03-04-2022, 12:14 PMRankle Wrote:

03-04-2022, 10:27 AMGeekusoid Wrote: First off I can say that, as it pertains to the learning curve and new GM's, this is a good move.

As it pertains to teams and individual players though, I can see this having a negative effect.  A couple case points (for the sake of argument):

• Special Teams
  

If a team sets their global sliders for example to be very high on attacking, and very low on backchecking (as the current meta dictates), This doesn't necessarily affect Powerplay units, however, it has the ability to make Penalty Kill units entirely less effective.  Via the tactical sliders you can absolutely dictate that with Penalty Kill units you can slow down the pace of the game (to kill the penalty), as well as be entirely defensive vs offensive, which is how it natively should be.

• Checking lines & specialty Players
  

On even strength lines, if you have a checking line...it would be counter intuitive to have them be highly offensive as opposed to their main function (defense oriented).  I myself have used lines like this in IIHF, SHL and SMJHL to varying degrees of success.  It could not have functioned properly had I not been able to dictate to a checking line not to go "balls to the wall" offensively and be more conservative in play.  The same can be said with specialty roles like Agitator, Shadow, Crease-clearing Defenseman.   In the individual tendencies is where these shine.  Using crease-clearing defenseman as an example:   If your team follows the current meta and is very high on the pressure and hitting slider, then what happens with a CCD?  Instead of maintaining their position in front of the net, they will be pulled out of position to try and check the person with the puck, or put a hit on them into next week.  How does this affect the player?  Their DGR and overall GR goes down.  Their +/- can then be affected, and so on.   Same can be said if you are creating (again, focusing on defenseman here) an OFD or DFD.  If you are a defensive defenseman, it doesn't make sense to have them follow the rest of the team with the "attack" slider maxed out to try and smash the net.  Their shooting, naturally isn't going to be fantastic (we default them to 12 accuracy), so they'll spam shot after shot after shot.   Shooting percentage goes down and, because the shots are poor quality, Goalie save percentages skyrocket.   Instead, via the individual sliders we can dictate to these defenseman to well...you know...be defensive.    

Defenseman especially don't get their points from goal scoring primarily.  Its their assists that shoot through the roof by being able to find that open forward for the goal...or in the rare case they're wide open at the point and they can take that shot and hope it goes in.


Anyway, that's my brief take against this move as I believe there are multiple other things that could be addressed aside from this to help level the playing field, but that's neither here nor there.

I'm not an FHM expert, but would it be possible to have league-wide static sliders set for individual player types? So, per your example, anyone in the league running a DFD has the same sliders for that player and they dont get stuck playing as a DFD but playing towards the team sliders for a more offensive player type. If we could do something like that it could still help make things easier for GMs by taking the individual player sliders out of their control, but not force each player be at the mercy of the team sliders. Thinking along the same lines, could we have league-wide static penalty kill sliders so the penalty kill doesnt end up playing a high attack, low backcheck style like you mentioned?