Steve

Couple big GHL games tonight testing some of the new guys!  
 
Gothic Knights 1st VS Vandals 6th -- Are GK for real this season?  Are Vandals just off to a slow start? Trojans 5th VS Oilers 3rd -- Are the Oilers enjoying beginner's luck?  Will the well seasoned Trojans send them back down to earth? Protons 2nd VS Rhinos 4th  -- Is the Rhinos' star fading fast or was last night's lost to Stray Cats a learning moment?

Well, Vandals squeaked by GKs in a SO, Oilers handled Trojans, and Rhinos sent Protons packing, so this season is truly wide open!  
Here are tonight's key contests:
 
Oilers 3rd VS Protons 4th -- Another big test for Oilers, but if they pass it, does this represent the changing of the guard in GHL?  Or do Protons still have a few tricks up their sleeves for the upstarts!
 
Two other teams to watch tonight are Grizzlies 14th and Minutemen 10th.  Both are playing teams in the lower half of the standings, which have always been typical easy wins for both.  If one or both continue their slide tonight, how long until we see some big moves?

Couple big GHL games tonight testing some of the new guys!  
 
Gothic Knights 1st VS Vandals 6th -- Are GK for real this season?  Are Vandals just off to a slow start? Trojans 5th VS Oilers 3rd -- Are the Oilers enjoying beginner's luck?  Will the well seasoned Trojans send them back down to earth? Protons 2nd VS Rhinos 4th  -- Is the Rhinos' star fading fast or was last night's lost to Stray Cats a learning moment?

My guy just set an all time new record for the biggest cliff dive in a professional hockey career and is now dropping a point daily! Yup, he dropped another point today...by the end of this season he may be dead!

At that age, I actually think it's fine, especially because I feel like there is an oversaturation of talent. Although rare in reality, some players do seem to just jump off a cliff.
 
My opinion is just let it be. It's a risk people should be taking by signing older players that just didn't pay off for you. As much as people don't like to admit it, winning still requires a bit of luck.

Well what could a goalie do wrong while sitting on the bench? Open the gates too late?

The player I was referencing in this post got injured today - checked out what kind of injury we were looking at- "5 days from being old"!

I received a message two days ago that one of my older players had dropped in his ability, today II received the same message from my scout voicing his concern once more. I expect a decline in old guys but this guy seems to have caught some fatal illness or something. I've announced to all my staff that we need to stock up on Centrum Silver as there is a shortage and we can't risk our guys loosing their edge without their multi-vitamin!
 
Anyone else seeing this? Is this normal?

Great thread! I think we need to get more activity in the forum for our game world
 
I know its early days but I think its great to see none of the usual teams in the top 3. Would love to see a really close season 

I think the issue was I did two trades two days in a row that were orange for my team.  The irony is that I purposely padded the 2nd one with the SHL team to be clear I wasn't trying to hose them, but in doing so, set off the sensors.  The good news is that Anders saw this right away and I got my account restored in a couple of hours.  

French Gulf Black Knights are now computer owned.  Can/Should we make a gentleman's agreement not to trade with them until a new user takes over?  The team isn't horrible (the right manager could save them still this season), but if they lose one or two key players, they are done for this season and several others.  

No new issues have arisen, at least not from what I can tell.

I totally understand where you're coming from. But on the other hand I don't want to build too many rules based on cheaters either. There might be a lot of reasons where a manager completely legit needs to make trades with signed free agents too (i.e. affected by a lot of injuries). But maybe the lock should be set for newly acquired players in trades too.
 
 
It's free for anyone to join. Just go to http://uat.gameplanhockey.comand sign up as CrimsonLumberjacks said. No need to resign from any other team if you don't want to.

That's actually a really good point that I don't think was really brought up when the idea was being tossed around. Maybe the solution could be to include a mandatory minimum amount of games played. However, I think the time limit would have an overall effect of reducing managers signing players only for trade bait as the biggest abusers currently pretty much just instantly sign and trade free agents for  picks/prospects/good players. Also with the time limit, people would use more thought in signing free agents as it's easier to run into the problem of needing a player, but not being able to acquire him because of cap space essentially locked for the time limit. All in all, I think it would be better to observe how this new feature plays out and to see if it does end up leading to any abuse and whether it is better or worse than the old abuse.

A pre release of the upcoming v1.1.8 has been installed on the UAT environment. The release contains the following features and improvements:
 
Pending contracts
A complete rework of player contracts extensions. An extension will no longer replace the current contract. Instead it will take effect after the player's current contract ends. This also means that you now have the possibility to handle both this and the next season's finance situation. Once your team has promoted or relegated you'll have the new leagues salary cap available for next season signings. This also comes with a limitation where contract extensions will only be allowed on the last year of the player's current contract. But it you will now be able to offer a contract to player's playing in Europe or in other non playable leagues once the regular season ends. If the player accepts he will join your team next season. Player that you own the rights to will be able to accept a contract offer during the complete season. Note that pending contracts also will be accounted for when releasing a player and they will be included in trade offers just like a normal contract.
 
General happiness
The contract happiness has been removed and is replaced by General happiness. This will be extended in the future to include more happiness factors, such as likes and dislikes in the team. But for now it will handle the contract happiness situation and will give more detail regarding if the player wants to move to a bigger club or just is unhappy with his salary.
 
Computer trading AI improvements
In a further attempt to prevent cheating or abusing computer teams in trades the following has been done:
Computer teams will be less likely to agree on trades involving a large number of players and picks Computer teams will be less likely to agree on trades if already been involved in a large number of trades the current season Computer teams will value incoming draft picks less There is also a new feature introduced where newly signed free agents will be on a trade lock for 20 days before being able to include them in a trade offer.
 
Transactions loading speed*
Improved loading speed for transactions on the transfer page. Also includes extended filtering for world leagues.
 
Note. This is quite untested features so please report back any oddities you might find. Just add to this topic. Thanks

Reggie, as one of the managers that laid out the information, I feel you are lumping us all together unfairly.  I am also one of the managers that doesn't have time to monitor trades very closely, especially ones outside my league.  However, one of the managers asked me to take a look to see if we both came to the same conclusion.  It took me two days later to find the time, but when I did, I noted some fair trades and trades that seemed to cross the consensus as unfair to the computer team.  
 
You are correct, there isn't a definition of abuse, but over a period of time, there were enough trades to show that a pattern had formed and several people came to the same conclusion.  I wouldn't have bothered to post a note had you done one or two borderline trades over the course of a season or two.  But that wasn't the case.  Anders handles the actual banning, we just self police each other.  
 
It had nothing to do with the success your team is having or the fact it might end up in GHL next season.  In fact, I think most of us would welcome another competitive manager since we have one computer team currently.  In fact, the same managers you accuse of ganging up on you and being unfair have been nothing but supportive, friendly, and congenial with me since I moved up to GHL three seasons ago.  Try not to make this personal.  If we are wrong, then I am sure you will have continued success in one of the other worlds or starting again with a new team.  

Personally I love seeing a lot of injuries and I say this with the fact that at one point I had 5 starting forwards injured for longer than a week at one point in the current season. In the past too many teams only had one or maybe 2 scratch players on their team. Now you have to save cap space for extra players in case of injury.

This is probably only more of an annoyance on slow worlds, but would it be possible to lower the number of days before a manager could be fired? Currently in my division, as is, there are 14 teams with human managers. Of those, 7 are on holiday, most of them since pretty much the day they joined their respective teams. Another manager has played under 12 days, so he might also be an inactive member, I am unsure and another manager was fired within this past week due to inactivity.
 
I bring this up because part of the appeal of this game to me is discussing possible trades with fellow human managers, and if the majority of the teams are not active, it really limits this aspect of the game. Sure, you might say there is a division below and above me that I can construct trades with, however, I argue they probably often suffer from the same problem and most of the realistic trades are for players within the same division as they have similar overalls. I am not including trades with the npc in my argument because there isn't ever a discussion in those trades and it is too easy to accidently create unrealistic or lopsided trades.
 
I understand part of the appeal of a slow world is being able to rejoin the same team after a while of inactivity due to real world time constraints, but I find the slow worlds give just a little bit too much time. At the top of my head, I think a person gets 12 days of inactivity before they are given the on-holiday status and then another 36 before being fired from their team. That's 48 real world days of inactivity in total! If you fancy multiples of 12, my suggestion would be to reduce the total inactivity period before being fired to 36 days which I doubt would remove any appeal from choosing a slow world.

Also, doesn't spirit help you decide who is good for an energy line?

Computer trading in of itself isn't cheating no but I have pointed out too many times in this forum that exploiting flaws in a game to your advantage is cheating. That means that exploiting computer teams via trades is cheating. That is exactly what you are doing in your trades.
 
 
Your point is massively flawed, poorly thought out and exceptionally weak as a result.
 
A new manager doesn't need to make trades with computer teams unless there are too few human managers to try to trade with. Unless you are in the GHL (which a new manager will never be able to be in) or on the brink of reaching the GHL you should not be concerned about the GHL, top teams or top players. They are completely out of your reach in every way. You should only be concerned about your league and what you can do in it. Also the edge will never get bigger unless you stop learning the game and resort to things like what you are doing to "catch up" to a perceived gap that isn't there to begin with.
 
Regarding new teams getting to the GHL it is completely within the realm of possibility to have a very competitive team your first year there. I am the perfect example of that. To my knowledge I am the most recent team, and one of the very few, so far that has made the playoffs their first year after promotion in the GHL for this game world and it wasn't by fluke. No it wasn't easy. It was rather difficult. It should be. You are a SHL team promoting to the GHL. Be realistic with your expectations. Honestly I still think that I would have been better off team wise staying in the SHL for one more season but I made my very unexpected promotion to the GHL work. Every offseason there are a number of quality GHL players to grab for the at least 2 teams that rank up into the GHL. Yes the top talent is maybe a total of 3 to 5 players but you only need 2 maybe 3 such players. My first year I grabbed 3 such players out of about 6 or 7. Two forwards and a defender. I then grabbed a few role players to fill out my team and my team played well enough to get into the playoffs. On the way I traded 2 of those top players for a top goalie and 2 lesser skilled forwards. Yes the trades were with computer teams but notice that I traded 2 top talent players for one top talent player and two lesser talented players in return. I didn't try to finagle top talent away from computer teams via giving a number of lesser players in return.
 
Trading with computer teams is not a problem. Exploiting the computer in trades to get an unfair advantage is a problem. No exploiting the computer in trades is not an answer to a bigger problem. There is no bigger problem. The only problem there may be is your own inability to learn and improve yourself as a manager and exploiting the computer in trades is not the solution to that problem. Never, in any multiplayer game, is using in game exploits of any kind to your advantage an "answer" to a "problem" perceived, proven and known or otherwise.

Per Reggie's comments, I think one solution to this would be to have a league that is designed differently, ie not and up and down, but more an NHL static level with equal leagues/divisions.  Some prefer that, some this.  If you want to jump in and be competitive in a season or two, then that style of league makes it possible, but not the current promotion/demotion style.  Each have their pros and cons.  
 
Like Erzac said, moving from SHL to GHL really requires most of us to spend 3 or more seasons before we have a realistic chance at the Finals.  My biggest challenge is not screwing up my plan and being impatient in the interim, haha.  
 
But more importantly, not doing these types of trades is also part of the sportsmanship of the league.  Anyone from GHL could easily pick off the top 2-3 players in each computer SHL team for a 3rd round pick and/or a bench warmer.  But we don't to not screw the real SHL players and we recognize the game is more fun this way, for us all.  We're all competitive, but we don't want to ruin the integrity of the game just to win a handful more of games each season.  

Per Reggie's comments, I think one solution to this would be to have a league that is designed differently, ie not and up and down, but more an NHL static level with equal leagues/divisions.  Some prefer that, some this.  If you want to jump in and be competitive in a season or two, then that style of league makes it possible, but not the current promotion/demotion style.  Each have their pros and cons.  
 
Like Erzac said, moving from SHL to GHL really requires most of us to spend 3 or more seasons before we have a realistic chance at the Finals.  My biggest challenge is not screwing up my plan and being impatient in the interim, haha.  
 
But more importantly, not doing these types of trades is also part of the sportsmanship of the league.  Anyone from GHL could easily pick off the top 2-3 players in each computer SHL team for a 3rd round pick and/or a bench warmer.  But we don't to not screw the real SHL players and we recognize the game is more fun this way, for us all.  We're all competitive, but we don't want to ruin the integrity of the game just to win a handful more of games each season.  

I just reviewed the transactions in SHL where 8 of the 16 teams are CPU, so understandably, trading is going to be hard to do without trading with these teams.  
 
TWO of the top four teams in SHL have a total of 14 trades with CPU teams this season.  Of those, I'd say roughly half are tilted in the players' teams favor.  
 
I think part of the problem is that the CPU AI over values the draft picks.  One could say this is true in real life too, some GMs wanting youth and picks over a current roster, but when you look at the trend over a large sample of trades, the CPU (which I assume is more or less the same for each team) values the picks over current players.  
 
Even if players (in every level) exploit this apparent weakness to stack their team (but sadly leave a team almost wrecked for any new player joining, which I feel is worse), once they move up a level, they are going to have to start all over again and assuming the next level up has more player managers, probably unlikely to be replicated, especially at the GHL level in Biscuit.  
 
So even though this is somewhat self policing, I think tweaking the AI in the CPU teams to make it damn near impossible to trade with them without giving up a lot is possibly the quickest or most long term solution.  

Per Reggie's comments, I think one solution to this would be to have a league that is designed differently, ie not and up and down, but more an NHL static level with equal leagues/divisions.  Some prefer that, some this.  If you want to jump in and be competitive in a season or two, then that style of league makes it possible, but not the current promotion/demotion style.  Each have their pros and cons.  
 
Like Erzac said, moving from SHL to GHL really requires most of us to spend 3 or more seasons before we have a realistic chance at the Finals.  My biggest challenge is not screwing up my plan and being impatient in the interim, haha.  
 
But more importantly, not doing these types of trades is also part of the sportsmanship of the league.  Anyone from GHL could easily pick off the top 2-3 players in each computer SHL team for a 3rd round pick and/or a bench warmer.  But we don't to not screw the real SHL players and we recognize the game is more fun this way, for us all.  We're all competitive, but we don't want to ruin the integrity of the game just to win a handful more of games each season.  

Per Reggie's comments, I think one solution to this would be to have a league that is designed differently, ie not and up and down, but more an NHL static level with equal leagues/divisions.  Some prefer that, some this.  If you want to jump in and be competitive in a season or two, then that style of league makes it possible, but not the current promotion/demotion style.  Each have their pros and cons.  
 
Like Erzac said, moving from SHL to GHL really requires most of us to spend 3 or more seasons before we have a realistic chance at the Finals.  My biggest challenge is not screwing up my plan and being impatient in the interim, haha.  
 
But more importantly, not doing these types of trades is also part of the sportsmanship of the league.  Anyone from GHL could easily pick off the top 2-3 players in each computer SHL team for a 3rd round pick and/or a bench warmer.  But we don't to not screw the real SHL players and we recognize the game is more fun this way, for us all.  We're all competitive, but we don't want to ruin the integrity of the game just to win a handful more of games each season.