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hockeyfan · 05-20-2023, 08:11 PM

05-20-2023, 03:27 PMslothfacekilla Wrote: Does anyone actually ENJOY the live sims? Would it be easier on simmers / to find simmers if they could just quick sim everything? It is what we had with STHS so I don't think it would kill the league.... I know I've thought about throwing my hat into the simmer ring but I don't own the sim but mostly I am not sure I could commit to streaming long streams on a schedule with work and real life. If it was less of a time commitment it is something I would definitely consider. Just throwing it out there I'm not sure how people view live sims.

This is also a part of why I had to consider not doing it. Just no time for live sims.

hockeyfan · 05-20-2023, 08:15 PM

05-20-2023, 07:05 PM_Blitz_ Wrote: I fired off a response to your personal criticism in the LAP LR, and I'm prepared for bygones on that part of this if you are. I will observe that, after thinking about it, I vaguely recall being put in my place about anger and misconceptions I had about the Awards process in the late S50s. I'm fairly sure your response was longer, but I don't recall if it was more graceful.

25-33% off time is about where we're at, with 2 weeks out of 6 total weeks for the scheduled games. I think it's difficult to place a balance on activity time for the season against the time it takes to do things (which is my biggest complaint), against how long people think a career should last. It starts to get into the argument of "How long does a person keep their attention focused on their player?" or "How long should a player last?". We can argue that it should take a little over 3 years to go 20 seasons, but then, how do we get 6 seasons in a year? If that priority has shifted, then we can open up on rolling the season out further. I don't control that, though.

This season was shortened. One of the ideas that the Sim Team talked about very seriously last season, in hunting ways to lighten the sim load and keep our people from burning out, was to do a 4 day sim week in a 5 week season, dropping Friday and Saturday sims since those were the hardest days to find availability. We were told that we had to stick to the laid out 4 week schedule. One of the factors cited was along the lines of "people want more seasons in a given year, so we have to have short seasons". So, we went to a 5 day schedule and only dropped Saturday.

I agree with your point about game inflation. If I could get away with it, I would be inclined to at least try a 6 week schedule, because you're right; it does make the days significantly shorter. If we could get sims to less than 1 hour, it might boost engagement. At the very least, it makes simmers' lives easier since there's usually anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes in prep time before the sim and right around 10 minutes after it to do the file drops and some other stuff. Our current average time for a sim is somewhere around 60 minutes. Spacing that out by half, we could probably get down to around 35 minutes and get prep time to a more consistent 20 minutes. So you go from 100 minutes down to 65, which is great, but there's still a staff availability issue.
We cut down from 48 sims (6 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to 40 sims (5 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to cut down on the number of schedule slots to fill. This job currently pays $14.5M, a weekly PT Pass, and a CW Pass, and I still can't get people to want to sim once a week for 6 weeks, including playoffs. Even with a pay raise to keep up with the inflation, I don't know that our team could staff a 6 week season with 2.5 weeks of playoffs (I got in a bit of trouble for forgetting that playoff predictions were a thing). It might be a lower average amount of time per person per day, but it would skim 10 minutes per sim, maybe. That's not accounting for 2 extra weeks of PTs, more file work, or more GM work. There's also a lot of people who don't know their schedule more than 2 weeks at a time and whose schedules aren't consistent more than 4 weeks at a time. It's been a problem that we're getting better at working with, but still has a lot of room for improvement.
It's something that if I could get a couple of extra people to have on-hand, we would at least have a proposal to try it. I don't see a problem with longer seasons for shorter sims, aside from how it makes us look next to other leagues.

As for IIHF, I don't know how much more can be done to make people who don't care about the tournaments, care about the tournaments. Between S65 and S69, I went big on schedule posting and format testing and a bunch of other things within my wheelhouse. I did a few surveys and a lot of the answers I got were to the effect of "Lol idc", "my team's not good enough to watch", "I'm bored". There are several great people who get involved, a few more who watch the games (Shoutout @slothfacekilla <3), but there's a lot of days where there's no one watching. If SHL dailies are around 25 views, the IIHF is around 10 and I'd be surprised if WJC is more than 5. It sucks, and so many problems would likely be easier to manage (not resolved, but easier) if IIHF had more draw. It's gotten a little bit better with more energetic fed heads that've come in and a better IIHF HO organization with Canadice and now Arty and MikeLiut, but the numbers and interest aren't there. I keep hoping that there's a "yet" on the end of that sentence, I want it desperately. I love the IIHF, it was one of the first places where I felt at home on the site. I think it's a matter of getting people to care about the regular season first and then bringing more focus to IIHF.

You are easily my favourite user on this site and I have so much respect for everything you do here <3

***aleks*** · 05-20-2023, 08:58 PM

05-20-2023, 03:27 PMslothfacekilla Wrote: Does anyone actually ENJOY the live sims? Would it be easier on simmers / to find simmers if they could just quick sim everything? It is what we had with STHS so I don't think it would kill the league.... I know I've thought about throwing my hat into the simmer ring but I don't own the sim but mostly I am not sure I could commit to streaming long streams on a schedule with work and real life. If it was less of a time commitment it is something I would definitely consider. Just throwing it out there I'm not sure how people view live sims.

The live sims in reference to the match engine solely, it is fucking trash. It is the worst looking thing ever. Genuinely painful.

Everything else regarding live chat with other users and the stakes or whatever is subjective but actually watching the matches is terrible

spooked · 05-20-2023, 09:50 PM

05-20-2023, 08:58 PMaleks Wrote: The live sims in reference to the match engine solely, it is fucking trash. It is the worst looking thing ever. Genuinely painful.

Everything else regarding live chat with other users and the stakes or whatever is subjective but actually watching the matches is terrible

It's kind of twofold for me. The engine itself is completely impossible to follow at times, including knowing what the actual score is and what the hell is going on in the live sim, which is weird because when I played a bit offline myself it didn't have as many issues so I am not sure what we are doing there to have it be so buggy. The other is that ANY live sim game also adds a large amount of time to the stream, so sticking around for my game that could be like an hour from now isn't really a great use of time from a pure interest perspective. I said it a lot, but I would be fine with 100% or close to regular season quick sims, maybe 1-2 marquee games a week that could be tied into the prediction PTs or something so there would be some value to watch if you tune in because you picked a winner if you did the PT.

***aleks*** · 05-20-2023, 09:53 PM

05-20-2023, 09:50 PMspooked Wrote: It's kind of twofold for me. The engine itself is completely impossible to follow at times, including knowing what the actual score is and what the hell is going on in the live sim, which is weird because when I played a bit offline myself it didn't have as many issues so I am not sure what we are doing there to have it be so buggy. The other is that ANY live sim game also adds a large amount of time to the stream, so sticking around for my game that could be like an hour from now isn't really a great use of time from a pure interest perspective. I said it a lot, but I would be fine with 100% or close to regular season quick sims, maybe 1-2 marquee games a week that could be tied into the prediction PTs or something so there would be some value to watch if you tune in because you picked a winner if you did the PT.

I can definitely understand where you're coming from, the most annoying thing is when it shows the same goal like 3 times? Wish we had an FM quality hockey sim, I'd make it if I was a billionaire for sure

*Good_Ole_Kimmy* · 05-20-2023, 09:55 PM

05-20-2023, 09:53 PMaleks Wrote: I can definitely understand where you're coming from, the most annoying thing is when it shows the same goal like 3 times? Wish we had an FM quality hockey sim, I'd make it if I was a billionaire for sure

if you were a billionaire would we still be friends

***aleks*** · 05-20-2023, 11:03 PM

05-20-2023, 09:55 PMGood_Ole_Kimmy Wrote: if you were a billionaire would we still be friends

What do you mean by "still"

FaraDian · 05-21-2023, 08:28 AM

05-20-2023, 09:50 PMspooked Wrote: I would be fine with 100% or close to regular season quick sims, maybe 1-2 marquee games a week that could be tied into the prediction PTs or something so there would be some value to watch if you tune in because you picked a winner if you did the PT.

This is a solid idea. Instead of streaming every sim, we could just do stats for most of the regular season and then have a once weekly YouTube video that's pre-recorded called SHL Primetime which just features live sims of the three Primetime prediction games. Maybe it eventually gets to the point of being edited, having commentary, whatever.

Since it would require fewer sim hours (since most are just being quick simmed), maybe it frees up time to produce the one YT video a bit more or the new format encourages new people to get involved (like as commentators, though they don't want to do the actual simming). One big hurdle would be with the schedule since Primetime would all have to be games on the same in-sim day. It's obviously a big logistical change but I think it's worth pursuing (I would try helping with the framework, to put money where my mouth is).

**RomanesEuntDomus** · 05-21-2023, 09:11 AM

05-20-2023, 07:05 PM_Blitz_ Wrote: I fired off a response to your personal criticism in the LAP LR, and I'm prepared for bygones on that part of this if you are. I will observe that, after thinking about it, I vaguely recall being put in my place about anger and misconceptions I had about the Awards process in the late S50s. I'm fairly sure your response was longer, but I don't recall if it was more graceful.

25-33% off time is about where we're at, with 2 weeks out of 6 total weeks for the scheduled games. I think it's difficult to place a balance on activity time for the season against the time it takes to do things (which is my biggest complaint), against how long people think a career should last. It starts to get into the argument of "How long does a person keep their attention focused on their player?" or "How long should a player last?". We can argue that it should take a little over 3 years to go 20 seasons, but then, how do we get 6 seasons in a year? If that priority has shifted, then we can open up on rolling the season out further. I don't control that, though.

This season was shortened. One of the ideas that the Sim Team talked about very seriously last season, in hunting ways to lighten the sim load and keep our people from burning out, was to do a 4 day sim week in a 5 week season, dropping Friday and Saturday sims since those were the hardest days to find availability. We were told that we had to stick to the laid out 4 week schedule. One of the factors cited was along the lines of "people want more seasons in a given year, so we have to have short seasons". So, we went to a 5 day schedule and only dropped Saturday.

I agree with your point about game inflation. If I could get away with it, I would be inclined to at least try a 6 week schedule, because you're right; it does make the days significantly shorter. If we could get sims to less than 1 hour, it might boost engagement. At the very least, it makes simmers' lives easier since there's usually anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes in prep time before the sim and right around 10 minutes after it to do the file drops and some other stuff. Our current average time for a sim is somewhere around 60 minutes. Spacing that out by half, we could probably get down to around 35 minutes and get prep time to a more consistent 20 minutes. So you go from 100 minutes down to 65, which is great, but there's still a staff availability issue.
We cut down from 48 sims (6 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to 40 sims (5 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to cut down on the number of schedule slots to fill. This job currently pays $14.5M, a weekly PT Pass, and a CW Pass, and I still can't get people to want to sim once a week for 6 weeks, including playoffs. Even with a pay raise to keep up with the inflation, I don't know that our team could staff a 6 week season with 2.5 weeks of playoffs (I got in a bit of trouble for forgetting that playoff predictions were a thing). It might be a lower average amount of time per person per day, but it would skim 10 minutes per sim, maybe. That's not accounting for 2 extra weeks of PTs, more file work, or more GM work. There's also a lot of people who don't know their schedule more than 2 weeks at a time and whose schedules aren't consistent more than 4 weeks at a time. It's been a problem that we're getting better at working with, but still has a lot of room for improvement.
It's something that if I could get a couple of extra people to have on-hand, we would at least have a proposal to try it. I don't see a problem with longer seasons for shorter sims, aside from how it makes us look next to other leagues.

As for IIHF, I don't know how much more can be done to make people who don't care about the tournaments, care about the tournaments. Between S65 and S69, I went big on schedule posting and format testing and a bunch of other things within my wheelhouse. I did a few surveys and a lot of the answers I got were to the effect of "Lol idc", "my team's not good enough to watch", "I'm bored". There are several great people who get involved, a few more who watch the games (Shoutout @slothfacekilla <3), but there's a lot of days where there's no one watching. If SHL dailies are around 25 views, the IIHF is around 10 and I'd be surprised if WJC is more than 5. It sucks, and so many problems would likely be easier to manage (not resolved, but easier) if IIHF had more draw. It's gotten a little bit better with more energetic fed heads that've come in and a better IIHF HO organization with Canadice and now Arty and MikeLiut, but the numbers and interest aren't there. I keep hoping that there's a "yet" on the end of that sentence, I want it desperately. I love the IIHF, it was one of the first places where I felt at home on the site. I think it's a matter of getting people to care about the regular season first and then bringing more focus to IIHF.

I already answered you in Discord, but absolutely no hard feelings from my end. I didn't like the way you made you argument in the post but my answer wasn't the nicest either and obviously I have no problems with you as a person and greatly appreciate all that you have done for this league and are continuing to do!

Now that we have both laid out our thoughts a bit, I think there is actually a lot of common ground. While I was unaware of how dire the situation seems to be for the sim-team right now, quite a few of my suggestions were actually aimed at making things easier for them and absolutely NOT meant as criticism towards them. Simming is a such a hard job especially because of the consistency and time-critical nature with which the tasks have to be completed. As you are saying, this seems to have made it almost impossible to find people who are willing to take on these jobs nowadays.

So we need to make the job easier and less scary. If you are saying that cutting down on the live-sim aspect would be a viable way to do that, then we should absoutely go for it. No more live-sims for the regular season or only for some highlighted primetime games, boom, done. Less time committment per sim for the simmer and more flexibility in scheduling seem like huge gains we could make by that kind of change.
If it were up to me, we didn't need any sims on YouTube in the regular season at all, if that helps the simmers, but that's probably a minority position. The viewing experience doesn't warrant the effort that goes into it in my opinion. And I hope the reason we have those "live" streams isn't just to keep tabs on the Simmers and catch every single mistake they make live, because that would be rather unhealthy too and another possible factor that contributes to the job not being attractive to people.

Also, more rest days for simmers by going down to a 4 day week? Absolutely, yes please. Having more rest days within a season is actually "good downtime" in my book, because it makes people look forward to when there are games again instead of taking them for granted for 4-6 weeks and then having none at all for weeks after that. Three sims on Monday-Thursday and then one at some point on Friday-Sunday that fits the Simmers schedule would sound ideal to me, but if you want weekends to be completely free then by all means, go for it.

If you say that 6-week regular seasons are not feasible right now due to lack of personnel, then that is a good and acceptable reason not do it and much better than those off-handed dismissals by some other people in here who didn't even seem willing to consider the point earnestly. I just have to repeat my core point once more because it seems to be so easy to miss or misunderstand, and it seems to have caused some frustrations both on your end and among the other people in charge. I am NOT demanding a shorter off-season and I don't think I've seen anyone honestly demanding that for years now. What I am looking for is ways to find a better balance between game-action and downtime, because as it stands right now most people are essentially alternating between 4-5 weeks of game action followed by 4-5 weeks of downtime. This isn't a very good rhythm not just in regards to having fun following your player/team, it also seems to contribute to Simmer burnout as well if we force them to crunch so much for the 4-6 week season instead of allowing a slower pace, more breathing room in between and less extensive individual sims.

I'm also wondering if the higher frequency of re-sims in recent seasons has contributed to the problem. Re-sims are a really bad thing in general not just because they inevitably nullify the achievements that some peoples players had in those specific sims, but because they put a huge spotlight on the simmers' mistakes. They highlight the downsides of the job and the possibilities to fuck up, which makes it look like a really daunting position. Updaters and Simmers have always made mistakes, it's part of the jobs, but instead of accepting those mistakes as necessary concessions, it almost feels like putting a knife in the persons back sometimes when we drag them out into the open so prominently by announcing big re-sims over relatively minor problems. Obviously there are some issues that require re-sims, major file mistakes that would lead to additional problems further down the line, mixed up lines or goalies in the playoffs, that kind of stuff. But those same problems in the regular, or a chunk of updates not being implemented in time for the first game of a round? Just suck those things up and move on, it's really not that big of a deal.

In regards to making the IIHF more meaningful, it might sound a bit cynical, but I think the best way to get people more involved is both through more activities and simply through more rewards. People will care if they can get something out of it that also helps their player outside of IIHF, money, TPE, whatever. Also, diverting some late season PTs away from SHL topics and towards the IHFF could help too. But of course we also have to be realistic here, we will probably never reach the same levels of engagement as in the big leagues, largely because of the limited player agency. Players have less control over which team they play for, they can't easily join their friends or transfer away from a GM that is only doing the bare minimum, so many will react to those kinds of situations with passiveness. I don't think that's a bad thing, ultimately thats what the IIHFs identity is all about, the fact that you are "born" into a nation and have to live with that, we should absolutely keep all that. We just have to manage our expectations accordingly.

*Pyro182* · 05-21-2023, 04:31 PM

05-18-2023, 10:43 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: It's about the fact that even decent to good GMs tend to be outclassed by the very best. As counter-intuitive as that might sound to many, GMs have too much weight and power in my opinion. In my ideal world, GMs would still be very influential in building a good roster, drafting well and creating a LR atmosphere that draws people to their team, but their influence on the results through lines and tactics would be greatly diminished.

Disclaimer: First off I am extremely new here and know that depending on level of competitiveness between people my idea could be sacreligious. Secondly I understand that the problem I am posing a solution to will not fix the whole problem and only at best a small part.

A GMs teaching GMs program might help with this issue. And I dont just mean in one team. I mean league-wide the GMs that know their way around the lines and tactics systems well enough to give their teams significant advantages, should be encouraged (at worst Mandated, though I'm not a fan of forcing things on people) to share some of their more advanced knowledge with the other GMs or even on a stream or youtube mini-series.

My suggested incentive would be incentivized picks based off how well helped GMs do in the next few seasons. Like add rounds 2b and 3b where teacher GMs receive picks in those rounds based off how well the teams they taught do. While this may cause some GMs to tank intentionally to either boost their chance at an extra round pick by artificially inflating the success of GMs they taught, or to prevent the gms they taught from getting the boost, I am hoping that the incentive to do that would be diminished with the rewards being able to be reaped two or three seasons down the line as players of teams will be unlikely to let their GMs tank for more than one season over an extra non first round pick. This would pseudo emulate the nfls system of rewarding teams that develop staff that other teams steal by giving them extra picks in later rounds depending on the staff member's position/salary on their new team.

***sköldpaddor*** · 05-21-2023, 04:47 PM

So, I'd like to just take a minute here to point out a couple of things. Over the course of the past season, a few things have been vocally and publicly criticized:

The seasons are too long. People don't want to spend three years on one singular career.
The seasons are too short. People want to care more about the regular season, so we need to stretch it out more. (In my opinion, making the season even longer is just not an option here. We already only make it through ~6.5 seasons in a year. It takes people at least two real years to get through one full length career, and that's a short one. Realistically, most of them are closer to three years. If we push the regular season to any longer, like six weeks, we're talking about a 10/11 week full season, around or less than five seasons in a real year. That starts to push a full length career past three years, and a long one closer to four years.
We are not transparent enough with announcing changes. (At one point, we were asked whether we could mass PM everyone on the site every time we have a SOTU address.)
We are too transparent with other things. (if we announce re-sims publicly we're shaming the simmers. I will say, we have made significant efforts to be transparent about those things without publicly shaming anyone. Simmer punishments are no longer announced on site; we keep a private log of them and they're dealt with when we do payroll at the end of the season. It has never, ever been our intention to publicly broadcast the identity of any simmer who commits any infraction, whether it results in a re-sim or not. It's not hard to figure out which simmer was simming on a particular day, since the GMs know and it's not a state secret, but that is not something Head Office will ever name and shame here on the site). I'd also like to point out here that when it comes to re-sims because of the wrong file being used, "suck it up and move on" isn't really a viable option. You either re-sim with the correct file, you make the filework team do an entire update cycle over again on the file that WAS used (in a very short turnaround time to get back to simming), or you tell everybody that the updates they worked hard on for that week are pointless and not going to be input at all for that week/playoffs. In basically any other situation, we're generally in agreement that re-simming isn't the best course of action, but when the wrong file is used (which is the reason for most of the re-sims we've done recently), re-simming is really the option that results in the least loss of work for the most people.
People don't care about IIHF and think it's a "waste of effort"
People DO care about IIHF and think we need to put MORE effort into it to make people care (I'm in this camp. I love IIHF and I think it's so much fun but I don't think enough goes into promoting it, and I don't really know how to fix that without stepping on any toes. I've put in a lot of time and effort for IIHF and a lot of it it hasn't been especially well-received, so if there's something we can do to make that better, I'm all for it but I'm not going to insert my opinions there any longer).
Regression is too harsh now and should not have been changed
Regression is not harsh enough and needs to be made harsher because careers are too long
It's no fun when the stacked team wins every time and you already know what's going to happen before the season starts
It's no fun to put real years of work into building a team that is the best in the league only to get slapped around by "randomness" and never see anything for all that effort
GMing is too much of a learning curve for new GMs, we need to make it more accessible
The steps we've taken to make it less of a learning curve have made it not as much fun for GMs who like the nitty gritty ins and outs and sliders and toggles and used to spend hours testing and if people want to be GMs they should simply get good.
The live sim experience sucks (yeah there's no counterpoint to this. We know the visual product sucks. We don't really have better options for that, so we've been working with the sim team to try and identify ways to make the experience around the sucky visual product more fun. Even the most garbage movie in the world can be fun if you're watching it with your friends and laughing about how awful it is together.)

You can see just from these few things that I threw together over the past five minutes that the viewpoints on even these few things are wildly contrasting, and that goes back to what I said before about different people wanting different things out of the league. I do think that the best course on most of these things lies somewhere in the middle, because the opposing ends of the spectrum are generally the loudest but the majority of people land in between, and we want to try to provide something enjoyable for everybody.

I think there's a ton of stuff that we can work on here, and I hope people bear with us because this league is a constantly evolving thing. I always want to listen to people's concerns and suggestions, I just hope that people realize how vastly different (and often contradictory) the opinions and suggestions we're getting are.

At the end of the day, any hobby can get stale when you've been doing it for 10+ years like many people on this site have. I've only been here for four and a half years and I will honestly say that my interest and enthusiasm has fluctuated. And that's okay! To me, like a lot of people in here have said, it's not really about the fake hockey. I love the fake hockey, of course, I love writing my little characters and telling little hockey stories and letting the sim engine feed me results that serve as prompts for those stories. But none of it would be fun without the other people in the league, and that's why I'm here. That's why this is by far my most time-consuming hobby, and one that is often a decent amount of work before I get to "play." Like I often tell people - if it wasn't about the community and the human element here, I could just go play an NHL game alone in my basement or with randos online, I could just go play FHM (no) by myself. I choose this hobby because of the people, and the people are the reason I want to put my time in to try and make it better.

*Pyro182* · 05-21-2023, 05:33 PM

05-21-2023, 04:47 PMsköldpaddor Wrote:
The live sim experience sucks (yeah there's no counterpoint to this. We know the visual product sucks. We don't really have better options for that, so we've been working with the sim team to try and identify ways to make the experience around the sucky visual product more fun. Even the most garbage movie in the world can be fun if you're watching it with your friends and laughing about how awful it is together.)

I definitely feel that making sims and drafts nonlive events would increase their entertainment value. With prerecorded sims being able to be more easily scruitinized for problems that would lead to resims without the public shaming. It would also open up the job of commentator, which I would love to do. And since the games would be pre-recorded multiple games could go up at once and even games with multiple different teams commentary. And then for the drafts I feel a pre-recording could help smoothe over any technical difficulties that arrive from extenuating circumstances. And if people like the live feel, I believe youtube allows event releases that keeps the live chat feed and group watch feel while allowing pre-recordings to be done.

***boom*** · 05-21-2023, 05:40 PM

05-21-2023, 05:33 PMPyro182 Wrote: I definitely feel that making sims and drafts nonlive events would increase their entertainment value. With prerecorded sims being able to be more easily scruitinized for problems that would lead to resims without the public shaming. It would also open up the job of commentator, which I would love to do. And since the games would be pre-recorded multiple games could go up at once and even games with multiple different teams commentary. And then for the drafts I feel a pre-recording could help smoothe over any technical difficulties that arrive from extenuating circumstances. And if people like the live feel, I believe youtube allows event releases that keeps the live chat feed and group watch feel while allowing pre-recordings to be done.

Being a manager, I much prefer the live draft process myself. I like that I can talk to people right up until one specific time, and the chaos can really make it feel more authentic.

*Zerg* · 05-21-2023, 07:05 PM

05-21-2023, 05:33 PMPyro182 Wrote: I definitely feel that making sims and drafts nonlive events would increase their entertainment value. With prerecorded sims being able to be more easily scruitinized for problems that would lead to resims without the public shaming. It would also open up the job of commentator, which I would love to do. And since the games would be pre-recorded multiple games could go up at once and even games with multiple different teams commentary. And then for the drafts I feel a pre-recording could help smoothe over any technical difficulties that arrive from extenuating circumstances. And if people like the live feel, I believe youtube allows event releases that keeps the live chat feed and group watch feel while allowing pre-recordings to be done.

Commentator job would be lit Ahh

Bfine · 05-22-2023, 09:18 AM

I will preface the below by stating that I absolutely love the SHL and I wouldn’t have 3 jobs here if I didn’t. It’s an incredible avenue to meet new people and I personally think the league is getting to a better spot in terms of things like parity. That said, my main two issues are as follows.

First is IIHF. It’s gotten a lot of mentions here and I don’t know the larger fix to make it a larger priority for people, and to be honest I’ve even paid less attention to it the past few seasons. It was nice to win Bronze this season, but I think it’s hard for people to care unless 1. You have a good team and 2. You have an engaged LR. I’m glad to see a mix of new leaders like Seany and Hockeyfan joining as Fed Heads while people like Toast with his wealth of experience also recently joined. If we can keep getting a mix of new and old I have optimism that together they can come up with ideas to re-popularize the IIHF.

My bigger issue however is with the current J structure. We were talking about it a bit in SFP, and to me its ridiculous that players are being called up to the SHL with more TPE banked than spent. That feels like such an easy way to get players to lose interest when they have to spend at least 4 months doing nothing but banking TPE. So what are the solutions? Currently the only solution is to ask your SHL team to call you up early. This is the option I currently plan on taking when I recreate and I could see it being an option more and more users start taking as well. In the current system where players get 9 seasons before regression kicks in after being drafted to the SHL, do you want to spend 33% of that in the J not really spending your TPE? That leads to what are some longer term solutions? I don’t think removing the cap is a good idea for reasons such as competitive balance and the rookie experience, but I think theres some room to maneuver in the cap. Could you bump the 4th season cap up to 500? Could you bump the 350 cap to 425 and then move the 425 cap to 500? Something that lets players spend more TPE because I personally feel if J GM’s weren’t so good at making LR’s welcoming a lot of players would opt to leave their teams early.

Like I said despite some issues I really do love this place, and unlike other sim leagues where I joined and couldn’t hold my interest, I’ve been active here for over 2 years with many more to go. I would just like to see J HO, and I know they already have, see if there’s something they can do about the J cap to make TPE earning feel more rewarding.

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