07-15-2022, 05:07 PMzeagle1 Wrote: I feel like people greatly underrate the importance of sim testing to a certain point, and then greatly overrate it past that point. The baseline of testing to have at least a vague clue about what works and doesn't work is huge. A very good team could suck because a GM hoped for the best and picked a bad strat. Now that team is losing and it's barely even the GM's fault.

I am willing to bet all my league money in every league that there's already people out there testing. Not gonna lie I thought HO was memeing when I saw the announcement banning testing.

All you need to do this is to own FHM8 and have a bit of time to set up a league file with tons of different teams with the same strats/DCs and create a bunch of custom players with the builds you want to test. A bit more complex in practice than on paper, but you get the gist. HO would have no clue this was happening, and all a GM would need to do to get their players working towards the new meta is to give build advice... like every other GM would.  Accused of testing because your team is too good? Pick a random excuse out of a hat- "I got lucky" "I just play a lot of FHM" "I saw it on the ootp forums" unless HO goes around banning people on minimal proof (which wouldn't surprise me), then you'd have to be pretty dumb to get caught.

If you want to yolo a build based on a concept or whatever, more power to you. I personally would be rather upset if I found out my player sucked because I had distributed my TPE into bad attributes because I (and everyone else) didn't know any better. Given, I have absolutely no FHM knowledge and infrequently watch hockey so I benefit from other's build testing/sim knowledge far greater than the average user here.

This feels rather like prohibition in America. The Government/HO gets lots of plaudits for broadly banning the big unpopular thing, but that doesn't really stop it.

Props to HO for actually doing the thing though, and I mean that genuinely. It takes big balls to take such a strong stance on anything major, and y'all sure as hell took a strong stance.

The problem with this sort of is, a partial ban is somehow even dumber than a complete one, because it's even less enforcable. Now, when you don't really get active access to the commish profile, you have to likely put in a decent chunk of work to redo your own file if you would want to test sim, but if they release it and then go "but only test sim a little", we are effectively back where we were. It's not the greatest of situations, but HO's options are somewhat limited on what they can truly attempt to actually limit, and going halfway between banning test simming and allowing it completely is probably the least likely option to work.

Mind you, these rules feel extremely similar to the tampering rules that seem to be fairly universally accepted as a thing, even though it has the exact same issue of being virtually unenforcable outside of actual insider leaks, that insider being one of the parties. The test simming does have an issue with how many people truly need to be in the know, limiting the ammount of whistleblowers, but in the end how many tampering charges has SHL seen in the past maybe 20 seasons, expecting that it's unlikely such activity has completely stopped existing.