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+---- Thread: Picture an SSL with much, much lower attribute scores. (/showthread.php?tid=9153)
Picture an SSL with much, much lower attribute scores. - woog - 2026-03-29
Over in the Simulation Basketball Association, I've recently taken a job as apprentice/assistant/deputy commissioner, just in time to ramp up a major effort to blow up the league and start over again with new player advancement and new plenty of other things.
One issue for the current SBA was a that over nearly 100 seasons, the league has pretty much cracked the code on an optimal meta of combining at least three 3&D players with one inside scorer and one defender or specialist role-player, which reliably outperformed teams that strayed too far from that meta. The engine the league uses seems to not have been designed to handle players with the spectacularly high attribute scores we have in our veterans - NBA hall of famers aren't nearly as well-made as second-tier stars in the SBA.
SBA "Reborn" will give players more starting TPE than they get now, but will start them off with abysmally low attribute scores (10/100 rather than 20/100, 35/100 or 50/100 today) and give them less TPE per season to grow, with attribute points costing twice as much to start, but increasingly much less steeply than in the current league.
That's a pretty loaded sentence, so let's say the same thought another way. We won't have players getting above 80/100 in most attributes any more. Some won't get there in more than two or three attributes at their peak. Players will be much more differentiated by how much they choose to shore up their weaknesses, and the degree to which they invest in their strengths.
I wanted to consider for a moment what the same change might look like in the SSL.
Picture an SSL in which players begin with 3 in all attributes instead of 5s. Then, instead of the early points costing 1 attribute point per TPE, ramping up to 25 TPE to get from 18 to 19 or from 19 to 20, picture attribute points costing 4 TPE each from 3 to 9, then 6 each from 10 to 15, and 9 each from 16 to 20 (that's assuming you even let people have 20s in everything - SBA Reborn is choosing to leave the top of its attribute scale untouched). If you're thinking "those prices are much lower than today! attribute scores will be even higher, dumbass!", it's because you also give much, much less TPE. The SBA will lower max earning from about 135 TPE per season to 80. Picture turning the SSL's 12 TPE + career tasks + predictions + cash-that-you-spend-on-yet-more-TPE each week into 8 TPE per week, period.
Result: You don't have every outfield player with 19+ paccel at their peak and a narrow band of differentiation between themselves and other players at other attributes. A player in "SSL Reborn" with 19 or 20 paccel would be running around the field insanely fast, getting to their next astonishingly bad error with astonishing speed. Some teams would still lean into a meta milking high paccel scores, because it works, but others would find new opportunities to expose the weaknesses of those teams at other skills. I have very few hours of FM24 under my belt, so I won't be the one to tell how what tactics benefit or suffer. But I'm confident the landscape of getting player builds to fit together would look rather different with players who have a likelihood to end up looking more different from each other.
I also won't tell you one is better than the other, because that's neither my place nor my privilege here. But, the thought exercise was an interesting one for me, as these are my two top sim leagues. Maybe considering such an alternate SSL is also thought-provoking for others here, which is all I intend with it.
(Also, if you're curious about SBA Reborn, hit me up on discord. We have two seasons at minimum before we make our big change, and hopefully fewer than five.)