Primis wrote:This has happened since the freeware version. It's just the AI's weird view of managing the roster. It especially used to happen with goalies in the freeware version.
The AI in EHM is supremely dumb and takes reputation of players into account much more than is reasonable, it's the same reason they keep signing 37 year old forwards who lost their legs half a decade ago on 5M a year deals and then can't resign their actual key players (who will ask for 11-13M a year contracts, cause they never heard about the salary cap).
If a player's CA is low/high enough they (the AI GM) will look past the reputation and play them/dump them regardless. For example if McDavid rolls the high end of his PA spectrum he will play in Edmonton from season 1 (using 15-16 rosters), if he rolls the very lowest end he sometimes gets to play in Erie until he's overaged. And generally he gets at least the 1 season extra with the Otters. On the other end of the spectrum we have someone like Joe Pavelski who tends to start losing his legs around 34 and hit "dear lord he's a pylon with stone hands"-mode around 36. But generally he will keep getting deals until he's almost 40 before retiring. The last 3-4 years he's putting up 4th liner numbers but still raking in 3-5M a year depending on how dumb that particular team is being.
This pretty much means that if a player is going to be good (~140-160 PA) but not Franchise/generationalist good, the team will just have him sit in the minors until he's ~23. Then they will trade him away for some 35 year old dman rental while they are all but guaranteed to miss the playoffs. The only saving grace is that they all do this, so the talent pool remains mostly the same, it's just you have literally no idea where a player will be from year to year. And once in a blue moon the rotations line up and one of the AI teams accidentally becomes competent for a single season. Then they mess it all up come trade deadline/off-season.
Add in that about 90% of the undrafted future prospects with set attributes have their Mentals set to make sense for their juniors attributes, not their finished attributes(minus the expected age gain) you end up with a lot of players that have high PA, but completely trash mentals. And the AI seems to not want to play those players in the NHL, which is fair. Cause they are really really poor for their CA. I've fixed that issue in my personal version of the db, and it seems to make them at least slightly more willing to play their prospects. But the catch 22 with rep means most never make it out of the AHL, or end up back in Europe. Despite being at least top 6 for their team on the depth charts(not that they are particularly accurate)
