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2020 has been a crappy year for all of us dude. We just have march forward the best we can. Whether it’s making your tsb 4 or converting tsb 3 to 32 teams both are really hard work and will be amazing when they are done. I just wish I had your knowledge to do any of them. There’s no pressure to get it done, it will happen when it happens. Keep up the great work and I hope 2021 is better for all of us.

This has been such a crap year, I really thought I was going to get this done. If 2020 has proven anything, it's that making plans is useless. With that, I have 2 straight weeks of 4 day weekends with no travel or family plans and plan to try do some coding. This game will be done at some point, let hope 2020 gives me a break these last 2 weeks of the year. Fingers crossed!

Apologies if there is another thread for this but I just wanted to say a huge thanks to @halifax, @kingraph, @smozoma and @danTML7 for all of your hard work during the two weekends of the Ko94 V tournament. I suspect that I have probably missed some people here (whether visible or working behind the scenes) but you were the ones that, well, entertained me (and annoyed the hell out of my better half as I hogged the TV...) whilst watching a load of people I have never met play an almost 30 year old game on Twitch. What a time to be alive! I get the sense that the whole thing was a logistical nightmare for obvious reasons, so fair play for managing to get everything running (almost entirely) smoothly. Next year, I will throw my hat into the ring, even if it ends up being more of a cameo than anything else. Mercifully, I will get summarily binned during the round robin, so will not have to suffer the indignity of the commentators laughing their asses off at me!!! (Not that you would do such a thing...) Thanks again!

I am still working on this! I am off work over the Christmas period now and have finally managed to procure a copy of Photoshop, so will hopefully be done over the next couple of weeks. I have been battered at work for ages now (law monkey, 14+ hour days and COVID has had no impact on my sector) and, frankly, the weekends have been for sleeping and hammering the rum! If you have been messing about with player ratings for the EIHL teams, let me know, as I would be grateful for a second opinion on these.

wrong socks and heads in asses... not possible to correct the socks from the players bench? http://escanabasucks.com/JUNK/nhlhockey.png http://escanabasucks.com/JUNK/nhlpa93.png http://escanabasucks.com/JUNK/nhl94png

Hello, just bought the game from steam, it still needs work on the shooting visits but it is a nice effort worth supporting for the few decent pc games out there. It's like a refurbished improved version of NES hockey and it is mostly shinney hockey. Good times to be had and support the developer. Just my two cents kids!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/801400/Hoser_Hockey/

I think we are all just happy you continue to make progress on this. Stay safe & healthy. We can wait and offer any assistance you may need. No rush,but, my brother will be in town for the holidays, just in time for us to wrap up season 26

Yeah home/away advantage will be neutral thats a definite. You can't have that in a draft league. Though I'd like to add a slight home advantage in the playoff rom. Maybe just one point, to make home ice advantage a little meaningful. Someone had mentioned this on Discord, and I liked the idea. Maybe vote for this at a later time. As far as the hot/cold, I agree there is a big swing. There may be a hack to tone it down, I will look into it (I think the SmozROM hack does this?) Weight bug is in for this one. Yes there will be A and B leagues, with one draft. I'll use the poll to decide on hot/cold and PIMs.

I really enjoyed listening to Raph, Smoz, Dan, Chaos & AJ on the mic during that recent online KO94. It's such a complex game and you all notice & point out things that other's might not. Would be great to hear 2 of you collaborate (on video) on the deep dive idea.

Yeah, I know what you mean about the motivation part. I have a list as long as my arm of "to do / finish" stuff and it's difficult, especially where the audience is relatively small by comparison to, say, an NHL' 21 deke guide. An updated website would be a good idea (I have the strategy site bookmarked!) and that would allow different people to contribute towards it, rather than you doing the lion's share (and having the burden of being responsible for it).

There's still downsides to trying to check everyone with C or CB, you miss and you take yourself out of position. If you the move the puck right before you get hit, no harm done and more ice opens up. Plus C check whores aren't a problem for anyone IMO. PS, I've always felt making great big hits should be rewarded not punished, so all this time big hitters have been screwed IMO. Imagine Tikkanen playing the entire time instead of being in the box 8 minutes of a 15 minute game. A vote is fine. I'll just have to ballot harvest from all the pro-checking coaches lol. Lastly, I like to phrase hot/cold as... "do you like consistent performance (that match the rating you look at when you're drafting) from your players or do you like randomly generated wild swings in performance". I personally feel hot/cold effects are excessive in 94, unrealistically so. If hot & cold were based on say previous game performance that carried over or in-game performance (like NBA jam for example) where you get hot after hitting consecutive shot, then it would be realistic. But Patrick Laine doesn't have a rocket wrister one game & weak the next. Johnny hockey isn't super agile one day & the following night loses a lot of agility. Kane doesn't stickhandle through heavy traffic one game then the next game lose that ability. McDavid doesn't blow past everyone on Monday night but Wednesday be fast but not overly fast. I think you get my drift. The swings are too pronounced in 94. We already have the momentum factor & user/coach based variability. No need for Ron Barr to hijack it all lol. However, if keeping it in the game wins the vote, it's definitely better to know who's hot with ratings on the screen matching on-ice performance. After all, real life coaches always play the hot hand and are be able to witness who is playing like s**t. I know AJ for example likes more randomness (like hot/cold, pims) and that's his preference, but we have that in all the other leagues. Removing more randomness means user ability & performance has a bigger role in the outcome (than refs or Ron Barr). Also, if hot/cold wins the vote, having a bigger roster is better so you can bench the cold and play the hot or average. A benefit of static (no hot cold) means you can have a shorter draft/less rounds. Also Chaos, Plabax's rom neutralized home/away advantages (again, to take more randomness out of the game). PS, I bet Habs would join too if Sebe did. And I'd do my best to convince Icestorm to come back from retirement. He'd be tempted by a serious draft league, especially if I call him out publicly . The thought of having a Phousse & Hogue duo would be too hard to resist for him. I have another trick up my sleeve if he doesn't join right away. I could threaten to show up at his door (he's like 15-20 min from me), with clown gear on if he doesn't. Last but not least, with pims OFF, I rarely change lines. With pims on, I change often. Just trying to sweeten the pot! OK one more thing before Dickon chimes in. Weight bug must stay in the game. Go play SNES if you want your weight bug fix fix.

May I be the first to thank dantml and King of 94 for their recent "Classic League," uploads, on YouTube! As someone who doesn't really do Twitch, and I find discord too busy and confusing, it's fantastic to be able to watch the classic league matches, on a comfortable platform. With the exception of Smash64 and GoldenEye Speedrunning, '94 is the only gameplay I watch. Largely due to reasons of boredom, (also, non interest), so, it's great for a non-competitive player, like myself, to be able to still keep up with the league games. Thank You, dantml and King of 94. (Both of whom are ahead of Jay, who hasn't uploaded s**t in months - jus' sayin' -, and don't get me started on Smo... Who I had to resubscribe to, a second ago, just to make this potshot more moral.) Cheers, from the UK, to organizers, uploaders and all of the players of this fantastic game... If you're ever in town, I'll lend you £10 and you can buy me a drink.

Sebe gets it. This type of league that has prestige (and history) is so much more fun than classic. It brings people out from the shadows, like chum for sharks. And I know some are thinking "but we have draft style leagues going and blah blah". True, but not a gold-standard, serious league like GDL was; the biggest prize in all of 94 land and anyone who was around when it was, knows this is true. The level of play can even be argued to be a tad higher because people make an entire team of players with skills that they are their best with. For example, Raph when he drafts Scott Stevens and Iafrate together as a D pair, and someone like Gartner up front, it's frightening. Give Habs a team with Tikkanen, Makarov, Housley, you'll see him at his best too. The one issue that kind of plagued GDL was that with 24 coaches, it became extremely top heavy in terms of talent (as there was no A, B, C etc). A lot of people don't want to admit it, but most top guys don't want to crush lower guys, it's a predictable outcome and waste of time for both parties. Not fun to get destroyed by someone way above your own level or be the one committing the massacre on the lower guy. In addition to the non-fun factor of leagues with so much variance in ability, it doesn't help the lower guy get any better if they are too far in over their head. So the easy fix is to just have 1 draft, but 2 levels (and B). But A's play each other and B's play each other, none of this inter-level play. Each compete for their own championship. Of course there is the decisions about the details of the rom. I (and many who aren't active these days to verify this) believe Plabax made some tweaks that perfected a rom like GDL (it was called Plablegs but can be renamed to something more normal sounding lol). Like I said a couple paragraphs above.... Imagine playing Raph with his D core of Stevens and Iafrate. Now imagine penalties are off. No downside to having those aggressive, checking monsters. Quicker access to GC was also added, making it a little harder to score. It's big-boy hockey (one of my favorite phrases by the way). Don't get me started on how great it is not to have hot/cold. Or if it is included, how nice it is to be able to SEE accurately who's hot and who's cold (or avg). There's also a sense of pride when you create/draft your entire team. The downside (for some) is there are not many available excuses when you lose. Can't blame the ref, hot/cold, home advantage, bad team AI etc. YOU MADE THIS TEAM, OWN IT. I remember when I drafted Garter with my first pick. I was so excited. But I never drafted any other fast players to keep up with him. I ended up hating having him out there because he was always too ahead of the play for my liking. But it was my fault and lesson learned. There were also times I drafted a team of clone fwds with average skills but nothing extraordinary in terms of passing, stickhandling, speed or agility. I thought I was doing good w/them until I ran into Plabax. He not only showed me, but told me something like, "you're not going to beat me if you can't get a step on my D, you need to have at least 1 fast fwd". Another time (might have even been the same team) I discovered how important awareness ratings are. I had a bunch of good shooters and passers but all had average awareness ratings. As a consequence, they weren't in the spots I needed them to be in, when I needed them there. I'd be talking to my monitor, "anyone want to go to the slot, want to grab that loose puck sitting in front of you". Awareness matters. So in summation after this sloppy, long-winded post, this type of league makes you a better player because you learn firsthand what works for you and what doesn't, who other coaches do really with, ratings details that make differences on the ice etc.

Right, after what feels like a decade, my copy of the "NHL '94 Game Card Set" finally arrived in the UK yesterday. I know that the set has been scanned previously (and features on one of the main website's pages) but here is a further set of the 225 cards, all scanned at 1200 DPI (but averaging around 2.5MB a card, as I have not buggered around with the output size). The cards have been scanned on an "as is" basis and, other than applying some basic filters during the scanning process, I have not edited / Photoshopped the cards to get rid of, for instance, any scratches etc. That said, given that the set is nearly 30 years old, is second hand (and then some) and has survived being processed by our postal service, I think that they look pretty good. All of the files are named and the dimensions are uniform across the set (3070 x 4252). The .zip file is around 880MB, so I have posted it on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lYVkzxMQHyIDx2eF4hTWcxflUwaI_rDO/view?usp=sharing Enjoy! @MonkeyHead - I am not sure if you have a copy of the set (or are remotely interested in it!) but FYI. (If you spot any missing cards etc., let me know and I will rescan these, although everything should be there.)

I wanted to document my thoughts about how we can look at a game result and understand what consistently separates (human) players from others. There are differences from "A" vs "B" players, but I want to further look at why guys like Mikhail and @annatar are consistently on top of the SNES side and why me and @angryjay93keep meeting in the finals in Genesis. The outline above represents my original thoughts and I welcome all feedback. In the most simplest terms, I believe there are two things that separate players: Game knowledge/Understanding of the Game Execution / Actually playing the Game Underneath those broad topics, there's a lot more to discuss. This is NOT a strategy guide, but I will highlight some quick thoughts on the topics. And this applies to Genesis and SNES. When I say "game knowledge", that can mean broad understanding, but there are also a granular details that separate the top players. A broad example would be understanding player attributes. A Genesis player trying a slapshot with Wayne Gretzky may not understand he has a weak shot. It may be a good play, but with the wrong player! Another broad example would be where I (kingraph) know how to score in SNES with a deke. However, at a more granular level, I don't have the knowledge of how far back I can shoot the deke, what angles are feasible, etc. than guys like @TheProfessor or other top SNES guys understand. So during the game, I wouldn't even try certain shots (they wouldn't enter my mind), or on the flip side try defend those dekes because I don't perceive them as a possible scoring threat. (I'm learning!) I think most of the "A" players excel in knowledge, but it's important to note that there are still those details that certain players know better than others. There can also be game-changing knowledge that happens. Think CB check that Plabax discovered or the Goalie Dive Across save in SNES that Mikhail has recently introduced. Before Mikhail (very effectively) demonstrated that technique in KO94-4, I didn't see anyone even trying these saves. That knowledge is a differentiator before the game happens. In Genesis, if you're not aware of the rebound goal, you won't try to score with it, OR defend against it. Now the biggest differentiator is the in-game execution. Some of the mechanics can be learned, such as quick one-timers, pass shots, "Y" button get up, rebound goal, goalie control, dekes, etc. that is visible. The top players more frequently finish one timers, finish dekes, get shots off, etc. Reaction time to the puck, to the play, to goalie control is also something that you can witness and differentiate. Many people say manual goalie is one of the biggest skills that separate the best players, and I think that's obvious. The mental game is harder to define or observe because it's unique to each individual. But ultimately it's trying to understand the decision making that happens many times throughout the game. From setting a lineup, to choosing which shot to take, to pass vs skate, to check or sit back, etc. In general, I feel the top players make better decisions throughout the game that lead to better scoring chances and better defensive options. And seeing those top players adapt each game based on what's working vs. what isn't. Having said all of that, we have the magic of NHL'94 variables that are overlayed on top of everything. These game variables are what causes all the variances from one game to another between two given players. The player variables will outweigh the uncontrollable variables over time, but in a given game anyone can win. You can make the right decisions, execute your one-timer, but Roenick will miss an open net from 2 feet. I tried to list out some of the things that happen each game that are somewhat uncontrollable. To be clear, this would be measured above what would be considered "normal". If that slapshot from Gretzky is stopped by the goalie, that isn't an abnormal result. If that slapshot gets passed Eddie Belfour, that would be considered above expectations. With all the tournament action and updated frequency of streaming games, I am considering doing some deep dive reviews of a game. Deep dive means either reviewing possession by possession, reviewing scoring chances, key plays/sequences, or maybe just goals. I may never get to it, but I'm definitely interested in trying to look at game with all of this in mind.

Thank you

I might have to come back for this.

That all sounds good ! thing I would add atm is to have no tolerance for slackers, try to keep a good flow going, it keeps it interesting . P.s Remember... trading is one of the great things about draft lgs but also can't get carried away like thee ol' days hahaha. 7 unlimited trades ? Cause people always use a few on the draft and then 3 to 5 after. You da man Chaos