Editing National Player Generation Quality in FHM6

[JeffR]

This is new to FHM6 and is a bit of a a complicated topic, so I'm posting this explanation here until I've finished with the manual, where it'll also be included.

The basics first:
-this allows editing of the general quality level of fictional players that are generated each July 1 in modern games
-this only applies to the modern games - historical and fictional have their own player generation systems that don't work in the same way.
-effects will begin on the following July 1 from the changes (new players are generated at the start of that day)
-editing is done on the individual national data screens (World-National Data, choose a country, then use its editing tab)

You'll see 10 "Hockey Quality" ratings, from 0 to 0.9999. These must total 1.000, and that doesn't get tracked at the moment, so you'll have to watch what you're adding and subtracting carefully.

The quality ratings are (very, very approximately) equal to the 1-10 player ability ratings (subtract 4.5 from those to get the approximate number of stars shown in-game for the player's talent and ability), plus or minus about +0.5 to -2.0 depending on the individual level (the lower you go, the more it tends to be on the negative side.) There's also a very small random superstar generation chance independent of this system. Again, this is a huge oversimplification of how the generation system works, but it's enough to give you a general idea of what these numbers do.

The decimal number indicates what percentage of players generate with this quality as their potential. So Canada's HQ10 of .0006 means 6 Canadians in 10,000 generate with quality 10.

But it's absolutely essential to remember that different countries generate very different amounts of players - the Under-14 (not individual national U14 leagues, just that one league specifically named Under-14) and Bantam leagues are where these players show up. Canada has 37 of these teams, where, say the Czech Republic has 4. So the individual Czech hockey quality settings at the higher levels tend to be better than the Canadian ones (and looking at them, I suspect they're a little low, I may need to adjust that.) They need that to keep generating enough good quality players to keep their normal international standard of play up from a much smaller player base (which is the way it works in reality, too, the Czechs produce a disproportionate number of NHLers relative to their overall minor hockey enrollment.)

Again, don't assume that just adjusting quality up or down will get the results you want - you have to consider how many teams are generating new players for that country. I can't emphasize that enough.

Note that the country name and abbreviation are editable, but it won't really work well if you e.g. change those and edit the Under-14 teams to try to create your own new country - the cities of the original country will still be connected to the new country name, and many, if not most, of the U14 teams have uneditable hidden data that ties them to a specific region. So if you change Spain to Atlantis and "Spanish U14" to "Atlantean U14" the players generated will still have Spanish cities as their birthplace and Atlantis will, for all intents and purposes, be Spain.

Finally, remember that the players generate at age 13-14 and it'll take a long time for them to reach the top levels of play, so the results of your changes won't become fully evident for a decade or so. But you can get a rough idea if it's working by checking the player search feature, filtering by year and possibly nationality, and sorting by potential to see if it looks like what you expect.