PowerPlay Magazine

"The maximum value of any player attribute is 655."
 

For 14 seasons it was a non-issue. 655 for a given attribute was very far away and wasn't something to worry about. That is, until I spent 450M on Mubarak El-Koraad, a Saudi universal CB with oodles of skill and upside. Right around the time he went RFA I checked up on him to see what type of bids I could expect. And, to my surprise, he had capped out his Def attribute at 655.35 and the auto-practice stopped training. This bug was reported and will be fixed but that's not my point here. My point is, for the first time in my many years of PPM, I had a player who had reach a ceiling - it is a novel notion for PPM where players have no hard bounds, only soft bounds governed by facilities, staff and qualities. Before I discuss the ramifications of this, let's explain where this odd number of 655.35 comes from.
 

We all know computers are binary machines. That is, they do everything in 0s and 1s. Without getting into the physics of why this is, this leads to the binary counting system or base-2 numeral system. Computers store values in memory with a certain bit allocation. In the case of a 16-bit number, this corresponds to 2^16 or a number range of 1 to 65536. Consider computers start counting from 0 and you have a max value of 65535. Since PPM measures training down to the hundredths (0.01), restricting attributes to a 16-bit number results in a maximum attribute value of 655.35.

Understanding where this restriction comes from - it is a means of controlling storage space on PPM servers, something that is of paramount importance for server health yet is often taken for granted by the community - what does it mean for playability and strategy within PPM soccer? Well, let's look back at El-Koraad.
 

He recently became a free agent. I had spent 450M to acquire him and 186 days later I was posed with a question:

Do I shell out the 422.5M fee to retain his services given the 650M bid. Or, do I let him walk and take my 325M? My first instinct was to do whatever it took to retain his services. He was my best player and this was right around the time where international competition gets tough and the top-4 spots in I.1 get decided. I made a few rash decisions selling some prospects for less than they're worth (including posting depth guys for sale with deadlines after El-Koraad's, oops!), but after seeking advice of many people, including that of alexfrantz, a close rival of mine, I stepped back and looked at it more logically.
 

El-Koraad is 26 years old. He was 25 4/6 last season and was only a few weeks into his first year of 3/6 when he maxed out his Def attribute. This was achieved through great training facilities. However, there are now players who have had lvl 15 training their entire careers and they'll be even better. A quick calculation on El-Koraad's potential replacement, Ludek Jurica, pegs him reaching that 655 Def atty cap in under 2 seasons and he is only 22 years old. That means he'll max out at 24 years old and 4/6 CL. I won't be the only team that begins to experience this phenomenon either. There will slowly be more and more players who max out their primary attributes which will ultimately lead to Exp and Che being the main difference between player strength. Teams will slowly be fielding players that are all maxed out and the market will eventually have these players freely available, meaning they'll be worth much less than they are now. So, with that, I came to my decision.
 

Players like El-Koraad are fantastic for teams. He is an anchor on my back line and helped me to a 2nd-place finish in I.1 last season and a CWC final appearance. However, thinking economically and logically for the long-term, he's not worth the 880M I'd need to spend (excluding salaries) to have him for 4.5 seasons. Letting him walk at a cost of 125M for 1.5 seasons isn't too bad at all. I'll certainly be sad to see him go, but I have others who can step up. Plainly said, it simply makes more sense to not sell off my future prospects. Below you will see a graph comparing the growth curves of El-Koraad and his replacement Jurica from 15yo to present day; the data was fetched using a program I wrote that parses the training history data. While the plot only shows OR, you can clearly see that Jurica will be much better than El_Koraad at the same age and thusly will reach his attribute cap at a younger age. While the slopes are very similar beyond 400 days old, the lower facilities in his early seasons resulted in a lower training rate for El-Koraad.

Note: It is also interesting to see that despite their CL drop from 6/6 to 5/6 to 4/6, their growth was very linear. Considering this and the attribute cap, it may be sacrilege but I dare say ignore C/L in soccer since with maxed facilities players will cap out before their C/L will cap them out; perhaps this is a topic for a follow-up article.
 

In conclusion, this article was not written to tell you about my first-world problems. It was written to inform you about a change in landscape for PPM soccer coming in the future. This cap does not exist in any other sport and while I would hope PPM could fix it before too many players reach the cap, in the meantime it is something that every team, not just the elite, should think about. If you are a top team, keep a close eye on your players' builds and think about how you'll train them once they've reached the max for their primary. Remember that salary is mostly tied to the highest attribute so the increase in salary beyond that is much less. PPM soccer is entering a different managing climate than anything seen before on PPM. Think carefully about your strategy going forward and set your team up as good as possible for the road ahead.