seventieslord

Is this a relatively new discovery? Have previous WBF roms been done using the "simple" method that is about 80% as flawed as the default calculation?

This is all great work, chaos. Thanks for all the clarification behind the scenes as well. I would like to share what is hopefully an extension of what chaos has explained, that may be extra helpful to those who are more visual-based. I've made a spreadsheet where one can just plug in the checking rating of the player doing the checking (and the impact number), and you can see on four color-coded graphs the likelihood of an open-ice check being successful. See it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VGPJbZE5Dlk87E0yK8JKRB0EMgrU1svd/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=111094358044569353347&rtpof=true&sd=true Before I begin explaining all of this, please remember that any time I use an actual number, I am describing the results with the parameters of a player whose Chk rating is 3, and with an impact value of 20. These are factors that you can play with in the spreadsheet. Chaos has advised that the impact value is unknown, but has a minimum value of 20. We also know that the way the formula works is that higher speed leads to higher impact and a greater likelihood of a check. You can see how this changes as you play with the impact value. I have no idea what the maximum is and what would be a high or average value. I don't know if the range is from 20 to 30, or from 20 to 200. I can see, though, that for a player with a 1 checking rating, it only takes a 122 impact to change all four tables to full green. For a player with a 6 checking rating, 109 would do it. Since there should be no impact value that results in a guaranteed 100% hit, I would suspect that impact values do not exceed 100. As you can see in the top-left table, the way that the game calculates the likelihood of a hit by a human-controlled player is, for lack of a better term, absolutely fucked. If it was as simple as, "the lighter you are, the better you are at hitting, and the heavier you are, the easier it is to knock you down", that would be easy to understand and follow a pattern that makes logical sense, even if it is completely counterintuitive. In fact, I believe a lot of us believed that for a very long time - I did until just a few days ago. But, as you can see on the top left hand graph, in the stock ROM, players have little to no chance of knocking over their own weight, one above, or lighter, but that immediately spikes to guaranteed success at +2 to +8 before tailing off gradually. Heavier players can knock down almost no one except their heavy brethren, but paradoxically it gets slightly easier the lighter the "checkee" is. Being that you have that huge swath of red right next to the green cells, there's no rhyme or reason to the checking formula in stock NHL 94, other than you can count on success with a light player, because most of their hits will be laid on players 2-8 weights heavier than them. From there, go to the bottom left table that shows what happens if the equation is flipped so that the checkee's weight is subtracted and the checker's weight is added. Logically, one would expect that this would make the game's checking fairer. And it does..... I mean sorta? And not in a logical way at all. Look at the super light 1 weight player. He really has a hard time knocking anyone over, which is good... but he is actually slightly better at hitting heavier players than lighter. A middleweight crushes the light players, but immediately turns into a lamb when picking on someone his own size. A heavy player crushes middleweights, while having a tougher time with the lightweights. Again, we have all that red next to all that green which makes no sense. We liked to think that this simple fix would make it so that "the heavier you are, the better you are at hitting, and the lighter you are, the easier it is to knock you down" - but that is definitely not true on this table either. Side note, these two tables are exact inverses of each other. Notice that opposite corners have all the same numbers in them. A simple WBF does make the game better when you look at the overall checking success of each weight of player (in 1st table, 1s have average success of 73, average success against of 11, while 15s have the exact opposite. In the 2nd table, those results get reversed), but it does it in a completely illogical way. The reason for this is the byte math chaos described earlier that results in numbers over 255 wrapping around to 0. The starting value being 240 is the reason for this. When the starting value is 120 the result will not go over 255 and wrap around. On that note, look at the bottom right table. When you fix the weight bug using the simple method (change + to - and - to +) to make human-initiated checks work better, you completely wreck AI checking, which was actually working fine! Now you have 1s with an average success of 70 and a success against of 12, with 15s being the opposite. From there, look at the top right table that shows how AI hits work in the stock rom, how/why CB checks work, and how a proper weight bug fix would work. A proper weight bug fix, as described earlier in this thread, would be to just change the starting 240 to 120. if you do that, the game works as intended and is 100% logical. Look at how every player starts with a 19% chance of knocking their own weight over, and that gets progressively lower as the checkee's weight gets higher, and progressively higher as the checkee's weight gets lower. Look at those nice colors! No red beside green. Every number is similar to the numbers around it. This is exactly how they intended for NHL 94 to be played. Also, yes, this table is the exact inverse of the table below it. It's remarkable to think about how much this game has going for it, that it could be so badly glitched and still become so popular. I mean, we love NHL 94 despite the weight bug, right? Not because of it. Playing with WBF is weird for a lot of people because it's so counter to what they know and have become used to, but that's only because of familiarity. If the ROM was never broken to begin with, and someone "fixed" it today by making it the way we know as stock, and tried to claim it made the game better, they'd get laughed off the forum. It really is too bad, because a WBF ROM is simply objectively better.

Hey Raph, as much as I'd like to be the 1st seed, I'm of the understanding that we determine which 8 teams make the playoffs using this math, and then we seed those 8 teams using win percentage. I don't deserve that position or an 8th place opponent.

yeah, i agree separating all of them could be tough at this point. However, maybe after a full season has been played, we could.

Alright, cool. what's the thinking on doing it this way instead of trying to separate by skill and having A-B-C-D?

sorry if this has been posted elsewhere, but if there's a B east and B west, does that mean we are separate leagues? do we play an interlocking schedule or are we really just two separate versions of B league?

I'll take LA.

I'm in. B

I'm trading pick numbers 57, 64, and 154 to Winnipeg for picks 50, 71, and 170

I'm very interested in making an all-time greats ROM, if it's not too much work. I'm very well versed in all of the top 1000+ players of all-time, and wouldn't have much trouble building up all their attributes compared to eachother. I've read up a lot on what aspects of the game the attributes drive. But still, I don't know where to start. Here are my questions: 1. Could I do this using the recent mod that contains 32 teams, aggressiveness pinned down and the weight big fixed? I feel like that's an improvement even if it's not used in official league play. 2 . Should I just create a starting lineup or do a full roster for each team? Would it be a waste of time if no one even plays with line changes anymore? 3. Do I need to have programming knowledge? Or is there some sort of ROM editing app that makes this easy? I remember back in 2002-04 I used to use something called Blommann's NHL editor to tweak player ratings 4. Would anyone actually be interested in this or would it just be a vanity project for a historian?

I will select Detroit Red Wings. Originally the Cougars from 1926-1930, and the Falcons from 1930-1932, they began as the NHL rehash of the WHL's Victoria Cougars, Winners of the 1925 Stanley Cup FInals (and losers of the 1926 series). They took on the name Red Wings after the Notorious James Norris purchased the franchise. They won 7 stanley cups between 1937 and 1956, and four more in the past 13 years.... none between 1956 and 1996, though. Detroit has had many illustrious players in their long history, most notable among them Gordie Howe, arguably the greatest player of all-time. Niklas Lidstrom, an outstanding two-way defenseman, and Steve Yzerman, a superlative two- way forward are two others. But not to be forgotten are sixteen other current or future members of the HHOF whose best years were spent in Detroit: Terry Sawchuk, Ted Lindsay, Red Kelly, Sergei Fedorov, Alex Delvecchio, Sid Abel, Pavel Datsyuk, Marcel Pronovost, Ebbie Goodfellow, Henrik Zetterberg, Norm Ullman, Jack Stewart, Syd Howe, Brendan Shanahan, Bill Quackenbush, and Herbie Lewis. The only seasons in franchise history that one of these all-time greats did not suit up for Detroit, were their first two, the last two, and the nine seasons from 74-75 through 82-83, 13 total seasons in which they earned just one playoff berth. Hey, it's almost like having good players helps ya win!

Is there a thread with a complete guide of how this league works? I'd like to make sure I know everything before we start.

Hi everyone. Happy to be joining this year's league. Dantml7 is my brother.

Hey @chaos make me purple cause I did test games with @dantml7 and @schmidt please and thank you. I'm in for this year's league.