Regular season starts in early september after expansion team added
 

Is there any way I can get the season to go back to its regular start date of early october? The season starting a month early wouldnt be an issue if I didn't have so many players away on international duty. This all happened after adding an expansion team to even the league at 32 teams.

Is it happening that way every year, or do you happen to be in 2022/26/30/some other Olympic year? Just wondering if that may be caused by the issue with the NHL taking an unintended Olympic break.

Edit: And which international tournament are the missing guys at? The World Cup or something else?

Well the issue isn't that they are on international duty. The issue is that my season now starts september 5th instead of early october. I think this is why I saw players on international duty. The main thing I want to do is get the schedule back to early october. Is there a way to do that?

I'm trying to figure out if it's related to the problem with the NHL schedule getting adjusted for an Olympic break, including an earlier start. That's why I asked for the year - if it's the Olympic schedule thing, that'll be fixed in the next update; if it's not (and after testing it myself, it may not be), that's something else that we'll need to adjust. There's no way to change the start date manually.

Players being away on international duty in September shouldn't be happening to an NHL team unless it's during the World Cup. If they're away at another tournament, that'd be another thing we'd need to investigate. If it's the World Cup, we can just move the tournament date back relative to the NHL start date, so it'll automatically adjust for expansion.

The year was 2020.

World Cup year, then, but not an Olympic one. Probably easiest to just change the dates on that if the NHL starts earlier, but we'll see if we can cut down on the early starts after expansion.

Okay so where do I go to change the world cup date?

It can't be changed. We're fixing this in the next update, the expanded NHL was using a pre-created schedule that started too early, it's being changed to one that's generated starting at a relatively normal start date. I'm testing it now.

Well it seems the season start date is still too early. I'm in 2020 and the season starts september 19th and i have 9 players away on int duty :(

Also we definitely need a way to save lines. Because since it takes so long to set them up and now that my players are away on int duty i have to create new lines again then when they get back I have to create more lines.

How many times had you expanded at that point? 3, or fewer?

I expanded after the first season to 32 teams and that was it. Just wanted even teams in each conference. If this issue is caused because of expansion let me know so I just will start a new save without ever expanding.

That's strange, with a single expansion the starting date should now be in October, I checked it a couple of days ago and it was doing that. Was this a newly-started game or one you'd started before the most recent update?

This was a newly started game after the update. But this doesn't happen if you don't expand?

No, it won't. But it shouldn't be happening after you expand, either. Do you recall if the 2018-19 or 2019-20 seasons started in September as well?

I can't say with 100% certainty that it happened during those years but I believe it did. It just wasnt an issue because I never lost any players on int duty.

I see the problem:

When doing the expansion, I force the game to use the schedule generator (so it works in that year) but the next year it will again look for a generic schedule and find one (the one with the early start date).

The workaround for you is simple: go to your "data/schedules" folder and delete the schedule "G82_C1_D1_T8_D2_T8_C2_D1_T8_D2_T8.xml" from there. The next season it should use the schedule generator again (because the is no fitting schedule anymore).