Bugs and issues I found in no particular order

ety516 · 04-13-2023, 10:14 PM

FHM9 bugs and issues in no particular order

note: I play primarily EU championship-leagues, and of those, I play the Slovak Tipos Extraliga the most, I have so far about 500 hours in the game, and I sim 99.99% of matches (not play in 2d mode or whatever it is called), the following list is based on my experiences with the game – some of these issues only really start to noticeably affect the game 10-20+ years into a run

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Bugs and large issues – refers to things that are outright broken (or at least appear so)

1.) Decrease of the hidden Aging stat automatically decreases the M:Determination and P:Stamina stat by the same amount, but this is not reflected in the Development Report and it basically destroys players above 30 (aside from those few with NHL level skills who have large enough stat pools to not be affected too badly before 35-ish). I am fairly sure this is not intended since it’s not reflected in the DR, but if it is intended, at least please add it to the DR so we don’t have to make screenshots or spreadsheets.

2.) Injuries are broken. Minor things like bruises or sores generally mean a player is unable to play, instead of just reduced fitness (which would make sense). It even leads to situations where a player gets a minor cut and is unable to play for two weeks (message says 3 stitches or whatever), and then another one gets a serious cut (30 stitches lmao) and – fitness reduced to 80% but able to play. Players get completely put out of play way too often and generally for much longer than they do in reality, because even minor bumps and scrapes are treated as full fledged injuries more often than not.

3.) The player generation in smaller countries is too low. On average, a Slovak team produces only 4-5 players a year (or rather the, I guess, two Slovak spawners in the Under-14 “league” produce only enough to send a handful of players for each team). This is not enough to sustain the lower div teams, the no-sim second division and the top league. By my rough counts, without my interference there would not be enough players to even fill the top league, even if all of them were to play in it, and even with taking foreign players into account, with the limit imposed in the league, it would be just enough. Belarus is basically dead in my latest longplay, saved only by the fact that Russians are considered domestic. Average Belarus player count in Belarus extraleague teams is 3, average TOTAL player count per team in Belarus 2nd division is about 10, there is only one team out of 15 with a full roster, some teams have less than 5 players, one even has no players. That’s in total about 180-190 players. To fill the rosters, you need 594 players minimum (no reserve), the foreigner limit in the 2nd division is 0, in the BXL it is 5. In reality, the current rosters have single digits of RU players in them, generally 3-5, a few foreigners here and there, rest is all Belarusian players.

Additional note: I understand that this probably also has to do with performance, so I would suggest not generating players at 14, but moving it up to 17 or even 18 and bolstering the number of players generated, and then removing old player records at minimum for those who did not reach the fully simulated leagues, perhaps 5 years after retiring, or even right away after they retire.

4.) The player generation algorithm seemingly picks a specific position for a nation and then churns out that position while others are neglected Â– in my latest long-play save, of the 23 Slovak FA, there are 15 goalies. Belarus has 26 FA, 21 are wingers. Austria has 5 FA, 4 are goalies. And so on.

5.) The economy part has a lot of issues, the first one is that if you select any budget option on the annual selection beyond the middle one, the stated point price does not apply. Instead, when you sim onto the next day, you will find that the game recalculated the prices where it actually took the stated increased or lowered budgets, took them as a baseline, created a new increase/decrease value based off of them, and then applied a new price value to your points pool, meaning you either get back more points or have to pay more points. You will also see that the budget value in the selection has now changed, but your actual budget will remain what you actually selected previously, so at least that part works...

6.) CPU Teams are absolutely incapable of managing themselves. They raise ticket prices to highest level, turn their fans Disloyal, then turn the price down to 1 USD. This happens within a decade with 95% of teams in the EU, and the teams stay like this infinitely unless they get a bit of lucky break and get a couple titles in succession which allows them to then restore some of the relations and in turn get prices back up, though generally not to the starting level. Once their luck with titles runs out, they again ruin themselves.

7.) Monthly Finances, CPU teams invest heavily into scouting, very little or nothing into team harmony, and nothing to promotion, although it should be less into scouting, especially with the lower income teams (because they generally have their own academy teams), a bit into team harmony and then prioritize marketing. They should also only raise prices if they have very high expected attendance, are gunning for a championship (or won it previous season), and they should not do so unless their fans are at least loyal under any circumstances. Some of these teams with 3000-5000 seats arenas pull in less than a thousand fans per game, getting a measly 1000 USD or less. But somehow, magically, they still make hundreds of thousands a month from merch…

8.) Annually, teams will favor normal or reduced marketing even if their fans are disloyal, and only very few times they try to get the loyalty back up. Their budget selection also seems extremely random – a team has a plan to be top three in the league, but it will use minimum salary and transfer budgets. Or it will plan a rebuild for both current and next year and set youth/training system to minimum investment. Actually, CPU teams generally don’t go for anything above normal youth system.

9.) Player budgets Â– the latest update has over-corrected the issue with too much growth and now considerable amount of teams get their budgets destroyed within a couple years, some of them losing more than a third of their budget. For example, HC Slovan Bratislava drops from around 3.5 million USD 22/23 to less than 2.2 million by 27/28 season. This is less than the budget of the team in 2007, even when not accounted for inflation. IÂ’m not going to question the 22/23 season numbers since I guess you have a good source for them, but I really don’t think teams should be dropping their budgets down this hard, and I would guess it was not your intention either since the patch notes state the intent was to prevent absurd growth rate, not create absurd reduction.

10.) CPU teams are able to acquire players at significantly cheaper salaries sometimes with a difference of more than 50%. A peak age player (27) requests 630k from me, and next season, he goes to play for a different team in the same league for 250k. This was a first line player who was given more than enough icetime. Same goes for trades – CPU teams generally trade on extremely low price level, trading even high potential prospects or KHL level players for chump change. They also seem to be super fond of one specific price for each league, for example in the top level Slovak league, more than half of trades are exactly 121,000 USD regardless of the level of player that is being traded.

11.) CPU teams are able to sign players way above their level way too easily, or rather, players tend to not even entertain the non-CPU team and then sign to a worse teams in the same league or even lower level league, sometimes for chump change salary. For example, in my latest run as Vitebsk in the BXL, a peak age four star player with KHL experience was “not interested” at all in my BXL Champion team with a spot in the CHL and went to middle of the pack team – for minimum salary of 10k USD a year despite making 70k in a different team in the previous season. Similarly, this happens during trades – a team will accept a trade, then player will reject a contract, even when the move is to a more prestigious league. The player will then accept a contract from a worse team or worse league for less money. Same goes for renewals - player, even with good loyalty stat, will reject renewal and in the better case, then accept new contract as FA (which is just infuriating) or in the worse case actually will go to a new, worse team, for less money...

12.) BXL has incorrect Play-Off format, in game it is Top4 instead of Top10 (top 6 + winners of 8v9 and 7v10), SVK has direct drop-out for last team, not play in / barrage / whatever you call it, and there’s probably a bunch of others that I already forgot about. My point is, someone should take a look at play-offs and promotions/demotions of teams in EU leagues.

13.) Negotiation GM stat has no impact on renewals and signing FA players at all. Whether your Negotiation is 1 or 20, the player asks for the same amount, and behaves the same when trying to negotiate a lower salary offer.

14.) Negotiation GM stat has both the opposite effect as it should have on trades and no effect on the trade prices – yes, really. The lower your Negotiation stat, the lower the initial trade price requested, the higher the stat, the higher the baseline price – I got as much as 55% higher prices when testing (Neg. 1 vs Neg. 20). However, the actual trade price to which you can negotiate down was the same, as much as I could check without actually being able to see into the AI’s “head” and how it calculates real player value. I checked with multiple players and teams.

15.) The issue with not being able to sign foreign, but within EU, talent before age 18 still remains, with the local hockey organisation rejecting the trade because of age excuse… Also, generally, even local players refuse to move up into a senior team more often than not, and choose, for God knows what reason, to remain in the junior leagues. I have never heard of this happening in reality, and even if it does happen occasionally (which I doubt), I highly doubt 90% of 16-18 year olds would reject an actual paid contract from one of the best teams in the country. That just makes no sense.

16.) CPU teams buy and then insta-release players, just throwing their transfer budget out of the window. Teams do this regardless of level of the player.

17.) CPU repeatedly sign really bad goalkeepers, and those then perform way too well for their rating. For example, the league average for goalies is 12-13. A team signs a 7-8 or 8-9 goalie and the goalie then performs as top 3 goalie in the league. There’s always at least one or two teams per season that do this. On the other hand, high tier goalies even with good mental and hidden stats tend to under-perform both for the CPU and the non-CPU teams and it’s generally better to stick to the league average rather than getting a good goalkeeper. I guess there is some regression mechanic that tries to keep stuff from getting too out of hand, but if so, it's way too aggressive on the goalies.

18.) In contrast to player generation, Staff generation is way too generous and there is often a ton of staff available. Partly, this is caused by the fact that the low/non-sim league teams have one, or zero staff members, I think, but there is still a lot more staffers available than necessary, and because they remain on market for longer time than players, 10-15 years into a run, the staff FA list takes way too long to load and even makes the game outright freeze at times, despite running it off of almost empty nvme SSD.

19.) Quality of coaches and setting up training appears to have no impact. Generally, the differences were 1-3 points either way Â– not for individual players, but for pools of 10+ young players and prospects combined, which can be chalked up to RNG, I think. Actually, even with no coaches versus full 20 stat coaches, the differences were within that couple points difference range.

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Smaller issues – small stuff that is mostly about immersion but does not really impact the game

1.) A lot of the EU arenas have incorrect amount of premium and skybox seats, often 0 even if they have hundreds (in case of the larger arenas at least). Of the ones I checked recently that I remember, all were incorrect (HC Slovan, Banska Bystrica, Dukla Trencin, etc.)

2.) The naming pools for some nations are very limited and so despite the low generated amount of players, you end up with a bunch of players named the same.

3.) Some of the real player and staff names are incorrect, some arenas have incorrect names as well, etc.

Alessandro · 04-17-2023, 05:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ety516

1.) A lot of the EU arenas have incorrect amount of premium and skybox seats, often 0 even if they have hundreds (in case of the larger arenas at least). Of the ones I checked recently that I remember, all were incorrect (HC Slovan, Banska Bystrica, Dukla Trencin, etc.)

2.) The naming pools for some nations are very limited and so despite the low generated amount of players, you end up with a bunch of players named the same.

3.) Some of the real player and staff names are incorrect, some arenas have incorrect names as well, etc.

Thank you for the interesting post. Regarding the quoted things, provide us with a list and we'll get all fixed

ety516 · 04-27-2023, 11:30 AM

I will try to do so for the arenas and the incorrect names, though it will take some time as I am fairly busy.

In regards to the naming pools, can this be pulled out of the game somewhere, or found somewhere on the forum? Would be easier to correct and expand an existing list than to create a new one, but I can do that as well if it's not possible to pull them out from somewhere.

ety516 · 04-27-2023, 11:47 AM

I believe I have found another issue - for some teams, the standing spots don't get filled at all, so they both receive less money than they should and their attendance is often significantly lower - for example, a team with nearly 3000 spots has an attendance around 600-700 because they have 1100 seats and the remaining standing spots are ignored.

I've attached (or tried to, not sure if it worked) screenshots, they also show what the AI does to ticket prices.

04-13-2023, 10:14 PM	#1
ety516 Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Apr 2023 Location: Slovakia Posts: 36	Bugs and issues I found in no particular order FHM9 bugs and issues in no particular order note: I play primarily EU championship-leagues, and of those, I play the Slovak Tipos Extraliga the most, I have so far about 500 hours in the game, and I sim 99.99% of matches (not play in 2d mode or whatever it is called), the following list is based on my experiences with the game – some of these issues only really start to noticeably affect the game 10-20+ years into a run xxxxxxxxx Bugs and large issues – refers to things that are outright broken (or at least appear so) 1.) Decrease of the hidden Aging stat automatically decreases the M:Determination and P:Stamina stat by the same amount, but this is not reflected in the Development Report and it basically destroys players above 30 (aside from those few with NHL level skills who have large enough stat pools to not be affected too badly before 35-ish). I am fairly sure this is not intended since it’s not reflected in the DR, but if it is intended, at least please add it to the DR so we don’t have to make screenshots or spreadsheets. 2.) Injuries are broken. Minor things like bruises or sores generally mean a player is unable to play, instead of just reduced fitness (which would make sense). It even leads to situations where a player gets a minor cut and is unable to play for two weeks (message says 3 stitches or whatever), and then another one gets a serious cut (30 stitches lmao) and – fitness reduced to 80% but able to play. Players get completely put out of play way too often and generally for much longer than they do in reality, because even minor bumps and scrapes are treated as full fledged injuries more often than not. 3.) The player generation in smaller countries is too low. On average, a Slovak team produces only 4-5 players a year (or rather the, I guess, two Slovak spawners in the Under-14 “league” produce only enough to send a handful of players for each team). This is not enough to sustain the lower div teams, the no-sim second division and the top league. By my rough counts, without my interference there would not be enough players to even fill the top league, even if all of them were to play in it, and even with taking foreign players into account, with the limit imposed in the league, it would be just enough. Belarus is basically dead in my latest longplay, saved only by the fact that Russians are considered domestic. Average Belarus player count in Belarus extraleague teams is 3, average TOTAL player count per team in Belarus 2nd division is about 10, there is only one team out of 15 with a full roster, some teams have less than 5 players, one even has no players. That’s in total about 180-190 players. To fill the rosters, you need 594 players minimum (no reserve), the foreigner limit in the 2nd division is 0, in the BXL it is 5. In reality, the current rosters have single digits of RU players in them, generally 3-5, a few foreigners here and there, rest is all Belarusian players. Additional note: I understand that this probably also has to do with performance, so I would suggest not generating players at 14, but moving it up to 17 or even 18 and bolstering the number of players generated, and then removing old player records at minimum for those who did not reach the fully simulated leagues, perhaps 5 years after retiring, or even right away after they retire. 4.) The player generation algorithm seemingly picks a specific position for a nation and then churns out that position while others are neglected Â– in my latest long-play save, of the 23 Slovak FA, there are 15 goalies. Belarus has 26 FA, 21 are wingers. Austria has 5 FA, 4 are goalies. And so on. 5.) The economy part has a lot of issues, the first one is that if you select any budget option on the annual selection beyond the middle one, the stated point price does not apply. Instead, when you sim onto the next day, you will find that the game recalculated the prices where it actually took the stated increased or lowered budgets, took them as a baseline, created a new increase/decrease value based off of them, and then applied a new price value to your points pool, meaning you either get back more points or have to pay more points. You will also see that the budget value in the selection has now changed, but your actual budget will remain what you actually selected previously, so at least that part works... 6.) CPU Teams are absolutely incapable of managing themselves. They raise ticket prices to highest level, turn their fans Disloyal, then turn the price down to 1 USD. This happens within a decade with 95% of teams in the EU, and the teams stay like this infinitely unless they get a bit of lucky break and get a couple titles in succession which allows them to then restore some of the relations and in turn get prices back up, though generally not to the starting level. Once their luck with titles runs out, they again ruin themselves. 7.) Monthly Finances, CPU teams invest heavily into scouting, very little or nothing into team harmony, and nothing to promotion, although it should be less into scouting, especially with the lower income teams (because they generally have their own academy teams), a bit into team harmony and then prioritize marketing. They should also only raise prices if they have very high expected attendance, are gunning for a championship (or won it previous season), and they should not do so unless their fans are at least loyal under any circumstances. Some of these teams with 3000-5000 seats arenas pull in less than a thousand fans per game, getting a measly 1000 USD or less. But somehow, magically, they still make hundreds of thousands a month from merch… 8.) Annually, teams will favor normal or reduced marketing even if their fans are disloyal, and only very few times they try to get the loyalty back up. Their budget selection also seems extremely random – a team has a plan to be top three in the league, but it will use minimum salary and transfer budgets. Or it will plan a rebuild for both current and next year and set youth/training system to minimum investment. Actually, CPU teams generally don’t go for anything above normal youth system. 9.) Player budgets Â– the latest update has over-corrected the issue with too much growth and now considerable amount of teams get their budgets destroyed within a couple years, some of them losing more than a third of their budget. For example, HC Slovan Bratislava drops from around 3.5 million USD 22/23 to less than 2.2 million by 27/28 season. This is less than the budget of the team in 2007, even when not accounted for inflation. IÂ’m not going to question the 22/23 season numbers since I guess you have a good source for them, but I really don’t think teams should be dropping their budgets down this hard, and I would guess it was not your intention either since the patch notes state the intent was to prevent absurd growth rate, not create absurd reduction. 10.) CPU teams are able to acquire players at significantly cheaper salaries sometimes with a difference of more than 50%. A peak age player (27) requests 630k from me, and next season, he goes to play for a different team in the same league for 250k. This was a first line player who was given more than enough icetime. Same goes for trades – CPU teams generally trade on extremely low price level, trading even high potential prospects or KHL level players for chump change. They also seem to be super fond of one specific price for each league, for example in the top level Slovak league, more than half of trades are exactly 121,000 USD regardless of the level of player that is being traded. 11.) CPU teams are able to sign players way above their level way too easily, or rather, players tend to not even entertain the non-CPU team and then sign to a worse teams in the same league or even lower level league, sometimes for chump change salary. For example, in my latest run as Vitebsk in the BXL, a peak age four star player with KHL experience was “not interested” at all in my BXL Champion team with a spot in the CHL and went to middle of the pack team – for minimum salary of 10k USD a year despite making 70k in a different team in the previous season. Similarly, this happens during trades – a team will accept a trade, then player will reject a contract, even when the move is to a more prestigious league. The player will then accept a contract from a worse team or worse league for less money. Same goes for renewals - player, even with good loyalty stat, will reject renewal and in the better case, then accept new contract as FA (which is just infuriating) or in the worse case actually will go to a new, worse team, for less money... 12.) BXL has incorrect Play-Off format, in game it is Top4 instead of Top10 (top 6 + winners of 8v9 and 7v10), SVK has direct drop-out for last team, not play in / barrage / whatever you call it, and there’s probably a bunch of others that I already forgot about. My point is, someone should take a look at play-offs and promotions/demotions of teams in EU leagues. 13.) Negotiation GM stat has no impact on renewals and signing FA players at all. Whether your Negotiation is 1 or 20, the player asks for the same amount, and behaves the same when trying to negotiate a lower salary offer. 14.) Negotiation GM stat has both the opposite effect as it should have on trades and no effect on the trade prices – yes, really. The lower your Negotiation stat, the lower the initial trade price requested, the higher the stat, the higher the baseline price – I got as much as 55% higher prices when testing (Neg. 1 vs Neg. 20). However, the actual trade price to which you can negotiate down was the same, as much as I could check without actually being able to see into the AI’s “head” and how it calculates real player value. I checked with multiple players and teams. 15.) The issue with not being able to sign foreign, but within EU, talent before age 18 still remains, with the local hockey organisation rejecting the trade because of age excuse… Also, generally, even local players refuse to move up into a senior team more often than not, and choose, for God knows what reason, to remain in the junior leagues. I have never heard of this happening in reality, and even if it does happen occasionally (which I doubt), I highly doubt 90% of 16-18 year olds would reject an actual paid contract from one of the best teams in the country. That just makes no sense. 16.) CPU teams buy and then insta-release players, just throwing their transfer budget out of the window. Teams do this regardless of level of the player. 17.) CPU repeatedly sign really bad goalkeepers, and those then perform way too well for their rating. For example, the league average for goalies is 12-13. A team signs a 7-8 or 8-9 goalie and the goalie then performs as top 3 goalie in the league. There’s always at least one or two teams per season that do this. On the other hand, high tier goalies even with good mental and hidden stats tend to under-perform both for the CPU and the non-CPU teams and it’s generally better to stick to the league average rather than getting a good goalkeeper. I guess there is some regression mechanic that tries to keep stuff from getting too out of hand, but if so, it's way too aggressive on the goalies. 18.) In contrast to player generation, Staff generation is way too generous and there is often a ton of staff available. Partly, this is caused by the fact that the low/non-sim league teams have one, or zero staff members, I think, but there is still a lot more staffers available than necessary, and because they remain on market for longer time than players, 10-15 years into a run, the staff FA list takes way too long to load and even makes the game outright freeze at times, despite running it off of almost empty nvme SSD. 19.) Quality of coaches and setting up training appears to have no impact. Generally, the differences were 1-3 points either way Â– not for individual players, but for pools of 10+ young players and prospects combined, which can be chalked up to RNG, I think. Actually, even with no coaches versus full 20 stat coaches, the differences were within that couple points difference range. xxxxxxxxx Smaller issues – small stuff that is mostly about immersion but does not really impact the game 1.) A lot of the EU arenas have incorrect amount of premium and skybox seats, often 0 even if they have hundreds (in case of the larger arenas at least). Of the ones I checked recently that I remember, all were incorrect (HC Slovan, Banska Bystrica, Dukla Trencin, etc.) 2.) The naming pools for some nations are very limited and so despite the low generated amount of players, you end up with a bunch of players named the same. 3.) Some of the real player and staff names are incorrect, some arenas have incorrect names as well, etc. Last edited by ety516; 04-13-2023 at 10:16 PM.

04-27-2023, 11:47 AM	#4
ety516 Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Apr 2023 Location: Slovakia Posts: 36	I believe I have found another issue - for some teams, the standing spots don't get filled at all, so they both receive less money than they should and their attendance is often significantly lower - for example, a team with nearly 3000 spots has an attendance around 600-700 because they have 1100 seats and the remaining standing spots are ignored. I've attached (or tried to, not sure if it worked) screenshots, they also show what the AI does to ticket prices. Attached Images

04-27-2023, 11:30 AM	#3
ety516 Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Apr 2023 Location: Slovakia Posts: 36	I will try to do so for the arenas and the incorrect names, though it will take some time as I am fairly busy. In regards to the naming pools, can this be pulled out of the game somewhere, or found somewhere on the forum? Would be easier to correct and expand an existing list than to create a new one, but I can do that as well if it's not possible to pull them out from somewhere.