UHS Build 11454 – July 2017
This is another large build that comprises many technical / system changes as well as a handful of quality of life and enhancements for league COMs and GMs. We’ve automated most of the build deployment processes and are removing a few tables where data was being duplicated, resulting in inflated league database sizes. We’ve updated all NHL teams based on the amnesiac rosters over at wasserlasser.com, including an updated NHL schedule for the 2017-18 season (yes, including the Vegas Golden Knights).
We’ve added a Team Salary Projection page that uses a CapFriendly.com style display to let you see how your player contracts line up at a glance. Players can now get sick: the Contagion has been released! AutoGMs have been further tweaked to introduce trade fatigue to further prevent poaching.
It’s a big build. Happy birthday to me (I’m a day late!)
NHL Updates
We have updated our NHL defaults by adding the new Vegas Golden Knights, the full 2017-18 NHL schedule and all player skills & characteristics. Player skill / characteristics were created by converting the amnesiac NHL09 rosters from NHL09 skills to UHS skills. Mileage may vary, I’m sure.
If you set the AutoGM on for all teams, there will be a handful of players that will be bought out. Two teams will require makeweights (one each for Boston and Philadelphia) as they are short on positions to fill a game roster. I will be updating the rosters with transactions as the month progresses, however, I will not be updating player skills until next summer unless there is something drastically wrong.
If you are interested in volunteering your time towards maintaining player skill characteristics for us, please open a ticket and let us know. We’re looking for someone that can objectively quantify player skill values using the UHS set of skill characteristics for new players (farm players that are moved up from time to time) and then a larger update based on the previous season once a year.
Team Salary Projections
Instead of using Excel to manually generate a CapFriendly-style layout for your team’s salaries, you can now go to Team > Finances > Salary Proj. to find them. The salary projections will show player salaries for up to 6 seasons and will also consider things like contract extensions, player ages and free agent status.
For seasons beyond the current one, the projections will make some assumptions:
– Players 20 and under will be in the juniors and have their salaries adjusted appropriately (10% of regular contract value).
– Players aged 21 to the Maximum Protection Age (the max age they can be sent to the farm without clearing waivers) will be assumed to be on the farm team and have their salaries adjusted appropriately (25% of regular contract value).
– Players older than the Maximum Protection Age are assumed to be on the Pro team and will use the full value of their regular contract.
Players are also grouped by C, LW, RW, F, D, G to help you see where contracts are running out by position. Player’s Level, Age and Skill are based on the current season only, the first column holding salaries. The Skill column will display either the player’s total skill (skills shown on) or the player’s skill class (skills shown off).
The projections will show the salaries for a full season only, so once a contract is expected to expire at the start of the next season either a red UFA or green RFA will be display to let you see when that player will be leaving your team.
Player Contagion / Sickness
Players can now get sick. There is a low base chance they will contract some kind of illness / flu. The lower the player’s IJ skill, the more games they will miss. If a player is ill, they are still allowed to play, however, their skills in the game are drastically reduced (by at least 50%). Players may spread the illness to other players in the same game on both their own team and their opponents. AutoGMs will never play a sick player and treat them as Injured / Suspended.
Player sickness does not apply to junior or all-star level games. If a junior player becomes sick during a pro/farm game and is moved back to the junior league before recovering, they will recover at the normal rate, however, they will not infect any other players.
AutoGM Logic Changes
– AutoGMs now have trade fatigue applied to incoming trades. Fatigue will adjust depending on the success of the team and the number of trades that they’ve already accepted.
– AutoGM teams will now be processed in a random order instead of the order they were added in UHS.
– AutoGM teams will no longer make bids on free agents that have at least 10 teams with valid / active bids on them. This is being done to cut down on the churn the AutoGM is creating with large numbers of free agent offers in bigger leagues.
Saved Lines
Previously we stored your teams’ Saved Lines in the overall UHS DB, however, we’ve decided to move them into your respective leagues. You should not see any difference in how they operate, however, if your Owner/COM decides to restore an older SavePoint where your lines did not exist, you would no longer see those saved lines.
Build Releases Going Forward
We’ve changed up how our build releases will be handled. A lot of the manual processes / activities are now automated. We’ve also split out the SavePoint updates so that once the build is released to current Leagues, you’ll be able to get back into the game and continue simming sooner than before.
What we have done, however, is that while UHS will be unlocked, loading or creating save points will be disabled as we will be processing your SavePoints behind-the-scenes. As a result, you may not be able to move your league forward from the playoffs to the offseason as this requires a SavePoint to be created.
Overall, this will allow us to release smaller builds more quickly with far less downtime since SavePoint updates take up about 90% of the entire processing time.
Bug Fixes & Miscellaneous Changes
– Fixed an issue where Goalies were using old code to check if they were rookies in the Team Players statistics.
– Fixed an issue where a warning would appear when deactivating an All-star team.
– Fixed an issue with Public Sites where the statistics drop-down would always display Playoff Series if the league was in the Playoff SeasonType.
– The default Salary Cap for new leagues or reset leagues is now $75 million (up from $50 million).
– Fixed an issue in public sites where the drop-down menu link for a team’s Personnel list would instead lead to the News page.
Hot Fixes
– Updated PubSite’s League Standings and Team Home pages to properly display team logos. Hotfix: May 6 2017.
– Updated PubSite’s Game Results to properly display team logos. Hotfix: May 6 2017.
– Updated PubSite’s Schedule page to properly display team logos. Hotfix: May 6 2017.
– Updated PubSite’s Players by Team, League Leaders – Goalies, League Leaders – Players stats pages to properly display team logos. Hotfix: May 6 2017.
– Updated pages to reflect TJHL’s faces and logo directories. Hotfix: May 7 2017.
– Released fix for issue where League’s Free Agency begins before the Entry Draft is over. In these cases, players will not be removed from teams even if the Free Agency time has started until all Entry Draft picks have been made. Hotfix: May 16 2017.
– Fixed an issue where players getting a Major + Game penalty were only getting the 10 PIM instead of 15. Hotfix: May 16 2017.
– Applied another fix for the Major + Game penalty issue. Hotfix: May 24 2017.
– Fixed an issue where Coach Rerates would return warnings. Hotfix: May 24 2017.
– Fixed an issue where only a small portion of teams were being shown in each standings division, regardless of how much vertical space was present on the page. Hotfix: May 30 2017.
– Fixed an issue where Game Results were not appearing on the League Home page for relegation leagues. Hotfix: May 30 2017.
– Fixed an issue where logos could not get uploaded if the team’s current logo no longer existed. Hotfix: June 5 2017.
– Fixed an issue in Public Sites where games going to overtime were not displayed properly when viewing the Game Results. Hotfix: June 25 2017.