My 25 year Custom Game Sim, and what i learned from it.

[G-Nuke]

just to see how the base game engine behaves, I decided to run a Custom game from 1967-1992. The game had no minor-league set up, and I did not use a salary cap. I varied the scoring levels from year to year to roughly replicate the different high and low scoring eras from real life.


The league started with 18 teams in 1967, and I expanded to 22 teams in 1972 (If you want to know how to hack expansion to be able to add more than 2 teams, PM me).


Observations:
- The game is really good at managing it's rosters, and I rarely see anything too weird in terms of player movement.
- Players tend to develop very late. It's not unusual to have players start out as 10 goal scorers as 18 yo and slowly develop into 50-60 goals scorers by their late 20s. IRL star players like that tend to hit their offensive prime far younger.
- The game doesn't seem to produce a lot of high-end playmakers (Adam Oates and Doug Weight types). There are a few, but most high end players tend to be the Joe Sakic, all arounder types.
- Defensemen scoring truly is much better, but there still is a bit too many assists going to them rather than forwards, but it's subtle.


Conclusions:
- I think a lot of the modern / historic issues come down to research, and I also get the feeling that salary cap management is an issue.


All in all the engine seems solid, and with a few more bells and whistles (Expansion, realignment, etc...) the custom game is going to be a ton of fun, especially for online leagues.


If anyone wants to dive deeper, I would be glad to upload the save file somewhere. I'll post some screenshots tonight.

[progen]

Good feedback. Thanks!

[Penfold75]

Originally Posted by G-Nuke

Conclusions:
- I think a lot of the modern / historic issues come down to research, and I also get the feeling that salary cap management is an issue.

Not sure what your point is about the research that is done to be honest. There is a lot of work put in by the researchers who are volunteers and do the work in their own time.

If you think there is an issue with the research maybe you should volunteer yourself.

[Fred Shero]

I asked to volunteer for the historic section and never received an answer.

[G-Nuke]

Originally Posted by Penfold75

Not sure what your point is about the research that is done to be honest. There is a lot of work put in by the researchers who are volunteers and do the work in their own time.

If you think there is an issue with the research maybe you should volunteer yourself.

I provided statistically derived data sets for every player since the beginning of professional hockey... I more than did my part.


The historical research is spotty and far too "opinion" oriented, rather than stats oriented (relative / normalized stats, not absolute values). You'll often find real life all-stars hardly able to crack starting lineups because someone either forgot to rate a player, or just didn't use any statistical basis for their ratings.


The biggest issue with the modern game research, is consistency and scale. Look at the elite players generated by the game engine in a custom game and you rarely see ratings beyond 17s and 18s, and perennial MVPs are often 4.5 rated players.


In the modern research games there are way too many 3.5 and 4 players, even at the junior level. In general the players have a much higher overall rating than what the engine produces.


It's not about hard work. It's not about recognition. It's about scaling the player ratings to what the game engine expects in order to produce results that consistently reflect real world results.


The other major wild card is the salary cap. I'm convinced FHM has a hard time managing rosters with such a rigid budget.


Screenshots as promised

[NolaSola7]

The other major wild card is the salary cap. I'm convinced FHM has a hard time managing rosters with such a rigid budget.

Did you play fictional without any cap?

[G-Nuke]

Originally Posted by NolaSola7

Did you play fictional without any cap?

Correct, no cap at all.

[krownroyal83]

Originally Posted by G-Nuke

The other major wild card is the salary cap. I'm convinced FHM has a hard time managing rosters with such a rigid budget.

There is absolutely no doubt that the game has a hard time dealing with the cap. For instance, LA in the 2015-2016. Nearly always at the top of the standings in that season. Usually a deep run, which is often if no always contributed by Kopitar. Kopitar never and i mean NEVER gets re-signed by LA. Why? In real life LA has some cap issues but they would never ever not do everything in their power to resign him. Things like that make me go from loving the game to just simply liking the game.

Edit: Is there a way to have no cap the first season or do you have to wait until the first July 1st. I'm tempted not to have a salary cap either as so many players get moved in the off season unrealistically.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by G-Nuke

I provided statistically derived data sets for every player since the beginning of professional hockey... I more than did my part.


The historical research is spotty and far too "opinion" oriented, rather than stats oriented (relative / normalized stats, not absolute values). You'll often find real life all-stars hardly able to crack starting lineups because someone either forgot to rate a player, or just didn't use any statistical basis for their ratings.

With all due respect, I've explained at length why your contribution wasn't usable, and that there are fundamental differences between the way you want historical mode to work and the way it actually does. I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by continuing to suggest the research is bad because the game doesn't work in the manner you want it to.

[NolaSola7]

Originally Posted by G-Nuke

Correct, no cap at all.

I scratched my first universe, to create a history....

I do have a cap, but I increased it pretty frequently.... I haven't noticed dumb moves ... all top free agents are free agents, not released or anything

[G-Nuke]

Originally Posted by JeffR

With all due respect, I've explained at length why your contribution wasn't usable, and that there are fundamental differences between the way you want historical mode to work and the way it actually does. I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by continuing to suggest the research is bad because the game doesn't work in the manner you want it to.

Jeff... with all due respect when the game benches Henri Richard for the last 10 years of his career, and Bobby Orr is a lady bing candidate, your research is shoddy. It's gotten better in 2015, but there is still too much "opinion" (the recent thread on Alex Mogilny is just the latest example).


It's intellectually lazy to keep pretending that it's about how *I* want it, vs actually rating players in a way that fits within the way the engine handles ratings (which in truth the Historical research does a better job than Modern) AND produces results that do a reasonable job of reproducing actual player production (Which Modern research does better than historical).


Having said that, I gave up on trying to hand you all the answers for free. Use whatever method you wish. from what I've seen though, the game engine itself is actually quite solid when left to it's own devices. That leaves the only cause of the imbalances and discrepancies down to player research. What I suspect is happening:


Modern Play
- Players are over-rated across the board compared to what the game expects, which leads to players expecting higher salaries across the board, which means that the pool of player talent is out of balance with the pool of money (Salary cap). the results are decent because most leagues Ratings are internally consistent, which the game engine seems to handle well in terms of generating game results and stats. If instead of averaging 12s across the board for attributes, you average 14s, but everyone is over-rated the same, the right results (roughly) are produced, BUT the financial model makes the players think they should be PAID as 14s, but the salary cap is balanced for 12s. (numbers chosen at random for illustration purposes).


So you can change the financial engine to reflect how players are being rated by researchers OR you can downgrade everyone across the board to fit the financial expectations of the game engine.


Historical
- The ratings seem to be inline better with the scale used by the player generation engine, BUT the internal balance between players is completely off in many cases. I have seen big issues especially around the time of the WHA merger, and also anything after 2004, but then those are the only periods I've tried yet in FHM2 because I've been trying to understand how the base engine has been modified since the first version.