Dynasty Hockey

I've recently started playing a new Facebook game, Dynasty Hockey. It's a typical Facebook game in the sense that you have a recharging set of actions you're allowed to take, you get bonuses if your friends play, and you can spend real money to just be better. The reason this game is interesting is you're building a hockey team out of current and historic hockey players.

The gameplay itself is a little on the weak side. Your recharging action is to play a game against another team, but the game is completely simulated. Your team faces their team, some goals are scored, and somebody wins. If you win you get a big bonus (two types of in game currency and the ability to buy a new player for your team), if you lose you get a consolation prize (20% of the in game currency you would have won, no new players). The person you play against has no change in their stats at all. It's as if you didn't do anything to them at all, win or lose, so other players are more like random NPCs than they are actual pvp opponents.

In and of itself that might not be so bad, but the problem is you get a list of 20 potential opponents and their approximate stats. Since there's no benefit to choosing the difficult game, a huge difference in the reward if you win, and a limited number of games you can play it should be pretty obvious that you want to cherry-pick the weak games and avoid playing anyone who might beat you. And since the game doesn't track how often you get challenged there's no punishment for being a bad team. As long as you can beat the truly terrible teams you're doing ok.

I just finished off the leveling aspect of the game and have moved into a league which provides a drastically smaller pool of opponents. Presumably we're going to play down to the end so if I want to win the league I'll need to be the best team of the 32 who signed up as opposed to just being good enough to beat the bottom 5-10% of players at any given level. (My record was 672-30 when I hit max level and if I was to start over I bet I could get there in more like 670-0. Most of my losses were in exhibition games that didn't use my game action number up and I now know how to properly spend the in game currencies.)

I want to see how this league thing plays out but mostly I'm just sticking around in the hopes of getting a chance to sign Gordie Howe. I already have Vladimir Konstantinov and Alex Delvecchio from Red Wings teams of the past!