UHS Build 6158 – April 5 2014
I was planning on sitting on this build until the end of April, however, it was brought to my attention that the All-Star team functionality was missing.  In the process of converting to UHS Dark I guess I missed the All-Star Game assignment and game setup functionality.  As a league has an All-Star Game scheduled this weekend, I’ve opted to use the old functionality / code and update it for UHS Dark.  The last piece of missing functionality (that I’m aware of) are the public league websites.  Leagues do not have any control over them at all and in fact they may be broken for your league anyway.

We’ve also opened up the Scoring Chance percentage to allow leagues to tweak their own scoring chance.  I didn’t really want to do this as I felt this was an integral part of the sim engine that *shouldn’t* be touched.  My main concern is that the percentage will get adjusted to maintain certain levels of scoring despite having overly strong scorers or goaltenders.  Rerates will not consider the Scoring Chance at all, so if the value is adjusted high, scoring will go up and skaters will tend to rerate up while goalies will tend to rerate down.

All-Star Games
Looks like we completely missed re-working the All-Star Game tools when we were making UHS Dark.  I’ve adapted the old method of assigning players and simming All-Star games and added it into the program.

League > All-Star Game > All-Star Rosters – This will let you manage player assignments for All-Star Teams.
Manage > Teams > Roster – You will need to use this to set your All-Star team method.  Please note you cannot set Lines at this time…  these are automatically set using 4Line and based on the Roster position a player has once the game is being simmed.
League > All-Star Game – When you select your teams, the program will check to ensure you have a proper roster set.  If Checks pass, you can then sim the game.  Simming is immediate.

All-Star Game results can be found in League > Stats Central.  Select Schedule and then select All-Star for a list of All-Star Game results.

Automatic Farm Moves
COMs have a new setting allowing them to toggle whether eligible players are automatically moved to the farm team during the Pre-Season to Regular Season transition.  By default this is enabled, however, some leagues (those that don’t use the farm system) will need to disable this (in the Settings > General section) as this would result in rosters being in error and just generally cause a lot more work than is needed.

Automatic Protection for Veteran Leagues
Leagues that are over 1 year old will automatically be protected from deletion.  We thank you for your loyalty and hope you will use UHS for years to come.

Player Rerates (Non-Statistical)
Players that do not meet the minimum requirement (currently 10 GP) for a Statistical Rerate will have a 10% chance on each skill to rerate down.  This is not new.  What we have done, however, is made a further check to see if the league has a real farm system implemented (basically all teams have farm teams and those teams play actual games).  If the league DOES have a farm system the previously mentioned 10% chance to rerate down will apply.  If the league does NOT have a farm system, the player will have a variable chance to rerate up or down, depending on the player’s age.

For each year that a player is under the UFA Age (the age in which players can no longer become RFAs), they earn a bonus 7% chance to their base 10% chance to rerate up.  There is a maximum 30% chance there will be no rerate and the remainder of the 100% will be to rerate down.

For example: A player is 22 years old.  The UFA Age is 28 (by default).
Chance to Rerate Up: 10% + ((28 – 22) * 7%) = 52%
Chance for No Rerate: 30%
Chance to Rerate Down: 18%

Once a player hits the UFA Age, they will always use the 10% up – 30% none – 60% down rule until they have retired.

SavePoint Checking
There will be a new behind-the-scenes job that runs to check for SavePoints that have stalled more than 10 minutes (savepoints, even those that are rerating should not be going this long).  The savepoint will be marked “UHS Investigating” and I’ll received an email notification.  If you still want to open a ticket or post in the forums, please feel free to, but just know that once I see this I’ll go in and manually set it to Complete…  you may (probably) will need to load an old save point and retry the one that failed.

Scoring Chances
When UHS went “Dark” we upped the scoring chance standard from 7% to 9% to account for an away team scoring bug being fixed.  Since then I’ve noticed scoring has been a bit on the low side.  In some cases there are really solid goalies but in most cases that just doesn’t hold water.  Even after making some adjustments for offensive zone puck possession to favour players with high SH skills, I don’t feel we’re back to where we left off with.

Scoring Chances are going to be bumped up to 10% by default for all leagues.  The default for All-Star games is set to 25% automatically…  there is no setting for this.

Additionally, COMs will now have the ability to change the Scoring Chance setting for their league.  The accepted range is anywhere from 1% to 25%, again all leagues will default to 10% initially.  You can find the setting in the Settings > Game Settings section.

Bug Fixes
– Fixed an issue where comment text was not wrapping properly when verifying a trade proposal.
– Fixed an issue where Show Skills leagues would not show skills but instead show scouting reports.
– Added a duplication check when adding a player to waivers.
– Fixed an issue where Available Coaches were not being shown in the Manage Coach section.
– Fixed an issue where the Team Activity section was not displaying trades.

Hot Fixes
– Fixed an issue where the incorrect player was receiving PIMs from fights.  Released March 26 2014.