Login

Crunk · 07-16-2022, 10:11 AM

07-16-2022, 09:43 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: It depends on the specifics and where we draw the line between looking for good tactics (which you can do in every regular singleplayer NHL season) and actually trying to break the game by creating your own kinds of files, decompiling or bulk testing specific tactics/builds. There obviously should be a place for the former but not for the latter in my opinion.

But this is exactly the point of the OP. I am openly questioning where the line has been drawn, as I think the definition of sim testing has been stretched way too far, when you are outlawing the ability to gain incredibly general sim knowledge by editing an attribute on a non-SHL player in a non-SHL file and looking at the results.

Even you appeared to assume that would be allowed. I was told by an HO member it is not. Does that not seem to be going too far?

07-16-2022, 09:43 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: . You are right though that it is tough to enforce either way which is why I'd be hoping that we as a community can be better than that and maybe just... stop looking for exploits for ones and stop trying to break the game that this league relies on? Is that really too much to ask? There are likely gonna be grey areas between what is banned and what isn't and the best course of action for all of us would be if people just didn't try to abuse those grey areas and try to skirt the rules constantly.

To reiterate here, I am not advocating for a return to full scale test simming. This article led to a conversation with a GM who was telling me about their 5-person sim team and all the time it was consuming. That is completely ridiculous - way worse than I thought it would be - and absolutely justifies the sim file being kept under lock and key.

I'm in favour of complete sim file secrecy to combat this - teams having no way to tell what strats other teams are running, no ability to sim using it, literally 0 access to the file, ever.

But as things stand, a particularly vague rule is banning us from finding literally anything out about the sim engine.

Justice · 07-16-2022, 10:23 AM

07-15-2022, 04:06 PMBfine Wrote:
07-15-2022, 03:04 PMleviadan Wrote: I think this has a lot of good points, I agree that I don't find it as fun to be taking shots in the dark with my attributes and no longer knowing what will actually make my player effective. I'm clearly on the decline now so it's not as relevant, but it seems like a valid concern to worry that one could build a 2k player that just totally sucks. A GM used to be able to help guide you but now they aren't allowed to know what makes a good player? Or they are, but not through direct testing... just like reading the manual? I'm not even 100% sure what is and isn't banned. Are they allowed to play FHM recreationally without the SHL teams and learn the game really well? Or that's also illegal?

I tend to think that making as much sim knowledge as possible public would be more effective than an outright ban on testing, but what the hell do I know. I've never played FHM in my life so my opinion probably isn't worth much.
To be fair in the FHM6 world @Tylar had a 2200 TPE player that sucked lol

[Image: 841162338287878154.webp?size=96&quality=lossless]

**RomanesEuntDomus** · 07-16-2022, 10:32 AM

07-16-2022, 09:54 AMMemento Mori Wrote:
07-16-2022, 09:43 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: It depends on the specifics and where we draw the line between looking for good tactics (which you can do in every regular singleplayer NHL season) and actually trying to break the game by creating your own kinds of files, decompiling or bulk testing specific tactics/builds. There obviously should be a place for the former but not for the latter in my opinion. You are right though that it is tough to enforce either way which is why I'd be hoping that we as a community can be better than that and maybe just... stop looking for exploits for ones and stop trying to break the game that this league relies on? Is that really too much to ask? There are likely gonna be grey areas between what is banned and what isn't and the best course of action for all of us would be if people just didn't try to abuse those grey areas and try to skirt the rules constantly.

It's probably a naive thought but that's why I'm so adamant here not just in defending the test simming ban, but in pushing back against the general mindset behind it that is all about min-maxing, breaking things and maximizing your own selfish gains over the common good.
I think this is a hopeless pursuit, you're relying on the idea that competitiveness = bad. The most effective tactics/strategy in every game (and fundamentally, SHL is a game with strings attached) is to stay just within the rules. A really obvious example of this is the salary cap and minimum contracts. Paying players less money means you can afford a better roster, etc. and so most teams will spend close to the salary cap and will pay their players as little as possible. You're essentially advocating for people to not try and be good within a competitive game, which is fine if you're not invested or you're not a GM, but it just doesn't make sense for someone to spend hours trying to optimally manage everything else that goes into GMing and then intentionally submit suboptimal strats. If a similar ban was instituted in the league where I GM, I would do whatever form of testing/research into the game they considered legal.

I'm not arguing that competitiveness is bad, I'm arguing that unchecked hypercompetitiveness that only cares about ones own team but not the community as a whole is bad. The kind of mindset that leads to people spending hours upon hours trying to break the engine we run on, looking for exploits and min-maxing every single aspect of it. It's something that we need to push back against, even if we can't or don't want to fully eliminate it.

spooked · 07-16-2022, 12:09 PM

There is a world where we return to create a player including player roles, and GMs having even less control over what they can do in the sim, and maybe then you have a centralized test or balance team in charge of creating artificial limitations in those roles so you can get to some objective balanced world where everyone can pick what kind of player they want to be, and there is not broken or extra terrible choice, but that would require a lot of ongoing work to adjust those caps, readjust existing players, etc. In that world sim testing is much more acceptable, but really with the number of knobs you can change right now, allowing any for of "breaking" the engine type testing is just a risk to site health honestly as we have no group in place to dictate back to the league some adjustment in terms of maximums to limit whatever broken shit we find.

Literally the only thing we have right now is the shooting range/accuracy limits, but based off just logic we should have already limited forward strength in non-strength type roles, and defense passing/puck handling in defensive roles, etc. Without player builds baked into create a player on the forum, there is literally no way to institute this type of balancing though and makes sim testing a real negative instead of a contributing effort to balance the engine for our purposes.

spooked · 07-16-2022, 12:10 PM

TLDR, sim testing to break the engine should never be used to find what is good for the purposes of doing better, it should be used to find what is too good so that we can stop them from being too good and bring them back to just good

PremierBromanov · 07-16-2022, 03:21 PM

07-16-2022, 04:51 AMMemento Mori Wrote:
07-16-2022, 02:05 AMgoldenglutes Wrote: I think this is the most important point. It feels like there should be a discussion for a middle ground where GMs aren't spending all their energy finding ways to perfect their team, but can still learn about the engine. Right now it feels like it won't be possible to learn anything about the engine unless you spend the next 10 seasons GMing to see a decent sample size of what works and what doesn't, or you play NHL saves in FHM 8 to familiarize yourself with builds/tactics/power levels that are probably not applicable to the SHL.

I don't have a perfect answer for how to reach that middle ground. Maybe there could be an unbiased sim testing committee (with people from multiple teams) that can do some general tests for builds/tactics and publish their findings for everyone to see?

This committee can also play a large role in steering the conversation around builds to ensure there's healthy variation. For example, instead of trying to find the one best build for all situations, they could try to answer questions like:

What are the attributes that contribute to playmaking?
How do you build a defensively responsible center?
Is there a viable way to build a speedy player that largely ignores defense?
Can you feasibly build a defenseman that specializes in puck possession and controlled zone entries?
What is the in-sim difference between a goalie focused on positioning and one that is more unorthodox?

Although the answers to the first two questions seem obvious, that's only with the context of how hockey works in real life. We all know that FHM did not make a perfect engine, and there are definitely going to be counter intuitive findings.

Back in the STHS days (before 40 passing), I remember there used to be build guides about common pitfalls to avoid and how to build viable players in each type of style. That's all I really want for the new sim engine.
Exactly. Just to draw attention to one of RED's points:

07-15-2022, 07:04 PMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: That's a legitimate concern that I'll concede, but for other reasons than the ones you've mentioned. I see the risk here more in the fact that there clearly is a knowledge gap between teams/GMs at this point even without test simming, and it will be harder for the inexperienced GMs to catch up without test simming as one of their tools. That's why we need publicly available resources and essentially databases where people share their sim knowledge that are available to everyone, and I think it's fair to doubt that we'll get that anytime soon.

People sharing useful sim knowledge isn't doubtful, it's impossible to do so in a (legally) provable way. I will continue to ask my GMs for build advice - they know more about the sim than me, spent draft capital to acquire my player, I want the team to do well, etc. - and unless the SHL introduces a new rule saying its members are supposed to be deliberately unhelpful when other members ask for build advice, there are two potential (legal) strategies to follow: give build advice based on previous sim knowledge, or guess blindly given that the sim has changed.

I imagine most users/GMs will opt for the first option, and as series-based sports games rarely overhaul their engine in such a way that a large number of attributes go from good to bad or vice versa, this advice will probably still be largely good. Teams with a lot of sim knowledge will likely therefore continue to build according to the same logic - which is the actual reason teams like Hamilton were consistently good anyway, not test simming.

I dont know that I have a point here, but your first paragraph reminds me a lot of the first change to FHM6, which is undoubtedly an experience everyone in the league at the time had and also undoubtedly one we are trying -- in part or in whole -- to recreate. There are often users who want input on their build, and advice was usually based on a combination of real life hockey and an assumption for how the engine works. However, that gradually changed into advice based on "findings", and I put that word into quotes because these findings were often contradictory after a time. It was often said screening was useless. It was often said that a 2000 TPE goalie was not significantly better than a 400 TPE goalie. It was suggested that checking was very good and positioning was not. It was suggested that agility was better for shorter players but otherwise not as good as the other skating stats. Etc. Ad Nauseum.

However, I think this aggregate, social-based decompiling was a lot more fun to grapple with than knowing exactly the most effective way to build a team to win. We "knew", it seemed, what was good and what was bad based on thousands and thousands of sims split up between different teams and users, and of course the evidence that your best results came from copying ham strats 1 for 1.

Even the illusion of deterministic knowledge of the sim made the whole thing drab. Are we right in the confidence we have in what we know? It hardly matters. We can treat the fact or fiction of whether or not we had really cracked the code as the same, because the difference between us being right or wrong about that is immaterial to how the league feels about it. And, if it's not true, the pursuit of the REAL truth produces a league that isn't much fun to be in. Either you've made the best player, or you havent, but either way you'll know.

Obfuscation is a great thing, and being unsure that you're building a good player, or even being skeptical of advice you might get from anyone...well that's just part of the experience isn't it? If I wanted to solve a math problem, I'd be playing Factorio (which i am). I'm not here to see if I can score 55 goals or 60 goals (Whether I hit the + 5 or - 5 statistical chances), I'm here to run a long-term simulation with an agree-upon version of reality that matters, and where no other realities do. Is it cool to know that a team rolled the 20% chance to win the series? Kinda. But it's not as fun as knowing that your choices will have real consequences, that you can build a player that can be very very good or very very poor, and the driving force behind those consequences arent whether or not you played for one of the big 4 teams.

***artermis*** · 07-16-2022, 03:49 PM

I was under the impression that only test simming and not sim testing was banned, as the latter need not involve the league's file

Crunk · 07-16-2022, 04:17 PM

07-16-2022, 03:49 PMartermis Wrote: I was under the impression that only test simming and not sim testing was banned, as the latter need not involve the league's file

I am under the exact opposite impression.

Wouldn't it be nice to get some clarity?

*RashfordU* · 07-16-2022, 04:35 PM

07-16-2022, 12:09 PMspooked Wrote: we should have already limited forward strength in non-strength type roles, and defense passing/puck handling in defensive roles

Cale Makar would like a word with your lawyer

***Citizen of Adraa*** · 07-16-2022, 04:40 PM

07-16-2022, 04:35 PMRashfordU Wrote:
07-16-2022, 12:09 PMspooked Wrote: we should have already limited forward strength in non-strength type roles, and defense passing/puck handling in defensive roles
Cale Makar would like a word with your lawyer

Cale Makar paid 8 mil to switch to Dman, don't worry about him

***artermis*** · 07-17-2022, 03:47 PM

07-16-2022, 04:17 PMCrunk Wrote:
07-16-2022, 03:49 PMartermis Wrote: I was under the impression that only test simming and not sim testing was banned, as the latter need not involve the league's file
I am under the exact opposite impression.

Wouldn't it be nice to get some clarity?

There's nothing preventing it under the rulebook and it's never had the stigma that test simming has, so

To quote the rule "Accessing the SHL or SMJHL league file for the purposes of test simulations in FHM8 is strictly prohibited." so my interpretation remains the same

Navigation

Extra Menu

About us