#86 Injuries

[Rocketcan]

Hello Coaches!

Welcome to another Dev Diary for NewSim on SimFBA!

We are continuing along with our updates to the engine to bring us to our v0.4.0 build. Next up is probably the biggest in terms of gameplay implications: Injuries.

Hello

So every once in a while, the sim will roll that an injury should occur. This can be on any play of the game (except extra points because of some weird little technical issues). If an injury event is rolled, then the next step will be to determine *who* gets injured. If the position that is selected has a player on the field, then that player gets hurt (There could be no player there, like no 3rd WR, which results in no injury).

I Hear You're Feeling Down

Next step has the sim roll against a large chart using the injured player's injury rating to see how long the injury will last. This can be anything from until the end of the quarter to about 20 games. This is all influenced by what kind of injury rating your player has. The worse the rating, the more catastrophic injuries will be. It is possible for there to be no length of time a player needs to be out, despite the injury (given a high enough injury rating and good roll). It is always possible for a player to miss multiple games, no matter how  good the injury rating is. For example, there is a column in the injury length table that has over a 70% chance of nothing happening, but there is always still at least a 2% chance of missing anywhere from 1-20 games after the game the injury occurred in. 

Can You Show Me Where It Hurts?

So now that the injured player has been selected, and their injury rating has been used to determine how long they will be out, the next step is to determine what the injury actually is. First, the severity of the injury is determined. There are four categories of severity:

• Minor: Anything 2 weeks of recovery or less.
• Moderate: 3-6 weeks of recovery.
• Severe: 7-12 weeks of recovery.
• Season-Ending: 13+ weeks of recovery.

Each position group (QB, RB, WR, DL, etc.) has their own set of injury probabilities based on severity, so the next step is to cross reference the injured player's position group with the severity to find the right list. Then, a weighted roll is made to see what the exact injury is. For example, hand injuries are more important for QBs and WRs, so even seemingly minor injuries of these types might be listed as moderate or severe, since it hampers a QB's play more than an OL's play.

The injury type is just flavor text. For now, there is nothing like "this player has sustained a knee injury, and therefore are more likely to injure their knee again." While we would like to do that for the future, for now we didn't have the bandwidth to get that in.

I Can Ease Your Pain And Get You On Your Feet Again

All players will eventually heal from their injuries. Some injuries are so minor that they will heal during the game, and those players will be put pack onto their team's depth charts. However, more likely, players will be out at least the rest of the game or longer. While a player is injured, they cannot be placed on your depth chart. If you attempt to place a player on the depth chart, you will receive a warning. Also, after a game in which any of your players are injured, the interface will redo any positions with injured players automatically in order to ensure that all slots are filled. It would be prudent to check each week to make sure your depth chart is to your liking.

It is possible that a player receives an injury that will last longer than the rest of the season. In that case, that player's season is over. Technically, it is also possible that a player that receives a "Season-Ending" injury make it back in time for something like the Super Bowl, but that will probably be rare. If that does happen though, that player will be available as soon as they heal like normal.

Just The Basic Facts

How will you know if one of your players got hurt in the game? Well in terms of things that currently are in the engine: all play-by-plays will have a blurb if there is an injury. It will provide who it is, what the injury was, and how long they will be out. In addition, injured players will show up in red on the interface depth chart. It has not been done yet, but what will likely happen is the box scores posted to the site will also have a new section showing any injured players.

Is There Anybody In There?

Injuries will be effective come the NFL preseason, and week 0 in NCAA. NCAA spring games will not be affected because they are in the spring. We will be attempting to limit the number of injuries initially to about 0-2 per game max. To be clear, though, there is no hard cap, and technically it is possible for more than that to happen. I would rather the sim have too few injuries rather than too many.

I really hope that this feature adds new layers to decision-making in the sim. Do you play your starters in the NFL once you have secured the best possible playoff seed? Do you play your starters in all of your preseason games to determine the best scheme despite the risks? What about playing rookies that you want to develop? An injury early in their career could really derail their development. Regarding that development, for now I think the best approach is for players that are hurt to not receive additional penalties to growth, rather they just end up with far fewer snaps than they likely would. This will reduce their potential multiplier and likely give them worse progression than a healthy player. Also, there will be some form of Injured Reserve for the NFL, but the details of that have not been hammered out just yet, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

For those of you wondering about whether or not you want to keep your starters in a blow out, that may or may not be the next feature I am working on...

 

This was probably the biggest lift for this update, so it is (mostly) downhill from here in terms of engine development. There are still some more features I'd like to add, but most of them are on the smaller side. After the last of the new features are added, we will need to do some testing, do a couple of balance passes, and then we have to do some logistical work to make sure that the engine can run on the server. This will ensure that none of the admins (particularly me) need to be home in order for the sim to run. This automation will mean that it will be much easier to keep this sim moving on a weekly basis. You will probably hear more about that in the coming weeks, but we are hoping to get the spring games and NFL preseason going fairly shortly after the NFL draft.

That is it for this dev diary.

Until next time,

Rocketcan

[PoopyRhinoPickle]

Great work! This will definitely add to the sim. Just a couple ideas to ponder: will this give us the ability to remove redshirts midseason? Also, a med center would make a good addition to the interface where all injuries are listed and able to filter by team, pending Tuscan’s workload of course. Super excited!

Edited April 5, 2023 by PoopyRhinoPickle

[Bundy]

Confused react because I got the injury spin and it assigned me a “got his bell rung” designation when emoting 

[Rocketcan]

2 hours ago, PoopyRhinoPickle said:

Great work! This will definitely add to the sim. Just a couple ideas to ponder: will this give us the ability to remove redshirts midseason? Also, a med center would make a good addition to the interface where all injuries are listed and able to sort by team, pending Tuscan’s workload of course. Super excited!

For now, the redshirt thing I am not sure. I think we go without it for one season while we think about how to implement something like that.