05-21-2023, 05:06 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: Hard agree. I have been of the opinion for a long time that access to knowledge and resources is one of our biggest problems. Hell, I was GMing in Nevada for four or five seasons before I learned stuff that was apparently common knowledge to a lot of other people. I think that we have/had a cool opportunity here in the early seasons of FHM8 that we will never have again, to tinker and find things that will work before everybody inevitably gets locked back into some hard meta that you can't succeed without.

But things are already settling into that. We have a league where most teams run all-offense all the time tactics, maximizing sliders that say "too much will pull you out of position" or "this setting will make you less effective defensively" - the majority of teams are just trying to out-score the other team at the expense of defense, so it's entirely unsurprising to me that we're seeing fifty-four goals in a four-game sim night (that is not an exaggeration, that happened once this season). It's just really hard to experiment with anything else when the majority of the league has already decided we're doing the goals goals goals goals 24/7 thing again.

I will put this out there - I am a pretty open book when it comes to my FHM knowledge. If you're nice to me and we talk a decent amount, I'm not keeping any secrets from you. I just try not to go aggressively critiquing my friends' lines and telling them how to do their jobs. At the same time, though, I don't know everything - I know a few things that have worked relatively well for me on the teams I've had a hand in coaching, but I think/hope/pray that there are so many other options. I want people to figure out things that I don't know, I want there to be more viable options than us all getting railroaded into the same old meta all over again.

The only like statistical approach you can really take to figure out what is good is to look at what teams that are outperforming their TPE consistently do, and then try to replicate/tweak towards that. PHI was the best example like 3-4 seasons ago when I looked into it a bit more, and really, if you are playing more defensive as a lower TPE team you are still going to lose, so it's better to try to score a bunch of goals against the EVEN lower TPE teams because the performance gap in our league is so large you aren't going to "steal" any games by playing defensive anyways if your players on average are even like 200 TPE lower. The TPE performance gap has pretty much invalidated defensive tactics in most matchups during the regular season (and all our awards and all stars are based on points, so you might as well try to go full offense anyways since goaltending is chaos), but in truly balanced games not sure if there is any advantage to not being on full rambo offense.