued that the stats output changed in that time because of ball manipulation and how the approach to player usage strategy changed, which is reflected in the stats total and stats modifiers, and not because there have been fundamental changes in player talent levels that need to show up in the ratings. For example, how should the PCM for home runs change over the last 15 years? Should PCMs show a downtrend in the middle that reflects the low home runs of 2012-15 and then rise to reflect 2019-21? Nobody would argue that players got fundamentally weaker with the bat early in the 2010s and suddenly got stronger in the second half of the decade. At that point, you leave the PCM unchanged or barely unchanged and let the league totals modifiers do their work to adapt the stats output. An 80 HR rating may get you 40 homers under 2008-2012 LTMs and 50 homers under 2019-21 LTMs, it’s fine. TL;DR league totals and modifiers adapt the stats output for any set of ratings, but historical PCMs provide a set of ratings that make it easier for the user to know better what he will get in different eras. There are historical PCMs for each year to allow for smoothing in how ratings change across different eras. But it is reasonable to keep PCMs unchanged for a given period of 20-30 years and let the different stats outputs be reflected entirely through LTMs instead of through ratings.