Quote:
Originally Posted by Djungelurban
Weren't there two Cory Stillman and two Petr Sykora playing in the NHL at the same time a few years back? And for example, there are 19 Johan Andersson that has been registered as playing a game this season over on eliteprospects. 19... Adding DoB is essential.
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Yeah... A bit of background.... If you go back to the original freeware EHM (prior to Riz signing on with SI) guys like Smetana, Tom, and Jayzin Smith making rosters ran into this issue, and in fact Petr Sykora was the first big one IIRC. Mike Green was another (the currents Caps' d-man, and then a prospect C that never panned out really but i think is kicking around in the minors still).
The freeware had no built-in way of distinguishing between the two really for pictures and the like. So the temporary fix was to add an extra space for one between first and last name, so you ended up with "Petr Sykora" and "Mike Green" for example. The DB also maxed out at 3500 players (quite small actually now).
I also know that at one point as recently as this year/season there were two different Kevin Bakers floating around the ECHL as forwards and one of them (the older) officially (not just in video games) has taken to being called "Kevin R. Baker" in order to distinguish them apart. I also recall reading a story recently about (I think) Vancouver drafting (I think) a Swedish center years ago only to find out there was another Swedish center with the exact same name and they'd drafted the wrong one because they weren't paying close enough attention to the details of the paperwork.
When SI launched NHL:EHM they added the birthdate convention to player photos, to help distinguish. If you poke around hockeydb.com enough you'll even find that birth year or birth month wouldn't be enough, in some cases there are players with the same name that are the same age/have same birth year even.
There just really isn't a better convention to distinguish. When the DB's get large enough you'll get name conflicts otherwise. If you want a pain, imagine trying to fix player photos when your game start-date is hardcoded into the .EXE and you're still trying to properly emulate current player ages and aging with updated DB's (like has been going on with EHM DB's for years now).