Hey all you party people! Welcome from SD/Corey!

I am here to talk about some exciting new details about FHM10 and how it correlates to the current state of the league while also showing comparisons of the league! Want to thank Fluw, Schwarz, Blitz for gathering all of this information as well as overall testing, and a massive shout out to Juke for compiling the graphs and charts. You will see a lot of graphs, so bear with us as we explain what we’ve found out through our numerous tests.

One thing to note, these FHM10 tests are less variable than they will end up in the normal league setting, as well as less variable than the FHM8 data. These tests were just a lot of replicates of the same season, but when we switch to 10 and keep going on with the league, teams will organically grow or rebuild, and each season the league/average team TPE/division strength/etc will look different.



Here are team-level goals, condensed to FHM10 vs. FHM8.





Next, team-level goals by each season's offense rank (ranked by number of goals scored for each team). Both as a bar plot and line graph. The note here is that scoring might decrease in FHM10 compared to FHM8 in the ~6th-10th







These are the same 3 graphs, but just using team points instead of team goals. The good news here is that it looks like our distribution of points in the standing won't change much at any spectrum of the standings compared to 8





Next, player-level goals and points by position. It looks like goals and points will decrease slightly, which we obviously saw with the team-level goals graphs above, and it does look like the decrease is consistent across each position. But, if you look at max goals/points per season, it looks like the top-end players are still going to be scoring as much, and the mid-level players will take a hit. It looks like scoring might decrease at the expense of "middle 6" players, while the best players are still gonna be putting up Gretzky 2 PPG numbers. Probably also why we saw that scoring decrease in the 6-10 teams. I do believe a lot of this will shift a bit however, when we see GMs optimizing their tactics and roles as well.





Here is an example of what we can do with the new box score .csvs. The first thing we now have access to is zone start %. This was always in the game, but never in the outputs. So Juke made an example of player breakdowns by their zone start %, as well as a league wide distribution.



This is the "game score" or an equivalent. The new boxscore outputs give us more data for when players are on/off the ice, like total team shots, team shots against, team missed shots, team goals for/against, shot quality, etc. We can use this to make some sort of model to assign player's a gamescore. You may have seen a similar graph for the NHL so I was trying to copy that.





Here are examples of shot quality. Shot quality is based on the area in which the shot is taken, starting from the crease area all the way out, in a cone-line shape zone as it goes further out. How exactly it’s applied here is something we are still working on, but we wanted to show some of the cool new stat subsets we can view.

Scatter plot is the total number of each shot quality, with the y axis being how many goals of each SQ. Color is the goal percentage of each SQ. Not save %. SQ includes missed/blocked shots as far as I can tell, so those wouldn't go into the save% formula. Of note, there were 0 goals of SQ0. All the boxscore graphs were just using 1 random test season as an example, but I checked a few others and saw 0 SQ0 goals as well. I might check them all just to see. The bar plot is just each players breakdown of the 5 different tiers of SQ.





Finally, we can do a really rough estimation of 'expected goals.' In real life, a lot goes into these models, but this one is super simple using SQ. Basically, if SQ4 has a 10% goal percentage for example, and a player took 10 of these shots, they would 'expect' to have 1 of them go in. So I added all that up for each player and each of their SQ0-4 shots, and compared it to how many goals they actually score. With the barplot then being each player's goals scored above expected as shown below.





And lastly, average distribution of goal differentials per season between the two. Basically shows that we will initially expect to see the same home winning %, as well as roughly the same ratio of close games to blowouts in FHM10 as we did in 8.

So this is a lot of the raw data we used in determining if the league would have any anomalies or any big outliers moving into 10. As you can see, 10 functions a lot like 8, with some dips in scoring in an unoptimized file. Seeing this we determined that we have enough raw data to go ahead with bringing SHL and the SMJHL to FHM 10 next season.

The QoL stuff and the UI is much better for what we use the game for. Including, but not limited to the more robust boxscore output data, line/roles/tactics support built into the game for GMs, a better and quicker UI, better playoff formats (1v8 reseeding, custom formats, support for more teams), custom schedules (eliminating 100 b2b games), and a small fix to happiness/chemistry.

Another big QoL fix is the goalie start settings in FHM now are in your goalie settings. You can choose directly who you want to start in the game from your lines page. This is something we are going to implement ASAP, this is a win for both GMs and Simmers. This will be replacing the goalie start sheet.



Going forward, we are going to monitor this season and see where things go in terms of scoring and other factors in the league and go over whether we would like to make any micro adjustments at the end of the season.

I will tease a few other things that we as a league are looking at in the sim engine itself and have already started doing some testing on. With the new tactics assistant in FHM10 we are looking at bringing back unit tactics. It’s something that’s been heavily discussed and something that I know some people miss, including myself. So we are going to look to see how we can utilize them in FHM 10, under some rule guidance. Another thing we are looking at is increasing fights per game. We believe this is a hobby, for fun, and people should be able to play the way they want. We’ve received some feedback about the low number of fights in the league and with the ability to change that, we are going to see how it affects the overall health of the league. With that we will also be looking at the goals per game setting, adjusting it to fit the trends of the league to keep scoring more balanced.  We are also looking at adding mental abilities to the TPE list. We are trying to find more creative ways for users to interact with the league and spend their TPE.

To recap, these are some of the things we are looking at going forward.

unit tactics
fights per game
goals per game
mental attributes
special abilities


Again I would like to thank everyone who has been patient and waiting for more updates about this. A HUGE thanks again to Schwarz, Juke, Blitz, and Fluw, as well as the rest of Head Office. We are working towards a full file transition at the end of this season. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, want clarification, or have ideas, please let me know. You can dm me on the site of on discord or anyone in HO.

Cheers,

Corey/SD