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Rancidbudgie · 04-28-2023, 12:43 AM

Where Have All the Gunslingers Gone?

An Analysis into Role Players in the Modern SHL

Word Count: 5400

Hello again SHL! In this article, I hope to investigate the history, popularity, and effectiveness of role players in the SHL, with focus on a particular role in the SHL - the enforcer. In recent seasons, I have noticed a stark homogenization of the stats produced in the index when looking for viable fantasy point producers - currently there are few, if any, players that produce PIMs and fights at a rate higher than anyone else, and the only numbers provided by the index to really compare a player’s non-scoring impact on the ice is now hits (or the advanced stats on occasion). The plus/minus stat really only indicates a good team, and PIMs seems to be a crapshoot rather than any indication of a player being built as a fighter or enforcer. This article is dedicated to investigating the place of the identity of the role player in the current SHL, in comparison to earlier eras.

The History of Role Players in the SHL
Since the beginning of the SHL, from the early years into the STHS system, followed by the FHM eras, goons have been a niche role in the game that has been popular with many users. In the sport of hockey in the real world, an archetypal role that sets the game apart from other sports is the acceptance of fighting having a place in the game, and certain players who made their careers as pugilists on skates. In popular media, hockey’s identity is that of a fast-paced and skilled game, but with an unrivaled physicality and brutality that is epitomized by the enforcer. In a simulation hockey league, where much of a player’s identity on the ice is which kind of stats they produce visible in the sim, a pragmatically physical player, a stay-at-home defenceman with a mean streak, or even a clinically psychotic fighter have always been an appealing roles for SHL users to embrace.

In the SHL, there is even an award for the most penalized player in the league for a given SHL season - the Turd Ferguson Award, named for one of the site’s earliest penalty box residents who led the league in penalty minutes two years in a row for seasons 4 and 5, and who also had a great name to associate with penalty-earning players. There is no comparable award in the actual NHL, so this is something embraced as being more unique to the SHL. The Turd Ferguson award was the shining example of a role player - something valuable in all simulation leagues.

With the “on ice” results and the stats on the index in simulated hockey games being reduced more to 1’s and 0’s compared to IRL hockey, there eventually remains only so many areas a player can excel in what is really noticeable to SHL users. When a user might be bored with the “High TPE = high points”, “good at defense”, and “is a goalie” kind of players, options for players to fit effective niche roles, either with on-ice results or from a roleplaying perspective, are valuable as options for users to have. I would personally state that a greater variety of notable roles in the player-designing process helps fuel user engagement and attachment to the identity of their player. A fighting/enforcing/goon role was one of those popular niches that fit well into the SHL’s framework, and we have many iconic players and users that made a name for themselves as gladiators, tough guys, and heels.

However, this tradition has all but completely faded as of late, and with all of the positive changes that have occurred over the last couple of years, an unfortunate and unintended side effect seems to have occurred. This side effect has been the identity and popularity of role players almost entirely vanishing in any tangible way. Within this article, I will argue that enforcers and penalty-minute eating role players are basically extinct in the current era of the SHL, and that it would be beneficial for changes to be made to revitalize the idea of a goon’s place in the SHL, in hopes of providing new areas of engagement for potential users to experience the SHL through.

What makes an enforcer?
To fit the mold of the enforcer, you simply need the foundation of a couple of key skills - be very physical in your play, and typically get into fights with some frequency. This means you can typically gauge the effectiveness of an enforcer with a combination of stats you can find on the index - things like hits, fights won/lost, and penalty minutes. With the exception of offensive players (looking at points and shots), it is the most easily identifiable and measurable role on the ice, where you can see the player’s impact with a quick dive into their generated stats on the index.

The enforcer was an SHL-designed archetype available in the STHS days, back when users divided TPE to their players between far fewer skills/attributes than the FHM builds we have available to us today. Back then, a player had certain skills they had to choose as “strengths” or “weaknesses” (your maximum ability cap was higher for your strengths, and it took twice as much TPE to upgrade attributes that were your weaknesses), which were dependent on their archetypes. The enforcer was able to choose a strength from attributes like strength, checking(hitting) and fighting. Their weaknesses had to be one of scoring or passing, to ensure that the enforcer was also not going to be terribly offensively competent as well. While the enforcer was likely one of the less relevant archetypes to on-ice success, there was still a stable chunk of SHL users who enrolled in fight club, and even without the archetype, there were still many players who had points in fighting and would get into a few scraps over a given season.

This role would ultimately change in the FHM era - with the implementation of FHM6 in season 53, the archetypes inherent at player creation were gone. Now, you simply put TPE in whichever skills you chose (with plenty more options now), and it would be up to your team's GM or coach to choose how to deploy you, with FHM having a built-in calculator that showed which roles your player should excel in based on your build. Here, the enforcer seems to evolve into a more nuanced role - FHM has roles under the sub-category of “enforcer” that varies based on slight alterations to a typical physical build. You could have a classic Goon - wants to fight and focuses on little else. Or, a more balanced Enforcer who fights often but plays a supporting hockey role too. There are also specialty roles like Agitator for if you want to make more of a pest, and the Old-school Defenseman, if you want the enforcer role on the blueline.

With this shift to more tactical roles and attributes, it looked like that all roles - the enforcer included - would experience more variety and appeal to the SHL community. However, something has gone off-track in recent years when considering the enforcer’s identity, and almost zero users, even on rebuilding teams, are being deployed as any of the enforcer archetypes in a way that makes the legacy of Turd Ferguson proud. We have reached a point where one of the most iconic roles in hockey is entirely absent from a simulation hockey league. While there are many valid points against fighting and high PIM being in the NHL or hockey as an IRL sport, we as a simulated league can avoid such pitfalls while still having goons in our games. Player injuries are non-existent, mental health-related stats are consistently preset for all players, and simulated players only retire due to inactivity instead of crippling CTE-related damages. We’ve had no (serious) lobbying against enforcer roles being in the games, and many users who have pushed for archetypal variety in the league. So… what happened between the expansion of player attributes and now?

The Decline of Role Players
First off, I should probably describe the symptoms of what prompted me to write this article in the first place. When I was looking to recreate a player recently in season 68, I considered what I wanted to try next. I had developed two defenseman in the STHS days - a two-way multi-tool kind of player who did a bit of everything in Jon Tellofsen, and a shoot-first scoring defenseman in Basil Magnicotta. My first player with a full and successful SHL career was my most recent player Nicolae Antonescu, a goaltender. I was looking for a new experience this time around, and wanted to build a forward. The archetypes I had not previously filled yet in my site adventures were a defensive specialist and a straight-up goon. By now I realized a full goon would be likely unappealing to prospective GMs, but I desired to make someone who at least dropped the gloves and could maybe go for a Turd Ferguson once or twice in his career, maybe after I entered steep regression.

So I looked into how enforcer builds were performing in FHM8 and found… pretty much nothing. At the SHL level, there were no clear enforcers or goons to speak of, and those slotted into an Agitator role were rarely, if ever, getting into a fight, and seemed to be designated there for the morale debuff agitators give to their opponents. The last enforcers I remember encountering in FHM at all was Niccolo Livius, who had a stint with my previous player as teammates on the Pride as we rebuilt in the late S50’s and early S60’s, and Juni Panda, the wrecking ball on the S60’s-era Manhattan Rage. That was where you typically saw goons - active but not top-earning users who were on rebuilding-to-decent teams that had some fun, and were usually great LR people. While top competing teams shied away from assigning a tactical role for any of their players to be an enforcer (minus maybe one agitator, per the rules), which is expected and not really an issue in itself, there was always a place for goons in the league, and usually was an opportunity for a rebuilding/not fully active team to have an active LR presence instead of an IA, while allowing them to pursue their hard-hitting and face-punching desires on the ice. Near the end of a given season, two teams out of the playoffs meeting on ice might be something uneventful outside of who can score points, but another fun factor added was often the team’s fighters lining up all night and resulting in a chippy 70-PIM game between the teams. But as I searched the records of the SHL’s newer-era games, there was nothing to be found comparable to those events and times.

Then and Now
The record holders for PIMs in previous eras include players like Danny Foster (Seven-time Turd Ferguson winner, and the 1st and 3rd best single-season PIM score in the entire STHS era, with 190 and 155 PIMS in the 50-game seasons of the S30’s), Shaquille Derisraka (Holding the single-season record of 178 PIMS in the 50-game FHM6 era) and the aforementioned Juni Panda (holds the top 3 single-season PIM records in the 66-game FHM6 era, with 226, 201, and 178 PIMs). The top enforcers of the day could anticipate to earn an average of well over 2 PIMs per game, and the record-holders of each category all broke over the 3 PIMs/game mark.

For comparison, the record holder for most penalty minutes in the FHM8 era (now 5 seasons in) was newly set this season, with Benjamin Surkhi-Ze’ev earning 75 PIM in 66 games. The previous record-holder for single-season PIMs of the current FHM 8 era was Fredericko von Schnicktenburg, with a total of 70 PIMs in 66 games. An immediate drop from prior eras to now just trickling over 1 penalty minute a game for the current record holders. Continuing on single-season records, 2nd place and onwards jump down to 62 PIMs and lower, all totalling less than 1 per game. No offense to Durden’s dueling Dane, von Schnicktenburg, but they are nowhere close in build to an enforcer, and received the Turd Ferguson by simply having a higher than average amount of stick infractions. Von Schnicktenburg has ZERO points invested in fighting, aggression, or bravery, and only 11 in hitting. Their checking skill is average compared to any player their TPE level, and they were involved in only 1 fight in their Ferguson-winning season, a loss. Surkhi-Ze’ev is built only slightly more physically, with a whopping 7 fighting and 7 aggression, and a respectable 15 in hitting, and had a more offensively focused build anyway, scoring over a PPG with 83 points for the Blizzard this season. Surkhi-Ze’ev had ZERO fights, once again having the majority of their penalties earned through stick infractions.

The first major sign of the enforcer’s rapid decline has been in the total number of fights that occur in an average SHL season. In the STHS days, the players that focused on knuckle-dusting (or had at least invested a fair bit into fighting) would typically expect to fight between 4 or 6 times in a season. Once the transition to FHM 6 occurred, this average dwindled a decent bit, with league-leading fighters hitting the 4-6 range, but an average enforcer earning most of their penalty minutes with 2-minute minors, and getting into the occasional couple of fights each season. Now that we have transitioned into FHM8, albeit with a small sample size of five seasons, the numbers are beginning to dwindle even further. In S69, the record for number of fights for a player was… one. One fight, split between a smattering of players that may or may not have put any points into fighting at all. Last year, the record was two fights, earned solely by Towelie, and only 15 players got into a fight at all. Before that in S67 saw the league leader, Ville Kurri, once again getting into only two fights, and this time only 13 unique players got into a scrap at all over that 66-game season with 20 teams (Kurri was the only player who fought twice).The first season of FHM8, S66, saw Lewis HamiltonIsBlessed, lead the league with 3 fights, a paltry amount over 66 games, and who still lost out to Von Schnicktenburg in PIMs. In the most recent S70, we saw a slight jump to the 3 league-leaders in fights scrapping twice over 66 games. The player with the highest score in fighting, Dusty Rhodes (with a 16 in fighting and a 16 in aggression) earned a total of 0 fights over the season, but 31 points as a rookie.

In the SMJHL, the numbers are only slightly better near the top of the board, with a handful of players earning exactly 2 fights (and only one player who won both, a bruiser in Maine literally named Goony Tunes, who has their fighting rating cranked to 15). Even in the junior leagues, with players constantly cycling and some IA 155s seeing ice time, a player can nearly max out fighting and see nothing in the sim to show for it. Franchise records for SMJHL teams regarding penalty minutes saw players hit 200-300 PIMs in a season in earlier eras. While I don’t seek to argue that an adjustment should be made solely to break records, it is a symptom of atrophy when even half of that PIM total is now completely, entirely unattainable by a player who might try to build a goon today. In S69, the SMJHL league leader in PIM was Jarrod Lakemore with 58 PIM in 68 games, and I’m pretty sure he barely won those honors because he was traded partway through the season, and played two more games than most others, because he had zero fights contributing to his PIM score (despite having a rating of 11 in fighting and 13 in aggression). In the FHM 8 era, there has not yet been player to achieve even 1 PIM per game at the SMJHL level, currently capping out at a measly 65 PIM in 66 games by Din Djarin back in season 67 (Who is the current PIM seasonal record holder in FHM8… which they did with a score of 5 aggression and 5 fighting, which adds to my point that to get more PIMS than others requires you to be unlucky rather than physical or scrappy).

Furthermore, penalty minutes and fights aren’t the only physical tools now off the table. Even if a user didn’t want to make a pure goon, physical grinders and bodycheckers are also feeling the drain of stats with severe reductions to hitting. Once again, let’s look at the record books.
In the STHS eras, Danny Foster led the 66-game record with exactly 300 hits in a single season. Foster also holds the second place single-season record with 260 hits, with the rest of the top-five hitting 250 times or more.
In the FHM6 era, Panda’s single season totals blew up the 66-game era with 525 and 515 hits in two different seasons. The rest of the top 5 all have well over 400 hits in a single season.
In the FHM8 era? The record had fallen to 181 hits in S67, by Liam Slate, who is still active and currently plays for the San Francisco Pride. S70 saw this record finally be beaten, by 1 hit, with Yannick Svoboda earning 182 hits for LAP this most recent season. At the highest level, that is an over 300 hit drop per season between the FHM6 days and now, and still only about half of what total hits were achievable by a player in the STHS years.

Meanwhile, scoring has rocketed up, greatly diminishing any perceived impact of defense-first or physical players. The following statistics draw from all SHL seasons from the FHM era - both FHM6 and FHM8, starting in S53 and leading up to this most recent season, S70. I compiled three statistics next to each season: The first metric is GF (Goals for the entire season, adding up the flat total of every goal all SHL teams scored that year). The second number listed is GpT (Goals per Team (GF/Teams in the league): As expansion teams were added, the number of total SHL games played in a season would go up, so the total goals would go up as well. GpT helps see league scoring numbers without the flat inflation from new teams being added. The final number is PPG players, the number of skaters that season who scored a Point Per Game or more (Only counting players who played every game)

S70: 4930 GF (246.5 GpT), 68 PPG players
S69: 4729 GF (236.5 GpT), 52 PPG players
S68: 4828 GF (241.4 GpT), 61 PPG players
S67: 4813 GF (240.7 GpT), 55 PPG players
S66: 4982 GF (249.1 GpT), 54 PPG players
S65: 4056 GF (202.8 GpT), 29 PPG players
S64: 4379 GF (218.9 GpT), 32 PPG players
S63: 4159 GF (207.9 GpT), 26 PPG players
S62: 4337 GF (216.9 GpT), 31 PPG players
S61: 4182 GF (209.1 GpT), 30 PPG players
S60: 4254 GF (212.7 GpT), 27 PPG players
S59: 3747 GF (208.2 GpT), 20 PPG players
S58: 3520 GF (195.6 GpT), 28 PPG players
S57: 3563 GF (197.9 GpT), 30 PPG players
*S56: 2637 GF (146.5 GpT), 31 PPG players
*S55: 2293 GF (143.3 GpT), 22 PPG players
*S54: 2469 GF (154.3 GpT), 30 PPG players
*S53: 2336 GF (146 GpT), 22 PPG players

*The asterisk notes the initial FHM seasons, between S53 and S56, where only 50 games were played in a season. Starting in S57 and up to the present, the SHL has 66 game schedules for each team.

As we can see, scoring has skyrocketed with the implementation of FHM8. To demonstrate why I am isolating FHM8 as the cause, I can observe the following patterns:

1. When expansion teams are added, the total number of GF went up, but NOT the GpT. After Seattle and Atlanta were added in S56, the GpT barely fluctuated, going from 143.3 to 146.5 GpT. Between S59 to S60, before and after Philadelphia and Montreal were added, the GpT also tepidly increases from 208.2 to 212.7

2. The number of games in a season would obviously affect both GF and GpT, as can be seen in the jump between S56 and S57. The 50-game seasons averaged in the 140’s for GpT, and the 66-game era before FHM8 stayed stable between 195 and 218 GpT - not a significant variance

3. The only significant change to explain the seemingly permanent massive jump in GF and GpT between S65 and S66, is the transition from FHM6 to FHM8. There were no expansions or schedule changes to the SHL that season

With the implementation of FHM8, without an increase in games or teams, the SHL has seen the GpT climb over 40 points - meaning on average, every single team is scoring 40 more goals per season, which means there are 40 more goals per team being let in - a good defense is now much harder to achieve, and top teams now only let in few goals because they have possession of the puck and are winning 7-0 for much of their games. A total of around 800-900 more goals have been added per season (and given the possibility of the goal and two assists being earned per goal, up to 2700 extra points to be earned by skaters).

You might ask - “Okay Rancidbudgie, I get your point, but why did you include the PPG player stats in this”?
In addition to total scoring going higher, the number of PPG players exploded, almost exactly DOUBLING from 20-30 skaters in the FHM6 era to 50-60 in the FHM8 era. Notice the change from 50 to 66 games a season AND the expansion teams being added seemingly had no effect on these averages. Total scoring has jumped up multiple times with teams being added, and the schedule change brought a big change in GF and GpT. But nothing until FHM8 changed the averages of the PPG players. Season in and out, there would be roughly 7% of skaters in a given season who played the full schedule and would crack a PPG. Now, that number is about 17%, or 1 in every 5.8 players who reach a point per game in a season.

So why has the number of PPG players spiked now, despite staying consistent before? And why does that matter?
I would pose the argument that FHM8 has drastically increased the total scoring of the SHL, which in itself might not be a bad thing (unless you are a goalie, and we have already heard many grievances from that front already). However, combining this with the sharp decline in defensive and physical stats being generated (like hits, fights, and PIMs), I pose that the defensive aspects of this engine are sorely under-evaluated in comparison to FHM6, and any players that focused on such builds became fairly irrelevant, not only being a detriment to team strategy in the current meta, but having such baseline problems as not even being able to generate the stats like they did before. Grinders and physical players are barely earning hits, despite building into that. Goons and enforcers don’t get into fights, even when facing off against someone else with high fighting, strength and aggression. Defensive forwards likely only qualify as such with the sim-generated stats because they are on a team that has possession of the puck so much. Unless you want to build a player that scores lots of points, there doesn’t seem to be any other archetype available to skaters anymore.

Riding off into Legend
It seems that the Turd Ferguson trophy, and by extension the role associated with it, has fully lost its identity in the FHM8 era. The custom now appears to be that you can accidentally win an SHL award for the most PIM in a season by having a player with slightly below average speed and stick checking on a not-great team (which gets you some extra stick infraction calls), and not a player built to fight, hit, and actually earn PIMs. Users that build as an enforcer, goon, or other skilled pugilist on skates don’t appear to receive any significant bumps to penalty minutes, or even fights, and investing TPE in hitting now gives you incredibly diminishing returns compared to all previous eras. The four current SHL players with the highest Aggression scores in S69 (2 players with 13, 2 with 12), have around 30-ish PIMs a season, with only Kayden Pale cracking 40 PIMs, a career best for them). The two players with a score of 13 fighting - sub 400 TPE IAs Dork Dipplet and Kayden King - got into zero and one fight this season respectively. The next 9 players with high fighting scores (Six players with a fighting score of 10, and three players with a score of 11), had four fights amongst the lot of them for the entirety of season 69. Four of those aforementioned 9 players have combined for eight total seasons without registering a single fight in their entire careers. All of these players are routinely and consistently out-majored by well over a dozen players who unluckily got a few extra tripping calls that season.

I actually sent out a call to the site in the general discussion forum to ask the community’s opinions on the state of physical role players, and got back limited replies. Goons and physical players aren’t the most popular builds, but I was hoping to get some outside perspective to come out of the woodwork. Which is why I’m thankful @juniped reached out to me to talk about the role of the goon in today’s SHL. A user famed for their physical players, you might remember their former player, Juni Panda, being mentioned in this article as one of the last true enforcers to grace the ice in the SHL. Panda was called up to the SHL for a few games in S59, played 22 games in S60, and played 6 full seasons (mostly with Manhattan) until S66. Panda holds the gold, silver and bronze medals for single-season PIMs in the FHM6 era, with 226, 201, and 178 (achieved three consecutive years between S61 and S63). They also hold the top two years in the FHM6 era for hits, with 525 and 515 hits in single seasons. During their SHL career, Panda played in 422 games, racking up 869 PIMs. This averages out to just over 2 PIMs per game. Asking Juniped about his career and why they enjoy playing rough-and-tumble types, they replied:

"I like goons and enforcers for a couple reasons. One is that it's pretty different. All the big SHL players are all like super "optimal" I guess. Snipers and walls of defenders. I find the idea to be a physical player, keeping the law on the ice just a lot more exciting. I know it's even a style of hockey not as popular now irl but honestly I think it's one of the most exciting parts and what really sets it apart from other big sports. Plus it kind of gives you a special role on a team usually nobody else has. I'm not really in it for the glory and I think it's a cool way to be able to help my team.
I've noticed that FHM 8 really seems to have cut down on how much hitting and fighting really seem to happen that on top of the removal of individual strategies actually hurt the archetype just as much as some of the more broken roles. You used to be able to turn up an aggressive players sliders to make them hit and fight the opposing players to maybe at least get some "advantage" but that's been cut down a lot too. Maybe FHM 8 could solve this in the end but it's been a few seasons now and I really haven't seen a change. Maybe that's because it's an archetype nobody really played anymore but my player can't put up NEARLY the same numbers. Less than a fifth of what my last one was able to. "

The breakdown of Panda’s enforcing antics throughout their SHL career is as follows:
S65: 30 PIMs
S64: 32 PIMs
S63: 156 PIMs
S62: 201 PIMs
S61: 226 PIMs
S60: 178 PIMs
S59: 39 PIMs (in 22 games with Manhattan)
S58: 7 PIMs (in 4 games with Toronto)
As you can see, Juni Panda made almost 800 of those 869 total penalty minutes in just 4 seasons, with the first 2 being shortened for GP, and the final two simply dropping off the map to 30 and 32 PIMs. So what happened to Panda between S63 and season 64? His team, deployment, and ice time didn’t seem to change. The noticeable factor, as far as I could isolate, was this: the tactics restriction that came into play for S64. Individual sliders and player tactics were abolished as options for GMs, to help combat the FHM sim knowledge gap for GMs and hopefully increase parity (personally, I think both desired effects have indeed happened since then, so a net positive). However, this is when we see the first initial wave of PIMs, hits, and fights taking a massive dive in frequency. Panda would be retired by the time FHM8 was implemented in S66, which I have already demonstrated to be the lowest hitting and fighting era in SHL history by far.

Wrap-Up
As well as featuring Juniped, I suppose this article is my own personal cry for help. This article began as a curiosity, and as I dug deeper into the numbers i realized the player I am building, Ignacio Garza, has functionally two options in front of him:
1. Change my build away from the identity I want, and focus on mimicking closer to players like Red Kirkby, Mikko Rashford, Lias Ekholm-Gunnarson, or Evil Allbran. They are the 4 players who all shattered the previous SHL scoring record - all in the same season, S70. No one had scored more than 116 points before this season - the first three names I mentioned all scored at 130 points or more this time around.
2. Keep my identity as a “non-offensive forward” and my build intact, and anticipate a career where I not only vastly underperform my peers offensively (while still somehow scoring 0.3-0.5 PPG), but receive no real noticeable change in any other stats, even the ones specifically meant to be generated by defensive/physical skaters. Even if I ramped up to 20 fighting and aggression, I might likely anticipate to be out-slugged in a given season by a playmaker with no points in fighting who had an off day.

Neither of those really seem appealing to me, and I wonder if there are other users out there who might feel the same, but just haven’t put the feeling into tangibles.

So... is this something that needs addressing? And if so, how would it even be addressed? In my personal opinion, a decrease in roles and the variety in which users can build their players is only a negative thing. It would be personally unpleasant to think that the state of SHL skaters is now reducing to a point where any impact or production is really only differentiated by their successful offensive output, as the role players largely go extinct or underperform into irrelevancy. So on that level, I think this something that should warrant conversation - something about the structure of the sim has started to make it pretty useless to invest in a role player’s build, be it a grinding forward, a rough-and-tumble old-school defenseman or a straight-up goon. Even with a player’s fighting and aggression boosted upwards, it doesn’t seem to translate at all into fights or PIMs.

Methods to address this remain a little unclear to me, as it appears to me that FHM8 itself really de-incentivizes fights and PIMs to a miniscule rate, and as far as I am aware there is currently no fighting slider available in the sim for the league/HO to utilize, only a penalty slider (which would really only increase the ratio of random stick infractions, rather than up the fighting majors or misconducts). Additionally, players who build goons and agitators might not be deployed as such by the GMs of a given team, as their impact on the ice is minimal unless in droves (Reference: The role player limits and player deployment rules of older years, after an entire team of aggressive forecheckers was deployed in the FHM era). In previous eras and with previous players, I remember fondly the good LR presences who were active but weren’t fully updating, especially on rebuilding teams, who went the full goon route so that they could have some fun and enjoy their player in a new way, without them necessarily being a top earner (miss you Niccolo Livius). Those players have one less option as a skater now in a league where a variety of impactful options weren’t abundant already, and most role players today lose a lot of flavor and identity. These players and builds simply become worse versions of scoring forwards and two-way defenseman, with nothing to differentiate their identities other than slightly (or significantly) worse offensive numbers.

This article largely is a lament to a loss in user variety when it comes to building their player, and FHM8 has addressed a lot of previous issues for the site, so laying this at the feet of FHM8 isn’t entirely fair of me - but this topic is something I hoped to open up to discussion and bring some attention to, as I am curious to hear the community's thoughts on this change in identity, and perhaps brainstorm potential solutions as the seasons go by.

Thank you again for reading and listening,

Rancidbudgie

Thank you to Ham and Sulo for the sigs!

Henrik · 04-28-2023, 05:52 AM

Great read. It definitely feels like we are getting more and more one-dimensional in the 'meta', which is a real shame. I'm not sure what the answer is but I think you have articulated some of the things in that the current state of our sim really has me feeling a little burnt out by.

spooked · 04-28-2023, 09:43 AM

There is probably a discussion to be had somewhere about reenabling some sliders, like on players at least, so you can pump up people who want to do specific things well. With testing banned, you can probably figure something out. Also the amount of silly scorelines in the results burn me out too. I actually quipped in the LR at the number of 9-1 and 7-3 results I saw this season, and then looked at our playoff sim against WPG, in which we lost 9-1 and 7-3. 10 Goal games being the average is not really attractive as a league in my opinion. I also don't know what the point of playing defensive as a player is when every single team in the league has the offensive slider all the way to max or about max so your player will always be asked to cheat defensively no matter how you build them. FHM right now has basically 0 player control on what your player will do in the sim.

EDIT: The dream for me would be players picking a tactical role and/or slider set themselves for their players, with some small ability to adjust it every season or something, but it would be clunky in application, but I don't think any other approach would be really better than now tbh. FHM just be like that...

JT3 · 04-28-2023, 11:48 AM

Credits to OrbitingDeath, Tweedle, Incite, Wasty, and Slothfacekilla for sigs!

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Samsung virtual assistant · 04-28-2023, 12:06 PM

Noooo the word Gun makes my Hoplophobia go bananas :(

***sve7en*** · 04-28-2023, 12:18 PM

04-28-2023, 09:43 AMspooked Wrote: EDIT: The dream for me would be players picking a tactical role and/or slider set themselves for their players, with some small ability to adjust it every season or something, but it would be clunky in application, but I don't think any other approach would be really better than now tbh. FHM just be like that...

I'm always going to be one of the biggest advocates for player agency, but this doesn't accomplish that and would just result in GMs having more control over the FHM side. A small minority of players will have sliders and roles they want where the rest are going to let GMs have control, knowing how the SHL works, some of that minority will get selected against in team building because they're not as flexible. We already can see that in the teams that look for their roster's feedback on roles and get little input back, as well as how a majority of teams and players work in tandem to build players because players don't want the TPE and player they invest in to be unproductive.

***RAmenAmen*** · 04-28-2023, 12:42 PM

Sliders being locked to team-only is a huge factor in the "everyone plays the same" meta. If I can't tell my physical defensive forward to slow down and focus on checking, or my flashy sniper who's allergic to defense to stay high and stop backchecking, then how are players supposed to feel like they can or should build anything but a solid two-way player? It seems the league has defaulted to offense over defense, both because FHM seems to like it and most players would rather score goals than lay hits, and now PPG players are the norm and no longer something special to admire, while other roles have vanished to obscurity altogether. Defensemen at least still seem to have the basic choice of offense or defense, but in a new era of record scoring, there's almost nothing to distinguish one great forward from another anymore.

spooked · 04-28-2023, 01:27 PM

04-28-2023, 12:18 PMsve7en Wrote: I'm always going to be one of the biggest advocates for player agency, but this doesn't accomplish that and would just result in GMs having more control over the FHM side. A small minority of players will have sliders and roles they want where the rest are going to let GMs have control, knowing how the SHL works, some of that minority will get selected against in team building because they're not as flexible. We already can see that in the teams that look for their roster's feedback on roles and get little input back, as well as how a majority of teams and players work in tandem to build players because players don't want the TPE and player they invest in to be unproductive.

Are you saying if we enable sliders, players have less control because GMs will set the sliders anyway? Or if we allow players to pick what they want their sliders to be, somehow GMs get to 4D chess their way into having more control by avoiding non-flexible people? I cannot really figure out what you mean to be honest, but as a GM, I don't really know what the purpose of being a player here is right now for many reasons, and this is probably going to be my last if HO doesn't start making moves soon, but based on what they say their idea of parity is, I doubt we see any changes soon to make the league more fun for people who aren't on the top X teams each season.

Slappydoodle · 04-28-2023, 01:28 PM

This has always been a league of slavish devotion to a so called "meta" build. The outliers that want something different are undervalued and unappreciated. People want to score lots of points and win awards. With the switch to FHM8 we have finally reached the point where even if you want too, no deviation is possib any more

caltroit_red_flames · 04-28-2023, 02:34 PM

04-28-2023, 01:28 PMSlappydoodle Wrote: This has always been a league of slavish devotion to a so called "meta" build. The outliers that want something different are undervalued and unappreciated. People want to score lots of points and win awards. With the switch to FHM8 we have finally reached the point where even if you want too, no deviation is possib any more

Blaming FHM8 seems like a copout. Those of us that were around remember the days of 99 SC, 99 DF, 99 SK, 90 everything else except CK. And then when we found the exploit it was 99 SC and 40 everything else.

I truly believe we need to look into introducing archetypes with a balancing to a la PBE/ISFL. Metas still exist but there is some level of enforced variety and if you can find out how to actually balance things by introducing high ceiling but low floor builds for less active users, defensive specialists, offensive specialists with tradeoffs then you'll see some true variety.

Until then we're stuck with this, but 1.) easier said than done 2.) going back to the "good old days" would show everything how not so good they were

Symmetrik · 04-28-2023, 03:06 PM

04-28-2023, 01:27 PMspooked Wrote: Are you saying if we enable sliders, players have less control because GMs will set the sliders anyway? Or if we allow players to pick what they want their sliders to be, somehow GMs get to 4D chess their way into having more control by avoiding non-flexible people? I cannot really figure out what you mean to be honest, but as a GM, I don't really know what the purpose of being a player here is right now for many reasons, and this is probably going to be my last if HO doesn't start making moves soon, but based on what they say their idea of parity is, I doubt we see any changes soon to make the league more fun for people who aren't on the top X teams each season.

I think the point is that even if you allow the sliders, players don't really end up with more because they ultimately with 95% of the time say "whatever is best for the team", so it goes back to the GM anyway and it's ultimately just a tool for GMs to make their team better rather than giving players more options to build differently.

I feel like picking the enforcer role for an article like this is also a weak position to start this conversation from - the enforcer is largely phased out in the NHL as well. The NHL's PIM leader had 150 in 80 games. Players picking up 200+ PIMs in the SHL in 66 games isn't representative of the game of hockey today. 50 of those 150 for the NHL's leader were from misconducts as well. The leader in PIMs for the NHL for a player who didn't take a misconduct/game misconduct is only 81 in 66 games. People have realized that players who rack up a ton of PIMs pretty much always put their team at a disadvantage.

Jorec · 04-28-2023, 09:21 PM

Well this was a really well written if depressing article, considering I just started building an agitator.

soevil · 04-28-2023, 09:37 PM

I was really disappointed to hear that fighting was basically no existent when I was creating my player. Not that I wanted that to be his identity, but the ability to get in a scrap here and there and win was really exciting for me. Instead I was urged not to put any points into fighting because it was a waste.

***Wally*** · 04-28-2023, 10:26 PM

BarnabasCollins · 04-29-2023, 03:39 PM

I researched and made a Bob Probert clone in Dusty and nothing even remotely plays like him. Very disappointing, wanted to have some fun with this player but with fhm I guess that's impossible.

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