The SCOUTing Report — Swoops Radio, Episode 14

Not everyone has the time to listen to Twitter Spaces, so we turned to the hardest working journalist in the Swoopsverse, Stuart Scout, to do the heavy lifting and bring you all the SCOUTing Report on the most important pieces of information. Episode 14 of Swoops Radio was chock full of alpha delivered directly by Swoops Co-Founder David Goldberg answering questions from the community.

Boxscores & Gamecast

The Boxscores that we have been seeing come out of Swoops GM are not as in-depth as the ones that we will be receiving once games fire up in Season 0 (SSN0). You’ll see a full breakdown of 2 point Field Goals Made, 2 point Field Goals Attempted, 3 point Field Goals Made, 3 point Field Goals Attempted, Offensive and Defensive Fouls, Blocks, Steals, Turnovers, and Free Throws.

Along with the boxscores that will be delivered a few minutes after the simulated game ends, users will also be sent a gamecast that can be viewed to walk through each possession from the game. Viewing these would allow for the best analysis, but will be pretty time intensive — in my opinion, spending time in this realm rather than just living in the boxscores is going to be where General Managers will find ways to separate themselves from the pack. You’ll see what areas of the floor players are attacking most, who they are shooting against while on offense, who they are struggling against defensively, and so on.

As the Blockchain Burners inquired, Swoops making the boxscores able to be downloaded to a CSV (or some other format) would really help users to better analyze their games.

Isolating Players

David recommended running many, many iterations of lineups in SSN0, including pairing your actual Swoopsters with players from the pool of 50 Free Agents. Free Agents will have ALL of their 15 attributes revealed, so users know exactly what they are getting when those players are placed in a lineup and should make it easier to identify a Swoopster’s unrevealed abilities by playing them alongside players with fully known qualities. After isolating players alongside 4 Free Agents, then you can start working with couplings— two or three Swoopsters paired alongside the same Free Agents in order to try and keep as many variables the same. He also recommended finding a buddy that you can try to pair up with and have them run the same lineups in head-to-head challenges so you can even try to keep the opposing squad the same, further allowing for more constant variables.

If you are serious about experimenting in SSN0, you’ll want to find ways to track player stats from boxscores as you try to nail down what their revealed attributes may actually look like. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to take into account who is on the opposing roster — it’s much different playing against 4 Free Agents than a team of 5 actual Swoopsters. Remember — Free Agents are expected to be half-star quality players and are likely worse than even a 1-star player, but they will be free to use and allow you to roster a complete lineup in SSN0 if you don’t have 5 Swoopsters!

Star System

The star system is a bit of a complex component given that it is imperfect, just like we see year after year with scouting sites like 247 Sports. A 1-star COULD be Jokic. The star system is meant to be an indicator of two different things:

1. Determines what set of distribution curves each of a Swoopster’s attribute ratings winds up in. It is a directional system to understand what revealed attributes MAY look like.

David had the following to say as an example:

“At reveal, you have a 5-star player. Each of their attributes falls within a distribution curve that almost looks like a bell curve. The range could be, say, somewhere between 50 and 99 [these are not the exact numbers, he’s making them up, but “directionally, they are accurate”]. So maybe the average is 75, and you would expect more of the attributes to be maybe 70 to 80. But then you have outliers in the mid to high 90s, and then you have outliers in the 50s. A 1-star might be on a distribution range of 30 to 70, with the average being about 50, and outliers being in the 30s and 70s. So you can imagine a 1-star COULD BE BETTER than a 5-star because on the outliers of the 1-stars who are in the 60s or 70s, and on the other end of the spectrum on the 5-star outliers are players in the 50s or 60s — it’s rare, but that could happen! “

2. It is ONE of the factors of each player’s development curve.

After every season, a Swoopster will age, one additional trait rating will be revealed, and the player traits will increase or regress. Every player has their own distribution curve, and each prospect and attribute (15 total) has its own different available distribution curves (hundreds each). It could be anything from a player who gets much better out of the gate and keeps getting better for a long time before flattening out, a player who never gets better, and everything in between.

The average curve will look like this: early on in a career, a player gets their biggest increases, flattens out in their prime, then starts to slowly decline until they approach an “end of life” around the 13-16th season, and then there’s a pretty dramatic drop off. There are extreme curves above and below, but this would be an “average” curve.

The first 5 to 7 seasons are considered “improving years,” then between seasons 7 and 10 are kind of flat, followed by a slow decline for a couple of seasons, then depending on the longevity of the player, a steep decline will start coming into play anywhere from season 12 to 18.

End of Season Trait Reveals

There will be a development period that takes place after SSN0 wraps and all Swoopsters will age one season and have an additional trait revealed. Users will only learn if a trait has increased or regressed if the trait has been revealed. So players will have to enter the next season with fresh eyes and try to gauge whether an unrevealed trait went up or down.

As far as order of operations, the current understanding is that the player will age, an additional trait will be revealed, and then users will see whether revealed traits went up or down, so it will be known if the newly revealed trait changed heading in to the next season.

In SSN1 and beyond, how many games a Swoopster appears in will be one of the elements that will affect their end of season development. Use them too much and you hurt their long term career length; underutilize them and they won’t receive their optimal progression for the season. This will not be taken into account for SSN0, which should further incentivize experimentation by users. There’s no load management to be concerned about for this season — the player development optimization after SSN0 won’t be affected by the number of games played, whether you play them in 1,000 games or 0.

The Swoops Team believes that the end of season reveals and unique player development are some of the most powerful features the game has to offer and wants to really highlight this period. Although Swoopsters will age at the end of the beta season, it is ultimately to the early users’ advantage. The oldest Swoopsters are currently only in year 7, so they are still on the up-swing or are approaching the beginning of their plateau. This should provide a natural advantage over all the new Swoopsters from the SSN1 rookie mint that will only have one revealed trait and will not have undergone any progression — the owners of those players would also be starting SSN1 with no experimentation involving those Swoopsters.

The initial development of these Swoopsters after SSN0 is unique because they are veterans but technically haven’t undergone any development periods yet. Because of this, they will “slot” into a progression curve based on their current season/age. The younger the player, the more they have in front of them. (Hint hint: there are only 40 Swoopsters currently that are in Season 2).

On a side note, it was mentioned that a player with a 50 rating on a trait has a lot more room to improve than a player with a trait rated at 90. David said, “you probably won’t go from a 92 to 100, but you can go from a 50 to a 60 pretty easily.”

Renting Players & Clinics

Renting players from another user will not be available in SSN0 but was said to be “probably a SSN1 or SSN2 thing...” This will be a really interesting form of passive income available to users once it comes to fruition, and it likely will be best utilized during Tournament play as that Swoopster would then be locked in a lineup and unable to be rostered by another team. The catch will be making sure the Swoopster reaches their ideal number of games played for development optimization.

To finish the quote from the last paragraph, David said “[Renting players] is probably a SSN1 or SSN2 thing, same with clinics.” This is fascinating. I reached out to David afterward to ask more about the topic and he indicated again that clinics are on the long term roadmap for Swoops, but it is “basically a way to improve a specific attribute (aka a Nike shooting clinic)” and there would likely be a cost involved or involve the usage of experience points. Offering a way to further improve specific attributes of Swoopsters already owned is going to be a really cool element and allowing experience points to potentially be used would then reward the most active users, whether they be earned from playing Swoops proper or Swoops GM.

Leadership, Longevity & Coachability

Some attributes are more important than others, especially when it comes to actual gameplay. There are three attributes that (today) will have no direct impact during an individual game: Leadership, Longevity, and Coachability. However, these out of gameplay elements will maintain a lot of value as seasons go on.

Leadership is still being figured out by the team, and the difficulty with it is primarily from it being a category that is not easily data driven. As of now (it could change later on), the only utilization of Leadership is in the retirement mechanism. A player can be retired, and then the user has the opportunity to choose a younger Swoopster to “forge” them with — creating a sort of mentor/mentee relationship. The higher the Leadership rating, the more of their skills and attributes that they will impart on the younger player.

Longevity affects a player’s aging curve and allows the Swoopster to “flatline longer and hold off their decline for longer periods of time.” David offered Udonis Haslem, LeBron James, and Andre Iguodala as examples that would likely have Longevity ratings in the 90s.

Coachability is going to impact the player development along with the star system. The weights of the two are unknown by the community at this time. A very high coachable player will get better, and a low coachability player will have a lesser chance of making dramatic increases to their attributes. Coachability will also play a role in the “forge” retirement process and will come in to play on the end of the younger Swoopster — a higher Coachability rating will allow more of the attributes to be received and improve their skills.

End of Life & Incentivizing Retirement

Attributes are capped at 100 on the high end and 30 on the low end. So presumably, if a player was never retired, their traits would be 30s all across the board, “and will be pretty crappy players.” Users will never be forced to retire a Swoopster — they can theoretically keep going on forever, but Swoops is encouraging the retirement of players by allowing the “forging” mentioned in the last section.

Older players may still provide value to a lineup and may be an average player in the 15th season. But by choosing to retire a Swoopster while they are still a really good caliber player, a user could help turn a good younger player into a potential All-Star. This will lead to some really unique decisions being made by users and could end up bringing lots of value to some lower caliber players that seemingly excel in only one or two categories but happen to have strong Leadership qualities (if older) or Coachability (if younger).

The possibilities of forging multiple Swoopsters on top of the same player has been discussed (and is still in the works), but the plan is currently to cap it at one. But that player would eventually be retired, forged to another, and we will see some absolutely WILD lineages of All-Star players.

I definitely encourage you to check out the Spaces on your own if you get the chance. There’s a lot to unpack, and I couldn’t highlight everything. Let me know in the comments what I missed!