Which years are you starting in?

Game summary screen, Team statistics panel.
Played the California seals- Vancouver Canucks
The panel has shots, PIM, Hits, GA, TA and FOW:
Team name is shown as Van:# for each stat but for the Seals there is a blank where the team name should be __:#
Edit:
the seals definition (CLF) showed up in the 3 stars list but not the scoring panel either
p.s. I realize that a screenshot would be more helpful but I haven't figured that out yet.

I played out 1970 and 1971 as two separate historical leagues since 1970 crashed just before the following season started. My problem is 1971-72 crashed right after the playoffs and cant continue. I tried to start a new historical season and no matter which year I pick I am told it already exists. I cant figure out how to delete the current saved leagues so I can actually start a new game. Until I do I cant play at all.

In the game itself a couple of strange things happened. I made it through one draft, when I clicked on a potential draft choice-Bo Berglund, Serge Bernier's stats and name came up. I right clicked on Bo and got "draft Serge Bernier" so I did just to see what would happen since he was already property of the flyers. Sure enough Serge became my property. I then moved to the start of the next season and both John Ratelle and Ed Giacomin got moved to my drafted players list and off my roster. I had to sign them both to get them back on my active roster. They were also the only two players I could do anything with on my list of drafted players.

Scoring seems to be very low. The league leader in pts have done so with totals under 80. The highest GGA a goaltender has had in the two seasons I simmed was 3.13, most were under 3.00. As was mentioned by Jeff defensmen scoring is very low, Bobby Orr scored 8 & 9 goals in the 2 seasons I played out and hasn't topped the 40 pt mark.

Players are drafted one year too early, at 16-17 years old (Beliveau in 48, Mikita in 57, Gretzky in 78 etc.)

Thought this was fixed a few weeks ago, but apparently not: the abbreviations are being pulled from the wrong field in some places (it's the modern one instead of the season-specific one, so it's blank for the dead California/Cleveland franchise.) Re-added to the bug list.

You have to enter a new save name during startup if you want to start a new game (you may have left it blank the first time, so the "no-name" save already exists.)


Uh-oh, Berglund shouldn't be showing up in the draft list at all, he doesn't have career dates set yet. We'll have to check that out, but that's probably why it's pointing to Bernier instead.

That sounds like may be related to some of the issues signing drafted players in the modern game. I'll do some testing with it in the current build tomorrow, since there have been some fixes to that, and see if all of that, or parts of it, are still happening.

Accurate historical scoring levels aren't implemented yet, but won't be far off. And defencemen scoring seems to have been broken at some point; we'll have to go back and check the match engine for that. It was at pretty good levels a month or so ago before we ran into trouble with low scoring levels in general; the fixes for that don't seem to have helped defencemen much.

It looks like the game's ignoring the draft rule settings and still using the defaults we were testing with a while ago, added to the bug list.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I can't seem to get a Historical game started at all. Here's my process:

1. Start FHM
2. Select "New Historical Game"
3. It asks me to select a "Database", but when I try to click the drop down box nothing happens, so I just select "Ok"
4. I select a year (I have tried both 1947 and 1993) and click "Ok"
5. I get message "This game name already exists!"

So I tried deleting the saved game file I had in the saves (under Documents) and retried it (note there are now no saved game files). I still get the same message.

Should I be getting an option at step 3? :confused:

I just learned you have to select a unique name. If you had another game and didnt name it "blank" already exists.

LOL thanks for the help. That did it. Maybe I should read through all the options first next time.

Not sure about '47 but '93 data points is not in yet I believe...I think only up to about '81 is in so try a historical before then...in the 60's or 70's should work...(unless there is another issue)

EDIT: ...and I need to read the rest of the thread before replying....

Salary Cap and Draft
 

I started a couple of games with the Sabres expansion franchise in 1970. So far I've only had one crash. This beta is more stable than a lot of other games post release. I see two major issues:

• The salary cap does crazy things a couple of years into the game. Gerry Meehan has one year remaining on his contract at $2,540,000 but has a cap hit of 7,620,000. It looks like the cap hit calculation is adding the total value of the duration of the contract in any given year. By 1972, I'm unable to stay under the cap.

• The draft issue was mentioned earlier with 16-year-olds being eligible. I drafted Clark Gillies in 1971, and he is still a one star player at age 18. This is probably my penalty for being a cheater. Seriously, I don't know if this is a database issue, or related to the starting age. Ironically, Guy LaFleur popped up on the Islanders roster in 1972.

All things considered, I can see that I'm going to get hours of enjoyment out of this game, and it's interesting to be part of the Beta test community.

I had the same thing happen to me cap wise. I made it through three seasons and in 1970 got slammed with two players earning just under 3.5 million in the last year of their deals who each counted as a 15M cap hit. I was OK August 1st and simmed to the start of preseason before it happened. I also lost 1/2 of my reserve players as well as a few players on my active roster.

I'm not having too many weird issues that I wouldn't expect or that haven't been covered, but...

How do I release a player from the protected list? Every off-season, I think 'oh good, I can get rid of that dude' and he hangs around on the protected list, green texted, and there's no way I can rid myself of 35 y/o Darryl 'Slip' Sly until he retires.

...and editting any player to set him as a free agent or put him on another team invariably crashes the game.

Historical Salaries....OOPS!!
 

using the new beta 0.9.4 and trying to start up a couple of games, and I got this.

I don't think salaries are supposed to be this high in either 1947 or 1980.

You beat me to it :p

They're obviously not, but when there's no salary cap set, it doesn't make a difference (a real difference that is), does it? I'm curious, it doesn't affect you from playing games etc?

Yes, it was blocking the game because there is a salary cap issue.

before you get going, there's an edit league screen, and thankfully the 'allocate random contracts' button works for now (I mean, it still gives out modern-day contracts, but at least your payroll isn't $200m)

(and I'm loving today's update, not having any weird rights things, being able to release dudes...)

Same thing here, just tried 1975 and average salaries are 13-16M per player. Since I cant turn the cap off I cant play the game. My payroll is at almost 300M.