Suggestions and views after a week

So the simulation has now been going on for a week and I wanted to gauge your opinions on a few things.

Firstly I want to concentrate on the styles of play rather than your teams individual results, remember someone has to lose

Tell me how you feel about the following:

Number of shots
Number of goals
Number of injuries
Number of penalties
Number of hits

For example do you feel the above are at the right level or would you prefer to see more hitting? Perhaps teams are not shooting enough at the moment?

Also an interesting thing has come up. As a few of you pointed out to me, your lines in a few of the games were not as you submitted and the reason for this was the case of injuries. If a player is injured in your first game of the 5 days then you still play another 2-3 then those lines are modified to fit in a replacement. Sometimes this is a simple swap but sometimes not. My suggestion for you is this, when I do the simulations, if I set a hard time to do the simulations then as long as you are about on MSN I will offer you the chance to re-do your lines in the case of an injury. This will be a simple matter of me outputting a new file, you loading it, making the changes and away we go. This way we can avoid people being disappointed by the simulator messing up your lines and we can also keep up the 5 days per simulation.

One last point of view is exactly that, how do you feel about the speed of simulation? Would you like to see it move along a bit quicker or maybe slower? Perhaps fewer simulations with more games per sim or vice versa, maybe more simulations with fewer games?

Let me know your views and we can move forward from here

The output seems to be very realistic to normal life lots of shots not as many hits that may need tweaking a little.

As for speed I think we could maybe do a few more days than 5

I want it slowed down a bit, sim wise, or in a month or so we will be in 2012

is anyone else having trouble with their lines and deployment thereof? To put it this way, I have Gaborik on 1st line ES, 1st line PP, 1st line 4v4 and he's playing about 15 mins a night. Kovalev is 3rd line ES and 2nd line PP and he's averaging 20.

Hey, Homer - I mentioned before about the amount of shots or lack of and I personally still think they're a bit low - which in turn is affecting the amount of goals. Maybe the Ducks are just a bit of a boring defence minded team but that's my take on it.

I don't believe I've had an injury yet either!

I would say shots are maybe a little bit out, quickly looking through the Most shots in the game record most people seem to be between 25-35 for their best 5 games. Average shots should probably be around 30.

Penalties seem ok, even though im constantly annoyed at my team taking too many even tho I have 0 physical play but they seem to be mistake / desperation pens not aggressive ones would be interesting to see how people with physical play are coping with penalites.

The ice time propblem KOC talked about is affecting me too where for some reason my 2nd line C has 2 whole periods more than my 1st line C even though they are on identical lines.

As far as sims go, personally i hate the wait between games so 2 games 4 times a week would be nice but with the injuries problem already discussed maybe its better to stagger them more? Find a day when most people can be online to solve injury problems say sunday? do 4/5 games that day then throughout the less active days sim less games.

Some good points here. Firstly on the idea of doing 4 sims a week....I would prefer not to do more than 3 per week from a personal stand point!

I think what I will do starting Wednesday is to slow down the simulation rate to 3 days instead of 5. Anyone who is online I will give the opportunity to fix their lines if an injury occurs or in the case that you cannot be online you could include in the email of your lines who you would prefer as a spare D/F then I could put them in instead of the sim auto'ing the lines. Also by doing only 3 days the worst case scenario for injuries is that it directly affects 1 game (in very rare cases 2) so this could be minimised.

Paddy, with penalties they are not always directly linked to physical play. If you have undisciplined players then it doesnt matter if you have 0 phsyicality they may still take stupid penalties (hence the reason I benched McLeod ).

I will look into the ice time thing as I have not come across that before and see if I can find out a reason for that happening. Could you let me know of any games where it has happened to make it easier for me to pin point?

Lastly I will look at increasing the shooting a little and see how that goes.

The ice time thing is pretty obvious if you look at my games Thornton has less ice time than Weiss in all but one game where they are tied. They have the same durability stat.

I was thinking it could be linked to the DU of their line mates except when Sexton DU 40 was on the 2nd line Weiss was getting more minutes when i switched him to first Thornton got closer. Sexton's minutes were still low.

Perhaps the players' icetime is being affected by penalties, Paddy? What I mean is who do you have on the PP, PK and 4 vs 4 situations?

I thought that but Thornton 4 PIM, Weiss 2 PIM. Joe is on PK 1 PP 1 on 4v4 and 3v3. Weiss is on PK 2 PP 2 same again. Thornton should be getting significantly more ice time but he isnt for some reason.

What about their line mates PIM? For most of the teams the top 2 lines play a similar amount of mins but I can see there is a fairly big difference there.

I am still looking through all the reports but my first thoughts on KoC is that it could be related to Hitchcock being the coach and his defensive style could see him using the checking line more but I am not certain that is the reason.

Kovalev was on 2nd line for the first 8 games, but I tried to restrict his ice time by putting him on the 3rd for the last 3. Made no difference as he was still on for 19, 20 and 16 mins in Mondays sims. I'd be pissed off if my coach was intentionally benching my best players and sending my pluggers out to get slaughtered night after night but I doubt it's that, especially as paddywan has had the same problems - although given his 2nd line is creaming everyone I wouldn't be too upset in his shoes.

The wingers on PP2 (Wolski, Kovalev) seem to be getting a disproportionately large amount of icetime, but if that's the case then I find it a bit bizarre that they're being put out there for 4 mins a game more. In the next sim I'm going to do a bit of experimenting with coaching and lines so we'll see if a reason presents itself.

I have posted the question on the Simon T message board so hopefully will get some insight soon. Looking through it there is a huge difference there so not really sure what would be causing that unless Kovalev is Hitchcock's little teachers pet

One thing I have noticed Joga is the Durability ratings.

Kovalev is 94
Krejci is 99
Fisher is 94
McDonald is 56!

This could be a reason towards why his line is limited on ice time. Have you tried playing Krejci or Fisher on the top line for a while?

lol taking Filatov's place no doubt! I remember now that my lines were auto'd for games 2 and 3 so McD was on checking duty :s, and looking back Kovy's icetime there was still v. high but the discrepancy between the top 2 lines wasn't so bad and the 3rd line got more suitable minutes. On the other hand Gaborik and Zetterberg played the same mins as Kovy but were on first line ES, PP, 4v4 and PK as opposed to 2nd line ES and PP. I will still def have a meddle with things on Weds and see if it bears any fruit - I'll report back here after to let those in the same situation know the results.

http://sths.simont.info/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7094

I think the answer to this may be the amount that McDonald is being played. Kovalev has very high durability so if McDonald is fatigued then his line may be taken off the ice with Kovalev's put on instead.

thanks a lot, straight from the big boss as well no less. I'll try McD on the 4th line for one game (I'm 3-8-0, I can afford to mess around) and see if everything rights itself.

I will have a look as well to see how it goes. Yeah that is one of the things that sold me this sim as contact with the designer is excellent and he didn't take long to reply at all!

Number of shots - about right, but I've not seen above 40 shots yet

Number of goals - I haven't looked at every game, but I've not seen more than 5 goals for any one team

Number of injuries - okay, I've had one (bizarrely, got hit and caught flu...)

Number of penalties - okay, if slightly too high. If I benched Milan Lucic I'd probably have a whole team of Lady Byng winners

Number of hits - okay, maybe get some more in? Thought that might let in more injuries of course.

Overall, it seems to work very well. But I think the shots / goals thing needs tweaking, if possible.

I'm happy with most things but injuries we need to keep an eye on. If anything we need more but lets give it more time before turning the league into a hospital ward