AI Player activity

[PatrickR]

Currently I'm playing in season / career mode. Having started as far down as No. 1954 in the rankings I have worked my way up in about half a game year and now find myself in the ranks somewhere between 100 and 200. Taking a look at the attached file "rankings.jpg" you can see something that has left me wondering if there might be something unsound with the "distribution" of player participation in tournaments. Players ranked from approximately No. 100 down to No. 300 don't seem to be keen to improve or at least maintain their positions as they hardly play any events.

AI Player activity

Rankings.jpg (198.36 KiB) Viewed 4723 times

On the other hand, I find that the top players currently are too busy. "Calendar.jpg" shows Rafael Nadal going on collecting bonus miles and titles by flying to South Africa and Brazil after his successful title run at Melbourne. Novak Djokovic, runner-up to Nadal at the Oz Open, also played events during these next two weeks. This is probably more a question of realism than a bug.

Workhorse Rafa ;-)

Calendar.jpg (198.52 KiB) Viewed 4723 times

Finally a minor issue concerning the player activity overlay where the last line is only partially visible ("activity.jpg").

Minor display bug

Activity.jpg (97.45 KiB) Viewed 4723 times

[kschoice]

It's indeed hard to find a good equilibrium for AI player's participations in events. I'll have a look at the display bug.

On a completely different note, try to refrain from using official player names too much on the forums.

[PatrickR]

On a completely different note, try to refrain from using official player names too much on the forums.

Okay, I'll keep that in mind.

It's indeed hard to find a good equilibrium for AI player's participations in events.

Hm. I think with a bit of common sense one could implement some guidelines that should help in producing more 'expected' results. I don't know if stamina / form is also being calculated for AI players but this alone could help stopping players who tend go deep in the draws of their tournaments from playing week in week out. And even without taking stamina into account it's rather unlikely that players who reach the quarterfinal or better at a Slam will play the following week with the possible exception of RG when there's only 14 days to make the transition from clay to grass.

Another idea would be to attach geocoordinates and country/timezone information to the tournaments and use them to calculate distances and timezone differences between tournaments to decide if it's realistic that a player would make the journey for the following week. Since we know the nationality of the competitors it would then be possible to make especially players with lower rankings choose tournaments that are not too far away from their home country as they might not be able to afford too many and / or expensive journeys and so on...

Being able to enter a qualifying draw after playing a final (or semi-final?) the weekend before is probably also rather unrealistic. Haven't checked if it does happen but players switching surfaces too often in a short period of time is also something that should be avoided at least for higher-ranked guys. Generally speaking I think the player distribution should go from top to bottom to avoid that a group of nearly 200 players with a reasonable ranking hardly play any events while people from No. 1000 onwards compete regularly in lower category tournaments. Oh, and what about granting wildcards to human player prospects in tournaments held in their home country?

[kschoice]

Hm. I think with a bit of common sense one could implement some guidelines that should help in producing more 'expected' results. I don't know if stamina / form is also being calculated for AI players but this alone could help stopping players who tend go deep in the draws of their tournaments from playing week in week out. And even without taking stamina into account it's rather unlikely that players who reach the quarterfinal or better at a Slam will play the following week with the possible exception of RG when there's only 14 days to make the transition from clay to grass.

Stamina is already taken in account for that. However the game doesn't completely prevent a tired player to compete a second event in the row, it just lowers the probability of that happening, but no lower than 1%.

Another idea would be to attach geocoordinates and country/timezone information to the tournaments and use them to calculate distances and timezone differences between tournaments to decide if it's realistic that a player would make the journey for the following week. Since we know the nationality of the competitors it would then be possible to make especially players with lower rankings choose tournaments that are not too far away from their home country as they might not be able to afford too many and / or expensive journeys and so on...

I thought about that, but it's too much work at the moment for a modest outcome compared to other improvements that could be made to the game.

Being able to enter a qualifying draw after playing a final (or semi-final?) the weekend before is probably also rather unrealistic. Haven't checked if it does happen but players switching surfaces too often in a short period of time is also something that should be avoided at least for higher-ranked guys. Generally speaking I think the player distribution should go from top to bottom to avoid that a group of nearly 200 players with a reasonable ranking hardly play any events while people from No. 1000 onwards compete regularly in lower category events... Oh, and what about granting wildcards to human player prospects in tournaments in their home country?

Player distribution already goes from top to bottom. I'll try to tune the system so players around 100-200 play more often.

[kschoice]

Finally a minor issue concerning the player activity overlay where the last line is only partially visible ("activity.jpg").

I've tried everything I can think of, and I'm not able to recreate this problem. Does it happen whichever the player you open ?

[PatrickR]

I've tried everything I can think of, and I'm not able to recreate this problem. Does it happen whichever the player you open ?

Yep. But as I said, this is no problem so there's no point in wasting hours on this one. I thought it might have something to do with my screen resolution but changing this didn't help. Even worse, when playing with the resolution settings while the game was running minimized I couldn't bring the game window up again afterwards. So let's stop here before I discover even more bugs.