Pivot 9.5 - combined Feburary/March post NHL TDL release!
General Updates:
- Latest notable transactions and contract extensions for playable leagues
- We no longer recommend disabling "Starting Financial Adjustments" to enable the game to determine and set initial starting team budgets. We hope this will make some playable leagues more sustainable and healthy financially instead of using the DBs set theoretical maximums which might be overkill. More testing and feedback needed from non-NHL EHM GMs!
- Set Natural Fitness to 0 for most players based on researcher consensus, this will enable more randomness with the length of careers for players, impact NHL prospects (161+ PA) should be able to overcome a low roll and be productive into their 30s. Natural Fitness has been manually set for 35+ year old players in top leagues.
- Many attributes have been set to 0 for all players under 161+ PA or potential PA roll based on researcher consensus and testing. Based on our research what the game was setting when set to 0 (let game decide) vs what we had a previous consensus of setting them to manually was not in alignment, we decided to let the game handle this going forward.
-- This includes mentals, as a result players have much more varied personalities
-- Existing NHL stars and notable players will be manually updated as appropriate
-- The intention here is for Current Ability to be the major driver of quality of players instead of static attributes, how I had been doing ratings did not produce enough unique players.
- Ensured starting Morale was set to 0 for all players/staff
- Fixed and refreshed club histories for playable leagues - how did no one notice 2023-24 stats were missing?!
- Started adding notable European future transfers for 2025-26 season, will continue to update rest of the year for top leagues only.
Prospect Generator Updates -- thanks ImActuallyAnOtter!!
= Change notes to be updated
NHL Updates:
- Cap expanded to 95.5m upper/70.6m lower limits, the 2025-26 projected numbers to allow teams to be compliant without end of season LTIR (
NHL, NHLPA announce team payroll ranges for next 3 seasons | NHL.com)
- Updated all players/staff involved in the Four Nations Faceoff
- Expanded goalie CA to 190 max, set min/max limits for Consistency based on scaled max PA
- Updated notable Euro/NCAA/CHL free agents who may get NHL contracts
- I've started adding more "favorite teams" to players, specifically home clubs for European players and junior/college teams (where the player captained or played multiple years) for others. Should add some more personality to the DB, this is being done for teams I've more recently re-rated in this release.
- Organization re-rates completed in this update:
-- CAL
-- CAR
-- COL
-- EDM
-- LAK
-- NJD
-- OTT
-- PHI
-- PIT
-- TBL
-- TOR
-- VAN
-- VGK
-- WAS
-- WPG
Chinese Updates:
- Updated new Chinese Ice Hockey League and added clubs and affiliation for Kunlun RS -- thanks Vik3tbotselektor!
Swedish Updates:
- HockeyTvaan has finally been added as a playable league! Big thank you to the multiple people that helped but especially Vik3tbotselektor and Aahlstroem along with many others who spent months trying to figure out how to make it work! It's a massive 80 club 18 stage monster of a league structure! This needs extensive testing, due to the low reputation of the league it may be difficult to play long term but should be a fun starting point!
- Updated HockeyTvaan and Swedish HockeyTrean clubs
- Various detail updates in SHL/HockeyAllsvenskan -- thanks Aahlstroem!!
- Fixed SHL so winner is now properly promoted to Champions Hockey League -- thanks Aahlstroem!!