01-08-2019, 05:23 PMThatDamnMcJesus Wrote:

01-08-2019, 05:22 PMxDParK Wrote: What’s your suggestion then?

idek.

On one hand I feel like 75% of the league is too much for making the playoffs.

another that playoffs+off-season wait times is horrible and 50% of the league experiencing that isn't option

This is a super important and quite tough to answer question imho that gets overlooked way too often. Because one of the biggest problems of the league is the season-to-offseason ratio, off-seasons are just too long compared to the seasons. Ironically this isn't because off-seasons have gotten longer, they aren't any longer than they used to be in the past, but because our simming has become so damn reliable with the last few simmers that it has cut down our season length significantly. Seasons used to be like 8 weeks followed up by a 3 week offseason, now it's more like 5-6 week seasons and then 3 weeks of off-season. However, this 5-6 weeks number only applies if your team goes deep in the playoffs - if you don't make the playoffs or lose in the first round then the ratio becomes much, much worse.

Look at last season for example: The regular season started on November 5th and it ended on November 29th, so if your team didn't make the playoffs you only had about 3.5 weeks worth of games, followed by a 4-5 week off-season. That means that people spend up to 60% of their time here without any games going on. Luckily we have a bunch of other activities like the IIHF and discord interaction, but that's not always a substitute for actual league games and generally it's just a terrible ratio overall. Even for teams who made it into the playoffs, losing in the first round can still put you in the 50% downtime range.

Now you could argue that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it stops people from burning out too quickly as they are actually excited for the new season time and time again, and it also allows the people with a heavy day-to-day workload, most notably the simmer, to have more time to recharge their batteries. Still, I think that at this point, we have too much time with no games going on compared to time with games. And there are different ways how we could adress this: Shorter off-seasons (unrealistic), longer regular seasons (has some downsides but could work) or simply more teams making the playoffs (my preferred approach)

Sure, some people might complain about "participation trophies" or whatever, but I think in a league like this as many people as possible should be allowed to participate in the fun activities, as long as it doesn't water down competition too much. Even if if is just a wild card round between the 4th and 5th seed, or something bigger like the 3rd-6th seeds battling out in round one of the playoffs, it would make things a lot more fun for a lot of people and it would also give more teams something to fight for during the regular season, because you won't have half a dozen teams completely out of the playoff race just halfway through the season. So yeah, anything between 8 and 12 teams should be fine imho - just stay away with that division bullshit .