In the meantime, here's an update from Jeff regarding this weekend's final preparations:
Playable Leagues:
No major changes to what I posted earlier, all those leagues will be playable. The situation with the Canadian junior leagues isn't great; we lost our QMJHL researcher midweek so that league is in very rough shape and the OHL, while a little better, also has a lot of holes in the data. They're going to stay playable, though, because it would cause too many problems at this point to pull them out. But I strongly recommend not trying to start a game in the QMJHL or OHL until they've had at least two or three more weeks of work done on them.
The Database:
Nothing significantly different than I said earlier. I spent a lot of time on Friday and Saturday getting the NHL prospects into acceptable condition and building up the prospect pools for the 2013 and 2014 draft enough that each should be good for 2-3 rounds of realism.
We ran into some problems getting the new name generation system set up, specifically with the feature that will let us specify ethnic name groups at the state/provincial (rather than national, as in OOTP) level. Since the whole system has to be implemented at the same time, we're just leaving the default OOTP names in place for now - so that's going to lead to some weirdness like too many hispanic names for US players, Canadian names lacking variety, and European names just being downright strange in places. The situation is very temporary, we plan on having the real system in place within a week or so.
The AI:
A little progress, but not much; it's still making most of the same mistakes, maybe to a slightly lesser degree.
Stats:
The low-scoring problem is mostly fixed. Still some issues with defencemen not getting enough points, but it's a vast improvement over where we were a couple of days ago.
Performance:
Stability is better; the crashes we're finding now are associated with an obvious cause (i.e., click on a certain thing and the game dies) as opposed to crashes that would occur mid-simulation with no apparent cause.
Speed still has a lot of room for improvement, things really start to crawl during certain parts of the offseason like the opening week of free agency.
Historical mode:
Progress, but still some problems. The roster handling and strange contracts remain as issues, albeit less severe ones now. Drafts work...once. Something's causing them to stop after the first year; we're looking into it. Expansion drafts seem to be OK now. There are issues with games that start before 1978-79 once they get to that season, because the demise of the Cleveland Barons isn't being handled correctly.
WHA will not be in, at least for now. The player database is completed through 1979-80; I was hoping to get a little more than that done but there were too many other things to do this weekend. But I'll get going again once things have settled down this week, and the 80s should go fairly quickly.
Customization:
Game Options:
Enable Injuries -> ok
Injury frequency -> ok
Development Options -> ok (aging speed and peak ages)
Hall of Fame Criteria -> ok
Autosave frequency -> ok
League Setup - Settings:
Game Engine Settings -> ok (regulates goals per game, penalties per game, etc.)
Number of Defense Pairing Used -> ok
League Details:
Name -> ok
Abbreviation -> ok
Cup Name -> ok
Nation -> disabled
Region -> disabled
Draft 1 + 2 -> disabled
Junior Type -> disabled
League Value -> disabled
Money Value -> disabled
Trade Frequency -> ok
Average budget -> disabled
Schedule Details -> all disabled
Allocate random contracts -> ok
Reset all injuries -> ok
Reset player contentment -> ok
Run computer manager on all teams- > ok
Generate Schedule -> disabled
League Expansion -> disabled
Draft Details -> ok
Playoffs:
Everything editable but creation of new playoffs disabled
Pre-PO/Relegation/Interleague-Tournament -> disabled
Roster Rules:
all disabled (roster sizes, number of foreigners, etc.)
League Rules
all disabled (salary cap, trading deadlines, etc.)
Contract Rules
all disabled (minimum and maximum ages, free agency, etc.)
Game Rules
all ok (points for W/L/T/OTL/SOL, OT/shootout rules, etc.)
Playoff Game Rules
all ok (as above except for playoffs)
Awards
all ok (which awards to use and their names)
League Names/Structure
All name edits on, all buttons/dropdowns disabled (so names can be edited, but teams can't be moved out of their division/conference)
Edit Team
all ok (basic team details - name, abbreviation, city, market size, attendance, arena)