The switch to FHM allowed me to have a little more fun with my build than I would have otherwise been able. Coming into the league on this particular recreate, I had opted to create a defensive-minded player. In the past, this had always tended to go poorly for players: although STHS had a utility for defensive defencemen, and they could help influence a team for the better, most of the work they did was buried in the play-by-play logs, which by their very nature were too painful to read through for anyone to really bother with them. FHM on the other hand has a wealth of easily accessible stats, making it much more rewarding on the face of it. So, I didn't change my build that drastically, but I definitely have a long way to go in figuring out how the various attributes work together. It's not going to be as simple as player building was in the past, but that might be the best thing about it: at the end of it, I hope to have a player that is largely unique to me, rather than one that came copy-pasted from every other player before me.

Maybe the biggest change for my player himself, having only been an STHS player for less than a season, is that I'm now able to build more specifically into something like shot-blocking, rather than having one huge, catch-all defensive stat. I'm also a little more confident in increasing my player's physicality now, given the degree to which the previous engine could effectively punish teams for players with too high a checking total compared to their discipline.