Spartan

Can't believe I got Torts smh

@LastOneUp come back

Imagine letting Moscow have a playoff spot, EU snoozin

1. I think we can't get complacent and have to keep earning to maintain our growth. 2. Fire the GM tbh 3. I think they're good as is, you do a great job! 4. My fingers and brain are too frozen to figure this out. 5. Both seasons provided a lot of value. Last season let us grow and develop with more draft picks. Winning shows us what we do right and wrong. 6. I'll keep all of that a secret for now!

I think we fared a tad bit better than y'all in those conference finals . Just not in the finals

I won't say we're back, but we're certainly present in the moment

Dislike

I am only at 4,279

Sooooo I can't have [redacted] ???

Obuz certainly won't even have a card at that rate then. Tough crowd to please with the cardmakers huh?

Yeah the SHL has some partnership with some company to assign packs to users or something like that. Some platform just for trading cards that's linked to their player bank accounts. Dunno if we'd make that system work.

Lack of people to invest the amount of time to make cards, and the lack of a platform for cards to be "bought" in packs and all that.

Really making me wish we had VHL trading cards

I respect it

@Moon I'm uncomfortable

Part of my point earlier was that I don't think there's a massive difference in a 1.15k TPA build and a 1.3k TPA build. All your core attributes are in the high 80's/low 90's, and it's proven that further increase beyond that point is fairly marginal. I think Mac Atlas maintaining that current build will still be a top VHL player. That's why I say that the planning is more important in being able to maintain a strong build at or over 1.1k TPA. You will still be an elite player. I will agree that depreciation changes midway through might have made it tricky for existing players despite the heads up notice that the league tried to give.

Is it tampering if I reply to this article??

I don't see the exact numbers since I'm too lazy to add up your old updates and applied TPA, but were you around 1,300 TPA? As I've said in this thread, you are basically asking for super rough regression if you go that high. Realistically you're hitting your peak by year 5 and then maintaining your build over the depreciation seasons. Anything over 1.1k TPA will definitely feel a bit difficult because you're spending so much, and also depending on how TPE efficient your builds are for regression. You're at 1.1k TPA right now and you're pretty much already the best of the best with 89 SC and 93 DF, all excellent metrics. SK/PH also in a good spot and you're not playing C, therefore avoiding the FO investment as well. SK/PH at 89 and 92 each too. You are going to get super marginal gains from where you're at now if you keep spending. Maybe you can bump a couple attributes up by a point with another 100 TPE, but I just don't think it's worth it. You'd actually be a bit more TPE efficient if you had kept PC at 90 and brought up DC to 90 instead, then use FO for increasing strength. It's small things like that that add up. Makes your OV the 100% Jagr whenever you use it since nothing else is spending over 90.

S80 was the first class of 9 season players, S82 or S83 was the first hybrid season yeah? At the least, only S80 and S81 folks might have been blindsided a bit but I think we were generally proactive about getting notice out to the league fairly quickly. Goalies are too strong yes, but funnily enough, scoring is still fairly ok in terms of overall numbers. Just a lot of boosted goalie stats which haven't really been corrected. A topic of discussion in the BoG already.

I 100% agree with your last line here. If you play 9 seasons, your peak TPA will be lower than someone playing 8. However, I would imagine that if you're someone who earns well enough to skip the E, you'd still be able to have a build around 1.1k TPA which is still quite excellent in the hybrid era given your team situation is conducive to allowing you on ice success. What I disagree with though, is that disappointment/criticism about the 9th season. You mentioned having spurts of inactivity which definitely wouldn't have helped with managing depreciation, and I also vaguely recall you having an extremely high TPA (maybe over 1.2k if I'm not mistaken?) at some point before or during regression. Without a proper pool of banked TPE, you simply can't peak that high when you choose to go 9 seasons. Realistically is that why people are upset about 9 seasons? Probably a valid part of it. I don't think people are as nerdy as I am to try and calculate their long term earnings with the guarantee of remaining active at a consistent earning rate in order to plan their 9th season TPA with completely new regression midway through a career. Maybe the league just shouldn't offer a path like this if people don't fully realize the difficulty. Or maybe that difficulty just isn't needed. On a final note though, I will slightly flex that I over prepared for the final season depreciation not expecting to be able to use a Jagr and peaked with the most TPA in my final season, up to 1,359 TPA. I ran a lower TPA peak around 1,150 or something expecting to not be able to use that Jagr and needing some 300+ TPA banked my final season which is a ridiculous number. Maybe if we wanted to add a % fighter for the last season only, instead of offering a Jagr, I'd agree at this point. I don't know how the pricing would work though, but I'd imagine it'd likely have to force 9 season players to stop buying random store packages before their depreciation seasons.

Yeah I don't mind saying that the system has enabled this decision making process. I was referring to "how it always worked" from a post-E perspective. I do feel that entering the E at or under 400 TPE is a much more difficult task than from when I remember coming up to the VHL around 300 TPE in the pre-hybrid era. You could have a much more fleshed out build back then compared to where someone at 350-400 TPE enters the VHL at now. So that's also part of my wiggle room here about the situation, that people are fine to stay down and experience the "normal as intended" 8 season career with a not totally useless rookie season.

I mean, I'd say I'm the literal example of how it'd work no? We have a lot of people who have various conditions on where they play, who they play for, who they want to play with. Mine was to always try and be on a cup contending team and I think I generally accomplished that goal, outside the first HSK season. In sim leagues people have always controlled their narrative to some degree, folks like @Baozi and @Ahma openly state their goals for every player. Either to play for cup contenders only or Davos only. Just a couple examples of situations where these top players can control their destiny. But most prefer to be loyal and stick around (which I love from a GM perspective). You mean, you will have a tougher career for picking the openly-stated tougher route, instead of the standard 8 season route that the league always expected most players to follow. I remember this being the exact discussion point when the E was introduced. Almost everyone will go through the 8 season career. A few who want to challenge themselves with a longer career will go that way. I still don't see any issue with people following career paths as was intended from the start. I get it if folks just don't like the E though. I'm getting to that point as well myself. But complaining about the E existing is a totally different argument than bashing on 9 season careers because they're as difficult/high risk as they were always made out to be. Staying down in the E to me just was never abusing a system if that's how it always worked.

Short podcast just for you @N0HBDY since you asked for more podcasts.

I always just considered it as the tradeoff for getting a full extra season to try and win a cup. You won't have a stellar rookie season often, although I'd say mine was fine for the era, so you're almost always sacrificing RotY. Goalies being so strong kind of makes them the default RotY winner though, that wasn't accounted for back then. I saw the E as a standard path vs the skipping/9 season option being an extraordinary situation. I just never saw the increase to 9 seasons to mean that everyone *had* to play 9 seasons if they were in the general TPE range. It just meant that people could choose to either follow a standard path and thats fine, or to play 9 seasons knowing its more of a challenge but with the ability to get some extra stats or go for a championship one extra time. Do I regret 9 seasons? No, not at all. I think I prepared well for the depreciation impact from the start and even had more TPE left over after the final "brutal" depreciation hit. I'd change other decisions I made in my player career about where I played and when, but not that I played 9 seasons. I wanted to cup chase and 9 seasons let me do that. With my goalie, it made more sense to develop for an extra season (as I believe all goalies should) and there was no point in rushing myself up to Moscow for a season that ultimately didn't matter outside of where we picked in the draft. However, that so many 9 season players didn't perform *as* well as you'd expect from mostly high earners may be the larger cause for concern, specifically with the difference in peak TPA that each can build. But then again, I think people have generally different perspectives and goals for their players that would lead them to choose one path over another. And to me, both are ok.