[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Swedishgamefreak

Seems like great additions to the game!
I have some questions though as I couldn't find my answer in the change log:

Has there been any changes to the future draft classes? The first and the second year are stacked but later it gets weaker. First round is fine but after that it kind of drops off very fast with having 2 star potential players already in round 4 and 5 as opposed to in year 1 and 2 having 2,5 star potential players in later rounds. It doesn't feel like the younger players improve their ratings the way they should be.

Been working on it. There's an information gap where it's much clearer who the top, say, 90 17-18-year-old NHL prospects are right now, vs. the top 90 14-16-year-olds. There are always some clear standouts in the younger group, but the consensus thins out rapidly, e.g. this what Eliteprospects' 2025 NHL draft preview page looks like now: https://www.eliteprospects.com/draft-center/2025 - Misa, a few more notables, and only 20-odd other guys. But I've been a little more aggressive with giving good ratings to the top youngest guys in the last 2-3 years (and toned down my over-rating of the current draft year, which was part of the problem), so the situation should be improved.

After those first few years, the real guys disappear and the game's player generation takes over, and at that point the player pool is pretty steady. Long-term tests 20+ years out are showing a player pool in the rosters and drafts that's very comparable to what's there are the beginning.

Has the difference between 2D and classic mode been changed? I noticed that the points total in a season for a player can be different depending on if the games was simmed in 2D mode and classic mode. In 2D mode there was more players that put up more goals than assists so the stats was a little bit off at times. Even when playing my own games in 2D and have the AI games sim in classic mode, puts my players in a disadvantage when it comes to the stats. I can't really put my finger on it, I just feel like there are some differences between the modes.

There'll always be a difference. Classic mode result generation is frozen now and won't be adjusted further unless we find it doing something really odd. With 2D mode, whenever we make gameplay changes I then do a bunch of testing to see what that's done to the statistical results, then do a bunch of tweaking to get the stats back at the proper levels. So while they'll never work exactly the same as classic mode, both should be producing realistic results.

Was there any plans on improving the scouting reports, making it more deeper and also improving the draft experience? Like getting trade offers from other teams in the middle of the draft. Maybe even trade deadline could be more active with getting trade offers, not just when you are shopping a player.

More scouting depth is still something I want to do, it was on my early planning list for 9 but I wasn't able to come up with a particularly fun/satisfying way of handling it, so we left it alone for now.

Mid-draft trade offers may be a little tough, the game engine isn't great at interrupting an ongoing event like that; we'd have to do it in a way that doesn't make the draft clunky and slow to advance. You'll notice in the new college recruiting "drafts", where teams compete against each other to sign players (requiring a lot of ongoing AI recalculations), that it tends to take much longer to finish the draft (even if you just auto-complete it) than a regular draft. So mid-draft trading would need to find a way around that problem.

We've done a few things, noted above, to get the AI trading more actively, including offers to human teams.

I would love to see like a conversation system (kinda like in Football Manager) to go with the harmony system but maybe that would be something for the future?

The big problem there is the absolute boatload of text that has to be written and maintained to make that kind of system enjoyable and non-repetitive. SI has no problem doing that because they have a core team of 100+ people, where ours can be counted on one hand. So we need to be a bit more abstract, for now.