04-13-2023, 03:06 PMboom Wrote: idk i feel like just yeeting iihf would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, people affected by this aren't asking for some major reckoning on geopolitics they just don't want to see the explicit imagery/iconography of a government that is hurting and killing their people right now, i think just saying "no one can have countries anymore" would be an overreaction

speaking from the point of view of being 8 seasons into a narrative, having to fictionalize everything to be in some fantasy country would have been a damper on benign elements of the story and make things really really complicated, and could put off new users who want to write about their player in a certain country.

@PremierBromanov you mentioned players wanting to create as more obscure nations, I can't speak for them but I know @eddiesnothere has done some pretty fantastic media with a Vietnamese player coming to North America. I think if users are going to make players from those countries we can let them figure out how to approach the stories and see where they go with it.

With only a representation of the top division in the real-world international hockey sphere without lower tiers, we're never going to be able to give every single country create a national team to play on and I think it's fine to leave that decision in the users' hands to adapt to being online.

EDIT TO ADD: not to mention the "vague geographical definitions" would probably lead to federations like Finland/Sweden/Denmark/Norway or Germany/Switzerland/France that become very oversized.

TBH I'm coming at this from a gameplay perspective, I think a "feeding frenzy" as feds compete to recruit people from the pool of new players would both be far more engaging and create a lot greater connection between people and their feds. Think about it more like college, where they compete for recruits every season. I think the current create system is bad both competitively and from a passion perspective because it makes it really easy as a player to not even realize IIHF is a thing when creating. New players create for a country and THEN get connected with their fed. This is of course excepting the transfer system, which I think is really cool and it's a thing I've always wanted to do that I've never been able to bc of how IIHF is, and I think a wider rollout of this cool system that really is totally different from the SHL structure would allow it to really shine.