Did nobody test this game before releasing beta?
 

All throughout the league in my game so far there are all stars that are playing on the fourth line. John Tavares and Ryan Getzlaf are both on the fourth line in my save right now. Giroux is as well. This makes the game borderline unplayable and extremely unrealistic. Fix ASAP

We had an issue with a change late in testing that was causing some issues with line selection, and Tavares was one of the guys affected in particular, but that was fixed. I checked a few saves with this version, and the icetime for Tavares and Getzlaf is a little low (the AI seems to be favouring defensive strategies too much, which probably hurts them a bit), but only by about a minute per game. Giroux is off by more, I'll have to see what's going on with him. Icetime for other top forwards is about where it should be, though, maybe even a little high.

I started a dynasty with the Islanders and let my assistant create the lines with no changes to the roster and they have Tavares as the 3rd center. . .

Yeah, I'm looking at it now and it seems to be affecting very specific players, but not touching other ones that are similar to them. Tyler Seguin and Mark Scheifele are fine, Tavares and Giroux aren't. Trying to get to the bottom of it now.

Thanks - You guys are great.

Yeah this is what happened to me as well. Except he was the fourth center. They had Cizikas as my first line center. I'm going to go around and look for other errors like this and will try to post them to help the developers.

I found the error in the source code. Young player will get unwanted bonuses for physical and mental ratings during the role checks, so they are overpowered. Is now fixed and will hopefully lead to better AI lines in the first update. :)

Sebastian found the problem: there was a small error that resulted in some younger players getting far too much credit for their physical and mental skills, which jumps them ahead of much better older players when the lines are evaluated. It won't really be apparent unless there's a particular combination of rookies and veterans on the team, which is why it's only hurting a few guys right now.

We're going to fix it and do some testing tonight, and can hopefully get that to you very quickly.

Edit: and he beat me to it.

Thanks guys. Sorry about the somewhat snark title, but I've been extremely hyped for this game for a couple of months now lol

It's cool, no worries. And for the record, it really isn't the testers' fault - we made some late changes that appear to be the source of this, they told us they were seeing strange things, we made some adjustments that seemed to fix the problem cases, but it didn't get everything, as you're seeing.

So just completed a season in standard mode with Montreal (GM only). Price got 51gp compared to Montoya 34gp. But I noticed that the coach (Julien) would unrealistically use Montoya way more often than he would. For instance.

1st round playoffs: Price got 4 starts, Montoya 3
2nd round, 2 games in and both were started by Montoya (who was listed as cold, not hot like Price).

So something seems to be a bit off with goalie usage. Not sure if it has anything to do with the known issues/observations listed above.
Just a heads up :)

Well, if you are a human GM, then you may change the goalies usage patterns (I think if you didn't change it, then you use the preset one), so maybe that's not really on the AI.

We made some tweaks to the goalie usage system today. :)

Update on this: the lineup/tactics problem turned out to be more complicated than expected: our first try at a fix corrected about two-thirds of the problem situations, but the remaining third took a lot of tries to clean up. Going to be testing tonight and tomorrow to make sure it's OK, but it should be in Friday's official release (and update for those with the game already.)

(Investigating it also turned up a wider flaw in tactics selection that's not immediately apparent in the game, but needs to be fixed; it's going to take longer than a couple of days, though, so it'll be in a post-release update.)

I had the same thing happen to me with Connor McDavid, he was 30 years old still 5 star and was having a great career. I simulated a year and McDavid only have 50 odd points I was baffled! Then I looked at my lineups and noticed he was on the 4th line. Thanks for the updates on the update ;) cant wait for friday! :D

This appears to be happening in the fictional leagues as well. I've seen many cases where players who are higher on the depth charts were actually assigned less targeted ice time by the AI.

Similar situation with the AI lineup logic. I am playing as GM only with Vegas, and my best player by far is James Neal, and he is stuck on the 4th line getting 8 minutes of icetime per night.

It's looking good in testing now. Nice variety of tactics used by teams, appropriate minutes/usage for the players who were having problems before (Giroux's getting 20+ minutes a night now.) Assuming everything goes well with our final testing, it'll be in tomorrow's update.

are you sure you didn't mistakenly re-hire jack capuano?

The lineup logic is killing me. Neal is still perpetually stuck on the 4th line. He gets 6-8 shifts, and 6-9 minutes, but is part of the first team power play. Same goes for Eakin, centering the 3rd line. I don't know how to influence the AI coach to play the best players. My expansion team is getting killed.