Durability and Longevity

[Juggernt]

Other than the obvious ability to avoid declining skills from injuries, does durability impact longevity? Is there any reason to believe that a Durable player will hang onto his skill set longer than a Normal one?

[Syd Thrift]

In the sense that every time a player gets injured they have a chance for their abilities to drop, yes, a player who avoids injuries altogether won't have talent hits as often as a player who gets hurt a lot, at least on average. In action, sometimes you'll get a guy who can't finish a season but who nevertheless stays a decent player well into his 30s, and sometimes that guy with the Iron Man rating doesn't hit his potential or suffers a random hit to his talent and winds up not being as good as you thought he'd be.

In-game, I like to have talent change randomness set to a relatively high level (120 in the current game) with aging turned down and development up so that my personnel decisions tend to be more of "do I want to invest in this guy" than a pure "who has the highest ratings" kind of thing. TBH I think that's more of how players are evaluated IRL (and I think that "real" development and aging curves are flatter than they look statistically as a result), although the game almost has to think of players in terms of pure ratings because otherwise that becomes an exploit.