Franchise Hockey Manager 2
FHM2 Update #4, Version 2.4.29, Now Available!
General notes: First, and most importantly: this update is dedicated to our friend Matthieu LeClair (Penfold on our forums), who passed away suddenly last Friday. Despite an ongoing illness, Matt had been a huge contributor to FHM2's testing and research efforts over the last year, and we'll miss him greatly. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
We've expanded a bit more beyond bugfixing in this update, making some larger changes. All-star games have been added, and the German league is, at the moment, a testbed for some roster-rule changes that will eventually be expanded into other European leagues with similar rule structures. The reported-bug list is now 63% cleared (from 40% last update; includes newly-discovered bugs added since then.) With the extensive work on the larger new features and bugfixing, we didn't have time to implement that many smaller user-suggested features this time, but still have a long list of those to consider.
The database in this build is the product of last week's research update, so it's a few days behind real life. The "Current" starting option is beginning to diverge more from the Opening Night one now.
Changes:
1. Clarification made in labeling of Fatigue column on Lines screen during games (it shows current Game Fatigue, not the skaters's fitness value.)
2. Adjusted the maximum value the AI will assign to lower-round draft picks. This was intended to encourage the AI to make more trades involving picks, but the effect hasn't been as noticeable as was hoped, so we're going to try another approach next that should result in more active attempts at acquiring/trading picks by the AI.
3. College-bound players should now be a little less willing to sign professional contracts.
4. Scouts assigned to the KHL draft should now scout more appropriate regions.
5. Player health status colours reversed so green = good, red = hurt.
6. Defencemen should now be somewhat less likely to be named playoff MVP.
7. MHL/MHLB (Russian junior) maximum age is now 20.
8. Czech relegation system corrected.
9. Corrections made to starting injury data.
10. Spelling of many Belarusian city names switched from Polish to Belarusian versions.
11. In leagues where money can be included in trade offers (e.g. the KHL), the dollar amounts will now be valued more accurately by the AI.
New Additions:
12. The (modern) NHL and KHL now play all-star games in midseason. Unfortunately, the NHL surprised us with the new all-star game format for 2016, and it's going to be difficult to get that 3-on-3, 20-minute game setup working in FHM, so for now the NHL game approximately follows the format used in recent seasons, with two captains selecting the teams. We can't rename the teams annually according to the captains' names, though, so the normal naming format of "Team Crosby" is replaced by the two teams being designated "Red" and "Blue". The KHL uses its conference vs. conference format. A special set of game settings and AI tactical choices are used to simulate the wide-open nature of all-star games with many goals and few hits or penalties, although the scores usually still fall a little short of the basketball-like ones in real life. All-star game stats are recorded in player histories (in addition to the existing preseason, regular season, and playoff stats.) All-star games will be expanded to other leagues and historical seasons soon, and the basic functionality will serve as the foundation for other non-club games, like international play, that will eventually be added in future versions of the game.
13. The incorporation of Eliteprospects player history data continues; we've experimented with a few more leagues and are now adding new ones regularly. In this update, we've added player histories for skaters from the Swedish SHL and Allsvenskan, Finnish Liiga, Swiss Nationalliga A, Asian League Ice Hockey, and the Federal League. The American Hockey league, Finnish Mestis, and Austrian EBEL have partial updates (the AHL one going back 25 years, enough to cover all active players.) The process isn't quite perfect yet, so you may notice some players with missing history when the all of the steps we've taken to match EP's player ID's to ours have failed, but it's a fairly small number (~2%); we'll be going back and correcting those manually later. Same with a few cases where the team histories had some flaws that caused the player stats to import without a team name or not at all, we're still picking those out. We're hoping to get all of the remaining playable leagues done by the next update; however, it's proving a little more time-consuming than we expected translating their data into our database structures, so we have to balance that with making other changes to the game. Nonplayable league histories may take a while longer because of that, as well as some concerns about the amount of memory and save file space they'll eat (although so far it's been much less than anticipated), and the necessity of fleshing out the framework history for some of them in our database. Special thanks to Duranium and Lazion for helping out with the stat imports.
14. The German league's roster limit and injury list have been removed to make the roster handling there more realistic; teams can now add as many players to their roster as their budget and annual contract maximum (32 per team) allow. The AI in this league has been adjusted to deal with these circumstances and to make better choices about the use of foreign players (it should now hold out for better foreigners, rather than signing weaker ones at the start of the season.) As mentioned, these changes are test runs for improving the way European leagues handle player movement, and may also be useful in improving the roster AI as a whole (although we still intend to make more direct changes in that area.)
Bug Fixes:
15. The AI should now always attempt to use the special teams units designated in the tactics screen instead of trying to choose its own. This has resulted in a slight scoring increases and changes in icetime for top-level players, we'll likely have to do a little more fine-tuning of this next update.
16. Game view slowdown when player is in penalty box fixed.
17. Goals scored while playing 4-on-4 should no longer end the penalty on the scored-upon team in some situations.
18. Asian League schedule should no longer change length after a few seasons have been played.
19. Season stats for goalies and skaters should now export to the appropriate CSV files properly.
20. The leaders and goalie leaders screens should no longer exclude players from categories for counting stats (goals, shutouts, etc.) if they haven't played a minimum number of games.
21. Using a special character in save name will no longer result in multiple copies of the save being created.
22. Opening Day quickstart now has the correct presets.txt (pre-existing injuries) file.
23. Hall of Fame Qualifications +/- field should now save edits properly, and has been adjusted to a starting value of 300.
24. In leagues with non-sudden death overtime, games will no longer progress to the shootout if the game is decided at the end of OT.
25. Potential crash in September 1980 of historical game fixed.
26. Russian under-18 teams should now have enough players at the start of the game to supply the first KHL draft properly.
27. Repetition of team name in one news headline fixed.
(continued in next post)
2.4.29 Update Notes (Continued)
28. Play-by-play should no longer occasionally announce breakaway goals as being scored by the goalie they were scored on.
29. No-movement clauses should no longer prevent a player from being called up from a farm team to a parent team.
30. 1920x1200 arena backgrounds should now work properly.
31. CHL Import Draft should no longer occasionally become stuck when user is participating in it.
32. AI should no longer use 3 forwards when killing a penalty 3-on-5.
33. Signing player contract extensions should now reduce the team's extended contracts budget properly, instead of the free agent funds.
34. Player scouting levels should no longer drop shortly before the draft.
35. During the playoffs, the team home page should no longer show the most recent playoff game as both last home and last away game.
36. When non-coincidental minors are called on opposing teams playing 4-on-4 overtime, the result should no longer be the teams playing 5-on-5 the rest of the overtime.
37. Players should now no longer be excluded from leaders in counting stats (e.g. goalie shutouts) if they've played a low number of games.
38. Penalties during non-overtime 4-on-4 play should now correctly result in a 4-on-3 power play instead of 5-on-4.
39. If a team has a player serving a dual major and then takes two minor penalties, the second minor will now start immediately, instead of waiting for the major to expire.
40. The player screen should now show the correct number of years remaining on recently-renewed contracts.
41. Goalies subsituted into losing games should no longer be credited for the loss unless they meet the normal loss requirements.
42. Attempting to look at the Montreal Wanderers' player index will no longer result in a crash.
43. AI-controlled KHL teams should no longer occasionally sign players contracted to NHL teams.
44. The InD (days lost to injury) column on the team stats page should now be calculated correctly and no longer show very high (60,000+) numbers.
45. Custom zone assignments should now persist when exiting the game and reloading.
46. Relegated teams will now have their farm teams removed to prevent possible conflicts with farm and parent teams winding up in the same league together.
47. Historical games started in 1931 with the "Set Initial Rosters by Draft" and "Generate Rookies at 17" options both turned on should now get a proper draft pool at the start of the game.
48. Crashes caused by a few rare situations discovered in user-submitted files fixed.
FHM2 Update #4, Version 2.4.29, Now Available!
General notes: First, and most importantly: this update is dedicated to our friend Matthieu LeClair (Penfold on our forums), who passed away suddenly last Friday. Despite an ongoing illness, Matt had been a huge contributor to FHM2's testing and research efforts over the last year, and we'll miss him greatly. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
We've expanded a bit more beyond bugfixing in this update, making some larger changes. All-star games have been added, and the German league is, at the moment, a testbed for some roster-rule changes that will eventually be expanded into other European leagues with similar rule structures. The reported-bug list is now 63% cleared (from 40% last update; includes newly-discovered bugs added since then.) With the extensive work on the larger new features and bugfixing, we didn't have time to implement that many smaller user-suggested features this time, but still have a long list of those to consider.
The database in this build is the product of last week's research update, so it's a few days behind real life. The "Current" starting option is beginning to diverge more from the Opening Night one now.
Changes:
1. Clarification made in labeling of Fatigue column on Lines screen during games (it shows current Game Fatigue, not the skaters's fitness value.)
2. Adjusted the maximum value the AI will assign to lower-round draft picks. This was intended to encourage the AI to make more trades involving picks, but the effect hasn't been as noticeable as was hoped, so we're going to try another approach next that should result in more active attempts at acquiring/trading picks by the AI.
3. College-bound players should now be a little less willing to sign professional contracts.
4. Scouts assigned to the KHL draft should now scout more appropriate regions.
5. Player health status colours reversed so green = good, red = hurt.
6. Defencemen should now be somewhat less likely to be named playoff MVP.
7. MHL/MHLB (Russian junior) maximum age is now 20.
8. Czech relegation system corrected.
9. Corrections made to starting injury data.
10. Spelling of many Belarusian city names switched from Polish to Belarusian versions.
11. In leagues where money can be included in trade offers (e.g. the KHL), the dollar amounts will now be valued more accurately by the AI.
New Additions:
12. The (modern) NHL and KHL now play all-star games in midseason. Unfortunately, the NHL surprised us with the new all-star game format for 2016, and it's going to be difficult to get that 3-on-3, 20-minute game setup working in FHM, so for now the NHL game approximately follows the format used in recent seasons, with two captains selecting the teams. We can't rename the teams annually according to the captains' names, though, so the normal naming format of "Team Crosby" is replaced by the two teams being designated "Red" and "Blue". The KHL uses its conference vs. conference format. A special set of game settings and AI tactical choices are used to simulate the wide-open nature of all-star games with many goals and few hits or penalties, although the scores usually still fall a little short of the basketball-like ones in real life. All-star game stats are recorded in player histories (in addition to the existing preseason, regular season, and playoff stats.) All-star games will be expanded to other leagues and historical seasons soon, and the basic functionality will serve as the foundation for other non-club games, like international play, that will eventually be added in future versions of the game.
13. The incorporation of Eliteprospects player history data continues; we've experimented with a few more leagues and are now adding new ones regularly. In this update, we've added player histories for skaters from the Swedish SHL and Allsvenskan, Finnish Liiga, Swiss Nationalliga A, Asian League Ice Hockey, and the Federal League. The American Hockey league, Finnish Mestis, and Austrian EBEL have partial updates (the AHL one going back 25 years, enough to cover all active players.) The process isn't quite perfect yet, so you may notice some players with missing history when the all of the steps we've taken to match EP's player ID's to ours have failed, but it's a fairly small number (~2%); we'll be going back and correcting those manually later. Same with a few cases where the team histories had some flaws that caused the player stats to import without a team name or not at all, we're still picking those out. We're hoping to get all of the remaining playable leagues done by the next update; however, it's proving a little more time-consuming than we expected translating their data into our database structures, so we have to balance that with making other changes to the game. Nonplayable league histories may take a while longer because of that, as well as some concerns about the amount of memory and save file space they'll eat (although so far it's been much less than anticipated), and the necessity of fleshing out the framework history for some of them in our database. Special thanks to Duranium and Lazion for helping out with the stat imports.
14. The German league's roster limit and injury list have been removed to make the roster handling there more realistic; teams can now add as many players to their roster as their budget and annual contract maximum (32 per team) allow. The AI in this league has been adjusted to deal with these circumstances and to make better choices about the use of foreign players (it should now hold out for better foreigners, rather than signing weaker ones at the start of the season.) As mentioned, these changes are test runs for improving the way European leagues handle player movement, and may also be useful in improving the roster AI as a whole (although we still intend to make more direct changes in that area.)
Bug Fixes:
15. The AI should now always attempt to use the special teams units designated in the tactics screen instead of trying to choose its own. This has resulted in a slight scoring increases and changes in icetime for top-level players, we'll likely have to do a little more fine-tuning of this next update.
16. Game view slowdown when player is in penalty box fixed.
17. Goals scored while playing 4-on-4 should no longer end the penalty on the scored-upon team in some situations.
18. Asian League schedule should no longer change length after a few seasons have been played.
19. Season stats for goalies and skaters should now export to the appropriate CSV files properly.
20. The leaders and goalie leaders screens should no longer exclude players from categories for counting stats (goals, shutouts, etc.) if they haven't played a minimum number of games.
21. Using a special character in save name will no longer result in multiple copies of the save being created.
22. Opening Day quickstart now has the correct presets.txt (pre-existing injuries) file.
23. Hall of Fame Qualifications +/- field should now save edits properly, and has been adjusted to a starting value of 300.
24. In leagues with non-sudden death overtime, games will no longer progress to the shootout if the game is decided at the end of OT.
25. Potential crash in September 1980 of historical game fixed.
26. Russian under-18 teams should now have enough players at the start of the game to supply the first KHL draft properly.
27. Repetition of team name in one news headline fixed.
(continued in next post)
2.3.19 Update Notes (Continued)
33. Fictional team Expansion option disabled in historical mode (wasn't intended to be added there, would break games if used.)
34. Agreed-upon trades should no longer occasionally be impossible to complete.
35. Shootout summary in boxscores should now report the shootout results correctly.
36. NHL-contracted players who are playing on WHL/OHL/QMJHL teams now remain on their junior team after being traded by their NHL team, instead of going to their new NHL team's roster.
37. European players drafted from the WHL/OHL/QMJHL can now be returned to their junior teams after signing an NHL contract.
38. Reserve list players can no longer be dressed/scratched (they must be moved to the active roster first.)
39. The AI will no longer automatically fill a coaching vacancy on a team the user is controlling in GM-only mode.
40. Fixed rate situation where draft data can become corrupted, leading to a single-round draft with one team owning all picks.
41. Players should no longer occasionally sign with AI-run KHL teams for $0 salaries.
42. AHL winning percentages now calculated correctly.
43. AI-run teams in historical mode should no longer release a large number of players on August 31.
44. Sorting stats screens by Game Rating (GR) should now no longer result in exhibition and regular-season stats being combined, or other display oddities.
45. User will no longer occasionally have his GM contract renewed automatically with no communication from the team.
46. If the user has "Setting Lineups" under control of his assistant, the assistant will no longer call up an injury replacement if a player of the correct position is already on the active roster but not dressed.
47. Trade negotiations involving a player's rights will now be terminated if the player signs a contract mid-negotiation.
48. Numerous team and player data corrections.
49. Reported-time issues on faceoffs and long-range shots corrected.
FHM2 Update #3, Version 2.3.19, Now Available!
General notes: With this update, we've begun to address some of the issues that required more labour- and time-intensive fixes. Generally, the most serious bugs (crashes and very intrusive problems) took precedence, but we also made some changes that only required minimal adjustments to the game's code and were easily tested. As of right now, we've cleared about 40% of our reported bug list and 20% done with the suggestions list.
We're also happy to announce that we've partnered with Eliteprospects.com to enhance our player and team histories with data from the massive Eliteprospects database. You'll be able to see the first step in this update: full KHL player histories for all skaters who've played in that league. It's a little complicated translating their database conventions to ours, since there are a few things we do in fundamentally different ways. So, we'll be introducing the data slowly and carefully to avoid the big, ugly errors that would result if we tried to do one massive data dump. But we should pick up speed as we get a little more experience with it, and intend to get the histories as complete as possible, so you can expect to see more and more data being added regularly as we update the game. We'll likely cover the playable leagues first, in order of their technical challenges, and then move on to the others. Many, many thanks to Johan Nilsson, Eliteprospects' founder, for his help and cooperation; being able to import the data like this will save massive amounts of time and open up some interesting new possibilities for us.
The database in this build is about a week behind our current research and editing, as it would've required a few additional days of testing to check this week's changes properly and the rest of the update was ready. So, no Tortorella in Columbus yet. We have, however, added a "Current" quickstart as a startup option in modern mode in addition to the Opening Day one; there won't be much of a difference at the moment but the Current quickstart will, in the future, be the one that has rosters updated with mid-season player moves.
Your existing savegames will be compatible with the updated game, but any fixes involving the database updates in the update will require a new start to be fully effective, and some of the update's fixes may not retroactively correct certain problems in existing saves.
Changes:
1. The processing time for the July 1 season-to-season transition has been reduced by approximately half.
2. Staff can now be re-signed anytime during the expiration year of their contract, instead of needing to wait for the email that announces their contract is expiring.
3. Player popups now identify player's current league in addition to the team abbreviation.
4. Team histories now show previous names the franchise has played under.
5. Name searches will now return results that include special characters with diacritics, e.g. "Lagace" will also show played named "Lagacé".
6. Commissioner mode now allows the editing of player uniform numbers.
7. The ABI column on the Dressed List of the lines screen now shows all numbers with one decimal place, instead of alternating between one and none depending on whether or not the number is whole.
8. The wording of the "Can't remove so much money from payroll" warning from the user's assistant during trade negotations has been changed to something that's a little clearer on the exact nature of the problem.
9. Goalie Games Played are now displayed on various non-goalie statistics views.
10. The Contracts tab on the roster screen now opens to the Contracts view by default, instead of the Info view.
11. The Injury List tab on the roster screen now opens to the Health Status view by default, instead of the Info view.
12. Human owners will now receive a warning after the expansion draft if they are below the cap floor and will need to take on additional salary before the season begins.
13. The free agency preview message now lists the position of each player.
14. The "Force Trade" option is now available in commissioner mode of single-player games, not just multiplayer.
15. Clarifying tooltip added to Roster Screen Action button about the effects of using "AI Setup Organization" with certain AI settings active.
16. When a player is sent down to a farm team but is still visible on the league Leaders screen, the team abbreviation shown will be the parent team, instead of the farm team.
17. In the initial draft in fictional leagues with salary caps, AI teams should now be much more conservative with their cap management. Having too many teams at the cap maximum was causing the AI considerable problems with roster management; while the fictional AI will likely need more work, as will player generation in fictional mode (appears to be generating too many middle-high quality players and not enough at either extreme), this should resolve some of the player movement oddities being reported in fictional leagues, and is a necessary first step to delving deeper into the AI issues.
New Additions:
18. The player view on the game screen (visible only at resolutions at least 1280 pixels wide) has been replaced by a Penalty Box that shows the currently penalized players.
19. The player award icons and trophy background are now removed from the skin and part of the quickstarts (like logos), so they can be customized more easily. They can be made league-specific by adding the full league name to the filename, e.g. national_hockey_league_po_tropy.png.
20. An age option has been added to the player creation screen, so the age of a newly-created player can be specified.
21. User will now receive notification if a player is signed off his roster (e.g. an NHL team signing a player from a junior or European team.)
Bug Fixes:
22. Various crash bugs in rare circumstances fixed (e.g., occasional crash while viewing first preseason game, crash while attempting to advance a day with an empty spot in the lines, crash on "saving continents" while saving, etc.)
23. Change made to player salary demands for NHL-caliber players signing in non-NHL leagues that should prevent the movement of decent players out of the top-level leagues to much poorer, lower-level ones that shouldn't be able to afford them.
24. Most special characters being displayed as "?" should now be fixed, with a very small number of exceptions that we're continuing to work on. This should permanently fix the problem and solve the issue with it reappearing after it's apparently been fixed, as has happened a few times in the past. You may notice a long loading time when you first load an older save, particularly if you've been playing it for several seasons, as news stories need to be re-generated to be fixed properly. This will not retroactively fix the '?' in roster (and similar) screens in older games, but new players generated in those games will no longer have the problem.
25. The AI should no longer reassign scouts in multiplayer games when scouting is under user control.
26. The AI should no longer sign players or make other roster moves in multiplayer games when roster management options are set to user control.
27. Users should now be able to set training for their team when training control is set to them.
28. Manager options for for minor league affiliates should no longer revert back to Assistant control in multiplayer.
29. Deleted emails in multiplayer will no longer reappear after the commissioner simulates games.
30. Mismatched and missing columns fixed in CSV export.
31. Personal.dat file in multiplayer games should no longer expand to massive sizes for some owners.
32. Game previews at the beginning of the playoffs should no longer show players with "-1" games played.
(continued)
Version 2.2.9 Hotfix Now Available
Your existing savegames will be compatible with the updated game, but any fixes involving the database updates will require a new start to be fully effective.
Changes:
1. While on the player search screen, selecting the view option for Mental Ratings (or any option below it) will no longer cause a crash.
2. Winning percentage now calculated correctly in leagues that use it to determine playoff positions.
3. League history in fictional leagues now displayed properly.
4. Bug that cause user's GM contract to appear to expire at the wrong time fixed.
Update #2, Version 2.2.8, Released!
Your existing savegames will be compatible with the updated game, but any fixes involving the database updates will require a new start to be fully effective.
General Note: The main focus of this update is providing the actual NHL opening-night rosters to you as quickly as possible. But we've also used the time to make a few more fixes and changes, as detailed below. At this point, now that the first two updates are out we're now going to shift to working on things that require more complex coding and multi-day testing. We'll let you know about the likely date for the next update as soon as we can make a reliable estimate.
NHL Update: the roster update was completed late on Tuesday, so the new rosters reflect the player moves up to Wednesday morning; the only major move that happened too late for inclusion was Scott Gomez signing in St. Louis. Starting injuries have been updated as well, so the players who are out right now should also be injured on opening night in the game. Some very late shuffling between the AHL and NHL in the last few hours before opening night isn't reflected, although we did manage to predict some of those moves correctly. Now that the NHL has sorted itself out, we should see rosters in other leagues stabilizing in the next week or two, which will allow us to get them into a more finalized state. As suspensions aren't in the game at the moment, Raffi Torres is included with San Jose (although his ratings reflect his long layoff.) NHL front office staffs still need some work on certain teams.
And while we were testing this update, we also did the official FHM2 Stanley Cup prediction for 2015-16: Rangers over Blues. Details to be posted on our blog site, blog.ootpdevelopments.com.
New Additions:
1. The Search screen (magnifying glass icon) now displays all players, rather than requiring a text search to be entered.
2. A League option has been added to the Filter dialog.
3. CSV output option is now available in all games, not just multiplayer ones.
Changes:
4. The fourth defensive pair, if the league uses one, is now sohown on the Game Preview Screen.
5. Lowered chance of success of very long-range shots.
6. Slightly increased number of shots from inside the offensive zone.
7. Slightly increased number of hits in the defensive and neutral zones.
8. Generation of fighting ratings in historical mode has been adjusted to prevent excessive ratings for good players who aren't particularly notable as fighters. (Note from Jeff: This will result in a noticeable decrease in PIM and fight totals in frequent-fighting eras, but not to extremely unreasonable levels; I'm still seeing PIM totals up to the high 300's and low 400's. So, don't panic if you notice lower numbers, this first step was necessary to get historical mode to the point where I can handle the final tuning of fight levels with data changes, as I did with the modern NHL. Fighting levels are very dependent on the collective availability of willing fighters within the league, so I'll now need to go through a lot of the player records by hand and set/correct their fighting ratings, as well as fix some guys whose general play style was miscategorized when I first built the database 2-3 years ago. We'll also be working on re-enabling multi-player fights and better misconduct handling at some point.)
9. More descriptive warnings and suggestions have been added to popups that will appear if the game is being played in non-Fullscreen mode at a resolution that is too tall for the computer's display resolution.
10. Staff salaries can now be edited up to $9,999,999 (was $3,000,000).
11. Upper limit on contract offers to players increased so their demands can always be met if desired (was formerly limited to $10 million.)
12. Injury proneness ratings for players generated in fictional leagues should now be much more variable instead of defaulting to 5.
13. Full team names (including nicknames) now shown in the standings on the league home screen if the resolution is >= 1280 pixels wide.
Bug Fixes:
14. We believe we've resolved the problems with the Continue/Load options after returning to the Start Screen; they haven't reoccurred yet in testing, although some versions of this were intermittent and may yet be lurking; please let us know if you have any issues in this area (e.g. not being able to click on Continue or Load, or having the game revert to the Start Screen after the loading process ends.
15. The AI should no longer sign players for human-controlled teams in a multiplayer league even when all team control settings set to human.
16. Issues with Fullscreen mode on Macs with display resolutions with heights of 768 have been fixed.
17. Corrected bug making some ratings visible only to a player in commisioner mode.
18. Timing issues fixed on opening faceoffs that led to very quick goals being recorded.
19. The Allocate Random Contracts to all players function should be working correctly now.
20. The missing scouting assignments in online leagues have been fixed.
21. Attempting to edit a coach will no longer result in his contract immediately expiring.
22. The previews for preseason games will no longer show players as having "-1" games played.
23. The play by play should now report the correct season assist total after the name of a player getting an assist, instead of (0).
24. Manual entry of staff salary amounts no longer limited to 6 figures.
25. Leagues that allow ties should now display them properly in the home/road records.
26. Finnish Liiga teams should now obey the maximum dressed skaters rule.
27. User-reported crash on October 24 fixed.
28. Crash related to incorrect Finnish team change fixed.
29. Occasional error in reporting human manager's status with his team fixed, as well as crash that resulted if the manager attempted to re-appoint himself.
30. Teams should no longer play multiple preseason games in one day when using certain league alignments.
31. Crash on first day of preseason games in fictional leagues due to lines not being set by AI teams fixed.
Data/Miscellaneous:
32. NHL rosters updated to opening night status.
33. NHL injuries updated to opening night status.
34. Updates to player data in several leagues, as well as to free agents.
35. Several duplicated players removed.
36. Some arena names updated and corrected.
37. Names file expanded.
38. Check boxes in Setup/Options screen realigned properly.
39. Fixed some news text errors.
40. Corrections and additions to various league/team history data.
41. 10 teams/2 divisions/52 games fictional league structure should work properly now.
42. German League rules have been revised, budgets and salary guidelines updated, farm-parent relationships corrected, and foreign players with missing German nationality have had it added.
43. Finnish Suomi-Sarja updated to reflect the loss of Kiekko-Vantaa Itä and the new schedule; other Finnish leagues have had their rules updated as much as possible (some things, like the guaranteed promotion of Jukurit Mikkeli to Liiga in 2016-17, couldn't be done yet.)
44. Allsvenskan rosters were updated completely (thanks to Vikke Allvin for taking care of this on short notice.)
45. Slovakian 1. Liga teams updated.
Upgrading the playable European leagues is a high priority for us right now, expect to see continuted improvements in their data and gameplay soon.
Update #1, Version 2.1.4 Released!
General note: Since this is the first update and we wanted to get it to you before the weekend, these are mainly the "low-hanging fruit" of the first reported bugs and requests - things we could fix, implement, and test very quickly. There are other reported issues that will take a little more time to address properly; we haven't forgotten them.
Note on data: This is not a data update, as our researchers are still working on the most recent roster changes. The data changes in this update are mainly fixes for errors that have been discovered.
Your existing savegames will be compatible with the updated game, but any fixes involving the database updates will require a new start to be fully effective.
New Additions:
1. NHL Expansion is now possible at the beginning of the game. To expand immediately, start a new game, do not choose a team (i.e., start unemployed), have Commissioner mode on, and then once the game starts immediately (or after responding to your emails) go to Team + League Controls >> League Edit, hit the Expand League button and create your expansion teams; there's an option to take over either of them in the setup. Save once you've finished expanding, and you can then advance to the next day, when the current teams submit their protected lists, and then the expansion draft the following day.
2. There is now a "Disable Player Info Popup" option on the Preferences menu (via the Start Screen). This will allow users who are experiencing noticeable slowdowns when mousing over players to turn the popup window off.
3. The boxscore now displays the season (or preseason, or playoff, as the case may be) goal and assist numbers for the player in the goal summary.
4. The play-by-play text now announces the assist number for each player who gets one when a goal is scored.
5. A "cannot be fired" option has been added to the Setup/Options screen (bottom right corner) so this can be enabled in a game that's already been started.
Changes:
6. Trading AI will now discount the value of older players more, and will not place as much emphasis on whether or not the player's contract offers good value for the money.
7. Compliance Buyouts are now much less likely to release high-value players.
8. When creating a manager, users can now select a birth year as late as 1997.
9. Expansion Draft AI will no longer select players with serious injuries.
10. Historical auto-expansion option removed (can't be implemented correctly at the moment due to some issues with scheduling, rules, and structure.)
11. Human-run teams can now instantly sign players from certain low-level leagues (the precise ones depend upon which league you are playing), allowing them to quickly fix roster issues when they're required to have a certain number of players, e.g. not having enough prospects.
12. Numerical summary at the bottom of the roster screen now also lists foreigner limits and prospect minimums, and your current number of each type of player.
13. Blind Mode renamed to Fog of War (both options do the same thing.)
14. If your screen resolution's height is at or below 768 pixels, you will now get an error warning with recommendations about how to fix the problem so the game will display correctly.
Bug Fixes:
15. Attributes will no longer be visible in some screens when Fog of War is enabled.
16. Bug that caused in-game lines screen to appear empty in some circumstances fixed.
17. The missing nations on the second nationality field in the player edit window have been restored.
18. The missing teams in the team fields on the player edit window have been added.
19. The CHL draft preview should now list the correct number of players.
20. Expansion draft AI will no longer sometimes skip picking goalies in rounds 2-3.
21. Crash on November 1 fixed.
22. Crash during league setup on some fictional modes fixed.
23. Crash when looking at certain retired players fixed.
24. Crash when attempting to view draft logs of players without drafting team properly assigned in database fixed.
25. Existing contract offers to players taken in the expansion draft should now be removed when they are drafted.
26. Editing non-playing staff should now work correctly.
Data/Miscellaneous:
27. German league teams now have a 32-contract limit and must carry 3 prospects age 24 or under (was formerly 2 under 20.)
28. Missing German nationalities for many dual-nationality German league players added.
29. Slava Voinov's contract with L.A. now properly voided, leaving him a free agent.
30. Broken links on title page of manual fixed.
31. Spelling errors in penalty file fixed.
32. Content of hints file (shown while loading) expanded.