How we managed to do a 82 game season over 2 2k leagues

Leaguegaming is the first league to do a full 82 game season with the exact NHL schedule format while using a 2k league.
The NHL schedule format for this year is you play everyone in your division 8 times, everyone else in your conference 4 times and 2 division's
from the other conference once.

To understand the list of problems better, one most understand our format.
As said above, we do a full 30 team 82 game season. The season is broken up into 18 weeks.
Each week a team has 3 games on their schedule. We also division the season into 2 half's where each half there are about 17 other games on that teams schedule. These are known as "wildcard" games and can be played
at any point based on which half of the season we are currently in.

The first problem is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to make the nil schedule fit into a 2k league, The reason is it's a mathematical impossibility to have
all games match up over their 82 "week" format.

Our Solution: We used 2, 2k league's with the intention that a lot of "space filler" games will never be played.
The first league will be used for all "week games" ( weeks 1-18 ). This 2k league was made with the length of 74 games, or 74 "2k weeks".
The other league was used for all wildcard games and made with the length of 44 "2k weeks"

The Second Problem: is that our schedule calls for a Team's games vs. every other team to be played in a certain order. For example Toronto's games vs. PHI schedule may call
for the first game to be played at PHI while the next 2 back in Toronto and the last back in PHI. To control this we discovered how the 2k league would determine what the
next game to be played is for teams that play each other multiple time's, It will always find the first free game based on which game has the lower 2k "week".
So for example if on the 2k league, it read :
Week 11 Tor @ Phi
Week 25 PHi @ Tor
Weeek 64 PHI @ Tor

It would take the week 11 game to be played first, then the week 25 then the week 64

This turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Every team's schedule would not only had to be hand done, but
verified that the order in which games have to show up on the 2k site match that order in which these games need to be played on leaguegaming.
There were numerous schedule conflicts where it was impossible for every team vs. every other team to match up correctly. To solve these
"filler games" had to be inserted. These games are inserted into the schedule with the intent to never be played but "Sim'd" by the admin before the season starts. With those games out of the way, the correct order for team vs. another team can be preserved. Those sim'd games are then recorded in the scoreboard as games to completely ignore, to never be scraped. This way we will get the true team record and stats.

To come up with the schedule, I made 8 scripts. These scripts helped me to come up with the best possible solution for each 2k week and who plays who.
Other scripts were created to help organize all "filler" games and the best solution for that, and other scripts were made so that the integrity was never compromised. IE that a team never played twice in the same week ect

It took about a total of 5 days to come up with the schedule and how it should be for a 2k league, Another 4 days spread over 2 people to insert all the games into the 2k league's
A total of 1770 games had to be scheduled and inserted by hand.

The process was incredible long, but we hope it's worth it. We hope the people in season 8 enjoy this season and appreciate what was needed
to get this task done.

-Tris10

 

Another season done!
For those curious on some of the tools i created to do this, here is a screen shot

Each week has to be looked at, then for each hole, each game vs game has to then be researched to make sure there is no conflict. Times that by about 300 times, it makes for a long and complicated process