01-04-2020, 02:14 PMnour Wrote:

01-04-2020, 12:26 PMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: I have to say, it's disappointing to see the attitude HAM is taking towards this. After what happened in the offseason, i thought that we had collectively agreed that these PA-SC-shenanigans are something that can severely hurt the league as a whole and that a) we need to look for substantial technical/engine solutions to this problem and b) that GMs would enter into sort of a gentlemans agreement to not take advantage of these loopholes while the league is still working on the fixes. I even thought that something like what was suggested in the OP had already been established to a certain extent as a stopgap, but I guess I misremembered.

But apparently HAM decided to say screw that, ignore the whole "overall well-being of the league" thing and instead decided to focus on maximizing their own advantage they could get out of this situation. Which, by all means, is not against the rules or anything, but don't be so sanctimonious and expect people to be happy about it and like you for it. You were presented with a choice "Do we do what is good for the league, or do we do go what is good for us?", and you chose the latter, it's as simple as that. For the second time, by the way.

When you originally discovered the exploit I could have given you the benefit of the doubt, because looking for an advantage over other teams is part of a GMs job and we can't blame you for coming up with a creative and perfectly legal way to accomplish that. But since then it has become very clear how this exploit negatively affects the overall health of the league in numerous ways, but even though we have this knowledge now, you are still sticking to the plan to a certain extent. Of course we can't expect you to put points into attributes that you know will likely make your player worse, but you are still using the current system to rush your players to the SC max, leave PA untouched or even use regression to drop players PA ratings, making the most of our current broken system. Again, perfectly legal but certainly not helpful considering the overall situation of the league, and therefore not popular.

I give you that this series against Buffalo doesn't really count as proof for the argument against you though because you are right, flukes happen in STHS and in the playoffs no matter what and shit can be quite random with such a small sample size. We have no way of knowing how much the build changes influenced the results or goalie performances, the Conference Winner sweeping the Wildcard team certainly isn't something super crazy.  Don't let NOLA hear that though.

I think a lot of what you said here has merit and is really fair, genuinely the points you made are well thought out and expressed in a discussion-encouraging way. I’ll chime in just because I like the open nature this comment provides:

There were a few players who had the egregious scoring-passing differential that left some of them with 40 passing. Offseason saw 6 of these players have redistributions rejected because of it and those 6 players adjusting accordingly, as well as the regression updates to ensure the gap isn’t as severe on players who are regressing. As it stands there are still more shoot first players on Hamilton, but at this point when shooting has been proven to be the better stat, the only thing to fix it using sths is to willingly ask players to build players they dislike playing and put tpe into stats they dont care about, which is already a slog to do for stats you DO like with how TPE scales in older players. In addition to this, we didn’t slam the league like NOLA did, high scoring or not we have a playoff calibre team tpe-wise, it shouldnt be a surprise ir outrageous that we performed well.

I’ll agree that the attitude out of HAM could be better. I’ve personally apologized in past threads that the team as a whole could be more empathetic towards the site, and I don’t really enjoy the “get good” sentiment that the team has been putting out and I really dislike that a lot of the antagonizing of the group comes from the attitude we put out to the site like its us against the world, I’ll fully agree with you there thats a problem. I will clarify like others have in the past that this isn’t the second time we are taking advantage of the sim, when they first found this strat it produced good results but we legit NEVER saw anything sim breaking in the tests we put out, and I may be mistaken but the really broken results only came through in public tests where EVERYONE on Hamilton has 99 Scoring/40 Passing (not feasible), and the one team tested against had the reverse (40 Scoring/99 Passing). Again I might be misremembering there but if I’m not, I don’t think thats a fair, totally unbiased test, and this season’s results + our personal tests can speak to that.

Not much to say on the third paragraph other than you’re right, certainly people shouldn’t be expected to love it and the attitude out of Hamilton isn’t entirely a good one.

Lastly, yeah this is awfully small sample size and I really don’t like that now any time Hamilton wins a game people can default to saying “oh its the strat fuckin pricks”. We were a better team than Buffalo this season and our goalie has double the TPE, and we only outshot them by 6 shots. The scoring stat doesn’t make your players better at shooting it just makes them shoot MORE, so by this metric, the Buffalo series was a standard SHL playoff series, where goaltending decided the outcome. I don’t entirely see that as a fluke.

Thanks for the well thought out and level headed reply!

I would agree that the data that we have on the PA-SC exploit is kinda problematic and not nearly as unanimous as it has been made out to be. Maybe I missed a post on this somewhere but it seems like all we have is different tests from different people with different set-ups, but no one-stop post where the availale data has been collected for some thorough analysis, and calls for such a post have been mostly ignored or missed. I really don't like that both the criticism towards you guys and the argument that a sim-change absolutely needs to happen is based on possibly faulty, but at the very least inconsistent and incomplete data.

In my opinion, or at least according to the information that is publicly availably, we still don't know how big this problem actually is. We have you guys who originally worked out this strategy and made your tests with it, then after this became public different people ran different tests with different setups. We had tests where an entire teams was built like that and nobody else, tests where it was one player on a team or three, tests where only one season was simmed, tests where a players whole career was simulated and so on, and thats not even taking into accounts the different methods people might have used in regards to sliders or auto-lines. And some of these tests have come to vastly different results.

After the test where all of Hamilton was 40-99 and no one else was (or other teams were even built the opposite way), everyone thought that the sky was falling and that STHS was dead, but it only gradually came out how extreme and unrealistic some of the parameters of this test had been. On the other hand, there were other tests like the Phelps (I think it was him) career-simulation with 40-99 for only himself, where his numbers were still very good but not nearly as inflated and crazy as in the other tests. In fact I would say that those kinds of numbers would probably be possible for a non-exploit player today if he started at Max TPE instead of having to go through progression and regression.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle but my point is that we don't know how bad the exploit actually is because we can't judge the different circumstances of the various test and compare them to each other. Or if that knowledge exists somewhere then it is only collected behind closed doors and not available on the public forums, which I think would be a mistakes because this is some crucial information that would benefit a lot from as many people as possible taking a look at it, poking holes into it and coming up with new tests.