Development Tips for Franchise Mode?

AvsCOL

Registered User
Jul 16, 2013
4,840
5,188
Anyone have any tips for getting guys to develop in franchise mode? I'll use Brady Skjei as an example. When I pick him up, he's an 83OVR, and I play him second pairing with a veteran, and can never get him past 85OVR.

When he remains on the NYR, he seems to get up into the high 80s (I've seen him at 90OVR)


How are you guys developing these 81-83 OVR guys to reach their full potential?
 

danielpalfredsson

youtube dot com /watch?v=CdqMZ_s7Y6k
Aug 14, 2013
16,575
9,269
I am still on Legacy, so I don't know if they've changed this for past games, but the secret about EA Franchise mode is that NOTHING you do will influence development.

You can have a temporary influence both positive and negative on a player's overall by either burying them well below their position leading to poor production (IE playing a 2nd liner on 4th line minutes with no PP) or by putting them in a position to succeed (IE putting a depth forward SNP with high o awareness+wrist shot on your top line+top PP so he puts up 80+ points) but that is known as "statistical growth" and after one season, the player will regress back to their real overall.

As far as true development, whenever you either start a new save, or a CPU generated prospect is created for the draft, their development path is already set in stone. So let's say I draft an 19yo C PLY 7th overall in 2022 that is CPU generated by EA, once I draft him the game has already decided that he'll go from 75 to 78 to 83 and then stop growing. Nothing I can do can change that. There's a big misconception that you have to actually manage players to get them to develop, IE I can put my top young 3rd liner with franchise potential on the 1st line and it'll help him develop faster. This isn't true. Nothing you do will change that player's development path long term.

For real life NHL prospects, at least on Legacy and prior, you'll sometimes see that if you start one save, one guy booms, another save, the same guy only becomes a 2nd liner, That is because everytme you start a new save, their development is re-determined. Think of it almost like the game rolls a dice on every player for every fresh game save. So on one, Jacob Trouba might stick at 85, for another he might boom to 92. This has nothing to do with how you've chosen to develop Trouba, it's pure luck with no skill involved. Maybe hearing this will take away some of the fun of GM mode for some people.

This means from a strategical standpoint, in order to be successful with "player development" in franchise mode, what you're really doing is learning how to track players and cut bait at the right time while keeping the right ones. This means, tracking their overall each season, trying to guess which players have peaked in their development, and trying to trade the ones who have peaked while they still have high value. This is especially important if you actually do a lot of deep drafting/signing undrafted free agents and are constantly rolling close to 50 contracts because you've gotta figure out who is worth offering a contract to.

If you're playing this doesn't matter as much, but if you're simming a lot of games and going deep into the 2020's, another factor, is you've gotta learn to read an actual player's attributes beyond their overall and figure out what attributes contribute to a effective sim player. For example, you might have a playmaker who is 85oa but if his stats are boosted up through skating+shooting, and he has 80 passing+80 o awareness, he will generally be very unsuccessful at putting up points while simming. You might have an 82oa or 83oa playmaker who has 88 o awareness, 88 passing, but his defense, skating, and shot are subpar leading to him having a stunted overall. In a top 6 role, the 82oa PLY would be more effective than the 85oa PLY. So from a development/scouting standpoint, being able to tell which of your players actually developed into EFFECTIVE sim players is an important element of player development for GM mode deep dives.
 

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