Fish wrote:Sorry if this is already posted somewhere, but what is the typical weekly schedule for my reference?
Sims seem Wed PM / Thu AM of the following week. When do player rating and injury status updates get finalized?
I ask because I see some practice squad guys without ratings even though I believe they were added in the week 2 update. Obviously that has no impact on the sim, but since it is easy to miss an update with how EA is publishing their weekly ratings it would be helpful to know when this is finalized incase we wanted to do a quick once over for some crowdsourcing efforts.
Thanks in advance, much appreciated.
"Typical" isn't always typical because it really depends a lot upon my personal schedule and when I can knock things out in this free, for fun game. Grades are MUCH, MUCH more difficult to update this year versus past years so that's complicated things early on. We'll definitely get the guys with changes noted from week to week with a focus there, and when time will try to do a complete grade update of thousands of players some weeks when time allows. If someone brand new gets added and aren't part of our update and it's important to your team depth chart grades or otherwise, feel free to send a PM for me to check into that. Otherwise most of the time we try to set it up where we can do the most important things in the most efficient way we can.
I cannot commit to particular days for sure for every step. Workload changes, hour+ long commute daily, daughter's activities, varying weekend plans, etc. So things will not always stick to this, but here's an idea of the weekly steps and times.
INJURIES/SUSPENSIONS
Usually the full NFL injury list for all games has been available on Fridays (doubtful, questionable, out labels). I try to update injuries over the weekend as they aren't dependent upon the game stats. I have to do another injury check for each NFL team's stats once they're collected and uploaded days later, to make sure that players out or doubtful who had 0 stats are marked for injury here in the sim also. Also try to catch key skill position contributors who were hurt in the first half of NFL games that week and didn't return for in-game sim injury here to limit their action here also if limited in reality. Injuries are also then reset and removed once game sims are completed, before they are updated again the next weekend for next week's injury report.
GRADES
Grade updates are also usually available on Fridays I believe. I also try to knock those out on the weekend since they don't depend upon game action either. Whether I can or not depends a lot on what's happening in life on particular weekends. Love the league (sometimes at least!), but family more. Completed that for this week last night. I have a method now that does take longer than past years but doable, focusing mostly on players with grade changes noted, and will try to do a complete update of thousands of players in the entire list at least monthly. If a player is playing, though, they'll likely have some updates from week to week if they matter. If they are new without a grade before they probably have a low grade that's pretty insignificant here in most cases, so those aren't high priorities with everything else needed each week, but people can contact me via PM if need something updated that isn't and I can check on it. In past years spreadsheets were posted in the forum and I would often respond when done, and I can post more like that if it's important to most, but with things different things different this year I just knock it out as best I can prior to the games simmed. Another way to see if grades updated is just to see EA Sports list and find a player with a grade update noted there, and see if same player updated here. If so, grades updated. They'll be updated for sure before we sim, usually on Wednesdays.
GAME STATS
I cannot complete game stats uploads until all the NFL games have been played for the week. I was hopeful for a new stat gathering option this year from a different resource, but it was missing some of the info we needed, so we're going from box score to box score still. In that case, I do try to get a head start getting the Thursday night game collected early, and the Sunday games on Monday, but usually just end up doing all of them on either Tuesday or Wednesday.
DEPTH CHART CHECKS
I have a script that goes through each sim depth chart and gives me an alert on teams that have players on their depth chart that are no longer on their team. I go in and manually fix those cases (so we don't have the same player in two different depth charts) before we sim. I don't make any subjective calls. I just replace invalid player with the next highest by grade. In case of invalid returners, I try to select a real returner if I notice one (don't know all the returners by heart) or otherwise just a random backup WR/RB as the system will also bring in a real returner into game action if real return stats.
GAME SIM
I'll aim for simming games on Wednesdays each week, after collecting stats on Tuesday. Some weeks it'll be earlier, some weeks later. Especially in the early weeks of the season, I recognize teams still may want to be making trades, etc. and try to get the games simmed as best I can by Wednesday so Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings depth charts unlocked and trades available for more time. Once we get past the NFL trade deadline, it's less critical for depth charts to be unlocked early as trades no longer allowed and if a team needs to make a depth chart change but depth charts unlocked, they can just send me a quick PM.
I still have some to do today, but hoping for a sim tonight.