passing ded

[hedgehog337 3,483]

 

 

My first media in 6 or 7 months is gonna start and finish with my frustration on team's performance since I had a big S75 draft. Safe to say this is currently the most unexciting period in my whole GM career here which spans 28 seasons and counting. I really lost a desire to do anything since mid-S77 to be honest. You may say that I've been GM'ing here for too long and I just got tired of it and I need to go? Maybe, but the main reason is: no matter how good the team on paper was; no matter how hard members were working on TPE earning (3 of TOP 5 in S75 draft consists of Riga draftees), the reality was 1 conference semi finals appearance in 4 seasons. It's really pissing me off now. Especially when some other teams who were wildcard tier team at best actually managed to skip the play-in from the 3rd place. Or even win the championship (yeah yeah I know, Pines and Lamb were there too). Meanwhile Riga was left off over and over again because of some bullshit from STHS. I wonder what's the reason of that shafting...

 

Oh yeah that's right, we didn't have any meta player in that period of time. Besides McLaren, but he was traded in S78 and his too high checking distracted him from scoring anyways. Oterwise, most of our players had 70 passing or higher and Linus was and still is a pass first. Meanwhile we can return to these supposed-to-be-mid-teams and what we do see? Either low as hell or just 40 passing all over the place. So what obvious conclusion I can make out of it?

 

Passing is fucking useless here. Sure, maybe you'll do fine individually. Team wise though? The lesser passing, the better. Malmo had that in S77-78, Vancouver was already showing some signs in the same period and went on to win last season. Warsaw was ready to go to the rebuild, instead they jumped into the third place last season and skipped the wildcard altogether despite not even having a good enough roster on the paper (after the trade deadline when they sold Lamb). Meanwhile some teams like Calgary and Riga are just struggling to get things going though the these kind of rosters just can't do bad...that's if STHS was considering every attribute besides scoring, defense and some skating with puck handling. But nah, fuck those teams, META FOR LIFE BABY!!!!!

 

Which is even worse, members caught that idea and started to lower their passing just to have better performance, both team and individual wise. Just look at the TPA recall and reroll threads. They just understood that passing is a shit attrbute here and no need to waste much TPE in it. Sure, we have some anti-meta or just pass firsts, but I feel like these players may as well as be the dying breed. Most of members wants to see their players and teams doing well and passing is doing nothing for the most part. I'm not gonna be surprised if players will be dropping in draft just cause they want to be pass first in the future. Like ''hey, he's a pass first and he will amount very little to the team with his build''.

 

In short, I'm very unhappy about team's performance after the rebuild, passing is useless and fuck STHS as always.

 

That's it and I'm out.

[Shindigs 1,771]

The issue is primarily that in STHS your team's best playmaker is, and forever will be, the opposing team. Because they will give you about 2k turnovers per player per season. How on earth is your playmaker supposed to make a dent in the number of pucks fed to your scorer when the opposing team is quite literally falling over themselves to give him the puck before you get a chance to?

 

Also passing without enough scoring is always useless. Just look at Jersey IRL the last few seasons. Their top 6 consisted of 4 playmakers and 1 inconsistent scorer for the most part. Which made the playmakers look like garbage, because they had no one to pass to. So yes, if your team has too much playmaking compared to how much scoring it has, then things kinda should suck. Not to STHS levels, but it *should* suck. The thing that's more relevant is to compare what a triple meta line does compared to 2-1 meta/playmaker etc.

 

Honestly I just want passing to not be useless, and it's not useless. But it's not a primary attribute by any stretch of the imagination. I consider it more an alternative to going checking for a defensive build, at least for defensemen. As it seems like Checking's negative effect of more PIM so far outscales the turnovers it forces, that it quite literally makes your player worse than if you had not spent that TPE at all. But at least based on the performance of the players I'm tracking in the M. 70 passing players have ~11% fewer turnovers than 40 passing ones do for defensemen. Which also means they accidentally pass the opposing team's scorer slightly less. So that's neat.

[hedgehog337 3,483]

52 minutes ago, Shindigs said:

Honestly I just want passing to not be useless, and it's not useless. But it's not a primary attribute by any stretch of the imagination. I consider it more an alternative to going checking for a defensive build, at least for defensemen. As it seems like Checking's negative effect of more PIM so far outscales the turnovers it forces, that it quite literally makes your player worse than if you had not spent that TPE at all. But at least based on the performance of the players I'm tracking in the M. 70 passing players have ~11% fewer turnovers than 40 passing ones do for defensemen. Which also means they accidentally pass the opposing team's scorer slightly less. So that's neat.

 

Having less turnovers isn't enough to outshine the all-meta team imo. even with that they'll find a way to make 60 shots per game in sths cause their build is just shoot shoot shoot. That's doing real wonders even if the team is not a super tier team on paper. I mean, scoring is the most important thing hockey (not only), but this sim engine is going over the top with it. I can agree that passing is more useful for defs, but even there that's not always the case (see: Pines in Vancouver last season).

 

Having one checking guy (forwards in particular) is good for the team imo. 3 of my 4 cups were won with the player who had high checking. More than one one - chemistry gonna be screwed up likely.

[Shindigs 1,771]

12 minutes ago, hedgehog337 said:

 

Having less turnovers isn't enough to outshine the all-meta team imo. even with that they'll find a way to make 60 shots per game in sths cause their build is just shoot shoot shoot. That's doing real wonders even if the team is not a super tier team on paper. I mean, scoring is the most important thing hockey (not only), but this sim engine is going over the top with it. I can agree that passing is more useful for defs, but even there that's not always the case (see: Pines in Vancouver last season).

 

Having one checking guy (forwards in particular) is good for the team imo. 3 of my 4 cups were won with the player who had high checking. More than one one - chemistry gonna be screwed up likely.

Yeah, but my thinking is more of the lines like. Okay the meta forwards (and I guess dmen) are gonna go ham. But at some point you do reach the diminishing returns on adding more scorers (unless everything is fucked). So then it becomes the question of "how do we maximize the possession of our meta forwards". That's where the interesting part comes in to me. How do we figure out and find the optimal 3rd guy to probably put with 2 meta forwards and 1 scoring dman. Does 1 playmaking dman make it better? Does something like RJs center make two meta wingers better? It's not really about that 3rd forward and 2nd dman having insane individual stats. That's not "supposed" to happen. It's more about if they can give their meta forward "outlets" even more gross stats.

 

I'm just not in a position to test it in any useful manner. But normally this meta shouldn't be optimal. But because of the insane turnover rates it's probably at least very close to ideal. But man is it going to get stale fast.

 

Another hypothesis I put forward in Nurx' podcast thread was "What happens if everyone on your team has 70 leadership?" A single player in a vacuum it's obviously a pretty shit attribute. But based on what Simon claims it does in the manual. if that formula for leadership=>team morale=>increased performance allows you to effectively "break" the 99 scoring hard cap (big if). Then what kind of scaling could a whole 70 leadership team get? I mean getting to 70 is just 2 weeks of TPE basically, so not the worlds biggest opportunity cost to try out. But it's something that you'd ideally want to try out in a controlled environment with STHS using the same sliders as the VHL and going 1k iteration or so tests on it. Which again, is something I can't do.

[hedgehog337 3,483]

24 minutes ago, Shindigs said:

Yeah, but my thinking is more of the lines like. Okay the meta forwards (and I guess dmen) are gonna go ham. But at some point you do reach the diminishing returns on adding more scorers (unless everything is fucked). So then it becomes the question of "how do we maximize the possession of our meta forwards". That's where the interesting part comes in to me. How do we figure out and find the optimal 3rd guy to probably put with 2 meta forwards and 1 scoring dman. Does 1 playmaking dman make it better? Does something like RJs center make two meta wingers better? It's not really about that 3rd forward and 2nd dman having insane individual stats. That's not "supposed" to happen. It's more about if they can give their meta forward "outlets" even more gross stats.

 

No one has ever tried all-meta team (like everyone has 40 pass) in this league, but looking at Vancouver now. 6 players out of 10 is meta. No one has higher than 78 passing and that's a defenseman. Obv they have no playmaker at all. That works for them pretty good I'd say and also they didn't have any pass first last season either. So yeah, adding more scorers isn't a bad thing at all.

 

One other league decided to switch the engines altogether cause one team found out all meta team is gonna destroy everyone in league. I mean, yeah, different league, maybe different settings etc. But looking what's happening here...maybe all meta is would do the same thing here.

 

In fairness, you could do fine with anything before 70 passing. 50-60 passers doing pretty well too. Anything higher than that - depends on team and luck.

 

 

31 minutes ago, Shindigs said:

Another hypothesis I put forward in Nurx' podcast thread was "What happens if everyone on your team has 70 leadership?" A single player in a vacuum it's obviously a pretty shit attribute. But based on what Simon claims it does in the manual. if that formula for leadership=>team morale=>increased performance allows you to effectively "break" the 99 scoring hard cap (big if). Then what kind of scaling could a whole 70 leadership team get? I mean getting to 70 is just 2 weeks of TPE basically, so not the worlds biggest opportunity cost to try out. But it's something that you'd ideally want to try out in a controlled environment with STHS using the same sliders as the VHL and going 1k iteration or so tests on it. Which again, is something I can't do.

 

I mean if there's someone that has sths and has lots of free time, why not. I don't believe in this attribute, but I can't be 100 on this. No one has ever tested this either iirc.

[Shindigs 1,771]

Just now, hedgehog337 said:

In fairness, you could do fine with anything before 70 passing. 50-60 passers doing pretty well too. Anything higher than that - depends on team and luck.

Yeah I'm not saying I'm sold on passing as a key attribute to push all the way to the sky. More of a "how about we get 70 passing instead of <insert other secondary attribute>. Scoring and Defense being disgustingly good is basically just a fact. There is no reason for anyone to ever skip Defense and the only reason to skip scoring is for stylistic reasons, for the most part. Because you're gonna 99 some attributes, Def is one. So what else would you 99 that is better than Scoring? Realistically nothing.

 

The part where you get some individual room for creativity and expression of what/who your player is, comes after that. So I'm mostly trying to make a point at maybe going 70 in some attributes that were previously left alone. Unless the effect of leadership can only increase your performance up to that of 99 from below 99 (which is a possible way for it to be coded) then that is a potentially interesting way of going about things, while creating a somewhat unique team identity. Hell, even if it can't push it above 99 equivalent. Maybe the offset to attribute decay from the players getting tired might even give it non-negligible value.

 

Alternatively just enforce some kind of limit to how much higher you are allowed to put any one attribute over others. Because let's be real, making a 40-99 makes basically no sense from a realism standpoint. No one is that one-dimensional at an Elite level. If when you increase your attributes in "Manage Player" there was an enforced limit that said you simply could not up your highest attribute to more than x higher than your 2nd highest attribute, and your 2nd highest couldn't be more than x higher than your 3rd highest etc. Then you'd at the very least limit how quickly someone can become a "meta forward", and they would be forced to skill up at least one or two (depending on x value) "secondary" attribute(s) to reasonable levels before it even becomes possible to cap both Sco and Def. Plus you'd end up with players that don't look 100% one-dimensional. The argument against this is that it forces us to build our players a certain way. But the meta already does that, just in an unofficial manner. So I don't really see that as a counter argument, but there may be some other issue with that solution that I'm not seeing cause of bias?

[hedgehog337 3,483]

32 minutes ago, Shindigs said:

The part where you get some individual room for creativity and expression of what/who your player is, comes after that. So I'm mostly trying to make a point at maybe going 70 in some attributes that were previously left alone. Unless the effect of leadership can only increase your performance up to that of 99 from below 99 (which is a possible way for it to be coded) then that is a potentially interesting way of going about things, while creating a somewhat unique team identity. Hell, even if it can't push it above 99 equivalent. Maybe the offset to attribute decay from the players getting tired might even give it non-negligible value.

 

Alternatively just enforce some kind of limit to how much higher you are allowed to put any one attribute over others. Because let's be real, making a 40-99 makes basically no sense from a realism standpoint. No one is that one-dimensional at an Elite level. If when you increase your attributes in "Manage Player" there was an enforced limit that said you simply could not up your highest attribute to more than x higher than your 2nd highest attribute, and your 2nd highest couldn't be more than x higher than your 3rd highest etc. Then you'd at the very least limit how quickly someone can become a "meta forward", and they would be forced to skill up at least one or two (depending on x value) "secondary" attribute(s) to reasonable levels before it even becomes possible to cap both Sco and Def. Plus you'd end up with players that don't look 100% one-dimensional. The argument against this is that it forces us to build our players a certain way. But the meta already does that, just in an unofficial manner. So I don't really see that as a counter argument, but there may be some other issue with that solution that I'm not seeing cause of bias?

 

I think one member had the similar idea about having a lesser gap between passing and scoring. The concern was that this would be just a bandaid and it might not help at all. Like if something like 70/99 was the max scoring build, that 70 passer would become that meta player and shit on the league the way the current 40 pass meta guys are doing.

 

And creativity? You could try to be creative...or just do a usual scoring guy and give your team more chances to win and maybe get some individual awards as well if you're luckier.

 

Also, we could use some test simmers.

[Shindigs 1,771]

1 minute ago, hedgehog337 said:

I think one member had the similar idea about having a lesser gap between passing and scoring. The concern was that this would be just a bandaid and it might not help at all. Like if something like 70/99 was the max scoring build, that 70 passer would become that meta player and shit on the league the way the current 40 pass meta guys are doing.

Yeah, the problem is that to make it an actual limitation you'd need the gap to be so small that you'd be unable to really make the decision formula work. With there being no control over the sim itself it's just a pain to deal with this issue. The possibly least popular solution would be to enforce a league wide hardcap on scoring below 99 at some value that through testing is found to give a less toxic level of shot inflation. That might actually level things out. But I don't see people being very happy with it. And finding the right timing to do it without absolutely screwing currently VHL players is basically impossible. You'd essentially need to make it only apply to newer players and let the existing ones be grandfathered in, which would create a ultra-fucked period where anyone who is already a meta forward becomes even better by comparison until they retire.

 

Really the meta build is just super hard to deal with in any reasonable manner, from what I can tell.

[hedgehog337 3,483]

51 minutes ago, Shindigs said:

Yeah, the problem is that to make it an actual limitation you'd need the gap to be so small that you'd be unable to really make the decision formula work. With there being no control over the sim itself it's just a pain to deal with this issue. The possibly least popular solution would be to enforce a league wide hardcap on scoring below 99 at some value that through testing is found to give a less toxic level of shot inflation. That might actually level things out. But I don't see people being very happy with it. And finding the right timing to do it without absolutely screwing currently VHL players is basically impossible. You'd essentially need to make it only apply to newer players and let the existing ones be grandfathered in, which would create a ultra-fucked period where anyone who is already a meta forward becomes even better by comparison until they retire.

 

Really the meta build is just super hard to deal with in any reasonable manner, from what I can tell.

 

Yeah, that'd be pain in the ass for everyone to change it. There is no good solution to this, but then things might get stale and boring if everyone goes for the scoring build too. I'd say the hope is on first gens here as they won't be aware of that meta thing and go for more balanced build or even pass first.

[Lemorse7 1,015]

Im interested to see what a skate-scoring-passer line would perform with STHS