Third, for XBL and NHL 09, I'd like to play as a winger. Center is "more responsibility" and I know I can't play defense (or lol goal).
That's cool, I've been chatting with Psycho about it on and off since I started reading about 09 and I think we'll probably both play D, he was/is pretty successful at it IRL so it'll probably be handy to have him on the blue line since he actually knows what he's doing and it should be pretty easy for the two of us to develop chemistry... I score most of my goals sniping rather than dangling anyway so offensively having to hang back shouldn't hurt me much and I'd rather pass than shoot if you guys can actually bury it anyway!
Part of why I asked now is I imaigne when we create characters it'll be useful to know where we're playing since it affects how you might want to distribute your stats(slap vs. wrist for instance and even dominant hand (I'll probably be lefty on the right side and psycho will be the reverse to feed each other one-timers and such, for instance)).
About Face Off wins favoring centers, we could compensate by adding face off losses as well.
And I earnestly believe that someone could try and draft certain specialized players with high win ratios to try and win both.
I don't really see how this changes anything, though. Face-off wins continues to favor centers and now face-off losses favors centers, too. Since it's a bad stat obviously it favors not being a center but that's two stats that essentially are only decided by one position - I think mostly the league is unanimous in not liking so many goalie stats because the categories are decided by one position and this is kind of the same thing, with again only position contributing.
And yes, you could definitely try to win both by picking up players like Perrault if he ever finds a team and like Draper and such, but I'm not really sure why that makes the game better - you're being encouraged to pick up players that are subpar(read: terrible) for the rest of the fantasy stats to try to inflate one(or two) categories. I think this is especially bad on yahoo since rather than 6 forward slots you have 2c/2lw/2rw and center is already the deepest forward slot for fantasy by a wide margin.
Aldaron said:
I'd also be fine with the splitting of PPP into PPG and PPA and dropping of SO to make the ratio 7:3 instead of 6:4 though.
If we were to add another stat, Short handed Points are a possibility, as I believe they add another dimension in that there is certainly a very low correlation between number of points and short handed points for fantasy.
A lot of the high scoring short handed points guys aren't really prolific scorers.
SHP hurts me deep inside because it's the type of true-to-real-life stat that I would want to add but it just works so poorly in fantasy... I think it works a little better than faceoffs if we decide we're really reaching for more stats since at least all the positions can potentially pick up points and while a lot of teams have penalty kill specialists it'd be nice to reward the fantasy hockey caliber players that actually kill penalties since there's currently no reward for that(which would make someone like Zetterberg more valuable relative to someone like Crosby even though he didn't pick up too many shorthanded points last year).
As far as the PPG/PPA thing I'm pretty neutral on it, I really don't think it needs to happen (6/3 seems like a fine ratio to me personally and it mostly prevents ties which is nice in h2h) but if it does I wouldn't complain too much. I don't think it really dramatically increases or lowers the value of anyone since part of why I think PPP is balanced and doesn't cause the game to favor passers the way it's being implied to is that the passers are naturally going to be worse in the SOG stat - there's the tradeoff of producing more in PP and less in SOG, and while it's easier to make SOG up PPP tends to be a much less reliable stat so there's some natural balance there... I don't think there's any real problem with how it is currently.
