Another ramble about fighting and hitting bad

[Mongoose87 389]

Tough guys - what a great opportunity for me to harp on one of my go-to pet peeves. The Victory Hockey League is not fair to tough guys. It is setting them up to fail. How so? The ways are two fold. 

 

First, it is rooted in a problem inherent in hockey itself. What happens to a player that fights? They are sent to the sin bin to think about how bad they've been for five minutes. Fine, that's nothing new. But what happens in those five minutes? The team is forced to play without that player. In the VHL that could mean playing with five forwards instead of six, not so bad, or it could mean playing with as few as two defensemen. Sure, both teams pay this price for the fight, but if the fighter is one of a team's high TPA players, then that's a very steep price. At best, fighting is a wash, but realistically, it's disadvantageous. And how do players end up participating in this disadvantage? Oh, just by spending their hard- earned TPE . What a goddamned newbie trap. I think there should be an element of skill in building a player, but I don't think there should be pitfalls that allow a user to invest in making their player worse. That's bad game design and that's how you lose new users. When you are capped in how much TPE you can reel in for a given week, it should not be possible to invest that in self penalizing. 

 

What's the second way tough guys are mistreated in the VHL? Hitting. It's a counterproductive strategy. Obviously the logic behind hitting is that a player invests in hitting to use their body to physically remove their opponents from puck possession, thereby giving their own team more chances to take the puck for themselves. This would be sound logic, except that there's an issue. Data suggests that our *cough* beloved Simon T Hockey Sim calls penalties on players that hit at a rate too high to be worthwhile. The players may produce more turnovers, but this is balanced out by giving the opposition more power plays. Once again, this is a newbie trap and not great game design. 

 

I have been raising this problem at every opportunity that I feel like it. I have yet to hear anyone suggest a better solution than the one I am about to outline. I would really like to hear from anyone that has one. Please, tag me. 

 

My solution? Change fighting and hitting from attributes that are invested in, like all the rest (except experience) and make them sliders that are set by the user at player creation and can be pushed up or down by up to a certain amount each season. For example, let's say I start my next player's career with fighting at 75. Now, while he has low TPE in the VHL, he'll be able to take a more valuable player away from his opponents. But, each season I will reduce his fighting by 5, so that once he is a high TPA player, and costing his team a lot of money, he will no longer remove himself from games by fighting.