Two things I am seeing in Fictional leagues

[Rich Tiger Fan]

I have started up a couple fictional leagues and I am seeing something similar in both of them after about seven or eight seasons or so…

In each league, two things are happening. One there are way too many really good players on the FA market that go unsigned from year to year. I have seen players sit out three or four seasons before somehow picking up a contract. A lot of times these are players in the prime of their careers. This is very similar to what is talked about in this thread:

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=308381

The second one that may go hand and hand with the first one, there are way too many five star players. Some rosters in my league are filled with four and five-star guys. I am talking about 90% of their rosters. The bad teams are half full of them. There just seems to be way too much talent being generated for the league. I would expect to see a player or three with five-star talent but not ten or so on a team.

I started a league where I chose the default junior option, I believe it is the CHL setup? And I thought maybe with so many teams there was too much talent coming into my 18 teams fictional league. So I started a new league, this time twelve teams, a farm league, and a junior league comprised of 28 teams. I got the same result both times. Way too many great players in the league.

Looking around my leagues I am beginning to believe there is something off about the evaluation of the players. I have to take a deeper dive into that…

Are there any other fictional players experiencing this?
I know FHM isn’t as geared towards fictional as OOTP is, and consequently, there doesn’t seem to be as many fictional leagues out there. I for one wish there was a lot more done here but that’s me.

[redtiger7]

In the past I have discovered that you can control the amount of talent coming into your league by the number of jr teams you have. A good rule of thumb is to have as many jr teams as major league teams. Adding more will increase the talent level.

[Rich Tiger Fan]

Originally Posted by redtiger7

In the past I have discovered that you can control the amount of talent coming into your league by the number of jr teams you have. A good rule of thumb is to have as many jr teams as major league teams. Adding more will increase the talent level.

That is what I was thinking but the tooltip during the setup seems to say the number of teams will not affect the talent level. Basically it says something to the effect of players will be spread out the more teams you have in Juniors but there won't be more talent.

I will have to look at that again.

[Rich Tiger Fan]

Here is the wording when creating your Junior league:

"It will always tend to create the same number of prospects good enough to play in the top league, so selecting a league with a small number of teams will just mean more good players for each junior team, rather than spreading them more thinly amidst a larger group of non-prospects."

[JeffR]

To clarify a little further: the size of the regular group of new players generated each year (only in fictional games and historical games that have passed 2019) is a fixed multiple of the top league's number of teams. So that number will stay constant regardless of how many junior teams you have; each of those players will be generated the regular way, so the actual talent levels will vary depending on the luck of the draw during player generation. If there are so many junior teams that they use up all of those new players and still can't fill their rosters, extra players will be generated for them, but using a separate algorithm that limits them to being replacement-level junk.

[JC1973]

Forgive me - this thread is ice cold - but I just got fmh 6 (hadn’t played since fmh 3, so thanks COVID for bringing us back together). Anyway, I’m having the same issue as OP. Trying to run a fictional league (24 teams with a minor league and the full 3-league CHL). I understand what was being said in the earlier posts, but that just doesn’t seem to hold water - either that or something else is broken.

At any rate, I’m on my third try at this and about to go back to fmh 3. Each time I run into the same phenomenon as the OP: the league is quickly inundated with 5-star talent. By year four or five my checking line is 5 stars across the board. No trades necessary - straight from the draft. And not just 5-star potential, they are 5-star actual - yep, 20+ of ‘em right out of junior hockey, every year. By year five, most teams are 75% full of 4 stars or higher.

At first I thought it might be the “% of talent from stats,” but that turned out not to be a factor, even after turning it to 0%.

Any insight here is appreciated. It’s a real downer getting attached to the players and teams just see all the realism go right out the window and starting over.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by JC1973

Forgive me - this thread is ice cold - but I just got fmh 6 (hadn’t played since fmh 3, so thanks COVID for bringing us back together). Anyway, I’m having the same issue as OP. Trying to run a fictional league (24 teams with a minor league and the full 3-league CHL). I understand what was being said in the earlier posts, but that just doesn’t seem to hold water - either that or something else is broken.

At any rate, I’m on my third try at this and about to go back to fmh 3. Each time I run into the same phenomenon as the OP: the league is quickly inundated with 5-star talent. By year four or five my checking line is 5 stars across the board. No trades necessary - straight from the draft. And not just 5-star potential, they are 5-star actual - yep, 20+ of ‘em right out of junior hockey, every year. By year five, most teams are 75% full of 4 stars or higher.

At first I thought it might be the “% of talent from stats,” but that turned out not to be a factor, even after turning it to 0%.

Any insight here is appreciated. It’s a real downer getting attached to the players and teams just see all the realism go right out the window and starting over.

Can you upload a save where it's doing that? I'd like to have a look at the exact composition of the league and the junior setup.

[JC1973]

Hi Jeff, thanks for the reply. I uploaded the save file of one of the more flagrant examples. This one is a 24-team custom league called USHL

I also tried a fictional league today using the 2019 NHL structure and the same thing happened. (I didn't adjust the leagues, teams, structure - everything was in the default format.) After just one season the draft yielded 35 five-star prospects, many of them being 5-star actual.

Again, thanks in advance for any insight.

[JeffR]

Strange, you've got that huge excess of talent in that league, but when I set up a new game with the same league sizes and run it to the same date, I get a much more normal distribution of talent, and only a couple of dozen 5-star players, which is a little high but nowhere near what you're seeing. In the upcoming draft, you've got about 70 5-star potential guys, my test game has one.

How did you set up the league's structure initially- 24 teams with 2 conferences/4 divisions and then added the extra divisions and moved teams, or something else? Any editing of the league rules from the defaults? And when did you start it, recently or a few months ago?

[JC1973]

No, I never changed the structure once I started the game. I did alter the rules slightly (Ties, no shootouts) and I changed the percentages of players to 44% Canadian/27% American/29% foreign - for both initial draft and rookie draft. Interestingly, I made that same 44/27/29 change to all my leagues with this issue, including the NHL custom fictional I tried today (also with the same super-sized talent pool issue). In the case of today’s NHL attempt I didn’t alter a single default element rules, structure, or otherwise - only the draft nationality ratios. Maybe that’s it?

[JC1973]

Ok, never mind, I did another new franchise today leaving the draft nationality ratios alone and sadly, it had the same results - a talent overload in just the second draft class (almost 50 5-star prospects in one draft class).

All of these seasons I’ve started in the past two weeks. (I only just downloaded the game recently.) I guess I’ll go back to fmh 3. Fmh 6 has some nice new features but I’m going to pull my hair out.

[Paddyjack]

Hi

Just to follow up on this. I started a fictional league like that (all teams, 3 junior leagues and AHL), and similarly for the first 5 seasons I observed what you guys have seen i.e. high level talents in the draft. However, in my season 6 draft something different occured. I had about 7-8 picks in the first 3 rounds because I wanted to build the ultimate strong team but to my greatedst surprise the players in the draft were absolute junk, except for the first 10 or so. Even more strangely, a very few players had been scouted despite having 5 scouts looking at the junior leagues.

Looking at s7 draft preliminary results, it seems to be crappy too. I suspected that the game had some mechanism to recognize the level of players and self regulating maybe?

[JC1973]

Interesting. Did it just stop suddenly or did it gradually slim down the pool of exceptional talent? I eventually dropped the junior leagues altogether and just went with major and minor. That had decent results in terms of realism - usually there were only a handful of guys (1-5) league-wide capable of making an immediate impact in the big leagues. Each team usually had a rookie or two on the parent team roster but rookie stars were extremely rare. The vast majority of players were projects.

I kind of liked this setup. The only problem was that it was only possible to scout the top 20 players from the draft class and even that was somewhat labor intensive. Everybody else you didn’t get to see until draft day and the “scouting central” appraisals were iffy at best. This made for some cool, surprising “diamond in the rough” situations, but it would have been nice to scan the pool beforehand.

[ZootMurph]

The problem is this: You have older players who were given long term deals getting paid a ton of money. So, when the young players play out their rookie contract, there isn't enough room to pay them. Or they get paid, the old guys get paid, and the really good guy in the middle of his contract ends up not getting paid.

No matter how you look at it, this is going to happen. Some teams are always going to have this situation, where they have the young guys coming off their rookie deals and they have to decide who they will pay and who they won't. Since BIG, blockbuster deals are rare, they end up as free agents.

[Paddyjack]

Originally Posted by ZootMurph

The problem is this: You have older players who were given long term deals getting paid a ton of money. So, when the young players play out their rookie contract, there isn't enough room to pay them. Or they get paid, the old guys get paid, and the really good guy in the middle of his contract ends up not getting paid.

No matter how you look at it, this is going to happen. Some teams are always going to have this situation, where they have the young guys coming off their rookie deals and they have to decide who they will pay and who they won't. Since BIG, blockbuster deals are rare, they end up as free agents.

Yes, and currently what is happening in my s7 is a bit hilarious. The UFA stars at 30-32 years old, 5 stars, guys who were in trophees somewhere every year, are currently sitting at home twirling their thumbs and training camps are started. I'm talking about 5-6 guys like that lol. Teams are tight in their budget because of the multiple young stars who finished their entry level contracts this year. "I heard a good thing about playing for xxx and I'm asking for 10M/yr for 6 yrs and no movement clause". Hmmm thank you but I will pass, said every GMs in the League lol

[JC1973]

Same thing happened to mine. I had hoped that the abundance of talent would drive down the salaries and that the economics of the league would self-adjust. Basically I was wondering if the stars would settle for lower contracts just to be employed, but they seemed content to sit on the FA list indefinitely. There were always 5-10 superstars just chillin’ in the free agent pool.

[Ramzavail]

I came to the boards to see if I did something wrong in my fictional league as to why there isn't an allstar game, but I also noticed that each team has about 5-10 5 star players on each team and then I saw this thread.

So, I am experiencing the same thing.

[reverist]

One thing I am trying to do to avoid what I am seeing here in my fictional league is to set the salary caps near the budgets, so that it's not the case everyone can just spend up to the cap and then have no room to sign such players.

[Paddyjack]

Originally Posted by reverist

One thing I am trying to do to avoid what I am seeing here in my fictional league is to set the salary caps near the budgets, so that it's not the case everyone can just spend up to the cap and then have no room to sign such players.

Yes, that would make sense, or even, to remove salary caps completely. But considering how crappy the draft has been for the past 3 seasons I suspect things will level out in a few seasons in my league

[Lord PichuPal]

I've seen that it was supposed to be leveled out recently to where new rookies being generated won't be immediately 5 star potential all the time. Perhaps it'll get better with FHM 7's release, because I do agree it gets frustrating to see the league get bogged down by an influx of young superstars that push out the older guys or results in guys being left unsigned but still have a team hold their rights so they sit and do nothing for years.