Sim Engine needs to be upgraded

[Steve 1,921]

Why can't players get information about how the sim engine addresses skills and line strats? I have asked GM's that have been here for many seasons and they have no idea on what this engine looks at and how skill levels are weighted. I find this frustrating to say the least. For a league with such a great forum and general overall appeal, it is amazing that we have a sim version that has many unknowns.

 

I heard in the last couple of seasons that another version or engine was going to run along side this one and see how it could work. What happened to that? I don't like how secret some things are or just not published on what stats/strats and skills are used in this engine. Does anyone know?

 

Maybe this league is more about hanging out and bashing each other on Discord, but I was hoping the actual hockey games part would be the most dominate aspect. It seems I am wrong.

 

Working on tasks each week are actual fun to do, but that fun doesn't translate into a good sim experience unless you are on a stacked team or one of the lucky ones that the sim loves.

 

I know everyone should not be a super star, and this isn't about that. I have observed a few things that are just wrong when you level up skills that make your player play worse.

 

If you notice, a lot of second season players have really good seasons and after that they drop off. I have looked a several non admin players that update each week and the findings show me over and over that once you start going over 95 on any or all skills, there is a good chance your player isn't going to reflect that increase, in fact, it makes them play inconsistent at best.

 

A few things that I would like to know that nobody has answered yet.

 

Morale, how does it work and what effect does it have on team/player performance.

Line strats, how much influence does it have on this sim engine, if at all.

Overall team strat, same with this, how much does it effect game performance.

Skill level. What skills effect performance and what ones are not even turned on.

Leadership. Does it work or doesn't it. FFS somebody has to know something about how it actually works. I have heard the theory, I want the definitive answer.

 

As a member of this league that just wants to win, these points are the important ones, not who is getting banned or any other drama that is the flavor of the day. Just building a player that works and understanding the sim engine's design is all I am after.

 

Why is it so hard to get answers to the most fundamental questions about this version?

 

I would love to see a much more transparent approach and have some good discussion about this engine and moving towards maybe something that works more consistent. I would be happy just to know how shit works and if it's a waste of time to go over 90-95 on any skill.

 

This is a great league with a flawed sim engine.

[Josh 1,671]

12 minutes ago, Steve said:

Morale, how does it work and what effect does it have on team/player performance.

Line strats, how much influence does it have on this sim engine, if at all.

Overall team strat, same with this, how much does it effect game performance.

Skill level. What skills effect performance and what ones are not even turned on.

Leadership. Does it work or doesn't it. FFS somebody has to know something about how it actually works. I have heard the theory, I want the definitive answer.

 

Morale is enabled (STHS manual quoted):

Quote

Morale - Affect all game stats at beginning of game. The higher the stat, the higher the players performance boost will be. (It's combined with the Team Morale)

 

Line Strategies:

Quote

Line strategies do not apply.
The percentage of ice time per lines does not apply.

Team strategies do not apply correctly. Only the “If the score is equal then strategy is” applies all game long.

 

Not sure what you mean by skill level? Bigger number generally means better.

 

Leadership increases 

 

[Josh 1,671]

Also this is the source:

 

http://sths.simont.info/ManualV2_En.php

[Tagger 2,722]

I agree with the point you make about too many stuff like settings and sliders not being made readily apparent as to what is being used and to what level. I made a similar point in my media article here and Devise mentioned the idea of making a video showing what settings and sliders are currently set, but since then I haven't heard anything more on that.  

[Steve 1,921]

Morale, how does it work and what effect does it have on team/player performance.

Line strats, how much influence does it have on this sim engine, if at all.

Overall team strat, same with this, how much does it effect game performance.

Skill level. What skills effect performance and what ones are not even turned on.

Leadership. Does it work or doesn't it. FFS somebody has to know something about how it actually works. I have heard the theory, I want the definitive answer.

 

Morale is enabled (STHS manual quoted):

  Quote

Morale - Affect all game stats at beginning of game. The higher the stat, the higher the players performance boost will be. (It's combined with the Team Morale)

           Interesting. So there is a player Morale level and of course, the team Morale value. So how does a player increase his own morale?

 

Line Strategies:

  Quote

Line strategies do not apply.
The percentage of ice time per lines does not apply.

Team strategies do not apply correctly. Only the “If the score is equal then strategy is” applies all game long.

 

Not sure what you mean by skill level? Bigger number generally means better.

You know that each skill like skating, passing and scoring has a level. Max being 99. I have seen, on many players, that moving one skill above 95 made their player play different, and not in a good way. I am not sure the sim translates certain skills the same as others of just compares the overall players level in tpa. Unknown to me how this works and haven't found people that has been here for a decade that can give me an answer.

 

Leadership increases 

 Increases what? and how does it actually help?

[Josh 1,671]

28 minutes ago, Tagger said:

I agree with the point you make about too many stuff like settings and sliders not being made readily apparent as to what is being used and to what level. I made a similar point in my media article here and Devise mentioned the idea of making a video showing what settings and sliders are currently set, but since then I haven't heard anything more on that.  

 

I don't believe we're allowed to show the sliders. Something about special sauce.

[Josh 1,671]

Just now, Steve said:

Leadership increases 

 Increases what? and how does it actually help?

 

My bad, meant to type Morale there.

[Steve 1,921]

According to that link from @Josh

 

Version 1.1

Advantage:

• Available in the STHS since February 2008 in version 1.1.
• Results are proven to be realistic.

Disadvantage:

• New features since 2010 are not added in the code (Referee/Lineman, Line/Team strategies, Percentage of ice time per line does not apply, etc).
• Some stats are not count and will always show at 0 in the simulator
• A lot of new functionalities are not implemented (For example, 3 vs 3 overtime)

[Enorama 2,038]

33 minutes ago, Josh said:

 

I don't believe we're allowed to show the sliders. Something about special sauce.

 

Bek said he would do it if he redacted sensitive info (meaning e-mail addresses and such)

 

[Josh 1,671]

Just now, Enorama said:

 

Bek said he would do it if he redacted sensitive info (meaning e-mail addresses and such)

 

 

Oh interesting!

[Beketov 9,025]

1 hour ago, Enorama said:

 

Bek said he would do it if he redacted sensitive info (meaning e-mail addresses and such)

 

I’m still okay doing that, just need to get around to make them. There’s nothing really special about our sliders; they are just what works for us.

 

Considering there have been, serious or otherwise, people claiming the sliders have been adjusted to positively affect the simmers’ players or team I wouldn’t even mind having it be added to the initial indexes every season, just showing what we’re using. Of course that isn’t proof that they never change but I can’t actually recall if you CAN change them once a season starts.

 

2 hours ago, Steve said:

You know that each skill like skating, passing and scoring has a level. Max being 99. I have seen, on many players, that moving one skill above 95 made their player play different, and not in a good way. I am not sure the sim translates certain skills the same as others of just compares the overall players level in tpa. Unknown to me how this works and haven't found people that has been here for a decade that can give me an answer.

Here’s the problem, we can’t give you the answer because we don’t really know ourselves. We have guesses and those are readily available but all we have is the same resources that you guys do. There’s no magic manual that comes with the simming job or something. I only just learned with my last player that discipline depresses your PIL by decreasing your hits. There’s a lot of stuff Simon kinda keeps under wraps.

[Steve 1,921]

2 minutes ago, Beketov said:

Here’s the problem, we can’t give you the answer because we don’t really know ourselves. We have guesses and those are readily available but all we have is the same resources that you guys do. There’s no magic manual that comes with the simming job or something. I only just learned with my last player that discipline depresses your PIL by decreasing your hits. There’s a lot of stuff Simon kinda keeps under wraps.

While I understand that there are some unknowns even to the people running the sims, don't you think that is a perfect reason to move to a more transparent sim engine? I mean, I see some huge differences in skills but little difference in play. If there isn't a reason to max each core skill, then what's the point of having a 1000 tpa build. I want to know what weight each skill has at each tier. It seems to many of us common folk that are just here to play and not on anyone's pre-built team that once several of us maxed a skill, or went above 95 on a core skill, our players are shit. So if this is unknown to the actual leaders of the league, then I think this is a horrible way to run a hockey league. The games themselves should be the ultimate outcome of this league. I feel that investing in any skill now is purely a waste of tpe. You can see that many, including myself, had a great second season and fell off the deep end the  seasons after. What had changed? We maxed our skills, that is what changed. The sim engine is over a decade old and the owner is a complete  asshole. Doing research to find answers, I found him rude and just a dick all around. So why are we still using shit that has so many things even you guys don't know about. Bad for the league. Upgrade into this decade please.

 

I respect you as a leader Beketov. You will do  the right thing.

[Beketov 9,025]

22 minutes ago, Steve said:

While I understand that there are some unknowns even to the people running the sims, don't you think that is a perfect reason to move to a more transparent sim engine?

No, for a very simple reason:

 

The engine is not perfect for our needs but the program is. Everything in the portal is designed around how easy STHS makes things. We can create and update players in like 2 clicks, we can output all our stats to the portal super easy, we can have everything work the way people have come to expect. We change away from STHS and all that goes away. Look at how the portal works on the SBA for example, it exists but most everything is still manual because their program isn’t as versatile as ours is.

 

We are shadow simming some updates but moving away from STHS IMO is out of the question.

[Peace 1,532]

5 minutes ago, Beketov said:

No, for a very simple reason:

 

The engine is not perfect for our needs but the program is. Everything in the portal is designed around how easy STHS makes things. We can create and update players in like 2 clicks, we can output all our stats to the portal super easy, we can have everything work the way people have come to expect. We change away from STHS and all that goes away. Look at how the portal works on the SBA for example, it exists but most everything is still manual because their program isn’t as versatile as ours is.

 

We are shadow simming some updates but moving away from STHS IMO is out of the question.

 

Moving away from STHS and onto something like FHM6 is doable, and with the help of their developers (assuming they’ll assist us) we could make it easy for FHM6 as well. 

 

FHM6 works in database files, so the bigger issue would be getting game by game results than anything I’d reckon. 

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

13 minutes ago, Peace said:

 

Moving away from STHS and onto something like FHM6 is doable, and with the help of their developers (assuming they’ll assist us) we could make it easy for FHM6 as well. 

 

FHM6 works in database files, so the bigger issue would be getting game by game results than anything I’d reckon. 

 

On the caveat that I haven't played FHM and only EHM, but assuming they're somewhat similar, it's much easier to create broken team and individual tactics on those engines than it is on STHS.

[Peace 1,532]

3 minutes ago, flyersfan1453 said:

 

On the caveat that I haven't played FHM and only EHM, but assuming they're somewhat similar, it's much easier to create broken team and individual tactics on those engines than it is on STHS.

 

By broken team and individual tactics I’m assuming you mean over powered and/or dominant. In that case no, honestly, FHM6 does a pretty good job of not having one or two required tactics and individual strategy. I don’t play online though, so it could be a thing and I’m just unaware of it. 

[Corco 1,237]

I would be against moving to FHM for the simple reason that it would basically render the entirety of VHL history useless.

[Peace 1,532]

8 minutes ago, Corco said:

I would be against moving to FHM for the simple reason that it would basically render the entirety of VHL history useless.

 

I don’t think it would be useless. Switching to FHM6 would produce realistic results which would keep the record book intact. Close the VHL chapter though, but still relatively similar. 

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

1 minute ago, Peace said:

 

I don’t think it would be useless. Switching to FHM6 would produce realistic results which would keep the record book intact. Close the VHL chapter though, but still relatively similar. 

 

TBH, our overall statistics as a whole have been much more realistic over the past couple of seasons with scoring becoming more spread out between players and less 100+ point players each season.

[Peace 1,532]

3 minutes ago, flyersfan1453 said:

 

TBH, our overall statistics as a whole have been much more realistic over the past couple of seasons with scoring becoming more spread out between players and less 100+ point players each season.

 

Exactly. I think everything transfers over well enough. League becomes less active? More scoring on both engines for individual players. More active? Rarely more than one or two 100 point players.

[Steve 1,921]

1 hour ago, Beketov said:

’m still okay doing that, just need to get around to make them. There’s nothing really special about our sliders; they are just what works for us.

 

Considering there have been, serious or otherwise, people claiming the sliders have been adjusted to positively affect the simmers’ players or team I wouldn’t even mind having it be added to the initial indexes every season, just showing what we’re using. Of course that isn’t proof that they never change but I can’t actually recall if you CAN change them once a season starts.

Just knowing the sims can be biased is cause to worry. I, of course, am not saying that is the case, but the sims are so private, who really knows what could happen in the future or what has happened in the past.

[Corco 1,237]

9 minutes ago, Steve said:

Just knowing the sims can be biased is cause to worry. I, of course, am not saying that is the case, but the sims are so private, who really knows what could happen in the future or what has happened in the past.

Rigging is much more arduous than you think; when you sim you don’t even see individual statistics, you only see the final score; I’m not sure if we do live sims for the playoffs, but you can see what it looks like during those live sims. I’m my time in the league we’ve always had trustworthy simmers, so it’s not something you have to worry about.

[Corco 1,237]

32 minutes ago, Peace said:

 

I don’t think it would be useless. Switching to FHM6 would produce realistic results which would keep the record book intact. Close the VHL chapter though, but still relatively similar. 

Well that’s the thing, I don’t really want to close the VHL chapter.

[Steve 1,921]

4 minutes ago, Corco said:

Well that’s the thing, I don’t really want to close the VHL chapter.

The NHL has gone through a tremendous amount of change over the years but the past is still relevant. I see no  difference here.

[Corco 1,237]

1 minute ago, Steve said:

The NHL has gone through a tremendous amount of change over the years but the past is still relevant. I see no  difference here.

It’s just a matter of opinion really; I don’t think the league should switch over, and if anything, a separate league would be a better idea. I just don’t see why we would need to switch over when the league has been successful on STHS for 10+ years. STHS has its flaws, but it’s decent enough for our use; you also have to remember, nobody makes a sim engine with the intent of it being used for a player-sim. We made do with what we have.