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+---- Thread: Academy Task 5: Behind the Scenes of the Preseason (/showthread.php?tid=5834)
Academy Task 5: Behind the Scenes of the Preseason - Laser - 2024-11-06
Ah, the preseason in the SSL. Though always looked forward to as the first action for many teams and players in several weeks, it may not be exactly what you think it is. Functionally, preseason means nothing and is typically just seen as a necessity of the sim. But ultimately, there are about 5 things that are essential behind the scenes for preseason that non-war room users may not know about.
At a glance, preseason is lauded as the first opportunity to see your player in action after not seeing them play for two to three weeks. However, this isn't really a good indicator of anything at all for the regular season. There's a bunch of reasons for this, including the most important reason of all - the simmers are not sure the file is accurate. The simmers do an absolute buttload of work every season to make sure the offseason file is as accurate as it can be and that there are no mistakes, but they are human and sometimes mistakes are present. The main and express function of preseason is so that there are games to engage users while also making sure that any mistakes do not persist into the regular season and that everyone starts as they should be. This is the only and main reason that there is actual meaning and importance to the offseason.
However, there are other advantages to the preseason for GMs and to a certain extent to players. Though it's not built into the sim, players can be given additional experience in certain positions that they may not have originally signed up for. This was a loophole for a long time, however it was closed (I think) when position experience resets were initiated not too long ago and it was made a requirement for users to pay for their secondary positions.
The next, and realistically the most important, is that GMs have a basis to test upon for the upcoming season. However, even this advantage is a bit of a hit or miss. Half the time, teams simply throw in their tactics for preseason because each tactic is automatically made as familiar as possible for the team. Then they add in their actual tactics for week 1 as a hope to throw off everyone, blow away season predictions, and more importantly hide potential out of position players that they are taking advantage of to make their team even better.
Lastly, and in a way connected to the last point, is that a lot of GMs and tacticians use the preseason file as a basis to make their season predictions off of. Ultimately the statistic predictions are usually a shot in the dark regardless of what stats you have thrown at you by season predictions. There are far too many changes that can happen in-season per trades, attribute increases, tactical changes, a million different things. Some teams also just prefer to go off of tactical familiarities and TPE levels at important positions, or average TPE at any level.
Ultimately, there functionally is no front-facing benefit to the preseason, but there is a lot of benefit in the back end. These are things that the management and majority of league job members will know about, but other users may not be aware of.