Are some sliders placebo?

[jake19ny]

First a little back story:

I’m trying to stay away from slider tweaking this year as the constant game updates always send you back to square one. That said I believe the NHL 19 early access version played the best offline game this series has ever seen....until 2 patches later turned it into NHL 18.

There was one particular play I experienced in the first minutes of that early access that I cannot erase from my mind and I’m sure I’ve talked about it. I skated down the boards in the neutral zone with the puck and the cpu defender closed off my space and rode me into the boards. I lost my balance and the puck squirted free and continues down the ice.

It was by far the most realistic and organic feeling play I’ve ever seen in the series. To me it meant better neutral zone play. Better board play, and more realistic loose puck battles.....3 things sorely missing from this series. Like I stated though, two updates later we were back to rubber players and glued pucks to sticks.

So....my wheels won’t stop turning and I’m wondering what slider(s) if any can recreate this magic.

I’ve only tried one so far....the one that causes the boards to make the puck carrier stumble. I thought this was the most logical one. Well at 100 players don’t stumble at all and at 0 players don’t stumble at all. It appears to have zero effect on the game.

I began wondering what other sliders have no impact at all. While i understand some sliders may interact differently when other sliders are moved but surely with a value of 0-100 most of these should produce a noticeable effect when moved. I’m going to begin testing other individual sliders and post which ones I see do squat and what I see from ones that do work.

In addition it got me wondering....when EA releases a tuner what did they tune? A patch is used for big game play changes, bugs, and content updates but tuners are gameplay only....wouldn’t that be the sliders? Why do their values never change after tuners come out? It would be incredibly helpful if the values changed so we could see what they’ve adjusted, compare to the previous tuner, and we could adjust accordingly. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to gameplay..

[jr86]

Try raising 'board affect puck carrier' slider. That one definitely works as intended.

[Al_Tito13]

Sliders are working really well, it's only a matter of getting the right mix and combination of sliders to make it work for your needs/style of play/vision of the game.

Like I said in another thread, for board play and checks/bumps, the most important sliders for me are "Stumble Threshold", "Fall And Stumble Ease" and "Incidental Contact Effect". Increasing these sliders will definitely improve the physical aspect of the game and also help breaking the kind of bubble surrounding the puck carrier, which sometimes would make him simply bounce through checks and be able to continue like nothing happened. That's something I hate and these sliders help a lot in that matter.

"Board Effect Non-Puck Carrier" and "Board Effect Puck Carrier" could also be useful for plays near the boards, but the previous sliders I mentioned will already make you stumble more.

[jake19ny]

Thanks for some direction guys will try these things out.

[Al_Tito13]

To see how much the game can be different from default with sliders changes only, you may also give a try to my sliders posted here for one game or two. I don't know if you will like them or not, it's not even important and certainly not the point, but one thing is for sure, you will see a big difference from default. It's impossible to get the perfect sliders set, so don't try to do it either, but at least, you can improve the game a lot and it's the most important point. Like I said before, adjustments will depend on a lot of things: needs, personal preferences, style of play, vision of the game, skills. All these aspects will change so much from one person to another.

As for your question about tuners versus sliders, it's because the sliders we have are only a small portion of the gameplay change possibilities in the code. EA will only give you a pre-determined range in the code that will be affected by sliders. So, most of the tuners will probably change things sliders couldn't do by themselves only.

[BleacherCreature]

They should just stop with the tuners and leave us to adjust the sliders on our own as we see fit. I can’t remember a time with this series where someone has said “wow, this tuner is great and totally made the game better!!”


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[oosterbe]

Size effect & speed effect have a lot of influence for checking and organic gameplay too, you can turn the checking power very low, when you set size effect and speed effect high. I have made very special set of sliders working with my special roster made to show a lot of variation between different players. Now I really feel who is fast, who has a huge shot, who has ability to crush players with huge bodychecks and so on. It really made a game very enjoyable.

For example, I set players speed attribute to very slow and used a huge scale to differentiate players skating ability and now I can play with 5/6 gameplay speed which makes the game play more fluid, but isn't too fast.

I mainly decided to create 5 or 4 different class for almost each player attribute, and tested how those work in game. In my opinion it's stupid thing to argue that player X needs to be 92 instead of being 91. If attributes doesn't effect to gameplay, who cares, and attributes have a lot of effect when there's enough gap between numbers. Inside my special roster NHL players passing attributes vary between 36-99, puck control 56-99, aggressiveness vary between 69-99, and so on. You really see when AI has 1st line on the ice and when not.

[HoosierMad]

Honestly I've always wondered this myself. I don't have a lot of evidence to really think that I guess but some of the sliders don't seem to be making an impact. But I would like to thank that they do do something but I don't think it's by the individual increments like one and then one and then one I think maybe that's by every 5 and 10 that it might change

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