VHL player attribute ratings are INSANE

[DMaximus 1,046]

What makes video games fun? There’s a lot of possible answers and all of them are some component of the joy we derive from playing games. Things like felling rewarded for being a good player or coming up with a plan an executing it to perfection. The sense of community from shared experiences with others. Transporting yourself to a world or role not possible in the real world. The VHL, being a video game, touches on all these things.

 

What makes us continue to play the same game? Likely, many of the same reasons that brought us to the game in the first place: community, accomplishment, etc. After some time spent mastering the game, your rewards are even greater for your increased skill or knowledge of the game’s universe.

 

What makes us stop playing games? The reward system that has kept us hooked starts to dissipate. Maybe that’s due to less people playing the game. Maybe you no longer feel the same level of reward for your expertise of the game. Maybe there’s nothing left to accomplish in the game or there’s no more interesting decisions to be made.

 

For me, the last reason is the biggest threat to long term members in the VHL. There are no interesting decisions to be made when building a player. Once you realize there is a very simple build process to follow to make your player a successful player, there are only simple decisions to be made. There is no demand from you as a person, other than to earn TPE to make the ideal build possible. Some would say the only decision left is to make a meme build or not (https://vhlforum.com/topic/101416-meta-vs-meme/).

 

Why are there essentially no decisions to be made? Because our attribute update scale allows everyone to maximize all the player attributes they need to make a god-like player. You don’t need to make any decisions when you can just apply points to everything.

 

To illustrate this point, let's check out some real world attributes for STHS:

Here's Connor McDavid (taken from https://showtimehockey.ca/API/NHL/164GP/2020-21/Ratings.php similar ratings are available at https://atlantichockeyleague.ml/playersearch.php )

 

 

Player Name	CK	FG	DI	SK	ST	DU	PH	FO	PA	SC	DF	PS	EX	LD	PO	OV
Connor McDavid	66	40	87	91	76	85	89	81	96	89	60	89	67	85	89	78

 

 

The highest single rating for the highest rated attribute for any player in the NHL is a 96.

You can use the page to sort by attributes to find the highest ratings for each attribute:

SK – McDavid 91

PH – McDavid 89

SC – Matthews 95

 

Now take a look at the ratings of the VHL. By my count there are 197 skaters on rosters in the VHL. Out of those 197:

42 (21.3%) have SK greater than or equal to 91, the highest rating in the NHL.

69 (35.0%) have PH greater than or equal to 89, the highest rating in the NHL.

80 (40.6%) have SC greater than or equal to 95, the highest rating in the NHL.         

 

21 (10.7%) players have three attributes SK, PH, and SC greater than 95. 

4 players have each of those attributes set to 99.

 

99 is the maximum rating and should be reserved for only the most impressive of players. In fact, you could argue that 99 should be nearly impossible for anyone to obtain. Yet we have 4 players with 99 in three separate attributes at the same time!

 

If we were to widen the scope to individual attributes, currently playing in the VHL:

7 players have 99 SK.

13 players have 99 PH.

48 players have 99 SC.

61 players have 99 DF.

 

Now I can hear the responses, this isn’t the NHL. This is a made up hockey league and we all play by the same attribute scale, so you’re really accomplishing nothing by comparing our made up scale to someone else’s made up scale you found on the internet. And all that’s true. Who cares if our scale lets 20+ players in the same league have attributes higher than anyone who has ever played the game in the real world?

 

My response to that is to circle back around to what I was talking about in the beginning. The problem isn’t necessarily that our players can get 99 in multiple categories or that over 40% of the league has a better scoring rating that anyone in the NHL. My problem is this: because we can get such high attribute ratings with the TPE we earn, it destroys any potential fun that could exist from making decisions on how to build a player. There is no thought needed for how to build a player. Earn TPE, put it in the required attributes, and hope.

 

I think the league would be much more interesting if we were able to prevent players from maxing out multiple statistics. I know there’s a bunch of ways to do this and I hope the BoG is having serious discussions around this. Although this has been a known issue for a long time and nothing has changed, so I’m not holding my breath.

 

In writing this article, I debated if I should make a suggestion for how to fix it. My concern is that the focus would then turn to debating my suggested solution, rather than a discussion on if what I’m presenting here is a problem for others or not. Ultimately, I decided not to present a solution because I want the focus to be on if what I brought up here is even an issue worth of discussion among the BoG/commissioners.

 

I guess I’ll leave it that, I have a couple ideas for how to resolve it. I’m sure other people do as well, which is probably why this problem hasn’t been resolved, too many potential solutions, too many ideas, too many people have to agree on a fundamental change to the league. Or maybe it’s not a problem to anyone else. I would love to know if that’s the case, so I’m eager to hear other’s opinions about this issue. Thanks for reading!

 

 

[ThePerfectNut 563]

Even maxing my stats, my player is worst than 350 TPE rookie so lmaoo

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

The very short response is that allowing maximum stats is a way to minimize the effectiveness of a true "super star" driven league. By that, I mean the top TPE whores are basically the ones who determine which team is good and which league is bad.

 

That's a gross simplification to a complex topic, but from my point of view, I'd rather have the current league/TPE set up (or something similar to it) than a league that came down to who had the most TPE whores.

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

And FWIW, this is not something that "the BoG" is in uniform agreement on. 

[Red 499]

32 minutes ago, Fire Vigneault said:

The very short response is that allowing maximum stats is a way to minimize the effectiveness of a true "super star" driven league. By that, I mean the top TPE whores are basically the ones who determine which team is good and which league is bad.

what's so bad about that

[Spartan 4,276]

5 minutes ago, RedSus said:

what's so bad about that

I'd presume you want welfare folks and users who don't earn 13+ TPE every week to go past 90 SC/DF. Otherwise you're really only going to see the handful of people at the very top with a true superstar build. You could severely increase the scale after like 85, but then fighting depreciation is going to be extremely difficult for the people who put in the most time into the league. But at most players' peaks, they'd all be at about a similar level, with max earners having a few more points in each attribute.

 

You'd need to do some math on it to see exactly how it may impact users of different earning habits, but increasing the attribute scale at the top end just raises the floor while lowering the ceiling. While you'll see more build diversity for sure, I don't think anyone would be able to predict how it would impact league scoring which is usually the primary argument against these types of major changes. Our history usually has consistent numbers from S1 to now in terms of individual scoring, albeit perhaps a bit more lopsided in the earlier seasons. But there'd need to be a lot of testing to see how changing update scales would impact the league, and there'd need to be tweaks to depreciation as well since 4-7% regression would be a crazy amount of TPE for someone over 800 TPA. 

[Frank 5,057]

It used to be a lot worse. Guys putting points into Leadership because all important stats were 99.

[DMaximus 1,046]

Week 2 claim