I am playing my fifth demo game now, on the next-to-hardest level of difficulty. One of my players, Pascale Etchemendy, is giving me trouble.
My coach has three levels in potential evaluation (95%). My best guess is that Pascale has technical potentials in the 80-85% range, but she is not acting that way. I had noticed that her skills were increasing very slowly (or not at all) through sparring, so I shut her down for awhile and just ran her repeatedly through training camp. Training her technical skills for 20 hours a week, she was barely able to get her three best skills (Forehand Precision, Service Precision, Return; she is a power baseliner) up to the 61.0-61.2 range, and as soon as I stopped training those they dropped like rocks. At 14 hours a week (4 each for Rally, Service and Special, and 2 hours for Volley) she actually lost ground from week to week, until she ended up just above 57.0%.
To me this seems like a bug. She is acting as though her potentials were around 57-58 instead of 80-85. Is it possible for a coach to misread a player's potential? If so, that would be a good game feature (in real life players are often believed to have more potential than they actually do); if not, then I think it must be a bug.
As long as I am asking questions, here is another: Are some players programmed to have 'bad luck'?
I have two players (Pascale and Sybile Niox-Chateau) who lose in the first round maybe 40% of the time when they are the top singles seed in a tournament. When not the top seed they reliably make it to the quarterfinals. The other two do not have this problem, but one girl from my earlier games (Parmentier) did through three games at three different levels of difficulty.
I have noticed that in the tournaments in which my players appear (almost all at the Challenger level) top seeds in singles — even when they are computer players — seem to lose in the first round more frequently than lower seeded players. I have not analyzed this, just observed it, so it may be that my observation is faulty.