Hmm. Suggests that my 7-year stint wasn't so bad, as these things go.
The thing that drives me nuts about FHL is that there appears to be no manual. There is a section of the website clearly labelled 'FHL Manual', but if you click on the link, you get a notice explaining that this is where the manual is eventually going to go. And the date on the notice is 2003. This is not much help to someone who wants to learn the game.
Neither is the fact that a skater in FHL has 13 separate ratings, all expressed as percentages, with no indication of how the 'Overall' rating is calculated. As an amateur game designer from way back, I hate it when a designer thinks that lots of number-crunching equals realism.
The best games are often those with simple rules and open-ended situations. There are only six kinds of chessmen, yet chess is infinitely deep: after 1500 years, no one has ever played the perfect game. There are only six positions in hockey, and coaches drill their players to be as interchangeable as possible, yet no two hockey games are ever quite alike.
I once read about Dave King's rating system for pro scouting. He only kept track of a few variables — offence, defence, skating speed, physical play, maybe one or two others — and the ratings were small numbers, from 1 to 4 or thereabouts. Yet that was enough to give him a solid read on every player and prospect in his database. It seems to me that a sim could have much simpler mechanics than FHL or Faceoff and still capture the essential flavour of the game. That was the theory I used in building my own simulator, and it seemed to work pretty well.
I would have liked to try the CPHL, but I understand there's a long waiting list. And I'm rather afraid of getting in over my head, since I don't know the FHL system and would be playing against experts.
Thanks very much, guys, for the input. I'll have to do some more digging.
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