Scribe99

Donch I also feel a playoff procedure needs to be posted and/or stickied. Require all owners to post their general availability (to the best of their knowledge) for the upcoming week. A matchup thread should be created for each series just to limit confusion and facilitate easy oversight by you. I think the best way is for one coach to suggest a time to play after both coaches have posted their availability. Give a 24 hour notice when suggesting a time to play, otherwise it will degenerate into 'I'm on right now' type BS. As long as each owner checks and replies to their playoff thread once per day, there should be ample time to negotiate a mutually satisfactory time to play. This is similar to how we handled scheduling of league games in a weekly 2k football league I helped run, and it made things cut and dry when deciding the outcome of an unplayed game.

We definitely need to do a one week per round deadline, as well as require both owners to post their respective availability on the forum, so that we have a record of who attempted to get the games in before the deadline. That way, if a series doesn't finish, the win is awarded to the owner who showed the most consistent effort in scheduling the games.

Cool, I'll look for you.

If I get my game in with EA tonight, I'll have 2 games left against Vocally Caged, and 1 against Hurray. From the sounds of it, those guys probably won't be around at all. So extending the deadline likely won't make a difference in the case of my team's schedule.

OK, I'll look for you.

I managed to get a bunch of games in this weekend. Still looking for: Vocally Caged (2 games) EA (1 game) Matt Hurray (1 game)

Counted 25 for myself, 10-10-5 (OL)

I finally have a couple days off, I'm looking for games. I'll be on AIM.

Late night Wednesday and Thursday. Friday Evening ... Saturday and Sunday all day. I apologize for not being around much post-holiday season. Unfortunately some things got in the way. Hopefully I can find a few games and finish at a respectable number.

I used to think that the number one thing 94 needed was a season mode, but now, with online seasons, I really want fighting in the game. There'd be nothing quite like a fight breaking out in the middle of an intense online game. We could just play '93, but without one-timers, it's not the same.

Likewise. The original 6 button pad seems to be the best.

Hey, I should be online a lot over the next few days. I'll look for you. Just been real busy lately.

If you guys were using the same rom, (maybe you weren't since you couldn't get a server game started), chances are that one player's connection was spiking. On p2p, the frame delay is locked in based on the normal ping between both players. Before starting a p2p game, watch the ping that it displays. If it randomly spikes way higher than your normal ping you need to use extra smoothing option so it doesn't desync the game.

I just want to respond to the connection topic, not the dispute here. But sometimes a connection will become unplayable in the middle of the game; it doesn't always show up right away. I leave my FPS display on, so I can always tell when a game's frame rate starts to drop. I've had smooth games with Jamonica and Carse, and I've had games where the control was horrible, yet it didn't seem to affect their play. I'm not sure if it's because both are using the stretch option or not, but I've had a problems getting smooth games against both players. From now on, if I see the frame rate drop like that, I'm not going to continue playing. I have almost no gameplay problems anyone in the league besides Carse, Jamonica, and Dmac. The strange thing is when I resize my window as I'm playing, the frame rate will pick back up, then slowly decline again. There seems to be an issue with the settings on their end, imo.

Yeah, that's what I play on too. Just last night I tried playing kgman on a few different setups and noticed that whenever we matched our window sizes and stretching or no stretching, the game played a lot smoother.

Please post your settings with your vote, so that others can look here before playing. It really makes a difference if both teams are using the same or similar settings. Thanks. - I play on either window or window maximized

Down is easier, I think because you can see more of the ice (no stadium crowd taking up part of the screen). And it feels like I can deke easier going downscreen.

Differences in window sizes and graphics options between opponents make a huge difference to online gameplay. If you have vastly different setup than your opponent, chances are that one or both of the players will experience very unresponsive or choppy gameplay. I tested this out with a couple people today after trying to play someone who was using the "stretch" option under the graphics tab. We had a very stable and fast connection, but on my side, the game kept running at between 10-20 FPS, when it should have ran at 60 FPS. What happens is the game might play at the correct speed, but control is bad and the graphics look very jittery. If you turn on your frame rate display from your options, you should be able to see how off it is. So if you are running full screen or stretched mode, and your opponent isn't; it's going to create problems. Even the smaller differences between someone playing the game in maximized window vs. a small window will impact the smoothness of the game. Basically there are four main options: full screen, window, maximized window, and screen stretch. Stretched mode and full screen mode seem to be the ones that really negatively affect the game when both players don't pick the same thing. The bigger the difference in settings, the bigger the hit in frame rate. I'm not sure what most people prefer to play on but I play without stretch mode or full screen (because they slow down the emulator). And I usually play on either a regular window or a maximized window. I don't know if we need to make a standard setup, but if you run into problems it won't hurt to ask your opponent what their settings are. So far, just by setting up my options the same as my opponent, I was able to enjoy server play a lot more because the frame rate remained steady.

It looks like the same game appears four times on the last games played and the team results column. Not sure if it affects the standings or stats.

If anyone quits mid-season, they should not be allowed back into the GDL unless they have a really good reason. People need to honor their commitments, regardless of whether they are winning or losing.

I used to play on kreed all the time, but I kind of prefer the old school look nowadays. Also, kreed is the slowest rendering I've tested so far and I wouldn't be surprised if the game's control and smoothness take a major hit.

I don't really want to delve into trading draft picks, but I think a free agent pickup and trading period during the season is a good thing. Let's face it, you don't always know how all of your players will mesh until you play a substantial amount of games with them. Having a midseason deadline I don't think would be a bad thing either. If anything, it would speed up the season because owners would be required to get their first 28 games played within a certain timeframe. As it stands now, a lot of owners have barely played any games. I guess I'm in the camp that would prefer to hammer out the regular season in a swift fashion, seeing as how these games only take 10 minutes to play. As an aside, how long do most people expect the regular season to take? I think we should look at our expectations because right now there is no set rule and I don't think that's a good thing. So to sum it up, I'm in favor of setting some regular season deadlines, and utilizing those to open a brief trading window to address your team needs. I love the GM aspects of this league, and so I see trades and free agency as a positive thing which compliments the draft itself.

This has been discussed before, but I'd really like to see a midseason window for making trades and free agent pickups. I think Dmitry has said that every team would need to have played the same number of games in order to work with the database, although I'm uncertain of all of the details. My proposal is for the league to set a midseason deadline which requires half of the games to have been played (28 games). At this point owners would have a couple days to a week to pick up free agents or make trades, before restarting the 2nd half of the season. There are a couple guys on the free agent list I'd really like to pick up, knowing what I now know about my team. Also, there are a couple of valuable pieces now riding my bench that I wouldn't mind turning into a useful player through trades. I think we could also vote on all-star teams for each conference and come up with some midseason grades just to make things more interesting. Then the new rom could include the GDL all-stars on each of the conference squads. What do you guys think?

I don't think my laptop is that fast, but it's less than a year old and it improves things for me. The issue appears to be the speed at which the emulator processes the graphics, not your pc. Just turn on your FPS meter on the emulator and turn off autoskip. Watch how fast your frames go when you switch graphics settings on the emulator. And then play on scanline. btw, I've always had issues connecting on one timers when playing online. This setting really improve the control for everything imo.

Use scanline rendering in your emulator's graphics tab, it improves everything.