Playing FHM7 as a Totally Blind Hockey Newbie

[BlindGuyNW]

Hi ALl,

I've posted on the FHM subreddit recently but figured I'd come here as well, since this is the official forum and all.

I'm a newbie to hockey and FHM who happens to be totally blind. I bought FHM more or less on a whim, a friend on another forum mentioned that it was somewhat accessible to play, though a little hard to get used to.

This matches my experience thus far. I'm enjoying the exploration of the interface though I honestly have little idea what i'm doing. I've had some issues with accessing the player information, mostly because of the game's implementation of GUI accessibility not quite being ideal to work with.

Still, I'm interested to learn more and hope that some improvements could be made to make the experience a little smoother. The largest issue right now is tedium, it takes a long time to find information which is visually obvious in some cases, and some screens are just confusing.

I'm wondering about the best way to enjoy the game. Is it reasonable to just start off handling GM duties, and let the AI handle my lineups and such? Honestly the biggest barrier to my getting familiar with the game is not having a great understanding of good first steps. I presume I need to get familiar with my team roster. Is there any way to export that to a CSV file or something? I'd almost certainly be able to digest the information a little faster given the current state of the table accessibility.

Any advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks all.

[Shadow4u]

One of the fun aspects of the game for me is you simply can not spreadsheet this. The old adage applies here - one man's trash is another man's treasure. For example - do you want offensive defencemen or defencemen - its a big difference. Are offensive skills more important to you than the physical abilities. You can win either way but I have found you need fit your roster around your play style. Then match the tactics to them also. If you hover over a player in the tactics screen, you will see the chemistry players have built with each other - this is important. Don't make a change and expect an immediate result. It takes time to learn tactics and build chemistry. I personally play a defensive game and the physical and checking aspects are most important and have had a lot of success with that. But other clubs favor offensive talent and do not emphasize the defensive aspects and can still be effective. In short - - the best players do not make the best team. It all has to fit together. Depth is important. Hope that helps

[BlindGuyNW]

Hey,

I was mostly trying to figure out if I could get the info from my roster in an alternate format, though the info about chemistry and related concepts is definitely appreciated.

At the moment the experience is tedious but a lot could be improved fairly easily. I can't seem to access the player tooltip information, but assume that most of that info is available from the player profiles in extended form anyway.

One of the silly things that tripped me up is the use of national flags to designate birthplaces, I was expecting text country abbreviations or something. At least it's understandable now that I grasp what's going on.

I'm thinking I should perhaps record a demonstration of my experience with the game, to show what I can do and what kinds of improvements would be helpful for my particular situation. I'll try and do that this weekend.

[JeffR]

There's an Export CSV function at the bottom of the World menu that'll dump a lot of the game's data, lines included, to csv files, although the main intended use of that is assembling something like a league website or spreadsheet out of multiple files, so I'm not sure how useful it would be to you.

There is a tooltip on the flag that lists the name of the nation in text, but if you can't access that it's also listed in text near the top of the personal details when you open the individual player screen.

[BlindGuyNW]

Thanks for this. I feel like I'm finally starting to come to grips with the way the game UI works, though some aspects are still somewhat confusing. I should hopefully be able to get a demo video out this weekend illustrating some of the issues I experience, and will certainly post that here.

For the moment I've decided to focus on play as a GM, as coaching seems to add a whole other layer of both UI and strategic complexity. My lack of hockey knowledge certainly doesn't help.

[Colorado]

If I were you,opt to be both GM AND Coach because you can get the AI to take on whatever tasks you want. You might want certain players playing on certain lines for example.