Preset Game Settings - Competitive v Full Sim
Under game settings, where you select the preset game settings, there is competitive and full sim as two options.
Competitive option says it is "balanced" game play. What exactly is the difference between this and Full Sim? You would think Full Sim would technically be balanced..meaning based off the player stats. Maybe competitive is actually based off the stats?
Competitive option says it is "balanced" game play. What exactly is the difference between this and Full Sim? You would think Full Sim would technically be balanced..meaning based off the player stats. Maybe competitive is actually based off the stats?
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You can change between the two and check the sliders.. full sim gives more control to the human player and makes the game a bit more difficult against the CPU AI - hits are not as powerful, shooting isn't as accurate, less time your players recover from fatigue, etc...
The more forgiving the tuning, the less the physical factors of control, speed, angles, attributes, etc. weigh into the outcome but all of the attribute variation is still taken into account.
The more simulation the tuning, the bigger range we have in the outcomes based on the parameters, and the more you have to consider when performing actions. In all game styles you are going to fair better the more you consider the physical factors and the players you are trying to perform them with, just at different weights.
Between Competitive and Full Sim, overall, it gets into more puck control differences and skating differences. Full Sim requires longer periods to get more realistic stats as there are more bobbled pucks, less accuracy, slightly less player acceleration to be closer to actual real world speeds, etc.
Competitive is still a very sim based game but it is just more forgiving than Full Sim. For something like one on one puck interactions for defensive actions and stick on stick incidental contact, the two are the same which is why Competitive is still much more sim than what people think of for traditional videogame hockey and that is because those interactions are more binary. However, for shot accuracy, it isn't as black and white as stick on stick contact so we can have more variation in how long you need to settle after getting the puck or performing an action to have full control, how much angles and shooting/passing against your momentum impact the power and accuracy of your actions, etc.
So you may see things in Full Sim where a player receiving a puck from behind on their backhand may cause them to bobble the puck where as in the same situation in Competitive, they receive it clean.
What I'm hoping for, is a balanced game play. I usually am a position lock player. But I would like the game to play "even" or according to the PLAYER ratings. As it seems now, PRO favors HUM and All Star favors CPU (if wrong, please correct me). Seeing there is a "competitive" setting, I'm hoping that puts me in the right direction to have a balanced game.
It also seems that when playing the games, no matter the team, they all seem to play the same way. No player separation is apparent. I've seen players with very high speed ratings get out skated by very lower rated players. Or players that aren't snipers seem to hit any spot of the net with ease. I'm hoping that with the competitive setting, the system will use the player ratings and not some "under mechanic" to determine who scores, etc. Thoughts on this aspect would be awesome.
Game Style/Preset and Difficulty are two different things. So for Presets changing the game style between Competitive and Full Sim, the only things changing are the physical factors for the mechanics themselves and how those play out in the game, for example, how forgiving shot/pass accuracy, pickups, etc. are or not, the rate of player acceleration, how much ratings weigh into body on body contact vs just the relative speed, etc.. You will see those as you dive into the more detailed slider screens and adjust the high level Presets.
Difficulty (i.e. Pro, All Star, Superstar) however, impacts the level of play of the ai players in the game and is adjusted across the different set levels for different User skill levels. If you are playing on lower difficulty levels, your ai players are helping you more than the opponent is hindering you. On All Star it is balanced for both teams and on Superstar, the human teams ai players are still at an All Star level to give the human player more of a challenge to do more of the actions with the puck and against the puck manually rather than relying on their ai teammates.
All that said, in 'player locked gameplay' it is different, since the majority of the players are ai controlled, the skill level of the ai stays balanced across all skill levels or else your ai teammates would be scoring way more goals than your opponents or visa versa since the one locked human player can't make up for everything without running way out of position.
If you aren't finding what you want for attribute variation on Competitive, you can either play on Full Sim which due to being less forgiving has even more range across attributes or you can either start on Competitive or Full Sim and adjust sliders for the different mechanics to add more error at the top end which will give more range for players of different attributes to stand out from one another. If you take something like shot accuracy, the different factors of puck control, and the shooting attributes weigh into the equation as well as the physical parameter that have an impact on your shot. A top rated sniper is going to need to settle the puck less to get their best shot than a low rated shooter but both the sniper and the low rated player are going to see worse shots if they are shooting before settled, shooting back against their momentum, spinning around before shooting, etc. as the physical factors still impact all players like they do in real life. That also means that a low rated player can still pick a corner, they just have more potential spread of error on their shot than a top rated sniper and increase that chance of error at a higher rate the more they don't maximize their shooting potential with factors such as angles, speed, control, etc.
I'll have go tinker with the sliders then with the above in mind. Thank you again!
That's not exactly true... the physical sliders like puck control and shot accuracy and even fatigue would affect your player as well as the AI while position locked.
Sorry, I was referring to my CPU controlled teammates.
I believe "human" sliders includes all players on a human controlled team regardless of position lock.
Maybe NHLDEV can chime in again real quick. I was under the assumption (maybe I misunderstood) based on what he said that when in position locked, the other players are AI controlled (CPU).
"All that said, in 'player locked gameplay' it is different, since the majority of the players are ai controlled, the skill level of the ai stays balanced across all skill levels or else your ai teammates would be scoring way more goals than your opponents or visa versa since the one locked human player can't make up for everything without running way out of position."
Guess we need clarification on this.
Those slider adjustments where there are HUM and CPU sliders are for the game style variation, not the difficulty. Although by favoring one side over the other in the physical factors, you are obviously starting to manipulate their impact on difficulty one way or the other by making the factors easier or harder for one side than the other.
When it comes to difficulty, we vary the ai based on factors that are closer to the Human players choices. For example, where to shoot on the net, how quickly to notice a loose puck and start skating to it, etc. With the game style however, the setting for shot accuracy is what is applied as physical factors that lead to error in the model after where you aim. So if you are on Competitive preset where the shot accuracy slider is set to the same value for human and ai in the gameplay sliders, they get the same error as you do with every shot regardless of difficulty level, but the difficulty level themselves (pro, all star, etc.) will change how likely the ai is to see the open part of the net to aim for in the first place and then shot error based on the mechanics settings through the game style sliders factors in from that original request.
This way, on player lock, I can expect my players to play according to ratings...ie..Crosby plays like Crosby. Makes sense? And thank you again for looking into this.
But a lot of people playing offline tweak sliders to their liking as there are a lot of different opinions on what is realistic and/or fun to play. In most cases you would want to keep the sliders exactly the same for CPU/HUM to keep things balanced but whatever works best for you.
Any insight on what you like to tweak? I always put penalties up 4/4 and the CPU/HUM penalty sliders up 50/100. I'll typically tweak goalie reaction and a few other things but so far I've only touched the penalty stuff as the goalies do seem better this year - maybe due to being quicker from post to post.
I just wonder what the devs like to tweak.