I dont think there is any weight behind the argument that it would be too hard to code this into the game..... look at what they have coded already! My goodness! Each game is 48 minutes of 10-20 players each with differing skill levels, playing various offence vs defence ratings, all combined together! Coding the experience benefit would be a piece of cake compared to the game engine design.
Only problem with my argument is that i have no way to really quantify it. Doesn't mean its wrong though does it!
I disagree, and I'm going to make that argument anyway.. Haven't you heard "the simplest explanation is usually the correct one"? :p
It would be far easier for Experience to just be based on number of minutes and weighted by type of game (Cup, League, Playoff, etc) I see that most people who pulled the actual numbers got the same range of total minutes for experience pops.
I would agee with you and the main stream of the discussion:
-Experience well might be linear.
-There is a differentiation between games: scrimmages<regular<PO games. My personal guess for Cup, Final rounds and would be: regular<cup<PO Regular=<Final Cup games(from semifinal and up). Maybe Finals(League and Cup) are more important. NT games should be more important than a Regular game, but again, Semifinal and Final of european tournaments should be weighted more heavily than the other rounds, same goes for Consolation tournament and World Cup games, and again, first round games and the World's Final. A lot of classification yes, but quite easy to code if experience is linear.
-Another point of interest than can be add to discussion is the relevance of the "quality" of minutes played. I think this is achieved trought the clasification of games in the sense of the previous paragrapgh. Further discussion might include that, maybe, the last quarter of the game gives more experience than, say, the second. This would be consistent with the fact(?) that experience do plays a more important role in the 4th quarter. Maybe the same is true for the last mutes of every quarter but I don't really think the calculation of experience is much more complex than this.
About how experience works:
My personal theory is that since players have a subjective evaluation of every in-game decision they are presented, there should be an objective evaluation of every of those in-game decisions. I guess that there is a "noise variable" between the subjective and objective evaluation and experience is what modulate this.
So, experience is going to be working during to whole game making your players take, in a more consistent way, better decisitions. This won't make your SG a better shooter since their JS-JR-etc skills are the same, but it will make him a better scorer since he's going to be better in deciding when to shot. Again, this noise level are increased in the last minutes of every quarter and in the final quarter. This will make the noise-reduction effect of experience more important in those situationes than in the "regular moments" of the game.