Questions For The Dev

[Rodafowa]

So, I made a character (not a junior) and my career started in 2008. It's now 2018. I noticed some weird things lately, and I hope the dev can give an explanation.

1. AI players Like Nadal, Djokovic, Federer, Gasquet, Wawrinka, etc. play doubles and singles in almost EVERY event and never seem to tire. Federer has won three singles tournaments back-to-back-to-back at age 36 and somehow has the energy to play singles and doubles in a Masters Series tournament, yet my player is absolutely shattered if I play singles and doubles in any given tournament.

2. Stat decay suddenly became insane after one of the recent updates. I had my forehand power up at around 96%. It's dropped down into the upper 80's after a single tournament. That's just a small example. I have to constantly train my physical abilities, as they decay 5-8% per tournament. Stats should not decay that fast, especially when I have 3 top tier coaches (in addition to my own coach) and a fully upgraded "home base."

3. My power has suddenly decreased. Despite having a serve power of 90% and a strength rating of 95%+, my second serve speed is almost always 130 KMH. Not only that, my ground strokes have become laughably weak. It's gotten to the point where I have to text sim all of my matches because if my character misses a first serve, the AI opponent just tees off on the second serves and weak ground strokes. Is this going to be fixed?

4. AI serves are unrealistic. It doesn't matter who I face. If I 3D sim the match, they nail first serves on the line almost every time. I had David Goffin serve up 4 aces in a row against me the other day. It's either they miss the first serve, or nail a 180+KMH serve on the line. Nothing else happens. Is it supposed to be like this?

[ManuTOO]

Hello,

1) The game engine doesn't take into account tiredness from one tournament to another one for the CPU players ; it's only done per tournament with starting forms at 100%.
It's to avoid complicated issues with form management & schedule.
I could probably add a lower tournament participate rate for old top players in the secondary tournaments.

2 & 3) It's likely 1 or 2 bugs. Could you send me a Bug Report when in your Training screen ? (HowTo => https://steamcommunity.com/app/760630/discussions/2/1642043267251533691/ )

In Pro difficulty, you should lose about 1.5% per week when your skill is at 100%.

3) Or it could be because you have turned on the Manual Player Control in Settings -> 3D Match, and lowered your player level to Club or Junior before a match.

[Rodafowa]

Thanks for the response.

1. I'm not sure of how this would work on the technical side, but it is very strange to see any player (not just a 36 year old Federer) playing in almost every single tournament.

2. I sent the report. Hopefully you get it.

3. I've had my difficulty on the lowest setting since I started this character because I tried playing on a harder difficulty with a previous character, and he would almost never win a match. Even so, my character never served below 160 KMH on a second serve and never hit such weak ground strokes before one of the recent updates. I also don't have manual player control settings on.

Also, another issue I encountered is player earnings. I've earned a total of less than $100,000,000, despite these numbers:

Emerson Cups - 1 singles, 1 doubles
Grand Slams - 30 singles, 14 doubles
Masters - 3 singles, 2 doubles
Masters Series - 47 singles, 17 doubles
Olympiads - 1 singles, 1 doubles
TET 500 - 7 singles, 5 doubles
TET 250 - 12 singles, 7 doubles
Challenger - 2 singles
Future - 3 singles

Those are only wins. The less than $100,000,000 also includes total earnings from sponsors, including having Rebook (with bonuses) for at least 4 years.

[ManuTOO]

1) Normally, top players should play 18~25 tournament per week ; they have a significantly lower chance to play when they already played in the past 2 weeks, but it's still possible to play 3 or 4 tournaments in a row sometimes (especially when there are mandatory tournaments)

2) I got your bug report, I'll try to check it today.

3) The 3D match level is a separate difficulty level that you can activate only if you have activated the Manual Player Control.
It was bugged at some point in the past though, so maybe I forgot to fix one edge case there ; I'll check what's going on in your saved game.

4) Prize shown for the tournament is the total of all prizes, not the winner prize ; you check your total prize in your activity screen ?

[Rodafowa]

Right now, Federer is 37 years old in my game. I'm at the US Open. This year, he's played 32 singles tournaments and 10 doubles tournaments (he's my doubles partner, so I'm assuming he'd play more if I entered into more tournaments).

I don't have manual control on. When I go into a 3D match, all I can do is change the sliders on left portion of the screen.

I've earned around $98,000,000 for my entire career (as per the activity screen). I should be well over $100,000,000 from the singles tournaments alone.

[ManuTOO]

1) I checked your player Falo on the Year 2018 Week 31.
He has FH Power at 94.2%.
I start the next tournament, Toronto ; it's now week 32, and the FH Power is down to 93.1%.
Either your player lost in the 1st round or win the tournament, at beginning of Week 33, he's at 92.0%.
For Speed, it goes down from 97.7% to 95.4% in 2 weeks.
So everything seems normal.

It doesn't happen like that on your PC ?

Did you install the Modding SDK ? If yes, delete everything you don't use, especially the Menu folder.

2) Earning are from the year ~2007, thus they are significantly smaller than 2010+ prizes.
Changing them would unbalance the difficulty and thus would require to change the prices of the Trainers & Coach Center.

3) I checked and Federer was playing too much because he's your doubles partner ; in that case, the player may have lower chances to play in singles, so when he does he grabs it very often. I'll tune that down for the next update when he already played a lot of singles events (ie: more than 20).

[Rodafowa]

1. I just played a tournament and won. These are some of my stats before the tournament and after returning home from the flight:

FH Power - 93.4% before, 91.3% after
BH Power - 91.1% before, 89% after
Service Power - 90.5% before, 88.4% after
Return - 87.9% before, 85.9% after
Speed - 97.7% before, 95.4% after
Strength - 98.3% before, 95.9% after
Concentration - 95.6% before, 94.5% after
Positioning - 95.6% before, 94.4% after

From just those 8 stats, that's a loss of 13.3 percentage points. If you scale that up to all of the stats in the game, my character loses 55.9 percentage points by playing a one week tournament. That would take 1.5 training sessions in a row just to get those stats back. That's 3 full training sessions in a row to simply recover my stats after winning a Grand Slam. This means I have to play a very small number of tournaments, otherwise my stats would decay to the point where my character can't compete. I checked the 2017 year for my character. I only played in 13 tournaments. Even with me trying to manage my stats as best as possible, I can never keep my stats anywhere near the top AI players, which means I'd never try playing on any difficulty besides the lowest one, because it would be incredibly frustrating. I still routinely lose when I come up against Nadal, Federer and Djokovic, despite playing the bare minimum number of tournaments to keep my stats high, and playing on the lowest difficulty.

2. IDK how earning more money would unbalance the difficulty. It took me something like 4 years to fully upgrade my training center and get 3 good trainers on the lowest difficulty. If anyone is trying to play on the hardest difficulty, they have no chance of ever beating a top AI player unless they fully upgrade their training center and buy all of the best trainers available.

3. It's not just Fed playing too many tournaments. I went back to the year I started playing doubles and looked at some stats. In 2015 (the year I started playing doubles), Federer played 18 singles tournaments and 21 doubles tournaments. Rafa played 26 singles tournaments and 20 doubles tournaments. Djokovic played 20 singles tournaments and 16 doubles tournaments. In 2013, Stan Wawrinka played 26 singles tournaments and 19 doubles tournaments. In 2012, Andy Roddick played 23 singles tournaments and 12 doubles tournaments (he retired after the US Open that year). Meanwhile, Bob Bryan never plays singles, yet the most doubles tournaments he's entered in a single year is 28. The top players should rarely, if ever, play doubles.

I deleted the Menu Folder in Mods, didn't seem to do anything. Still averaging 180 KMH on the first serve and 132 KMH on the second serve. Still hitting weak ground strokes.

[ManuTOO]

1) Falo's global force is 93%. (on average speed surface)
Nadal is 89% ; Federer 87% ; Djokovic 90%.
So your player is significantly above all of them.

However, your trainer setup is very bad : you have 2 old age specialists, which is 1 too much as the training bonuses don't stack (you can check this in the Team page where your current bonuses are shown ; display of the age specialist was glitchy and it's fixed in today's build), and 1 sparring partner which isn't the best choice once you're in the top 50 as your player is much better than him.

And they don't travel with your player, so every time you're at a tournament, he doesn't get their bonuses.

Plus you still can hire 3 more trainers.

So you should fire 1 age specialist, possibly your sparring partner, and hire the best trainers to boost all the different kinds of training and you'll be even more above Nadal & co.

2) As an example, the AO Slam winner prize is 2.5 times bigger now than in the game ; UK Slam is 2x. It means once you win a slam for the 1st time, it'd be even more a game-changer than it is now, and thus completely redistribute the difficulty curve.

You can relatively easily change that by yourself if you want to. Or you can download this Mod which features realistic 2019 money prizes & schedule : https://www.managames.com/Forum/topic11-31544.php ; or this Mod for 2018 here : https://www.managames.com/Forum/topic11-30570.php .

3) When I created the player base, I took the best doubles year to tune the doubles participation rate, thus the results you see.

TEM is not supposed to 100% realistic and I like to slightly promote doubles... :-)

If you don't like that, you can lower the SingleDouble value of the top players in your Players.ATP.ini (it should take only a couple of minutes :-) ).

4) I checked and actually your player has serve effect talents and thus he does slower 2nd serves but put different spins in them, so it's normal.

On the 1st serve, as he has the Sliced Serve talent, he's doing ~30% of 1st sliced serve, and thus it lowers his average 1st serve speed.

[Rodafowa]

1. I didn't know the trainers don't stack. Still, those were new trainers I hired. I had rally, special shots, serve, physio trainers etc. before them. I could still never get anywhere near Nadal, Federer or Djokovic stat-wise, because the decay is just too much. The AI has no decay, while as I demonstrated, it takes about 1.5 full training sessions to restore lost stats from a single one week tournament. It's just too much. Stat loss should be extremely minimal until you hit a certain age. As for the sparring partner, I need him to train on the surface of an upcoming tournament before it starts. If we shouldn't be using a sparring partner once we hit the top 50, let us train with someone entered into the tournament before it actually starts.

2. The difficulty is already too high with the stat decay the way it is.

3. All this does is make doubles players useless. Bob Bryan, Nenad Zimonjic, Leander Paes, Marcin Matkowski, Daniel Nestor, etc. never win any tournaments. It's always two random singles players paired together for whatever reason. I don't really feel like going into the files and editing the lines for 30+ players.

4. Under no circumstances is it normal for someone with 95% strength and 95% serve power to hit a second serve 80 MPH. I think you should add a tooltip when picking the slices letting us know what they do, because I just assumed if I didn't pick them my character would never slice the ball. I also think you should add in a button to activate a sliced serve and maybe even another slider to determine how much your character will use slices in general.

[ManuTOO]

1) A little tip : you can train your rally skills to get used to a new surface.

2) Your player is both number 1 in singles and doubles, by almost double points over the #2 in singles, and more than double points over the #3 in doubles (#2 being your doubles partner :-) ).

And you have won almost all the tournaments you entered in the past 52 weeks.

It's still not too easy for you ?

I watched a Let's Play and the guy got to #1 in 2 years and a half in Junior difficulty (1 tick above the Club difficulty you play with), while playing really not well.

Other users have become #1 in Master & Incredible ; check the achievement stats here, you'll see there's a healthy rate between all the achievement difficulties (ie: similar to other games) : https://steamcommunity.com/stats/760630/achievements . (except the Master #1 which is maybe a bit too low)

However, if you really want to turn off or lower the drop speed, you can change its value ; more info here : https://www.managames.com/Forum/topic1-472.php (it's for TE2006, but it still works the same way :-) ).

3) I checked more and the top singles players were getting a too high Doubles Spirit !
That's why the Doubles specialist couldn't win enough tournaments.
It'll be fixed in the next update, thanks to your report ! :-)

4) I checked and got this for the 2nd serves with 95% Service Power & Consistency, with all 3 serve talents :
- Flat : 100-105mph
- Slice : 90mph
- Topspin : 90-95mph
- Kick : : 80-85mph
It's indeed a bit low, especially for the kicked serve. I'll raise by ~5mph all the spin serves for the next update.

Also I'm planning to add Coaching sliders to control the 1st & 2nd serve spin, aim & speed.

[Rodafowa]

1. Didn't know about that. However, it seems as though we can have 5 trainers + a sparring partner. That's what I have right now. IDK if that's intended or not, just letting you know.

2. The record my character has was only achieved through save scumming. If you're unfamiliar with what that is, you save right before an upcoming event in a game, play through said event, and if it doesn't work out, you reload and keep trying until it works out the way you wanted it to. In this case, that means saving before matches. I do this because I still lose to random players quite frequently. For instance, Kyle Edmund just beat me at the French Open (an event I haven't lost at in like 6 years) in straight sets. My stats are better than his across the board. If it happened at a 250 or 500 event, I'd let it stand, but not in a major. I reloaded that save and simmed the match, beat him 4, 2 and 0 or something. I'll make a new character today or tomorrow, play on the highest difficulty, and accept every defeat the game gives me. I'll show you where the character is it in like 5 years.

3. Glad to have helped.

4. Excited to hear about the serve controls.

Keep up the good work.

[ManuTOO]

1) You can get any kind for your 6 trainers ; you have 3 per player, plus you got a +3 bonus from your Coach Charisma

2) Oh ok, I see.

If you lose a match you think you shouldn't lose, check your Form of the day and your opponent's one (by mousing over their Energy bar), and if both are in the 98-101% range, then send me a Bug Report (HowTo => https://steamcommunity.com/app/760630/discussions/2/1642043267251533691/ ) from the screen with the match score, so I could replay it several times to check the outcome and check if there's any funky calculation somewhere.

3) The update is there with the Doubles Spirit skill lowered for the singles players ; please let me know if it's ok like this or not. I didn't test much so it may require additional tuning.
Note : Federer should be now a bit less interesting doubles partner... :-)

[Rodafowa]

Federer just retired (along with Nadal, Djokovic, Tsonga and a couple others) in 2021. I've decided to just focus on singles and see how much longer my character can remain on top. I will check the doubles results as the tournaments go by to see if it's working.