Posted by god_mike on 9/15/2014 12:56:00 PM (view original):
I don't see how sitting your FP is any worse than sitting your three five year close to maxed out vets. :>

If you have to declare a FP, who is one of your better players, and play them every season, then you at least have to play one star player, even on your off season. It's a small limitation on the warehousing you can do. Which is why 2 franchise players (both for 2 or 3 seasons) that have to be declared and played could also work - its a way of getting each team to play a more competitive team each season and limit warehousing to a small extent.

I would be a bit cautious with reducing the quality of drafted players. Owners will still be able to create great teams, and the competition will be starting from a lower point. It could lead to even greater disparity between teams, and more lopsided outcomes. If lower quality players were used there would need to be some type of limitation on how long you can keep them in your system.

The simplest way around warehousing is to have players salaries increase every year, regardless of games played.

chuck, if I believed there were a genuine appetite for leaguewide repeal of warehousing, this would be a very simple issue to resolve.

Every one of these problems would go away. The draft would take on tremendous weight. We'd all simply line up our players and play them. Scoring - and injuries - would skyrocket. Unfortunately, there would be very little strategy involved in playing this league anymore, and I have to suspect the owners would miss that aspect.

I say the only new rule is you have to Ice a full lineup every game. that seems to be the main issue " I hate playing a 5 man team" seems to be the major complaint so just leave all rules the way they are and make sure no one plays without a full lineup for more than 3 straight games ( to allow for someone that couldn't check in and ended up with an injury and couldn't fix his lineup before cut off) I believe that would fix most of the complaints Who gives a crap about warehousing everyone can do it if they want but with current rules in place for playoff eligility and no bonuses handed out to the bottom teams there would be no reason to tank.

Had a crazy idea, thought I'd throw it out here for discussion.  It'd make it so that warehousing would still be able to take place, but it wouldn't be a sure thing and it would add a risk factor to those who employ it.  I suspect this idea won't appeal to some at first but give it some thought as I feel this could eliminate the ability to create super teams.

What if........ in the offseason, when I am in possession of the league's player file, any player who has a SHOOTING or SKATING rating of 90 or more automatically has their STAMINA level set to 60-70.  We could call it "The Age Factor" in that they slow down and are more injury prone.

With out current setup, players can be warehoused/cooked without limit, leading to perfect players who can be built up and used for the entire season, literally destroying opponents at ease

With this "What if" idea, players could still be warehoused/cooked but it would add some risk to it in that sure they would have high skill levels, but they could end up injured and thus not being a guaranteed asset for any given team.

The workload for such an idea would be heavy for the first season or two, but eventually, it would be reduced as time went by.

That's an interesting idea OKP, having players "age"

You could also use salary - say every time a player gets to salary $471,256 their stamina goes to 60-70.

OKP, what stats can you change? could you change player age. It seems that the majority of maxed out players are age 17. Perhaps remove age 17. Ask WIS to change the draft player ages to range from 18-25 instead. Or when you get the player file change all age 17 players to age 18. Overall slower development of players and longer term lower overall stats.

I suspect just changing player age after the player is generated would not be cosmetic. The player would have the same attributes. And I don't mean to be contrarian, but if we took 17 year old players out of the system, then I'd just draft only 18 year olds. Which was part of my strategy anyway, long before cooking or warehousing or anything else.

If I can say something in support of okp's "aging" idea, it's going to be to see how my Firebirds do this playoffs. We have one of the top three records in the conference, but because I'm not playing all-maxed-out players, injuries are very likely to wreck any kind of run we try to make.

The stats/skills I can tweak in the player file are age, stamina, shooting, skating, toughness and defense.  For goalies, age, stamina and saving.

Changing a player age manually in the file once he reaches a certain levels won't help because they'll already be at those levels.  As for making salary the deciding criteria for when the stamina gets docked, that won't work because GMs could control it and just not let their players hit a set salary level........they wouldn't be able to control the player hitting a specific skill level limit since they increase on their own...and if you did, that player wouldn't be very helpful. 

It would be awesome and more realistic though if players really did age with time.  Like for example, a drafted 17 year old wouldn't still be a 17 year old 4 seasons after he was drafted.  It'd also be awesome if the sim would automatically dish out some decline(instead of improvements) in skills after hitting a certain age.  It would essentially kill the ability to build super players and super teams.

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Kinda related to this aging factor........The simhockey site a bunch of us migrated from long ago had an aspect like this to its gameplay.  It didn't have a draft in the offseason but they did have a free agency sort of deal in the offseason where you would attempt to bid on, outbid other GMs to sign certain players.  That has nothing to do with our league......but the players who were coveted most had higher attributes but also the younger ones because it was known they would be able to improve with time(and training).  However, once any player hit the 28 or 29 year old mark, their skills across the board began to decrease.....especially stamina and injuries became a factor.  GMs had to maintain a balance and weren't able to rely on star players to remain star players forever.

The free Soccer Dynasty on this site also uses a similar system. Once the players hit a certain age, their skills start dropping and they become less valuable forcing their GMs to manage their team accordingly.
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Seeing as how we don't have automatic ageing in the hockey sim here for our MLers, perhaps creating one ourselves where its manually done when I have the file in my possession in the offseason could be effective. 

Tracking MLD players careers and lengths of time in the league is not ideal.  Too much work to scan every team and it becomes complicated with players who were traded and show split seasons in their player cards.  Its also possible to keep a rookie 165k player in the minors until his skills max out at 100 before playing him. 

Having a designated level of 90 for shooting or skating that would trigger a massive hit to a players stamina just might work and the more I think about this idea, the more I like it.   (I'm not suggesting 90 Defense be used as a criteria because some Dmen get drafted with 90+ def rating)  The shooting/skating ratings seem like the best ones to use, I don't recall seeing players with 90+ levels in those skills in the draft....the most I recall are 70s.

^ but then someone would just pull a "Bretton" and bid wife & kids on all the good players and **** off everyone else on the site!

Actually, that also may be where you are getting this aging factor idea. If I remember correctly, on SLH there was the "7 season decline" where all the attributes began a steady decline when the player hit season 7. Administration said it was coincidence, but it surely was built into the sim engine.

Speaking of being built into the sim engine: Will changing the age of a player after he's been created actually affect his attributes? I'm not very computer savy and have absolutely no idea how these sim engines work, but if they write a "code" for player X who is 17 years old, does you manually changing his age, actually affect player X or is it just cosmetic?

It always puzzled me why players didn't age in the sim.

Yes I think maybe we can get rid if the bonuses or at least the SC bonus and adjust the others as has been suggested.

I'm in favor of a team having to play their FP. That being said, I currently am not playing my FP but I'm also not technically warehousing him either. He's on my big league roster, he's just not in the line-up so he's not benefiting from increasing attributes in the minors. He's a 17 year old D-man with 93 Stamina, 81 Shooting, 83 Skating, 1 toughness and 100 Defense. Prior to sitting in limbo in the big league, his last 2 stat improvements were on 7/13 and 8/21. So basically he went 5 weeks without improving while playing in the big league last season.

I'm not sure if making a manager ice a full team is appropriate. While I can agree with some that playing against a team that only has 5 players playing is not fun and certainly not realistic, making a manager ice 20 guys that all get to play a fairly equal amount (sans the back up goalie) isn't realistic either. It's not like we can have our 4th lines play only a few shifts a game (which is realistic) while double shifting guys on our 1st and 2nd lines. Yes, I know we can double shift a line with advanced offense settings, but that is only for 20 minutes or less left in the game. But it's only 1 line and only if losing.

There's a little bit of my thoughts on the subjects.
 

Why don't players age in this sim? Because it's not a real dynasty league. If this were a genuine dynasty league that WiS coded, they surely would age.

As I have long said, we are using these players for things they were never intended to do. And one of those, apparently, can be playing 80+ hours of icetime per season.

"Actually, that also may be where you are getting this aging factor idea. If I remember correctly, on SLH there was the "7 season decline" where all the attributes began a steady decline when the player hit season 7. Administration said it was coincidence, but it surely was built into the sim engine. "

Right....that's what it was, I confused it with the free Soccer Dynasty on here.

I still think having an ageing factor would be a nice touch.  One where all attributes would start declining, and not just stamina. I wonder if MikeW would be able to help with such a task.  Perhaps he can add a script that simply adds a +1 to age after every season and/or sends attributes into a state of reverse aka decline once a certain age limit is reached.

As for age just being cosmetic in the player file.....I don't think it is but I could be wrong.  Age is one of the attributes that can be edited in the player file so that leads me to believe that if it is changed, it will have an effect.  (similar to Stamina and DEF)

That would be a coding issue OKP, one that Mike would love to do, but probably couldn't as Fox has him working on baseball and other sports. The hockey sim has been in a state of neutral for many years now, and nothing planned to be done to it I'm certain. Mike works on his own time on the hockey sim whenever any issues arise.