Historical CHL

[daigle91]

With historical World Junior Championships now integrated, could this be considered the early groundwork for potentially introducing historical Junior leagues down the road?

[reverist]

Originally Posted by daigle91

With historical World Junior Championships now integrated, could this be considered the early groundwork for potentially introducing historical Junior leagues down the road?

I would love the 1998 Memorial Cup, with Marian Hossa, Brendan Morrow, Andrew Ference, and the Portland Winterhawks defeating the Guelph Storm in OT. Hossa got a pretty serious knee injury in that game, too.

[JeffR]

I posted this over on reddit (/r/franchisehockey), so I'll just repeat it here - it was in response to a question about playable historical minors, but I mention playable juniors, too:

Getting closer to being able to do it, but at a minimum I still want to broaden out the player database more before we can do a good job of it. I made good progress on that this summer, but I'm not done yet.

There are also a lot of complications because of the relative instability of the minor leagues - multiple leagues emerging, improving, and declining, NHL affiliations shifting around, far more team changes than the NHL, and so on. It's going to take a lot of thinking and coding to work around those kind of things.

Right now, there are a few big additions for historical that will be competing for inclusion in upcoming years' versions of the game, and it's unlikely that more than one a year will make it in:

-playable minors (most popular request, most difficult to implement for the reasons mention above)
-adding the World Championships (moderately popular, not hard to do on the coding side, will require a bunch of new database work)
-playable European leagues, probably SWE/FIN/RUS (some demand for it, a little easier to implement than the minors because they're independent of the NHL, but still with unique complications)
-adding the NHA and extending the 1917 start year back to 1909 (some demand, some minor coding challenges but nothing unreasonable unless we were to go heavy-duty into implementing era-specific rules for the 2D engine; this came close to making it in this year but I went with the WJC's instead, so it's the front-runner for 10 at the moment)
-playable junior leagues in the post-sponsorship years (very little demand, easier to do than the minors, like the WC's would require adding a lot of players to the database that would never have an NHL shot)

So that's where it stands now. We'll take a look every year at what kind of time we can budget for historical and pick the best option; eventually it'll work out for the minors.

[jmetrow]

Historical CHL would be one of the best additions I can imagine, I didn't even know it's something I wanted but now that I know it's possible it sounds perfect. I would love to replay some of the Peterborough Petes dynasties throughout history and see players take different paths through junior hockey.

[snarls200]

Originally Posted by JeffR

I posted this over on reddit (/r/franchisehockey), so I'll just repeat it here - it was in response to a question about playable historical minors, but I mention playable juniors, too:

How would extrndimg back to 1909 work withe tge Cup being a challenge competition through 1914

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by snarls200

How would extrndimg back to 1909 work withe tge Cup being a challenge competition through 1914

Either award it directly to the NHA champions (since they won it every year in that period anyhow) or generate a nonplayable team for the finals with the correct name for the actual opponent that year (except for 13-14, when it's the PCHA winner.)