11-04-2021, 09:21 AMcaltroit_red_flames Wrote:

11-04-2021, 07:26 AMMemento Mori Wrote: When you create a player, there are 23 attributes you can increase, 22 of them limitlessly (shooting accuracy/range for defenceman/forwards). It's vital that you upgrade some of these right away. There's others where it's (seemingly) vital that you don't. Then you combine that with the fact that unlike other sports games physical attributes aren't vastly overpowered, and the attributes you should improve are even less obvious. I found and still do find SHL the most daunting from this perspective. When you consider how interconnected the sim league community is, this is a problem. I backed out of creating at least once before I actually did. In the end, some friends built my 155 build, my J GMs built my 350 and 425 builds, and my SHL GM built my current build. I don't want to hinder my team by not following the 'right' update path, so I'd rather they just build my player for me.

Wouldn't balanced archetypes fix this exact issue? You come in and think "I want to make an offensive defenseman", boom your arch is there and you know what to do.

@RomanesEuntDomus I don't see archetypes as limiting uniqueness. FHM has 22 minor roles for forwards and 14 for defensemen. If create archetypes for each role that that are balanced in a way that each each has a level of viability then we're going to have a ton of unique builds. I can go to HAM's roster on the other hand and I guarantee you there isn't a single player without at least 17 defensive read and checking. Doesn't matter if you wanted to be an offensive minded sniper, having that much "freedom" has forced them to build the meta player. It's not real freedom if we know what the meta build is. Again archetypes would allow us to tweak metas out of existence.

SDCore and others have talked about this much more eloquently than me already, but in my opinion it absolutely does because it puts your career on rails essentially. Right now players can theoretically do whatever they want. They naturally gravitate towards the meta builds but they can change their minds along the way, go for different builds than originally planned, choose to not chase the meta anymore etc. You can go for crazy things and attribute combinations that don't make much sense on paper because of roleplaying. If you do strict archetypes, then the moment someone creates a player he already knows what his eventual perfect build will look like and it's just a grind to get there from now on, with little to no chance to deviate from that pre-selected build. I for one find that an incredibly boring thought. That's in no way meant to defend the current meta-situation, but in my opinion we'd just be replacing one boring situation with another.

Also you'd have to make sure that these archetypes are near perfect, because if they aren't you will end up having players who are worth much less than their competition no matter how active they are, just because of the archetype they selected when they were still new to the league and had no idea how everything works. And with how quickly new metas and/or exploits seem to pop up these days, I highly doubt that we'll be able to find these perfect builds that will stand the test of time for 10+ seasons.