Game Systems: Historical Play

[JeffR]

Next topic, the historical game. We've largely finished working on this (although a few necessary bugfixes remain, as well as some finishing touches on certain game systems), so what you're seeing now will be, by and large, what's there at release. This will be a mixture of documentation (likely to show up again in the manual) and some commentary on where we are now with historical play, why, and where we're headed.

Game Setup

We haven't provided much documentation on the setup options yet, so here it is, with a little extra commentary:

A. Available Years

The earliest year available is 1947-48, for reasons I've explained before - the need to stick with modern-era rules in this version and wanting to get a couple of years clear of the data issues cause by World War II-era replacement players. The next version of the FHM will extend that backwards, at least to the first NHL season in 1917-18, probably to the first NHA season in 1910, and possibly a few years before that to the first professional leagues (time, research materials, and the coding required to get 7-man hockey working permitting.) But for now, it`s the Howe-Richard era and forward.

B. Player development and retirement

At the moment, we're forcing the use of the "historical retirement" and "recalculate before each season" options, so the player's real-life final pro season is also his final in-game season. That restriction will be removed soon, to allow you to use the same systems as the regular game, allowing much more variable player careers.

C. Expansion and the expansion draft

We're planning a little more work in this area; we'd like to get the more unique aspects of the historical expansion drafts implemented, particularly the Cleveland-Minnesota-San Jose contraction and re-expansion, as well as the unique roster moves involved in the NHL-WHA merger.

D. Drafts and player generation

There are four possible combinations of these two options, each providing a fairly distinct experience:

1. Draft off, Generate at 17 off: this will result in teams getting new players at the same time they acquired the rights to those players historically - Eric Lindros, for example, appears in the game in 1991 as an 18-year-old Quebec Nordique. This is the most literal historical setting, where players show up at the "right" place regardless of whether or not it makes sense in the context of your game - Pittsburgh may be the best team in the game in 1983-84, but they'll still get Mario Lemieux in the following season.
   
2. Draft off, Generate at 17 on: Players will appear at the start of the season in which they turned 17, and will be signable as free agents whenever they reach the league's minimum age. This is the free-for-all setting, and the closest thing to the way the pre-draft NHL worked, although players won't be getting signed quite as early.
   
3. Draft on, Generate at 17 off: Players will appear in the season in which their rights were first owned by an NHL team, and will go through the draft before being signable. This will result in most modern players appearing at 18, when they were drafted, but a late-blooming free agent signee like Adam Oates won't arrive until he's 23. This setting is useful if you want to have a draft, but don't want to include players that may not make sense historically - for example, Eastern Bloc players prior to the 1990's (while building the database, I ignored the speculative drafting of undefected Soviet and Czechoslovak players, so although Sergei Makarov was drafted by Calgary in 1983, he won't show up in the league under these settings until 1989, his "rookie" year.)
   
4. Draft on, Generate at 17 on: Players will appear at the start of the season in which they turned 17, and must go through a draft when they're old enough to qualify for it. The least historical setting, but most consistent with the 'reality' of your game world - finishing last in 2004-05 gets you the best chance at drafting Sidney Crosby. Since everyone shows up at 17, this will lead to some very ahistorical arrivals, like the 70's and 80's defectors arriving much earlier than they actually did, e.g. Vaclav Nedomansky in 1961 instead of 1974. The first Finns and Swedes will also tend to show up a few years too early.

Staff

Historical staff is going to remain fictional in this version, sorry. There's just nowhere near enough time to build a good staff database. We'll try to get coaches and general managers in next time (there are some things I want to do with player progression into coaching that should work well with historical mode), and possibly owners (because who wouldn't want to work for Charlie Finley or Harold Ballard?) Scouts will probably be a little farther out, since they're a tall order for data entry and aren't quite as important in historical play, where most users will have some familiarity with the players and/or can easily look up their real careers.

Drafting

Drafting is going to be fairly predictable for a while, but one of the changes we're introducing with the new scouting system will let me add a factor that can adjust the way a player's value is perceived (basically, an overrated/underrated setting.) So, I can now inflate the value of Patrik Stefan and decrease that of Henrik Zetterberg, and the 1999 draft will look a little more like it actually did. That puts the player at an advantage, of course, if you're at all familiar the players in the era you're in. I might look at eventually adding some kind of optional temporary masking, so the players' names and basic biographical info get obscured until they're on your team, but we'll see how it works without it first.

The WHA and Other Major Leagues

We've got the WHA functioning more or less properly now, although there still seem to be some lingering issues that we need to clean up. The good news is, now that we've got one league to appear and disappear during a game, we can handle the early part of the century properly, with multiple major leagues and the birth of the NHL out of the NHA. So, Habs fans, a 1909-2013 game with your team might be possible the next time around.

Minor Leagues

We get asked a lot about the possibility of adding minor and European leagues to historical play. The good news is, the database is built in a way that supports that possibility. The bad news is, it'll be a huge research task, and in some cases the necessary information just isn't there - even for fairly well-documented leagues, the data can get pretty sketchy once you go back later than the 1970's. There are also some other problems posed by adding non-major leagues: for example, the shift of the old International League from regional AA league to a coast-to-coast mini-NHL means huge changes in finances and player quality in a fairly short timespan. That would be tricky to model. I think the minor leagues may have to come in on a very gradual basis - the AHL is the obvious starting point, since it's well-documented and has occupied a pretty fixed position in hockey's league hierarchy for most of its existence. The Soviet league might be interesting to do, as well, if enough data on the early years is available; the top levels in Sweden and Finland might also be possible candidates.

International Play

Which brings me to another frequent question topic: when can we get international tournaments in the historical play? We'll be adding international play to the regular game in the next version, so we'll have the systems to handle it. But the problem, again, will be the research. It's easy enough to put rosters together for the major hockey powers going back decades, but how do I get data on the Australian team in the 1960 Olympics or the Hungarian one from 1928? We'll have to figure out some way of dealing with that, likely fictional players for the minor nations. I'm not sure exactly when we'll be able to do that, though; probably not next version.

Stats in Different Eras

We've got the basic goals/game and penalties/game settings working in historical play now. We still need to do some upgrading to the match engine to get the league's top scorers getting realistic point totals, but at least now you'll see a lot of 100-point seasons and goalies with 4.00+ GAA's in the 1980's.

Customization

I'm going to have to disappoint some of you here. Historical play will be very light on customizable setup options in this version. It's going to be challenging enough to get custom leagues working to an acceptable standard in the regular game; historical brings a new set of complications that I really don't think we're going to be able to deal with properly now. Once we've got some experience working with custom leagues and their unique issues, we'll be able to do a proper job of making them work with the historical database. But we're not there yet.

The Player Ratings
(this section is largely repeated from the article I wrote a few months ago, for the sake of those who haven't seen it)

The nature of baseball statistics makes it relatively easy to create an accurate picture of players just using the numbers. Hitters will hit precisely the right number of homers, pitchers will walk the right number of guys, fielders will make the right amount of errors. With hockey, we're not so lucky - often all that's available, particularly for older seasons, is a handful of basic counting stats like goals and assists. There's really no way to make workable player ratings from those, and you're left with the immense task of manually rating each player. Not an attractive option for a small, volunteer research team, and it gets vastly more daunting if it has to be done for every season a player was active. What to do, then?

We came up with a couple of answers. First, to ease the task of entering all the ratings manually, there's the template system: break down players into various types (for example, offense-oriented wingers who tend to shoot more than they pass and don't take a lot of penalties, tough stay-at-home defencemen, and so on - we came up with about 50 different ones) and then build a fully-rated database entry - the template - for an "average NHLer" of each type. Then, every real player gets assigned one of those templates and four simple "target" ratings - offensive, defensive, mental, and physical. If the target is above-average, for example, the ratings the player gets in that group are raised from the average level in the template; below-average and they go down. (Additionally, any specific attribute ratings that are entered for a player override the template numbers.) So by selecting a template and entering four numbers, I get a reasonably accurate depiction of a player without having to enter 30-40 individual attributes.

The second answer deals with the need to enter ratings for a player's whole career. It was inspired by a similar system in Title Bout Championship Boxing: Every player gets five career dates entered - start, pre-prime, prime, post-prime, and end. Those dates are used to further tune the ratings in the templates, so if a player is in a season right before his prime, his ratings will be lowered a little to reflect that.

Now, will these systems give you the kind of statistical results that OOTP does, where the numbers can match real life almost perfectly? No, there's just too much abstraction involved, and there are some things that just can't be handled accurately like major mid-career changes in a guy's playing style. But I think this will get us very close, certainly enough to give you an accurate picture of what a player was like and how he fit into the context of his team and league.

Gradually, we'll replace the automatic template ratings with specific ones, but that's a big task and will take a long time. The initial release version won't have much in that respect aside from some ratings needed to create more realistic individual penalty totals, which are a bit of a weak point of the template system. Currently active players will also have some ratings set as part of the basic game (and the historical game can infer proper older ratings from those), so there'll probably be an increased level of accuracy in later historical seasons.

Finally, the scope of the database will, at release, be limited to only players who played at least one NHL or WHA game. That's not a problem for gameplay, there are always more players available than the teams need to fill their active rosters. But I may still expand the slightly, time permitting; I'd like to get all historical first-round picks in as well, and some players who were prominent in international play but never played in the NHL despite their rights being owned at some point by an NHL team. And, eventually, we'll get it to the point where there'll actually be leftover players after an entry draft.

Summary

To sum up, what we've got is 65 years of historical database that can be played in various configurations, but will be limited to fairly historical league structures. It's a long way from the level it'll eventually get to, but for now it's still a big step forward for a hockey management game to have the option of playing historical leagues - no more need to be jealous of the baseball guys who've been able to do that in OOTP for years.

[redtiger7]

Is the financial system going to remain the same throughout historical play, or will it be adjusted for the time? Right now we have players in 1947 making $5-6 million. Not historically acurate, but does maintain a uniform system. But will player's salary demands rise higher and higher each season?

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by redtiger7

Is the financial system going to remain the same throughout historical play, or will it be adjusted for the time? Right now we have players in 1947 making $5-6 million. Not historically acurate, but does maintain a uniform system. But will player's salary demands rise higher and higher each season?

It'll stay uniform. I'd like to eventually get the historically-accurate financial levels working as they do in OOTP, but that's a big task, and probably one that's better tackled after we know exactly how far back we're going to go. So for now, keeping everything at an unchanging 2013 level is the best compromise, since most hockey fans already have an understanding of what salaries apply to what level of talent right now.

[geckon]

Originally Posted by JeffR

Minor Leagues

We get asked a lot about the possibility of adding minor and European leagues to historical play. The good news is, the database is built in a way that supports that possibility. The bad news is, it'll be a huge research task, and in some cases the necessary information just isn't there - even for fairly well-documented leagues, the data can get pretty sketchy once you go back later than the 1970's. There are also some other problems posed by adding non-major leagues: for example, the shift of the old International League from regional AA league to a coast-to-coast mini-NHL means huge changes in finances and player quality in a fairly short timespan. That would be tricky to model. I think the minor leagues may have to come in on a very gradual basis - the AHL is the obvious starting point, since it's well-documented and has occupied a pretty fixed position in hockey's league hierarchy for most of its existence. The Soviet league might be interesting to do, as well, if enough data on the early years is available; the top levels in Sweden and Finland might also be possible candidates.

KHL! It has a short "history" but it would be nice to have it.

[Xxhabsfan31xX]

I think I encountered a glitch but only a handful of players (14) were drafted in 2003, 99% of them, Im sure, played in the NHL (minus a ton of today's stars)



im on the 4th option (generate at 17)

[dave1927p]

Originally Posted by JeffR

one of the changes we're introducing with the new scouting system will let me add a factor that can adjust the way a player's value is perceived (basically, an overrated/underrated setting.) So, I can now inflate the value of Patrik Stefan and decrease that of Henrik Zetterberg, and the 1999 draft will look a little more like it actually did.

i signed on from work so i can post for this. Awesome! That's all i got to say

[Rob316]

Jeff,

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has donated they're time to the game on researching teams and whatnot, it's not a easy task! I'd like to thank the people who have expressed interest into the rougher side of the game on the forums as well and considering this game has now developed itself into focusing on scoring and historical gameplay I'm confused as to how you developers are looking into the roles of the fighters past and present ???

I like your game alot, it has alot of potential and I really honestly do think this game will eventually be the Hockey sim's of hockey sim's.
I'm frustrated at all of your lack of attention regarding tough guys and role players of the NHL. So far the last few months I've read nothing about Enforcers and PIM adjustments and thats including the historical gameplay.

The king of heavyweights Bob Probert recieves a modest 15 for fighting in the 1990 era and guys like McSorley, Gaetz, recieve 15 's ??
A 20 year old rookie Tie Domi with a 14 ?? Denis Vial with a 12 and a physicality rating of 13, Chris simon 13's Really??? If you guys took the Tough guy role more seriously then people who enjoy a rough and tumble game could expect to embrace and look forward to beating certain PIM leaders and whatnot. A lot of these guys have played enormous roles on they're teams past, present and the future.

We would be looking into helping the "researchers" look into adjusting the tough guys / Enforcers but how can we when this is all being overlooked ??? The game doesn't even have a decent engine to accept the Enforcers or the role they play now do they ??

I'd love to hear again your plans on the rougher side of hockey Jeff because at this point, after waiting egerly like everyone else on the release, you'd think the game of hockey would have more respect for the tough guys and the fighting especially the wars these teams have been in past , present, and future!

P.S - I think being able to adjust player attributes and saving them as your own personal file so we can enjoy our own ratings upon every new career would be a breakthrough as well. FHM with a option to rerate the league and save it along with a button to restore to default seems logical no ???

[mgom27]

League Rules if you change Players protected to like 999 it goes back to 50 and when playing with 1979 League at Draft all Players don't get Drafted and should and could be solved if their was a Salary Cap or Players protected were higher then 50.

Minor Leagues could use the ones that Comes with 2013 Rosters same goes for Staff/Personal and also would solve losing a Unsigned Draft Pick for no reason.

Using a League starting in 2000 up intill 2005 Draft doesn't happen but when does the Players who are available to Drafted I don't think both Brian Elliott and Halak were Drafted in same year and yes Players Protected was at 999 but next year went back to 50 but at least I see Trade Deadline and Trade Responses from a Trade Prospals from years ago and to take it a step further no Trades are happening.
How about Historical Transactions and Lineups?

[gosens]

Jeff thanks for another enlightening post.

A few observations / suggestions:

- Is the historical goals/game setting reset or updated each year in the off-season, or is the game fixed at the goals/game setting of the start year? I noticed a big difference in 1980's scoring between a game I started in 1947 and one started in 1981.

- Historical trades - for future versions are there plans to incorporate historical trades and transactions/signings, and the option to use historical transactions or not?

(As an aside I currently see NO trades or movement of any kind aside from expansion drafts.)

- Almanac - There are plenty of comments about navigation and interface already, but it should be said: one of the greatest joys of historical play is browsing the stats to see our alternate history. League and team stats from year to year at the click of a forward/back button, same as for yearly standings and playoff results, would be greatly appreciated. You've already got sortable player stats, so the addition of some filters (by team/all; by position; single year/career; etc.) would add a lot of value.

Thanks!

[mgom27]

Another thing about Unsigned Prospects is when we load a League theirs none and teams had some like if I load 1980 Wayne Gretzky would be one or if load 2012 it be from 2013 Rosters minus this years Draft Picks.

http://blues.nhl.com/club/page.htm?id=34251 would like to do an All Time Blues Roster that includes all active and former Blues Players so maybe include Retired Players in Database.

[sprague]

Originally Posted by Rob316

Jeff,

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has donated they're time to the game on researching teams and whatnot, it's not a easy task! I'd like to thank the people who have expressed interest into the rougher side of the game on the forums as well and considering this game has now developed itself into focusing on scoring and historical gameplay I'm confused as to how you developers are looking into the roles of the fighters past and present ???

I like your game alot, it has alot of potential and I really honestly do think this game will eventually be the Hockey sim's of hockey sim's.
I'm frustrated at all of your lack of attention regarding tough guys and role players of the NHL. So far the last few months I've read nothing about Enforcers and PIM adjustments and thats including the historical gameplay.

The king of heavyweights Bob Probert recieves a modest 15 for fighting in the 1990 era and guys like McSorley, Gaetz, recieve 15 's ??
A 20 year old rookie Tie Domi with a 14 ?? Denis Vial with a 12 and a physicality rating of 13, Chris simon 13's Really??? If you guys took the Tough guy role more seriously then people who enjoy a rough and tumble game could expect to embrace and look forward to beating certain PIM leaders and whatnot. A lot of these guys have played enormous roles on they're teams past, present and the future.

We would be looking into helping the "researchers" look into adjusting the tough guys / Enforcers but how can we when this is all being overlooked ??? The game doesn't even have a decent engine to accept the Enforcers or the role they play now do they ??

I'd love to hear again your plans on the rougher side of hockey Jeff because at this point, after waiting egerly like everyone else on the release, you'd think the game of hockey would have more respect for the tough guys and the fighting especially the wars these teams have been in past , present, and future!

P.S - I think being able to adjust player attributes and saving them as your own personal file so we can enjoy our own ratings upon every new career would be a breakthrough as well. FHM with a option to rerate the league and save it along with a button to restore to default seems logical no ???

umm this

[Orioles1966]

Are we going too be able to save the WHA from folding,or if that's not possible,start up a fictional WHA at the point where the real WHA closed shop?

[Parker27]

Originally Posted by Rob316

Jeff,

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has donated they're time to the game on researching teams and whatnot, it's not a easy task! I'd like to thank the people who have expressed interest into the rougher side of the game on the forums as well and considering this game has now developed itself into focusing on scoring and historical gameplay I'm confused as to how you developers are looking into the roles of the fighters past and present ???

I like your game alot, it has alot of potential and I really honestly do think this game will eventually be the Hockey sim's of hockey sim's.
I'm frustrated at all of your lack of attention regarding tough guys and role players of the NHL. So far the last few months I've read nothing about Enforcers and PIM adjustments and thats including the historical gameplay.

The king of heavyweights Bob Probert recieves a modest 15 for fighting in the 1990 era and guys like McSorley, Gaetz, recieve 15 's ??
A 20 year old rookie Tie Domi with a 14 ?? Denis Vial with a 12 and a physicality rating of 13, Chris simon 13's Really??? If you guys took the Tough guy role more seriously then people who enjoy a rough and tumble game could expect to embrace and look forward to beating certain PIM leaders and whatnot. A lot of these guys have played enormous roles on they're teams past, present and the future.

We would be looking into helping the "researchers" look into adjusting the tough guys / Enforcers but how can we when this is all being overlooked ??? The game doesn't even have a decent engine to accept the Enforcers or the role they play now do they ??

I'd love to hear again your plans on the rougher side of hockey Jeff because at this point, after waiting egerly like everyone else on the release, you'd think the game of hockey would have more respect for the tough guys and the fighting especially the wars these teams have been in past , present, and future!

P.S - I think being able to adjust player attributes and saving them as your own personal file so we can enjoy our own ratings upon every new career would be a breakthrough as well. FHM with a option to rerate the league and save it along with a button to restore to default seems logical no ???

Great post Rob.

I played season 95/96 and there was so low fights. I dont know if this is a right place put these things. In real life that season was fight filled season. 5 guys gets more than 30 fights. Matthew Barnaby has 37 f*cking fights :-)

Now in this game guys like Peter Bondra, Tom Fitzgerald, Boris Mironov, Donald Audette, Pavel Bure, Paul Coffey are fighting!! Dont make sense at all. Guys like Paul Laus, Matthew Barnaby, Brad May, Darren McCarty, Dennis Vial, Tie Domi, Rob Ray,Donald Brashear, Bob Probert, Mike Peluso, Stu Grimson, Reid Simpson & Jim Cummins etc etc are not fighting. And many teams they are playing in "minors" I love this game but you have to do something about this. Please. Its important part of north american hockey. Has been and will be allways.

[Orioles1966]

Can a team get two minor penalties at the same time? So far, I haven't noticed that happening in my games.

[Puckhead]

Originally Posted by Orioles1966

Can a team get two minor penalties at the same time? So far, I haven't noticed that happening in my games.

It's there, it happened maybe two times in the first year of my Sabres savegame. But I agree, it should happen more often than that.

[grindline]

Originally Posted by JeffR

Customization

I'm going to have to disappoint some of you here. Historical play will be very light on customizable setup options in this version. It's going to be challenging enough to get custom leagues working to an acceptable standard in the regular game; historical brings a new set of complications that I really don't think we're going to be able to deal with properly now. Once we've got some experience working with custom leagues and their unique issues, we'll be able to do a proper job of making them work with the historical database. But we're not there yet.

Firstly, thank you Jeff for the hard work you and the rest of the team have put in. I wanted to ask a specific question about editing the historical leagues but I'm preparing myself for disappointment.

Can I alter the expansion process so as to differ from real-life? What I want to do is take over the NHL in 1991 and model it the way I would have if I was the first commissioner. My expansions would happen in different markets at different times (e.g. no Anaheim or Florida but there would be expansions later in the decade to Seattle etc.). I don't need custom expansion drafts because the default settings are fine but I would need to able to keep the old two conference, four division structure and change the scheduling matrix a little.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Quick question: when you are in a historical league are you required to do historical franchise relocations? I'd like to be able to keep teams where they started and use an expansion system to populate new markets.

Or alternatively turn off historical expansion (for those worried about "talent dilution" over the years -- it should result in teams in general being better stocked with talent and might serve to cause fewer teams to be terrible).

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Xxhabsfan31xX

I think I encountered a glitch but only a handful of players (14) were drafted in 2003, 99% of them, Im sure, played in the NHL (minus a ton of today's stars)



im on the 4th option (generate at 17)

Mostly a function of 2003 being so close to the (current) end of the database - the completed years (up to 2004-05 in the last update) are the classes of rookies that I've finished editing. So in 2003, you've just got the guys that debuted in 03-04 (04-05 being the lockout year), which isn't a lot. As I get more years in the 2000's done (mid-2007 now, and about to work on some more as soon as I finish with the forum), the 2003 draft class will fill out - it looks like 130 of them have played NHL games so far, so there'll be at least that many to pick.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Rob316

Jeff,

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has donated they're time to the game on researching teams and whatnot, it's not a easy task! I'd like to thank the people who have expressed interest into the rougher side of the game on the forums as well and considering this game has now developed itself into focusing on scoring and historical gameplay I'm confused as to how you developers are looking into the roles of the fighters past and present ???

I like your game alot, it has alot of potential and I really honestly do think this game will eventually be the Hockey sim's of hockey sim's.
I'm frustrated at all of your lack of attention regarding tough guys and role players of the NHL. So far the last few months I've read nothing about Enforcers and PIM adjustments and thats including the historical gameplay.

The king of heavyweights Bob Probert recieves a modest 15 for fighting in the 1990 era and guys like McSorley, Gaetz, recieve 15 's ??
A 20 year old rookie Tie Domi with a 14 ?? Denis Vial with a 12 and a physicality rating of 13, Chris simon 13's Really??? If you guys took the Tough guy role more seriously then people who enjoy a rough and tumble game could expect to embrace and look forward to beating certain PIM leaders and whatnot. A lot of these guys have played enormous roles on they're teams past, present and the future.

We would be looking into helping the "researchers" look into adjusting the tough guys / Enforcers but how can we when this is all being overlooked ??? The game doesn't even have a decent engine to accept the Enforcers or the role they play now do they ??

I'd love to hear again your plans on the rougher side of hockey Jeff because at this point, after waiting egerly like everyone else on the release, you'd think the game of hockey would have more respect for the tough guys and the fighting especially the wars these teams have been in past , present, and future!

P.S - I think being able to adjust player attributes and saving them as your own personal file so we can enjoy our own ratings upon every new career would be a breakthrough as well. FHM with a option to rerate the league and save it along with a button to restore to default seems logical no ???

I've covered some of this before, but to recap:

-the AI, up to now, hasn't been set to evaluate tough players properly. That's been addressed since the last update (maybe too well, in my current test game Dean Dorsett has a value comparable to a second-liner.)
-there's been minimal reward for using physical play so far: I sent Sebastian a set of new tactical effects yesterday (if he hasn't added them yet, he will shortly), and included among them was an increase to the impact "Aggressive" and "Very Aggressive" settings have.
-there's been no benefit to having tough players/good fighters: we'll be working on the match engine again very soon and fixing this is one of the priorities, alongside improving scoring for star players and defencemen and making leadership more significant.
-fight results aren't being tracked: this will go in at the same time we add advanced stats, which I believe are close to completion right now.

Regarding the ratings, this is more complicated, but bear with me: the historical ratings are the product of the template system, which is discussed in the first post. In short, right now there are no specific aggressiveness/fighting ratings set for the vast majority of the database - the only place they exist are for players who are still active, or just retired. So, the ratings for the players you listed are the default ones for enforcers/physical players, adjusted a bit for ability.

The enforcer template isn't working out too badly for goons, but the problem with all of the guys you mentioned is that they were decent hockey players, and need the less-extreme "physical" templates to model their non-fighting ratings properly (although I think I need to switch Vial to the enforcer one.) That template class covers a pretty broad spectrum of physical play, so right now Probert is drawn in similar terms to, say, Wayne Cashman. That'll get fixed as soon as I can go back and set individual aggressiveness and fighting ratings for players. And that'll be my first priority after I get done with doing the basic setup for the remainder of the database, since those are fairly easy ratings to set and it's the weakest point of the template system. But I want to finish the remaining years first, so the historical game is playable right up to the present. That'll probably take me right up to release date or shortly before it, so the fighting ratings will start to get better right around that time.

And, if it'll finally clear up the concerns that we have some kind of a bias against physical hockey:

My favourite player of all time is Tiger Williams. I'm very happy that Fred Shero, an underappreciated genius, is finally getting into the Hall of Fame, and I think that his Flyers-Red Army game in 1976 was one of the most brilliantly-coached games in hockey history. My Grade 8 locker was a few feet away from Mick Vukota's. I grew up watching the BCJHL in an era where 200 PIM in 50 games got you 6th place on the team. I saw the first game Link Gaetz played in Junior A. One of the highlights of my minor hockey career was fighting a guy who went about 6'3, 220 in bantam (I lost.) I agree with Don Cherry more often than I care to admit in polite company. My sister dated Probert's cousin. I think our boys did the right thing in Piestany. I was disappointed my Canucks didn't even make an offer to George Parros this summer, and I'm hoping Zack Kassian gets the green light from Tortorella to fight more this year. In short, I'm the last guy you need to worry about neglecting the physical side of the game. Good?

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Orioles1966

Are we going too be able to save the WHA from folding,or if that's not possible,start up a fictional WHA at the point where the real WHA closed shop?

No, not going to be possible in this version.