Originally Posted by JeffR
You're trying to change stat production by modifying individual variables based on real-life stats. While that may get you some results that look acceptable, it creates far more problems because you're adjusting them in isolation of every other rating, and using stats that are woefully inadequate, in isolation, to explain why players perform as they do.
In the injury ratings you gave me, for example, you gave a huge number of players a 20 (maximum number of injuries) rating. Since they seem to correspond to guys who only played a limited number of NHL games, I assume you arrived at them by making some kind of straight-line calculation involving games played. For example, Harry Pidhirny and Willie Marshall, a couple of players from the 1950's who had 35 career NHL games between them, both are rated 20. But Pidhirny and Marshall both had 20-year minor league careers where they were rarely injured - the first line in Pidhirny's AHL HOF bio even describes him as "durable and reliable." Making them extremely injury prone in order to limit their NHL careers is not consistent with the way historical mode is designed - the goal is to create accurate representations of players, so the user has to evaluate them in the way they were evaluated historically. Marshall didn't have trouble making the Leafs because he was fragile, he didn't make it because Toronto had better alternatives. If he had started with another team, he might've had a long NHL career, and if someone playing as, say, Boston trades for him in the game, there should be a chance for that to occur without him breaking a leg every time someone touches him.
Now, I'm not saying the database is capable of providing a very accurate picture of every player right now. It's going to take a while, and a lot of work, to get to that point. But shortcuts like trying to make crude equivalencies between stats and ratings won't help the process. It just distorts the overall picture by turning a large number of players whose NHL stats don't tell the whole story about them into weird abstractions of those numbers. That may be appropriate for something like a single-season stat replay game like Strat-O-Matic, but FHM (like OOTP before it) isn't designed as that kind of game. Doing ratings in that manner will just create a big mess that will eventually have to be corrected, making the long task of developing the database even longer.
Finally, a word about historical mode in general: I had to spend a lot of time talking Sebastian and Malte into including it in the game at all, and put hundreds of hours into building the historical database as a volunteer, before I joined the team, in order to convince them to put it in. And it's an ongoing, and often losing, battle to get coding time allotted to it, because, Markus aside, it's something that's a very foreign concept to a European developer: you don't see a historical mode in Football Manager, for example, even though SI is sitting on 20 years' worth of player ratings. But I'm going to keep fighting for it. It would just be nice to have to deal with a little less venom from the userbase over it, when I've said all along it's a work in progress. Try to remember that as a niche (historical) within a niche (hockey) within a niche (sports management games), its future is always going to be on shaky ground, and it doesn't help me making a convincing argument for keeping or adding to it when Sebastian keeps seeing relentless negativity ("completely random results") over historical out of a few people.
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