Let the Gloves Hit the Ice

[Mongoose87 365]

The power forward - one of the most iconic archetypes in hockey. They can hit, they can fight, they can score. They're a goalie's worst enemy and a power play's best friend. General managers have wasted countless draft picks on massive, plodding players, praying that they can refine their technique and learn to skate at the professional level, hoping against hope that they're strong enough to bully adults, not just the 16 and 17 year olds that they've been playing against, despairing that those stone hands are because they still haven't adjusted after their growth spurt left them towering over their peers. 

 

Most of the time, these young players - let's not dance around it, these kids - never develop professional skating, or can't adjust to playing against others closer to their size, or are just plain going to be unskilled and uncoordinated for their entire life. They get a short look at their team's camp, play in a few preseason games, maybe even a cup of coffee at the professional level, but ultimately no one will hear their name again in a few years. 

 

But sometimes they're special. They make you wonder how someone so big can skate so fast. You can't believe that someone who hits so hard has hands that soft. And then they drop the gloves and beat the tar out of that pest that everyone hates. All the failed picks were worth it, because now we have a player that will own the ice. 

 

The power forward is usually a fan favorite. These beskated warriors represent the biggest crowd pleasing elements of hockey: hitting, fighting and scoring. Skilled star players love to play with them; they watch the skilled players' backs and don't drag down the offense. Opponents hate to play against them, their goalies screened, their defensemen hit and their pests punished. 

 

Indeed, no one represents old-time classic hockey quite like these centurions of center ice. Gordie Howe, Mark Messier, Maurice Richard - some of the most well known players of their eras, or even of all of hockey. 

 

Why then, I must ask, is the Victory Hockey League keeping them down?

 

You read that right. Look over the top scorers this season. There are a handful that will drop the gloves regularly. Two have actually raised their Fighting attribute, the highest to a mind- blowing 53! 

 

Why do so few of our top scorers embrace the Gordie Howe Hat Trick and make significant investments in Fighting?

 

Simple: the league is structured in such a way that anyone trying to maximize their on- ice performance will avoid spending TPE on Fighting. That is to say that the costs outweigh the benefits. 

 

Let's look at the sim benefits of fighting:

Pride - Hockey players that fight tend to take pride in doing so, and users tend to take a similar view in looking at their simulated players. Unfortunately, STHS's inscrutable algorithm has yet to provide any indication that Pride improves a team's chance of winning games.

 

Morale - Pride's humble sibling, Morale, on the other hand, allegedly does have some effect on the sim, and my understanding is that Fighting does improve morale. Morale is also so insignificant that three players deep into my VHL career, I have yet to hear anyone bring it up.

 

Awards Consideration - Maybe the voters will take fighting into account for the Boulet or Wylde?

 

That totals out to some tiny positive difference in the sim that we don't know how to measure and maybe a small positive consideration at the margin, if your player is contending for one of those two awards. There's a word for this amount of benefit: negligible. 

 

Now, let's examine the costs:

TPE spent - This is pretty obvious. As with any attribute, you have to spend your hard-earned TPE to increase the Fighting attribute.

 

Penalties - Mongoose, you might say, isn't the objective of fighting to rack up those five minute majors? How can that be considered a cost? Dear reader, are you familiar with the concept of Opportunity Cost? Opportunity Cost is the other things you might have done but no longer can because of the choice you made. In this particular case, if your top goal scoring forward is sitting five minutes for fighting, they are also very much not putting pucks in the net for those five minutes. Worse, they could get an instigator and leave the game altogether.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that those costs far outweigh the meager benefits of investing TPE in Fighting. From the perspective of lost ice time, the argument could be made that investments in Fighting are actively punished. 

 

Personally, I view this as a failure of design in the VHL system. While there is a skill to building a good player and I would never want that element of the league to change, there is a difference between rewarding system mastery and punishing users for investing in a trap attribute. The former is an important aspect of game design. The latter is the sort of failure that punishes new users. 

 

I have a proposal for a change that would go a long way towards rectifying this design flaw: stop treating fighting like a normal attribute. We invest in attributes to improve our players' performance. Fighting does not do that, so it should not be an option to invest in. 

 

What does that mean? For starters, eliminate the Fighting hybrid attribute and restructure Grit. Next, instead of having Fighting be determined by TPE investment, let users set it to their desired level upon player creation. Since fighting does not provide tangible benefit in the sim, there is no reason to require TPE investment to have a high attribute and the users might as well be allowed to start with it wherever they like. 

 

Each offseason the user will have the opportunity to increase or decrease their Fighting attribute by 10 plus the number of fights their player had the preceding season, so a player won't go overnight from being a pugilist to a peacemaker or vice versa. 

 

This plan will do a few things. First, it will remove the new user trap that exists in fighting right now. STHS is a fairly inscrutable sim - we don't need to punish people on their learning journey. Second, it will introduce a greater diversity of builds to the league. The change to hybrid attributes already told us this is considered desirable, so this should be a welcome result. Lastly, it will make the league more fun. I know it's very easy for many of us to get very serious about the VHL - we all have that competitive spirit within us - but the ultimate purpose of this whole venture is for people to enjoy simulated hockey. As I said earlier, fighting is a crowd pleaser. We may not have a proper crowd here, but I think there are more than a few users who would love to see their players and others duke it out, if it weren't for the drawbacks. 

 

What I don't want to see is an increase in the number of Donald Brashear, Derek Boogard and Eric Godard type players, players who don't contribute to the game outside of fisticuffs. I don't think encouraging fighting will run a serious risk of doing that, either. While GMs may enjoy choosing to take on more fighters, they remain constrained by the salary cap - Opportunity Cost rears its ugly head once again - and no GM is going to choose to spend that precious cap cash on a player who can't improve their team's chances at getting the big prize. Likewise, the league doesn't provide much of a path forward for a user who only cares about pugilism. I can't imagine a user sticking around a very long time earning TPE that they do not spend, or even just doing the bare minimum to remain active without updating. At most, you might see a small uptick of such players in the VHLM, but they would be weeded out quickly.

 

No, what this would encourage is a Renaissance of players who can contribute on the ice but aren't afraid to drop the gloves when their goalie gets run or their star player is taking a few too many hits. It would be great fodder for PTs and game recaps, allowing users to develop rivalries between players that can't help but challenge one another every time they meet. That's the sort of energy that a league like this thrives on, and it's the sort of thing we should be encouraging at every opportunity. 

 

This should be an easy decision. I have yet to hear of a disadvantage from anyone I have made this suggestion to. Current low levels of investment in Fighting mean there wouldn't even be that much TPE to refund. This is what they call a layup, a safe bet, all upside. If you are in Head Office, make the right choice, make the choice that makes the league more fun. If you are not, I encourage you to share this idea and help it get to the decision makers and make sure they see that you approve. 

 

[Doomsday 4,036]

For what it's worth, I attempted to make an enforcer defenseman around Season 40 or so. His very first attributes were invested into getting fighting to 70, and this was back when the VHL gave performance bonuses for achieving milestones in the VHLM, and one of them was +2 TPE per fight.

 

He didn't fight once.

 

I don't think it's an aversion to fighting from the VHL's perspective, it's STHS itself. Fights seem to happen very randomly, with little rhyme or reason. However, general fights seem to be MUCH more common in the playoffs. The fighting attribute seems to affect the frequency of a player fighting, with strength affecting their ability in fights.

[Mongoose87 365]

21 hours ago, Doomsday said:

The fighting attribute seems to affect the frequency of a player fighting, with strength affecting their ability in fights.

I guess I should've have mentioned this in the article. I took this as a given. 

[Mongoose87 365]

Claim 3/3