Mythanatos:
something like 95% of all patents are never commercialized. VEM is more than likely an idea that never saw reality.
and the continued success of the same individuals in tournaments time and time again indicates that.
it does however seem to exist as an excuse for inconsistent players.
VEM is in use in this game but I'm not really disagreeing with you, I think you're right in what you mean and you have been the last few posts in this thread.
The VEM in use is precision and forgiveness.
I know I've copied it before but I think the post below is well worth reading carefully.
WGTniv:
Wow, you guys have made this so amazingly more complicated than it is. Let me see what I can do to simplify this...
The game is pretty simple. Precision controls your accuracy. Imagine it's like a circle that surrounds the flagstick when you aim at it. The size of that circle is related to the precision rating. The higher the rating the smaller the circle. Your ball can land anywhere in the circle on a dinged shot (left or right, long or short). It will ALWAYS land in the circle on a ding shot, though sometimes it may land in the center of the circle and sometimes it may land on the very outer edge or anywhere in between those two points. When it lands on the outer edge this is what you guys have come to know as "the beast". Was the shot pre-programmed? Does it know you're standing on the 17th hole at Kiawah? No, it's just unfortunate timing. The result you see is the logical spread dictated by the precision rating of the club over 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 shots taken on the site. No matter how big or small the sample it's amazingly consistent because it is after all only a simple mathematical formula. The shot data is spread out amongst all users, so there will be times when you run into a lot of "edge cases" (aka deviations, aka outside edge of the precision circle) and times where you seemingly can't miss the center (even when you mishit). This is the ebb and flow of the game and it's always been there. In the short term you will have "bad" days and "good" days. In the long term (providing they are using the same clubs) any one player will see the same amount of "edge cases" or "deviations" that the rest of the players do.
And that's all there is to it! The other theories can be put to bed. There's no behind the scenes tweaking, no changing club attributes based on skill and no hidden mechanism that knows when you're on a water hole. It's just a formula that runs exactly the same for every single shot and it has no idea (nor does it care) where you are on the course. It doesn't matter if it's the first tee shot on #1 or the winning 10-foot putt in the USGA Virtual Championship. The formula runs the exact same calculation every single time and you're always at risk for an "edge case". How far away an "edge case" can take you depends solely on your precision rating for that club. The higher the precision rating (and conversely the more lofted the iron) the less "edge cases" will take you away from where you aimed.
Course releases have ZERO affect on your clubs. When a course is released it's just assets, hole maps, minimaps, HD photos and stuff that has absolutely no affect on your clubs. Us adding a JPG picture file (or 100,000 of them) does not change the way your approach shot on Kiawah #2 interacts with the green. Each course has it's own settings and each course comes with it's own set of "surfaces". If you go into Oakmont expecting your clubs to interact the same way they do on Kiawah then you've already made your first mistake. Every course has it's own nuances right down to how the ball is affected by elevation and break and you'll have to figure that out with practice. While adjusting to those nuances you may forget the nuances you learned on the older courses and get stuck in between your adjustments. That happens to me too. A new course comes out and suddenly I can't make a putt on Kiawah because I've spent so much time learning how to play the new breaks on Oakmont. As a result I end up over-playing breaks on everything for a short time while I adjust.
Hope that clears some of this confusion up. You fellas certainly come up with some wild ideas, but it's no where near as complicated or convoluted as some of you seem to think it is. Remember, keep it simple because it really is simple.