Originally posted by Burdiac
As confusing as this may sound I think this forum has gotten too complex with the simplicity of thier thoughts. The argument of diminishing results is rather moot. If we are going to continue using economic terms to this game than lets apply "opportunity cost" ... For a while we got caught up in if a 120 speed is faster than 110 speed or if a 90 speed corner could cover a 120 speed wr.
What we should think about is what good is running fast if you cant catch the ball? I.E. Devon Hester on my beloved Chicago Bears... One he had a marginal at best QB throwing to him and really does not know how to how to react to a thrown ball as well as Torry Holt or even a Joe Jerivicous who are slower than Hester but have had more productive years as a WR.
Or lets take this argument away from speed and apply it to Strength on the line... While I played defensive tackle and end in college I beat out plenty of big Offensive lines who could lift far more than me but couldn't block to save thier life or couldn't move as fast as I could... This is why at the combine they dont ask players to max out thier benches but see how often they can bench 225.
We have made this game far to complicated tand that raising a stat to extreme levels at the cost of increasing other stats will severely damage your players productivity... As Bort stated earlier about WR's that the player with the best states will get targeted more often than one can argue that it is better to have 110 speed 70 agility 50 vision 50 catch 50 confidence etc.. than it would to have a wr with 120 speed 90 agility 40 vision 40 catch 40 confidence.
There I think I have written enough and I apologize for any spelling errors I'm dyslexic and it looks right to me 
THIS.
There are two things at work. Even if we assume that Bort was being straight with us, that attribute points -- NOT SP's -- are linear, the product of adding more SP's to a skill has diminishing returns at the soft caps. Simply: it takes more SP's to increase an attribute from 90 to 100 than it does to increase it from 50 to 60.
Opportunity cost: Getting an attribute at base from 60 to 70 takes almost the same amount of SP's as taking two attributes from 30 to 48. It gets even more dramatic as you go from 70 to 80, and up. At some point, that has to mean that the overall benefit to the player's performance, from increasing other attributes rather than pushing the prime attribute ever higher, has to become the better choice.
The other thing is that whether the functions are logarithmic or linear, or however they might be mathematically described, Bort has told us that in every function, at least two attributes are involved, and for the attribute with the higher value, anything beyond 150% of the lower value is basically wasted. If agility is 60, the difference between 90 and 100 speed is insignificant, and the player who wants to reach 100 speed has to figure in the SP cost of pushing agility to 66 or 67 on top of what's going into speed. We all know that rule by heart at this point, it can be bent (64-65 agi, continuing the 100 speed example) but not broken. This covers a lot of pairings -- strength-blocking for OL, strength-tackling for DL (especially, to be considered for all defenders, really). Etc.
Builds in this game will never be a matter of simply running one attribute up as far as possible. Bort won't allow them to be successful, and I think it's a good thing.
