EHM The Blue Line

Well after playing my first 24 hours I'll say something about the game. I love it and I'm back in it!

I like the way the attributes are handled now. It looks more realistic and we can easily see who steps out in a specific attribute now. Good job to those who rated the players.

I also like how balanced the game is now. In my first season you could clearly see the parity among the league and how close the competition is now. The final scores are more realistic as well as the pts players earn. (Though I didn't mind scoring 150+ pts in '07 ) Also the rating system seems more realistic too, with most players between 7 and 8. I think it fits better that way, since I don't think any players can give a 10/10 rating 5 games in a row.

So yeah, I really like it and I'm looking foward for even better improvement!

Is RFA broken? All RFA guys in my save game ended up going to UFA since the last update...

The seemed to have removed the ability to right click on a team to invite them to play an exhibition game.

Also when I'm in the draft, I would view who is drafting when, right click on a team to orchestrate a trade. I cannot do that anymore. Now I have to click on the team and click on the propose trade button.

Not a big deal, but these little things just add extra steps to things that I want to do.

This latest patch is really messing things up for me. I have signed prospects who aren't showing up in my roster unless I select show all contracted players, but I can't use them.

I have Goldobin under contract. I can't send him back to juniors as his junior career is over and when I send him to my AHL affiliate, his name shows up being green. If I click on him to check him out, he's not part of any team. It's almost like he's on loan, but not with anyone. I can't even use Thomas Chabot.

It's a bit messed up.

I have the exact same problem. This happens at the beginning of free agency. Chabot is not found on the roster unless I click on all contracted. Also tried to call up Nick Paul, but he doesn't come up. On the all contracted screen his name is green, as if he was loaned somewhere. When I open his profile it looks like he would be a free agent, showing the Canadian flag and colours yet the contract screen has all the current info. Also the game crashes if I press offer out on loan in his profile.

Weird stuff.

Same thing here when I tried to offer out Goldobin. I've started a new game to see if that fixes the current issues. Kind of bothers me because I made trades that I don't think I'll be able to make again and I managed to draft Auston Matthews.

It seems the latest issue fixed my RFA problem with Beau Bennett. I reran from my last save and he's RFA now. But Chris Kreider is a UFA, not RFA, is that correct?

I simmed through a season with a new game and Chabot seems to show up properly.

Guess I'll just have to start over too, then.
A bit of an annoyance, this. But I guess it is what it is.

Thanks for the info Stone169.

This game is edging closer to being unplayable for me. Haven't really noticed anything about changes to the match engine in the changelogs (unless I've completely missed it), but my goodness...some players are unable to play 2 games in 3 days, let alone back to back games now. It's not like they have bad stamina either but they get SO tired and coupled with my team having way too many PP opportunites still (7-12 PPs/game is the normal) forces my guys to play well over 20min/game. And as of the latest patching they can't cope any longer.

saberhagen83 wrote:This game is edging closer to being unplayable for me. Haven't really noticed anything about changes to the match engine in the changelogs (unless I've completely missed it), but my goodness...some players are unable to play 2 games in 3 days, let alone back to back games now. It's not like they have bad stamina either but they get SO tired and coupled with my team having way too many PP opportunites still (7-12 PPs/game is the normal) forces my guys to play well over 20min/game. And as of the latest patching they can't cope any longer.

Strange. I've not noticed any such problems. Maybe the patch somehow made your save buggy, but a new game would fix it?

Tasku wrote:

saberhagen83 wrote:This game is edging closer to being unplayable for me. Haven't really noticed anything about changes to the match engine in the changelogs (unless I've completely missed it), but my goodness...some players are unable to play 2 games in 3 days, let alone back to back games now. It's not like they have bad stamina either but they get SO tired and coupled with my team having way too many PP opportunites still (7-12 PPs/game is the normal) forces my guys to play well over 20min/game. And as of the latest patching they can't cope any longer.

Strange. I've not noticed any such problems. Maybe the patch somehow made your save buggy, but a new game would fix it?

I did not notice that either. Since reading that post I've been monitoring my team's fitness level closely and so far no problem in playing back to back games (regardless of the players level).

Probably you have already analysed it but how do you roll your lines? Is it possible you are overplaying some of your players?

You make a good point, it is possible the patch broke my game. They do get overplayed quite a lot though, and this is mainly because the AI teams takes so many penalties and as my PP consist mainly of my top 6 players some do play between 20-28min. It wasn't as big of an issue before the patch, I mostly had to rotate some in b2b games to keep them fresh, now they tumble down to 55-75% and won't recover even if I put them on rest for a day or 2.

I quite often roll all 4 lines, so I have it set to "equal" with 1st & 2nd line on 30sec shifts and 3rd/4th on 20sec. Chasing a game in the 3rd I usually go "overload" or "just 2". If PPs are at a realistic level my top 6 guys play around 18-20min.

I will try starting up a new save tonight, see if it my save that has become broken.

saberhagen83 wrote:I quite often roll all 4 lines, so I have it set to "equal" with 1st & 2nd line on 30sec shifts and 3rd/4th on 20sec. Chasing a game in the 3rd I usually go "overload" or "just 2". If PPs are at a realistic level my top 6 guys play around 18-20min.

FYI based on your shift times you're assigning your top 6 to play 60% of the time, so if there were no penalties at all and if you never switched to Overload or Just 2 your top 6 guys would play 18 minutes a game


Also, Condition relates to Practice too, so practice + icetime ingame affects Condition (and the game has been tweaked to better represent this, as there were many reports of all Intensive/mostly Intensive Practice not affecting Condition much if at all).

saberhagen83 wrote:they tumble down to 55-75% and won't recover even if I put them on rest for a day or 2.

Hmmm...that sounds strange (I'd think if this was widespread there'd be a lot more reports of it). I noticed some changes since the last update, like I can't practice all players on Intense and play 3 games in 4 nights, and I found that putting certain players on Resting when playing 3 games in 4 nights resulted in most players being at/near 100% when the 3 games in 4 nights was done

nino33 wrote:FYI based on your shift times you're assigning your top 6 to play 60% of the time, so if there were no penalties at all and if you never switched to Overload or Just 2 your top 6 guys would play 18 minutes a game

Yes. I'd be fine with that actually. Realized I was a bit off when I posted that. I used to play more evenly but switched it some time ago to go a little more on the top lines with shorter shifts. I went back and checked some games where we had 3-4 PPs and my top line played between 18-21min and 2nd line had about 16-18min, which is fine and they seem fine condition-wise. Bottom 6 plays between 10-13min (including PK time for some). The problem with whatever tweak they did in the patch then is that since we usually end up playing 8-12 PPs/game forces my players to play more then they should.

Also, Condition relates to Practice too, so practice + icetime ingame affects Condition (and the game has been tweaked to better represent this, as there were many reports of all Intensive/mostly Intensive Practice not affecting Condition much if at all).

I was thinking about that. But I've had bad experience using intensive training in the past, so I leave it pretty neutral.

Hmmm...that sounds strange (I'd think if this was widespread there'd be a lot more reports of it). I noticed some changes since the last update, like I can't practice all players on Intense and play 3 games in 4 nights, and I found that putting certain players on Resting when playing 3 games in 4 nights resulted in most players being at/near 100% when the 3 games in 4 nights was done

Yeah. I suppose, like I was thinking before, that something might have messed up my save. They seem to recover far to slow to be normal.

saberhagen83 wrote:like I was thinking before, that something might have messed up my save.

Yep, that could be it

saberhagen83 wrote:we usually end up playing 8-12 PPs/game

Or maybe this is the issue! HaHa
Maybe there's just to many penalties/powerplays? I've never looked at it closely (how does EHM compare with the NHL over a season of data? last year in the NHL teams had 212-294 Power Play Opportunities, and teams had 209-383 Minor Penalties)
Could connect to tactics too I suppose (maybe "to many penalties" only occurs with certain tactical matchups?)

nino33 wrote:Or maybe this is the issue! HaHa
Maybe there's just to many penalties/powerplays? I've never looked at it closely (how does EHM compare with the NHL over a season of data? last year in the NHL teams had 212-294 Power Play Opportunities, and teams had 209-383 Minor Penalties)
Could connect to tactics too I suppose (maybe "to many penalties" only occurs with certain tactical matchups?)

Looking back at last season, we had the most PP opportunites with 465, 2nd Oilers with 448. The team with the fewest was Colorado with 333. This season I have played 16 games so far and already had 105 PPs, so on pace for 530+! So yeah, I'd say this needs some serious tweaking still. We were only short handed 263 times, which is alright, but we sit dead last with the team above 339...so a pretty big difference. I would hazard a guess AI teams play too aggressive, I don't so that is probably why we don't take so many penalties.

Unfortunate for me the PPs are a curse though as we have like 13%. Our PK is always around 76-78% cause opposition either don't score of they score 1/2, 2/3, 2/4 or worse.

Are you playing Quick Sim or Full Sim?

So glad to see Nino answering something about that here. That might be the answer I was looking for the question I asked a couple of days ago in the general tactic thread.

I simply think the humongus amount of ice time my checking line and my PK guys had was because I was taking too much penalties.

I still don't understand though how Zadorov, who is only on my third pair, without PK or PP time is sometimes finishing with 20+ min when Barrie who is on every lines finishes with 16-18 min.

nino33 wrote:Are you playing Quick Sim or Full Sim?

I have it on Full Sim. Haven't noticed any difference playing on quick, possibly could have effect league wide though...never thought about that actually. Still have a lot of special teams out in my own games.

Just wondering...
Full Sim's the way to go IMO (I use it 100% of the time)

It would seem AI NHL teams are back to signing scouts as head coaches. Someone reported it earlier, but I did not see it in my game until just recently.

saberhagen83 wrote:

nino33 wrote:Or maybe this is the issue! HaHa
Maybe there's just to many penalties/powerplays? I've never looked at it closely (how does EHM compare with the NHL over a season of data? last year in the NHL teams had 212-294 Power Play Opportunities, and teams had 209-383 Minor Penalties)
Could connect to tactics too I suppose (maybe "to many penalties" only occurs with certain tactical matchups?)

Looking back at last season, we had the most PP opportunites with 465, 2nd Oilers with 448. The team with the fewest was Colorado with 333. This season I have played 16 games so far and already had 105 PPs, so on pace for 530+! So yeah, I'd say this needs some serious tweaking still. We were only short handed 263 times, which is alright, but we sit dead last with the team above 339...so a pretty big difference. I would hazard a guess AI teams play too aggressive, I don't so that is probably why we don't take so many penalties.

Unfortunate for me the PPs are a curse though as we have like 13%. Our PK is always around 76-78% cause opposition either don't score of they score 1/2, 2/3, 2/4 or worse.

That is so annoying. I reported this penalties issue over the SI forums back in December but it seems it's still not fixed.

Regarding the conditioning, in my experience the following thresholds apply:

- Forwards: more than +/- 6,5 minutes a period will cause around 10% drop in energy level
- Defense: more than +/- 9,5 minutes a period will cause around 10% drop in energy level

Everything with less minutes is far less likely to drop a lot in energy levels.

Real life stats for comparison (yes, this is realistic ):
http://www.nhl.com/stats/player?reportT ... te=0&pos=F
http://www.nhl.com/stats/player?reportT ... te=0&pos=D

My problem was that I was running my 1st line, 1st PP, 1st PK and ES 4vs4 lines with for example Crosby. He would end up playing 26 minutes a game every night (unrealistic!), so I had to limit the ATOI for these kind of guys. I ended up running PK with different players than PP. Also I made sure that PP is evenly distributed, but 1st line gets 60 seconds per shift. Since then I didn't have too much problems, unless I got a lot of PP chances which weren't converted. I then switch around 3rd and 4th liners on PP to evenly distribute the ice times.

As bad as it feels at first, I think this update makes the game way more like real life. You're forced to make decisions on ice time which you didn't had to before. Playing a strong opponent next game? Limit ice time for star players. Really need to win this game? Overload and let your stars play more, but take the consequences next game. And this also enforces players to draft bottom-6 forwards and 3rd line (PK) D-guys, because you can't play your superstars on every line, every game of the season.

saberhagen83 wrote:This game is edging closer to being unplayable for me. Haven't really noticed anything about changes to the match engine in the changelogs (unless I've completely missed it), but my goodness...some players are unable to play 2 games in 3 days, let alone back to back games now. It's not like they have bad stamina either but they get SO tired and coupled with my team having way too many PP opportunites still (7-12 PPs/game is the normal) forces my guys to play well over 20min/game. And as of the latest patching they can't cope any longer.

I'm noticing the same on my game since the update. Some random players are losing conditioning in a massive way after each game. I've swapped them onto "resting" practice but after several months on resting there's no improvement. Their Stamina is 95+!
Other players on the more intense schedules are not affected, including the players I call up who have played a dozen more games as they've been in the AHL.
I had thought my line usage of 'Normal' was causing it as one or two had high minutes (but not all of them), but having swapped to 'Equal' it hasn't helped.

I really don't want to lose a long running game, I only recently went back to it after my fantasy draft game suffered an RFA/contract bug. What's going on with this game?? It was really good at one point.