Gaining Part 3: Gains & Opposition Quality (27/02/2014 06:01)

"Don't be ridiculous, we're way too good to share the same field as your rag-tag bunch of footballing lepers."

- Every team who has ever rejected my friendly challenge, in my head at least

 

For those managers with the time to play them, most player gains come from friendlies. The most credit-efficient way of getting to 200 per season is to take 100 open challenges, and play 50 'sets' - that is, a home and away tie against another team. Once I started buying credits and found myself with enough to spare, I went over to the forum and started challenging people who'd requested sets. To my surprise - and, OK, indignation - most of these were ignored or rejected.

Flashbacks to high school. Didn't the forum say that teams asking for challenges would accept them, and challenge you back? And weren't these teams still posting messages asking for friendlies ten minutes later? Why was I being so cruelly rejected from the dance? Could it be that my lower-division side was failing to fill their stadium and costing them some money? (No, by the way - even I hit the maximum income for friendlies and my stadium's only just reached 20,000). Well, after a while I realised my self-consciously ridiculous team name probably wasn't the reason, and stopped taking it personally. It seems instead that player gains are affected by the quality of the opposition you face, so most of these sides were waiting for someone with a higher Q rating to challenge them.

In a comment on the previous post, King-Eric highlighted an old quote from Spinner which seems to confirm many of the factors involved in calculating player gains during a match:

"There are so many factors involved in this "gaining-bit", each of them alone has almost no impact. Ok, a stronger opponent might increase the chance of gaining marginally. However, against a strong opponent, your team is likely to perform "less good" due to being tackled, intercepted etc, which is another factor in the gaining-thing. Along with minutes on the pitch, individual performance, potential, which stat is selected for gaining, how high the stat is, how much the stat was used etc etc etc etc...." 

- Spinner

 

So let's take that as true. Better opposition quality means better gaining. We knew this already! Our gaining strategies are optimised! We can all go home now, right? Not so fast.

It might be true that stronger opponents give better gains. But look at all the other factors that are true - attribute levels, age, stars, minutes on the pitch, performance, age of surrounding players, position... and a healthy dollop of luck. As Spinner himself notes, the fact that there are so many factors means that the influence any single factor has on your gaining is small. It's also easy to forget that every time you make a decision, or do things a certain way, it has other consequences - missed opportunities for example, or unexpected impacts on other factors. If you just blindly restrict yourself to higher-quality opponents in friendlies (or play your defenders in goal...) you may dilute or even reduce your gains through lower team or individual performance. And restricting yourself to only certain opponents means it could take longer to play all your friendlies, requiring a greater investment of time in the game. All this is to say:

 

It's useful to know whether something has an effect - but it's more important to know how big the effect is.

 

That could be the mantra of this blog.

---

 

Opponent Strength: To Steamroller Or Be Steamrollered?

So let's take a look at opposition quality in particular. This is an interesting case because as noted above, if you take the Spinner quote at his word there are several different factors working in opposite directions:

1) Better opponent quality should lead to better gains. But...

2) Better opponents also leads to poorer performance from your own players, and less time on the ball. Which leads to poorer gains. But you could counter this by having...

3) Higher-quality players on your own team. But that means fewer gains..

Etcetera. Let's decide we can't really control the quality of our own players - we know who we want to gain, and we just want to maximise how many attributes they get. So which should we aim for? Easier opponents, or harder ones? And is the overall effect big enough to worry about selecting our opponents carefully, or is it so small that we'd really be best off playing whoever challenges us first and using the time saved to go out in the sunshine?*

To answer this question, I've kept a track of my last 342 competitive and friendly games, recording the type of game, the opponent, their quality, and the number of attributes my players earned for each. I can now look at the attributes, and determine how strongly related they are to the type of match and the quality of the opposition. I've isolated the effect of each factor in a couple of ways - partial correlations and multiple linear regression - and they give pretty much the same conclusions.

It won't surprise anyone to know that friendlies earn you fewer attributes than player cups, which in turn earn you fewer than competitive league and cup fixtures. The effect isn't really that dramatic: Friendlies only gained 27% fewer attributes than competitive games, while player cups were in between. That's the reason that friendlies still make up the bulk of most teams gains in a season - you play so many, and they're nearly as good as playing a real match. But even this modest difference is very strongly statistically significant, with p-values less that 0.0001 for both of the analyses I ran. That means there's less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of seeing such a difference just through random chance, and means we can be very confident both that friendlies really do earn fewer attributes, and that our analysis is powerful enough to detect quite small patterns in the data very clearly. So what happens when we look at the effect of opponent quality in the same way?

Answer: We see virtually no effect. Very slightly more attributes were gained against higher-quality teams: For example, playing against a Q90 team rather than a Q79 one earned about 7% more attributes. To put it another way, the quality of your opposition determined about half of one percent of the match gains, while the other 99.5% was determined by all those other factors we talked about. It's not a big effect. What's more, we can't even be sure this effect is real. Unlike the difference between playing a friendly or league match, the significance of the trend was marginal at best, with p-values of 0.18 to 0.19 depending on the analysis. In other words, even if quality had zero overall effect, we'd see this pattern about 1 time in 5. Not exactly something you'd stake your house on.

My guess, then, is that since opposition quality has a negative effect on your own player and team performance, these two things roughly cancel out, and you gain about as many attributes against a Q65 team as a Q95 one. The story might change as we add more data, but for now I'd conclude:

 

Don't worry too much about the quality of your opponent. Any differences in gains are so small you probably won't even notice them. Go outdoors and enjoy the sunshine.

 

I'll add a small caveat. If you're a very small team, with a stadium capacity below 15-20,000, you'll probably earn a little extra money from playing a higher division side. If your stadium's much bigger though, you should be maxing out your income against virtually any opposition. And for stronger teams, it's possible you'll pick up more injuries against weaker sides, since lower tackling stats should lead to more fouls (on the other hand you get more practice building up hidden free-kick stats). Having said that, my thankfully rare friendly injuries have all come from better teams so far, so I think it's mainly just luck.

Finally, though, there's one much bigger reason why we should all relax and accept challenges from smaller teams: It's just polite, and you'll be helping some new player get involved and addicted to the game. Remember that was you, once upon a time! :-)

As always, let me know what you think in the comments! Next post I'll look at whether there's a 'form' element to gaining. Should you keep playing friendlies when those gains are rolling in?

 

- Belizio

 

 

*The author lives in California. Your climate may differ.

 

 

Click Here to return to the Wonderstar Analytics home page