New for FHM9

[scootermojo]

Has bold faced type made it to a players statistical page for when he leads the league in a category such as this on hockey reference?

[TheAlaskan]

Can expansion CHL teams be assigned a farm team (e.g. regional Junior B league)?

[GMO123]

"added Injury Deferral: you can now choose to defer injury treatment for some types of injuries until after the season ends. That will let you keep the injured player in the lineup with reduced performance and a risk of making the injury worse."

Great addition. Thanks.

Can the player decide they want to play or not play, and the team has a different idea?

Will the player have an attribute where the player has a tendency to want to play when injured (such as during playoffs), or have a tendency to not play when injured?

[Sabres2000]

As far as ncaa goes are the teams editable.. let’s say I want you to change a ncaa and put one in Canada can they be edited and changed like other leagues can be or can u expand ncaa leagues?

[Sabres2000]

When it comes to recruitment for ncaa.. what staff does ncaa teams have besides bc and assistant coaches? Do they have scouts? Also when players come into the database at 14-15 for junior leagues can we add those players into short list so that we can keep an eye on them for when recruiting for our ncaa school..

Also if I want to create a school from scratch and I release all players and staff and change it, the regular season begins when in October that way if I start in early off season I have a ton of time to sign players if I want to build a program from scratch?

[Saul Goodman]

Any updates and/or fixes around goaltenderstarts? I feel like back up goaltenders still in FHM8 were getting way too many starts over established or star goaltenders.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Swedishgamefreak

Awesome! Thanks for the answers! I have another question that just came up. Are there any reasons why not every league is editable? I want to move up Karlskrona HK from Hockeyettan to Hockeyallsvenskan but I can't see a way to do that.

It's usually due to unique mechanics for that league needing hardcoding that editing would be very likely to break, e.g. in the Allsvenskan's case, the odd number of playoff teams and the relegation system.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by boscoJJ

thanks for info.
But how are althistorical Pro/Rel handled?

Teams appear in the years they were actually in the tournament, i.e. the in-game results don't affect who gets relegated the next year.

[jumpSeat]

Originally Posted by Nickphillies

As in sometimes the starters don't get the bulk of the starts?

Yes. There's no mention of any goaltender improvements in the new changes list. And for whatever reason, Jeff isn't saying anything about it.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Risk2014

Sounds amazing. But I have some questions.

When you choose your NHL team, your AHL and ECHL minor teams can you play in 2D games and have the option to make decisions like you make for your NHL team? Example Pass, Fight, Shoot etc?

In-game feedback responses yes, on-ice decisions no - that's still on the wish list, but not implemented yet; you would need to play in multiplayer and add a second GM controlling the minor league team to do that.

Last year while playing the NHL games in decisions mode or 2D mode I found it was easy to score 8-10 goals every game. Has that option been adjusted? What about body checking? Has that increased?

I found that there was hardly any checks when you play the game. Most is 2 hits.

Yes, there's a note above mentioning that the overpowered in-game decisions have been dialled down.

Hits were running low in 2D so I've adjusted that upwards, but bear in mind they're following the NHL's definition of the Hits stat, which requires that puck control be lost.

Your AHL and ECHL teams do they have an option for you to make changes manually before a game and edit lineups? What about during the game when you are playing it? Example is after the 1st period is over you can edit your lineups?

Yes, you can change the lines before/during games if you have lines control turned on for the farm teams in your manager settings.

Can you have an option to have a player play on two lines? Double dipping?

Not directly, the closest you could come would be to leave a line spot open so the AI will have to fill it via the regular empty-spot procedures during the game, which will tend to give priority to better players if they're not tired.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Curve Ball Dave

I'm looking forward to the 8th and am laying the groundwork for my new fictional universe.

My questions: Have you made setting team colors a little easier? OOTP has an eye dropper so you can just click on the team logo to set colors. FHM requires me to copy and past the HTML code for team and script colors which can be very time consuming.

Like OOTP, can we now create a fictional league with historical teams and then do an initial Fantasy Draft?

Still the same UI for setting colours (aside from a fix to a problem making the text on the color selection popup difficult to read.)

At the moment, it looks like getting historical players into the initial draft isn't working the way it should. There's a workaround that should allow it, but doesn't for some reason; I've added it to the bug list and hopefully we can get that changed quickly.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Félicette

Pretty excited about all those changes !

Quick question, will we have some new flavour texts coming during play-offs ?

(Like a quick recap of opposing team performances and players to follow, etc).

Right now the play-offs come a bit out of the blue, I think some kind of presentation would really add to the immersion for this special time of the season

Nothing new for them this year, but I would like to add some kind of previews and mid-playoff updates. Requires a bit of work to make them handle some of the odder playoff formats, though.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by mjcarr74

Do we still have names for players on 2d still?

Yes, there are still the options to switch between various combinations of names and numbers. The screenshots don't show it, but we also recently improved the look of the numbers.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Scottababc

Any chance you changed the draft where you can now see who's pick is where, particularly in the first round. As in the past if a team had multiple first round picks it's impossible to know which first rounder is which when trying to trade the pick.

The original owner of the pick is listed in the trading interface, so you can infer which pick is which by seeing where they're drafting in other rounds, but yeah, there's still a chance for ambiguity with first-round lottery picks. I'll see if we can find a way to add pick number to the trading UI when its available (i.e., pretty much only on draft day, but I assume that's what you're interested in it for.)

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by artlan

Hi JeffR,

To say that I am looking forward to November 8th would be an understatement. Thank you for the continued development of the game.

Has the goalie usage bug has been fixed? Several users, including myself, brought up the issue of the AI coach using the backup goalie on a more frequent basis than the starter and during important games, such as playoff elimination games, notwithstanding the starter's condition/hot streak.

We've made a number of changes to address that in the last couple of years. At the moment, it looks like there's something odd that's happening with goalie stamina development (young guys are getting ratings that are far too high) that's having an unintended effect on the starting system, still looking into that. But the vast majority of the time, the expected starter is getting most of the starts.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Savoie45

I noticed in a screenshot of the Game Setup menu there's "Hidden Trade Factors". What exactly is this?

That controls whether or not the AI takes hidden ratings (mainly the personality-related stuff) into account when evaluating trades, which was a new addition this year. It's on by default, but can be turned off if you just want a pure evaluation of on-ice talent.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by scootermojo

Has bold faced type made it to a players statistical page for when he leads the league in a category such as this on hockey reference?

I want to get this in, but bolding doesn't look great in the UI, so we'll have to find another way of highlighting them that doesn't mess with readability.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by GMO123

"added Injury Deferral: you can now choose to defer injury treatment for some types of injuries until after the season ends. That will let you keep the injured player in the lineup with reduced performance and a risk of making the injury worse."

Great addition. Thanks.

Can the player decide they want to play or not play, and the team has a different idea?

Will the player have an attribute where the player has a tendency to want to play when injured (such as during playoffs), or have a tendency to not play when injured?

There's a check (based primarily on time of year, player personality and trainer skill) that takes place before you're given the option to defer - if that's failed, you don't get the option. If you see it, the player has already agreed to it, the final decision is up to you.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Sabres2000

As far as ncaa goes are the teams editable.. let’s say I want you to change a ncaa and put one in Canada can they be edited and changed like other leagues can be or can u expand ncaa leagues?

Leagues aren't editable/expandable (way too much stuff that could get easily broken by tinkering with team numbers and league structures in the college league), teams are editable. So you could move a team to Canada; I can't think of any unexpected consequences to that offhand, since there aren't any foreign player rules, but it's not something that's had much testing.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by TheAlaskan

Can expansion CHL teams be assigned a farm team (e.g. regional Junior B league)?

No, I wanted to do that but ran into a problem where the in-game editor requires a specific setting in the league data to make a team eligible to be a farm team/have farm teams, and it's not possible for a generic league (like the Junior B leagues) to have that value - the parent-farm relationships in the game at the start for junior leagues use a bit of a hack to get around that, but can't be changed for the same reason. I had an idea that might let us get around that by associating a nonplayable league with the junior league for this specific purposes, but there are still some issues to work out with that setup.