Bantam players won't sign with me?

[snowkiddin]

Hi all,

So I've been playing a lot of EHM 2005 recently (great game), but I've been having some problems signing my WHL draft picks. I'm playing as the Wheat Kings, and there were a couple of players from the 2006 Bantam Draft that I wanted to sign on to my team. I waited the full year like you are supposed to.

The players that I am trying to sign are Wayne Glass, a winger who I took with the 11th overall pick in the 2006 WHL Bantam Draft, and Aaron Sullivan, a center who scored 104 (!!) goals in 60 games last year in midget, and who I specifically traded for the rights of (so it's a real bummer he won't sign).

Anyway, I tried to sign them, and a few lesser (but still good) players from that draft. Now, the other four signed with me, but Glass signed with the Grande Prairie Storm (AJHL) and Sullivan signed with the Notre Dame Hounds (SJHL). So both rejected my contract offers. What's really weird is that in their information, it says that both want to play Major Junior hockey, but they went to play in a lower level (Jr. A). Has anyone had this happen to them? Did I sign too many other 16 year olds and it won't let me sign them? I lost a lot of players last season to graduation, so I have the roster room for them. They both are highly thought of by the scouts, and my scouts rate them as "excellent prospects who can make an immediate impact," I was super pumped to have them on my team, but they won't sign!

One other thing I should mention: I am in July 2007. Both Glass (October) and Sullivan (December) have late birthdays, so technically they won't turn 16 until later in the season. Is this why they won't sign?

TL;DR: My two best prospects in the WHL won't sign for me, they signed to play in a lower league (despite "wanting to play Major Junior hockey" and I don't know why.

Bonus Question: In the Import draft in 2006, I drafted two of the best players in the draft, but they refused to sign with me and played in Europe last season (RSL and DEL respectively). This year, I made sure to draft players who said that they wanted to play Major Junior hockey. However, when I went to sign them, they didn't sign because "he has no interest in negotiating terms because he is concerned about the difference in language and lifestyle." Is this common? Do the imported players ever sign for your junior team?

Thanks for reading.

[Shindigs]

Exact same thing happens/happened in EHM 1 too. So it's not been fixed. My theory is that the issue lies in team reputation, at least in EHM1. But I haven't done any testing on it.

Simply put CHL teams have slightly lower rep than they should, and for some reason Junior A teams have HIGHER rep than CHL teams in a lot of cases, which causes the prospect to sign for them because they are a better team than you in the games eyes. Because the game only really seems to care about Rep when looking at how likely a player is to sign with any given team.

The way the team stops youth players who want to play in the CHL from signing with teams in Europe is by setting their wage demands to a hidden and absolutely enormous value. This way the AI won't ever sign them, even though they technically could; And any player who isn't being silly won't sign them either. The issue comes in with Junior A since they have a flat value for salary same as the CHL IIRC. This means that the player will be signing for the only salary that's possible to sign for, and thus completely bypasses the "fix" to make sure that won't happen in the form of the super high wage demands.

To reiterate I haven't done the testing to be 100% sure that's why it happens. But it's where I'd start looking.

[nino33]

Exact same thing happens/happened in EHM 1 too. So it's not been fixed. My theory is that the issue lies in team reputation, at least in EHM1. But I haven't done any testing on it.

Simply put CHL teams have slightly lower rep than they should, and for some reason Junior A teams have HIGHER rep than CHL teams in a lot of cases, which causes the prospect to sign for them because they are a better team than you in the games eyes. Because the game only really seems to care about Rep when looking at how likely a player is to sign with any given team.

The Junior A teams with a higher Rep than the CHL teams...does this show this way ingame somewhere?

Looking at the TBL database using the editor the WHL teams have a Reputation of 3500-4500, the Junior A teams in the west have a range of 1500-2700, and the bantam teams I looked at all had a Reputation around 500

[Shindigs]

I think it was changed to the latest version of the db as I did bring it up with Alessandro. But previously Calgary Mustangs used to have higher rep than the lowest rep WHL teams at least if memory serves me right. If you didn't have "generate no extra players on" you could very quickly find these teams by trying to sign one of the good FA generated players, this would cause all the high rep Junior A teams to instantly go in for that same player, and since their rep was higher the player would sign with them over you regardless of the "wants to play major junior" label. Since this was changed in the last few months I assume it wasn't fixed back in 05 as that wouldn't make much sense. They would sign with the Junior A team every time if you didn't offer a Key role and they did, and even when you did offer a Key role it wasn't 100% that you'd get the player over them. I think the CHL leagues used to have lower league rep too, putting them closer to that of Junior A. But I don't have any saved db where I haven't edited the rep values myself so I can't check the details. Haven't looked at this for the better part of a year so I can't recall exact values.

Edit: Found an old save I could get the values from, they weren't actually higher, just close enough that players wouldn't immediately prefer one over the other. The league rep gap was 2 less than it is now and the difference between the lowest WHL team and Highest AJHL team was within 1k rep of eachother. That's less of a rep gap than exists between teams in the same euro league. So it's close enough that a Key contract in the "lesser" league is still valued above a smaller contract in the "better" league by the player. I'm not entirely sure why the CHL teams have such low rep as it's literally the only place someone with Major Junior ambitions from that protected area to go. So it should be way above the rest, just like the NHL when looking at Men's leagues. The difference between Victoria Royals and Calgary Mustangs shouldn't be so small as to be ignored by a player when choosing where to sign. But it is/was. Haven't tested it in 10.1 to see if that still happens; Because it's possible the +2 league rep for the WHL fixed it.

[Manimal]

There is a 1k difference between the Calgary Mustangs and the Vctoria Royals right now in the db.
There is a difference of 4 on league reps for them (WHL and AJHL)

What values do you have them at in your edited db?
Nobody has worked on reputations in a while for major junior IIRC

[nino33]

There is a 1k difference between the Calgary Mustangs and the Vctoria Royals right now in the db.
There is a difference of 4 on league reps for them (WHL and AJHL)

That's what it is in the first ever database released for the new EHM too (TBL 7.3), and what it was last year (TBL 9.0b) and in the 2017-18 TBL beta database as well

[Shindigs]

There is a 1k difference between the Calgary Mustangs and the Vctoria Royals right now in the db.
There is a difference of 4 on league reps for them (WHL and AJHL)

That's what it is in the first ever database released for the new EHM too (TBL 7.3), and what it was last year (TBL 9.0b) and in the 2017-18 TBL beta database as well

No idea why it was 10 in that save for the WHL then. When I opened another save from the same db version it was 12. I'm looking at doing a WHL save soon as I've tinkered some with the rep values of teams and leagues. But haven't gotten there yet. Since the CHL more or less exists in a vacuum you could theoretically put the team reps very high without interrupting the rest of the world. Doing so might even help push prospect reps higher to make it more likely NHL teams play them in bigger roles (which isn't happening enough currently).

American/Canadian youth players essentially just have two choices College or Major Junior. If they pick College they won't go the major junior route no matter what as far as I know. So the players who pick college won't be affected by CHL team reps.
The players who do pick the Major Junior route obviously should always jump at a spot in the CHL over Junior A. So for them a high team rep in the CHL is entirely positive.
This leaves us with the Import draft players, I've personally never gotten a player who doesn't have the "wants to play in major junior" note to play for me in the CHL since you can't really use any incentives. So theoretically you shouldn't be able to break Europe by being able to sign the "wrong" prospects from there due to higher CHL team reps.

Maybe I'm missing something but personally I see no reason not to crank CHL teams to around 5k rep and up the league reps by maybe 1. I can't recall exactly what I did in my current version I'm about to test, but i'll get to you back on what I find.

I'm also in the process of testing what effect setting all NHL teams' rep to 10k has on the way the NHL plays out, so far it's caused the Coyotes to not suck. But it's too early to tell why exactly, but due to the "bug" that causes you to lose rep rather than gain it when you win a cup at 10k rep it should makes repeats harder, as it will make whatever team won the cup the lowest rep team in the NHL (until someones else wins it) and at least in the playoffs there is some ice tilt when a lower rep team plays a higher rep one. This is also mirrored in regular season PP and BP numbers, so presumably the ice tilt is a thing there too. But there are so many variables in a full regular season that it's really hard to tell.

[nino33]

I'm also in the process of testing what effect setting all NHL teams' rep to 10k has on the way the NHL plays out, so far it's caused the Coyotes to not suck. But it's too early to tell why exactly, but due to the "bug" that causes you to lose rep rather than gain it when you win a cup at 10k rep it should makes repeats harder, as it will make whatever team won the cup the lowest rep team in the NHL (until someones else wins it) and at least in the playoffs there is some ice tilt when a lower rep team plays a higher rep one. This is also mirrored in regular season PP and BP numbers, so presumably the ice tilt is a thing there too. But there are so many variables in a full regular season that it's really hard to tell.

I've never heard of this before...has it been posted in the SI Bugs Forum so Riz knows about it?

[Shindigs]

I can't remember if I did or didn't. I seem to recall relaying it to Riz via Alessandro. But my memory sucks, so maybe I didn't. It happened consistently in my Jets save though, we ping-ponged between ~9700 and 10k rep every other season for our 24 consecutive cups. I caught it by accident when looking at the team to see how high our rep had gotten in the editor, because I wasn't sure if 10k was the cap (it is).