Renegades

I know my brother made a post about this almost a year ago back when he was in the LIHL losing any guy that got better than a 65 overall, but now I'm having a similar problem in the SHL with an added bit of frustration. As Anders has been trying to fix from my understanding, there's a sort of butter zone of players between 80 and 85 overall where they become too expensive for the SHL, but not good enough for the GHL. Recently in free agency, people in that 80-85 overall range have been asking for less money now (say about 800k to 1 million range instead of 2.5 million) in hopes of being signed. This is so in the free agency, but does not seem that way for the team trying to re-sign a player from their team that's improved into that 80-85 range. In other words, players that have been on my team would request something like 2 million or more which I wouldn't be able to pay. But next season they would be signed by a team (especially recently promoted teams) for dirt cheap, around 600k-900k usually, even though they're 84 or 85 overall. This happened with two of my star defenders, Bastien Perkins and L. Wingo. They were two of my top point scorers and best defenders and supposedly loved it on my team. After they both improved 1-3 times though, they demanded 2-3 million. They were then picked up by other teams for nearly a quarter of that, and once again dominated, just against me instead of for me. These discrepancies in salary between re-signing a player and signing someone from free agency makes it feel like there's no loyalty and players only care about baiting for money (and when they don't get that money on a re-sign they drop their price ridiculously).

Not sure if this is a bug, or just extremely bad luck for me, but it's become such an issue for my team that I thought I'd see if anyone else has the same issue, or is maybe on the other side of the issue and benefiting ridiculously. In general, the issue is that goalies that I've faced have been performing astronomically well recently. In the past 30 or so games that I can remember, half, or more than half, have had a goalie shut me out or have a SV% of over a .950, maybe even a 0.970. What makes it so frustrating is that I consistently out-shoot my opponents by almost double. This past game I lost 2-1 when I out-shot them 44 to 26 when their 78 overall goalie had a 0.977 SV%. I also had 7 PP's to their 1, and still lost. In general, my goalie is average, my defense is ridiculously good (which should help my goalie a lot), and my offense has a lot of talent now as well. I can't figure out if anything is functionally wrong with my line choices or anything like that because I consistently get shut down by opposing goalies regardless of line assignments/combinations. I can't tell if other goalies are just putting up the best performances of their lives against me, or if my team is just slow rolling pucks into their pads, but something doesn't feel right and it's making my team feel absolutely powerless regardless of how much talent and power I stack on my team.

Baden, building a team from complete scratch is honestly pretty fun and a really good experience. It also makes changing tactics and building your team how you want to build it a lot easier. I joined a team that got relegated and had almost nothing left my first season and I dominated and got first place. Best of luck in regards to that! My pre-season has been quite fantastic after a crappy draft situation. I got a replacement for my first line center, signed three of my prospects, and have enough good backups to survive any injuries. I'm excited for the new season and really hoping this is the team to take me to the GHL.

Well my post-season has already gone as terribly as possible. The one position I wasn't looking for was defenders, and I ended up drafting two defenders that could start for me, even though they were at the bottom of each of my draft pick organizations. I strongly needed a center and a couple of forwards, which there were quite a few of in this draft pool, but there was a recurrent story of these guys being drafted just before me, or even ridiculously far ahead in some cases. I acquired a lower team's 2nd round GHL pick which got an unlucky lottery spot and landed me at the 22nd pick where I mostly shortlisted guys in the 27-30 range that I liked with a defender at the very bottom of that grouping. All those guys were gone before me, even one that was ranked 30 something that went in the first 10 picks! Only to make matters worse, I've had a center, Tyler Ridgway, who has been my first line center ever since I joined the game some 10 seasons ago and brought him up from the IHL to the SHL. Although not very impressive stats-wise, he performed amazingly, consistently winning about 70% of face-offs (on the first line!) and getting 40-65 points every season regardless of the league. He had still been improving slowly and had over 50 points this past season in the SHL, but somehow decided to retire at the age of 35! Only 35! This is disastrous for my team as he has been the backbone of my team for as long as I've been the GM. All of this wouldn't be too terrible if I had the cap space to replace them. My biggest hope was that I could find some centers and forwards in the draft that could be starters which I was set up for with the 2nd, 22nd, 33rd, and 98th picks. Even if they were 4th liners, they'd still be cheap, which is what I need as my young team improves and demands higher salaries. So I guess in conclusion, if you're looking for young defenders in the 79-85 overall range, I've essentially cornered the market and will be looking for forwards and center of equal caliber. Feel free to message me about trade ideas because right now I'm pretty much doomed haha. Cheers!

All is solved now. I emailed the gameplan hockey support email linking this thread and Anders unbanned me about a day and a half after I was banned. This was my first suspension so I'm not really sure why it was going to be 5 days long, but it's fixed now for the most part. Anders said that the same IP trade (to repair the bugged trade with the Coquitlam Timberwolves) could have been part of the reason for my ban, but I apparently had several cheater votes against me way back near when I started playing (possibly from the suspicion of me joining in as 16th in the SHL and turning the team around and coming in first in the IHL the next season). None of those managers that reported me are active anymore so Anders saw no reason for me to remain banned. However, in the 2 or 3 game days that the computer took over, it re-signed a bunch of guys I wanted to get rid of (fortunately you can cancel pending contracts), messed up all of my lines, and ultimately lost me the first round of my playoffs series, although it was ridiculously close. So it was all rather unfortunate timing, but Anders is doing an amazing job with the game and I can't stress that enough. Thanks all for your involvement and support! Cheers!

I logged into my gameplan account a couple hours ago with no problem, but then went to log in just an hour afterwards and I'm banned for supposed cheating for 5 days (10 game days). I'm mainly concerned since I'll miss the entirety of my playoffs and possibly the ability to re-sign all of my outgoing players and the draft (of which I use shortlist only but haven't prepared yet, and that I have really good picks for). In the end I'll probably just have to wait it out, but I wanted to sort of think out loud for some of the things that could have lead to my ban. 1) My brother (in the GHL in Clapper) traded me a decent prospect for essentially nothing from my team for me to trade down to a team in the BHL where I took that team's worst player to give them the prospect from my brother. This was all done to repair a trade that my brother had carried out with that BHL team the season beforehand. Because of a bug (that is now fixed) the player did not get transferred to that team. This was a series of obviously imbalanced trades that also involved a conflicting IP Address, potentially causing a ban for me. 2) Several imbalanced trades could have also been a cause. I've done a ton of trading these past couple of days to try to rebuild my team considerably, and quite a few of these trades were done favoring the other team to sort of sway them to carry through. This could have had an effect on my "cheater status", but none of it was done illegally or to maliciously benefit my team. 3) Ending up with great draft picks could've been suspicious enough for people to report me. Whether out of jealousy or suspicion, I'm not really one to assume, but it could have been a cause. I got rid of all of my own draft picks and acquired a 1st round GHL, 2nd round GHL, 1st round SHL, and 3rd round SHL pick (after 3 of the 4 picks got bumped up from teams being promoted). One of these picks was from Anders' himself, and I was involved actively in messaging other managers to get these trades to go through and figure out what would work. In the end, I don't believe I've done anything ban-worthy and think it may just be an automatic system that locked me out. I'm not really upset so much as concerned that I'll miss the entire post-season of which I really need to be involved in. I hope something can be done, or that this at least helps others avoid "risky business" that may lead to a ban.

Hey everyone! I'm Luke Ciccone and I've been the manager of the Reliance Renegades for over a year now. I guess that means I'm not exactly new, but I figured I might as well introduce myself. Some of you may already know me as I'm rather active with trading and messaging other managers in Clapper. I'm also Mike's brother, who is the manager of the Colome Knights. He got me into the game and I'd like to think I'm already a better manager than him. Haha, maybe not but it's nice to have someone to bounce trade ideas off of. When I joined, I was randomly placed on a BHL team when the regular season had already ended. My team had finished last place and was going to be relegated. I lost essentially everyone due to 1-way contracts and I had quite a bit of cap space locked from the previous manager releasing players with years still left on their contracts. I started completely fresh from the IHL where I finished first place in my very first season. I've worked my way up into the upper half of the SHL now where I was close to promotion into the GHL last season through the playoffs, but lost in the third game of the series. This season has been all about building up a strong young team for the next season. I'll likely be in the playoffs again this season but I'm not expecting promotion in the slightest. I didn't really mean to give my whole 11 season summary, but I really love the game and am always excited to get to talk about it. I wish everyone success in their future seasons. Thanks!

"Coach, you're five games into season 19 and have been performing quite sub-par compared to your near promotion through the playoffs last season. Any thoughts?" "We're working on it. Our team has a lot of young guys trying to make names for themselves and needs to sort things out." "Speaking of arrogant young guys, what is going on with your list of goalies? You've got five of them, they're all in their 20's, and even worse is that they all have the worst personalities imaginable! How do you deal with a bunch of egocentric agitators at the goalie position?" "It's quite entertaining really. Our backup goalie, Giger, taunts the opposing team relentlessly from the bench. On top of that, our starter, Cvejn, has gotten in his sixth fight already. That kid's got quite the arm." "Six fights!? As a goalie!? We're only five games in!" "Oh you must've misunderstood. Those six fights were just last game. He's probably closer to twenty or thirty fights on the season." "Absolute madness! Only thing worse is if you make that punk a captain!" "Wow, you really are full of good ideas. Heck, let me go do that right now!" "You can't be serious. Wait, where are you going? Hey, come back here!"

Hello everyone. I just thought I'd make some suggestions on how to make the Draft Preferences window more painless and easy to use. So currently, to move people around, you have to click on the player's up or down arrow, and follow them up or down the rows, continuously clicking that button and scrolling and repeating the process. It's not the worst system ever, but it can become rather irksome when trying to move a large group of people, resulting in nearly hundreds of clicks and scrolls all over. I thought up two ways that could potentially improve this: Firstly, the functionality and appearance of the window could appear the same, but having some sort of way to group players or select more than one player at once would make it much quicker and easier to move players around. This could be a process similar to SHIFT-click selecting and/or CTRL-click selecting entities. A second way could be to make each player in the draft preferences window a drag-able entity. Similar to moving files around in file explorer, being able to click and drag a player around the list would be very convenient. Even combining and implementing both of these processes together would make the window extremely painless to use, but even just one of the changes would be great. However, I'm not a programmer so I have no idea how difficult or improbable such a function would be, I'm just putting ideas out there. Thanks, Luke Ciccone

I don't think that's right either. I'm pretty sure changing someone's contract in the middle of the season adds a year to the current season. But that wasn't my main point. I'm not talking about expiring contracts, I'm wondering when the best time is to change the contracts of players that still have years left on their current contract. "The best time" meaning when I can essentially get 2 seasons out of them for a 1 year contract change.

I was curious about how the contract extension mechanics work for a player who is already on your team. A major sort of question I have about this is during what time frame is the contract extended versus being completely changed regarding the years left for that player on the team. For example, say I have someone on a lower league contract making $46,000 on a contract that's 3/6 years through. Say the player wants $180,000 for one year. I'm not sure of when the "optimal time" to change his contract would be (so that he doesn't feel ignored and thus performs better). So, continuing on this example, if I change his contract in this way halfway through the season, it appears as an extension? In other words, $180,000 for 2/2 years? And at the end of that year that's already half over, it'll be $180,000 for 1/2 years? Now, what happens if I wait until the next season to make this contract (when it runs down to 2/6 years)? I'll give a couple of examples. For one, I don't really know how Silly Season works. Is it part of the new season, or do contracts in this time only count for one year? In other words, if I make the contract change this coming Silly Season, would it only be for 1/1 years, or 2/2 years, so I essentially get him for 2 years off of a 1-year deal? Or do I wait until the start of the season, such as regular season game day one? Would it be 2/2 years as soon as that game starts? I'm also not sure about Preseason. Would that function like Silly Season and count a currently signed player's contract change as 1/1 years? Or do I have this entire idea wrong and changing a signed player's contract automatically results in the addition of 1 year to the current season (thus 2/2)? I'm sorry, I know this is a lot of writing and confusion. I've just been running so many scenarios through my head that I have no clue what the real answers are. I just want to make sure I am changing players' contracts at the right time and don't end up losing them nearly immediately or missing out on an opportunity to get essentially two years out of a 1 year contract change. Thanks a ton, Luke Ciccone

I enjoy actively initiating trades with all sorts of teams in different leagues and whatnot and wanted to suggest something to make the whole process a lot less time consuming and painstaking. My usual process for looking to make trades is going to a league, clicking on a team, searching through the transfer tab of their players, checking their cap space, and then looking into any transfer needs or trade block players. This takes quite a bit of time and can is annoying since I constantly run into teams with little to no cap space or no trade block players or transfer needs. Yes, I understand I can still make trades without any of those aspects being in play, but after getting an uncountable number of those trades rejected, I've learned not to waste my time anymore. My point is, it'd be nice to have all of those things in one place (cap space, transfer needs, maybe even trade blocked players). I think a good place would be the "New Trade" action in the transfers tab. On that daunting list of teams from all the leagues you can trade with, having that information listed beside each team would be inexplicably useful. I know I know, that's too much to put on one line; so I was thinking maybe next to each team, display simple things such as their cap space and perhaps the manager's trading reputation (neutral, enthusiastic, hard to please, etc). Then maybe have an "Expand Details" button or something that reveals transfer needs, trade block players, and anything else you may find helpful for making a trade. I'm not sure how feasible this is as I'm no programmer or anything, but just wanted to share my thoughts on how to make the game more user-friendly. And who knows, maybe such a feature would encourage more managers to initiate trades, because down where I've been, trades are extremely rare. Thanks for any time you may have wasted reading my thoughts, Luke Ciccone

Just wanted to provide an update and say that this is still a ridiculously annoying issue. I just lost 5-0 against an exhausted goalie that performed at a 92 in the BHL. I guess taking a nap in front of the goal is a more effective strategy than rotating goalies and making sure they're active and healthy. Below is a link to an image to show this. https://gyazo.com/a3e06fc253da83cb395fec8b5b65e5e9