07-27-2020, 06:53 AMZema Wrote: I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here that is not fully related to this post, but I will touch on it further down. But the tangent is about the scheduling.
I find it very odd how the scheduling is done across both the SHL and the SMJHL. It feels like there is only a vague timetable of when everything will happen, and that the dates for when events (drafts, international tournaments, playoffs, pre-season) happen are decided upon a week or two in advance. There should already be a starting date for pre-season and the season beyond when the current one starts. Draft date (or weekend) should be set in stone what day it happens much sooner. I think this time around we found out it would happen 4-5 days before? That is way too late.
The more planning ahead things are done, the better the result will be. I'm not sure how much is being done right now from the HOs, but for us who aren't always ITK it gets frustrating not really knowing when things will happen, because you can't plan your time around something you don't know when it will happen.
The timezone difference should go into the planning. NA are a big majority on this site, but that doesn't mean EU shouldn't be cast aside to completely compromise at every step. If the draft would start at say midnight on a weekend CEST (using it as an example because it's my timezone), it would mean a starting time for anywhere between 16.00-18.00 for the general NA public. Both sides get to compromise a bit, but EU gets to at least compromise less.
tl;dr: More planning ahead, and a finished (open) schedule around every event for the season before it even begins so make it easier for everyone involved to plan ahead.
To give information toward this, the reason planning is done so quickly is because our schedule isn't able to be set in stone very easily. If we start playoffs and say okay, if every series goes 7 here's the date it ends, then we need multiple days to start the recruitment drive and set up the mock draft so draft is say 5 days later. But then, every series ends in 4 or 5, and we now end where the draft is about 8 days away instead of 5. That's a significant difference for recruitment and activity. We lose people between the end of their first SMJHL season and the draft since there isn't much to do yet for that time. So with how fluid our timetable can be, we end up having to work on the fly because until the Finals are set, we have no idea when things could end.
As for what RED asked for the discussion, we had I believe 3 or 4 surveys this off-season by HO to find the best date and time that worked with the most GMs, and ended up on a weekday at 8 pm EST. They tried a weekend only poll at first, and the majority said no day worked for them. They tried early on weekdays, and the majority said it didn't work for them. This is an unfortunate circumstance of how difficult it can be to pull together nearly 20 people including HO at the same time for a hobby.
An old man's dream ended. A young man's vision of the future opened wide. Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.
Okay so as the old co-commish of the league I'm going to make a command decision. From now on, all league business will be conducted on the second Wednesday of the month at midnight Eastern time.
Sigs by Me, Merica, High Stick King, Rum_Ham, Jess, vulfzilla, enigmatic, and Carpy
I spoke to others about this but with more time to develop the idea, I’m going to come up with a better prediction method to help accommodate everyone. This was very much a trial run to see if this was something we could run with.
07-27-2020, 06:53 AMZema Wrote: I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here that is not fully related to this post, but I will touch on it further down. But the tangent is about the scheduling.
I find it very odd how the scheduling is done across both the SHL and the SMJHL. It feels like there is only a vague timetable of when everything will happen, and that the dates for when events (drafts, international tournaments, playoffs, pre-season) happen are decided upon a week or two in advance. There should already be a starting date for pre-season and the season beyond when the current one starts. Draft date (or weekend) should be set in stone what day it happens much sooner. I think this time around we found out it would happen 4-5 days before? That is way too late.
The more planning ahead things are done, the better the result will be. I'm not sure how much is being done right now from the HOs, but for us who aren't always ITK it gets frustrating not really knowing when things will happen, because you can't plan your time around something you don't know when it will happen.
The timezone difference should go into the planning. NA are a big majority on this site, but that doesn't mean EU shouldn't be cast aside to completely compromise at every step. If the draft would start at say midnight on a weekend CEST (using it as an example because it's my timezone), it would mean a starting time for anywhere between 16.00-18.00 for the general NA public. Both sides get to compromise a bit, but EU gets to at least compromise less.
tl;dr: More planning ahead, and a finished (open) schedule around every event for the season before it even begins so make it easier for everyone involved to plan ahead.
To give information toward this, the reason planning is done so quickly is because our schedule isn't able to be set in stone very easily. If we start playoffs and say okay, if every series goes 7 here's the date it ends, then we need multiple days to start the recruitment drive and set up the mock draft so draft is say 5 days later. But then, every series ends in 4 or 5, and we now end where the draft is about 8 days away instead of 5. That's a significant difference for recruitment and activity. We lose people between the end of their first SMJHL season and the draft since there isn't much to do yet for that time. So with how fluid our timetable can be, we end up having to work on the fly because until the Finals are set, we have no idea when things could end.
As for what RED asked for the discussion, we had I believe 3 or 4 surveys this off-season by HO to find the best date and time that worked with the most GMs, and ended up on a weekday at 8 pm EST. They tried a weekend only poll at first, and the majority said no day worked for them. They tried early on weekdays, and the majority said it didn't work for them. This is an unfortunate circumstance of how difficult it can be to pull together nearly 20 people including HO at the same time for a hobby.
It shouldn't be very hard to just set a date for the draft a couple of months in advance going for the worst case scenario. It might be a couple of days longer of off-season if it ends quickly, which gives more time to prepare. But I also don't know the full process between off-season -> draft, so this is me simply speculating.
If people quit because there aren't many things to do between SMJHL season ending and the SHL draft happening, it kinda shows a problem that could be fixed with a schedule that runs side-by-side between the SHL and the J, and with a set date for the draft. With better planning ahead, things will go more smoothly which will make for a better experience for everyone involved. It will also become easier to plan in off-season activities if someone wants a run at that.
I don't know enough about the full process behind how the preparations for the seasons/draft work to say exactly how it can be planned ahead better or prepared in a different way. But setting a solid timetable early on with few variations from it will make it easier to plan/prepare, and that is true for everyone.
And it's always hard to plan for 20 people around a hobby of course, and it becomes practically impossible to make everyone happy in that scenario.
07-27-2020, 11:29 AMJayWhy Wrote: To give information toward this, the reason planning is done so quickly is because our schedule isn't able to be set in stone very easily. If we start playoffs and say okay, if every series goes 7 here's the date it ends, then we need multiple days to start the recruitment drive and set up the mock draft so draft is say 5 days later. But then, every series ends in 4 or 5, and we now end where the draft is about 8 days away instead of 5. That's a significant difference for recruitment and activity. We lose people between the end of their first SMJHL season and the draft since there isn't much to do yet for that time. So with how fluid our timetable can be, we end up having to work on the fly because until the Finals are set, we have no idea when things could end.
As for what RED asked for the discussion, we had I believe 3 or 4 surveys this off-season by HO to find the best date and time that worked with the most GMs, and ended up on a weekday at 8 pm EST. They tried a weekend only poll at first, and the majority said no day worked for them. They tried early on weekdays, and the majority said it didn't work for them. This is an unfortunate circumstance of how difficult it can be to pull together nearly 20 people including HO at the same time for a hobby.
It shouldn't be very hard to just set a date for the draft a couple of months in advance going for the worst case scenario. It might be a couple of days longer of off-season if it ends quickly, which gives more time to prepare. But I also don't know the full process between off-season -> draft, so this is me simply speculating.
If people quit because there aren't many things to do between SMJHL season ending and the SHL draft happening, it kinda shows a problem that could be fixed with a schedule that runs side-by-side between the SHL and the J, and with a set date for the draft. With better planning ahead, things will go more smoothly which will make for a better experience for everyone involved. It will also become easier to plan in off-season activities if someone wants a run at that.
I don't know enough about the full process behind how the preparations for the seasons/draft work to say exactly how it can be planned ahead better or prepared in a different way. But setting a solid timetable early on with few variations from it will make it easier to plan/prepare, and that is true for everyone.
And it's always hard to plan for 20 people around a hobby of course, and it becomes practically impossible to make everyone happy in that scenario.
I appreciate the enthusiasm to try and get this done, it's a good discussion to have for sure. The more I look at the numbers, the more I'm struggling to find a way we can consistently make it easier on our euro users as much as I'd love to. So to respond to you:
There is 0 way to plan out a date that far ahead. We can say what week the draft will be (though that will even be hard), but that's an entire week that we then have to decide closer to that time what exact day. If we were to say right now, the draft is going to be let's say the week of September 6th just as something to throw out there. We then start discussing, I can't do Friday/Saturday because I'm buying a house and close on Friday and move on Saturday. Now again, it doesn't matter for me personally, my co-GM may even be able to make it. But then we start getting from others, well there's this planned for that day and this planned for the next day. We come down to, it has to be during the week. Well, we could do an early draft. Except, the North American GMs and HO members work until say 5/6/7 PM, personally I work until 8 PM EST. So now we're looking at a later draft, because we can't really hold it during a time when people are working. So even if we plan ahead, we end up in the same predicament most of the time.
Then we take a look, you brought up planning between the SHL and SMJHL for events or such. Well, what do we do if say the SHL and SMJHL seasons end 10 days before our planned time? Then what happens if it ends just 2 days before? Then we don't have time for a mock draft and we need to change that completely. What if it hasn't ended by the time we expected it to for unforeseen circumstances? I don't know what events you may be thinking could happen, but the drivers of activity are typically things that drive money or TPE, but we can't give out more TPE and money isn't consistent in how it drives activity. So I'd like to hear ideas as to what could fill that time if the season runs shorter that also could be cut completely if the season runs longer and does not provide TPE as a reward. It's pretty difficult to have something consistent for that.
Back in the early days of the SHL, we used to take things very slowly. We used to have off-seasons where we took our time getting things set up, we took days to decide on dates and times to get everything right. What happened with that? Well, people started to drop off. They had no reason to look at the site for 3 or 4 days, and by then they now have a habit of not checking the site and then by that point they stop thinking about SHL and ... away they went. So we saw a clear connection of the longer the off-season is, the more activity wanes. We adjusted for that. I used to drag out the playoffs to allow for discussions in the GM Office and for PT opportunities to be posted to drive more activity by separating rounds by about 1-2 days, and it changed nothing and only made people angry for what amounted to an extra maybe 4 days usually. The longer things take, the more angry people become, the more exhausted with the league they get. So we can't manage to the idea of, oh it'll only be a few extra days, because a few extra days has proven in the past to be a major issue to users as a whole.
At this point, we have 16 teams in the league right. So presumably, 32 GMs in the league then. You look at HO, counting in the GM Office I see 7 of them there. Counting out who I know for sure as euro, I see 4 GMs and 1 HO member who are euro. I may be off by one or two. So out of 39 total people to plan a draft around, we end up at 5 who would need special provisions for their time zone for being overseas. Then we have the West Coast GMs, who if we put things earlier, end up having morning or afternoon drafts that can cut into their day significantly and potentially cut into their working hours significantly to account for also. So we end up with 34 people who are North American based to focus on.
I know that you also want us to think of European users in general, but ultimately we can't make decisions as to what's better for users as a whole that then effects teambuilding and GMs. If we have it where 9 team can make this time but the european userbase is available versus 13 teams can make this time but the european userbase won't be online, we need to make the decision that favors the GMs. This is unfortunately just where things have to be since GMs are so important to this decision.
I'm hoping that I'm clearly explaining this, I'm kind of rambling it out, but effectively it's that while there are a lot of European users, there still isn't a majority, and we can't really make decisions to benefit a minority at the expense of the necessary parts of the league. I don't know the way to solve for this, but no amount of planning changes that we have 28 GMs who are North American based and will prefer times that don't take them from their children or from work or otherwise and a lot of that ends up not being european friendly. This is definitely a good discussion to have, but one that on most occasions there won't be a path out of. Nonetheless, every single time we discuss it, it is always brought up to try and accommodate as many people as possible and we do honestly do our very best to accommodate everyone, it's just legitimately extremely difficult to do.
An old man's dream ended. A young man's vision of the future opened wide. Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.
07-27-2020, 07:49 PMZema Wrote: It shouldn't be very hard to just set a date for the draft a couple of months in advance going for the worst case scenario. It might be a couple of days longer of off-season if it ends quickly, which gives more time to prepare. But I also don't know the full process between off-season -> draft, so this is me simply speculating.
If people quit because there aren't many things to do between SMJHL season ending and the SHL draft happening, it kinda shows a problem that could be fixed with a schedule that runs side-by-side between the SHL and the J, and with a set date for the draft. With better planning ahead, things will go more smoothly which will make for a better experience for everyone involved. It will also become easier to plan in off-season activities if someone wants a run at that.
I don't know enough about the full process behind how the preparations for the seasons/draft work to say exactly how it can be planned ahead better or prepared in a different way. But setting a solid timetable early on with few variations from it will make it easier to plan/prepare, and that is true for everyone.
And it's always hard to plan for 20 people around a hobby of course, and it becomes practically impossible to make everyone happy in that scenario.
I appreciate the enthusiasm to try and get this done, it's a good discussion to have for sure. The more I look at the numbers, the more I'm struggling to find a way we can consistently make it easier on our euro users as much as I'd love to. So to respond to you:
There is 0 way to plan out a date that far ahead. We can say what week the draft will be (though that will even be hard), but that's an entire week that we then have to decide closer to that time what exact day. If we were to say right now, the draft is going to be let's say the week of September 6th just as something to throw out there. We then start discussing, I can't do Friday/Saturday because I'm buying a house and close on Friday and move on Saturday. Now again, it doesn't matter for me personally, my co-GM may even be able to make it. But then we start getting from others, well there's this planned for that day and this planned for the next day. We come down to, it has to be during the week. Well, we could do an early draft. Except, the North American GMs and HO members work until say 5/6/7 PM, personally I work until 8 PM EST. So now we're looking at a later draft, because we can't really hold it during a time when people are working. So even if we plan ahead, we end up in the same predicament most of the time.
Then we take a look, you brought up planning between the SHL and SMJHL for events or such. Well, what do we do if say the SHL and SMJHL seasons end 10 days before our planned time? Then what happens if it ends just 2 days before? Then we don't have time for a mock draft and we need to change that completely. What if it hasn't ended by the time we expected it to for unforeseen circumstances? I don't know what events you may be thinking could happen, but the drivers of activity are typically things that drive money or TPE, but we can't give out more TPE and money isn't consistent in how it drives activity. So I'd like to hear ideas as to what could fill that time if the season runs shorter that also could be cut completely if the season runs longer and does not provide TPE as a reward. It's pretty difficult to have something consistent for that.
Back in the early days of the SHL, we used to take things very slowly. We used to have off-seasons where we took our time getting things set up, we took days to decide on dates and times to get everything right. What happened with that? Well, people started to drop off. They had no reason to look at the site for 3 or 4 days, and by then they now have a habit of not checking the site and then by that point they stop thinking about SHL and ... away they went. So we saw a clear connection of the longer the off-season is, the more activity wanes. We adjusted for that. I used to drag out the playoffs to allow for discussions in the GM Office and for PT opportunities to be posted to drive more activity by separating rounds by about 1-2 days, and it changed nothing and only made people angry for what amounted to an extra maybe 4 days usually. The longer things take, the more angry people become, the more exhausted with the league they get. So we can't manage to the idea of, oh it'll only be a few extra days, because a few extra days has proven in the past to be a major issue to users as a whole.
At this point, we have 16 teams in the league right. So presumably, 32 GMs in the league then. You look at HO, counting in the GM Office I see 7 of them there. Counting out who I know for sure as euro, I see 4 GMs and 1 HO member who are euro. I may be off by one or two. So out of 39 total people to plan a draft around, we end up at 5 who would need special provisions for their time zone for being overseas. Then we have the West Coast GMs, who if we put things earlier, end up having morning or afternoon drafts that can cut into their day significantly and potentially cut into their working hours significantly to account for also. So we end up with 34 people who are North American based to focus on.
I know that you also want us to think of European users in general, but ultimately we can't make decisions as to what's better for users as a whole that then effects teambuilding and GMs. If we have it where 9 team can make this time but the european userbase is available versus 13 teams can make this time but the european userbase won't be online, we need to make the decision that favors the GMs. This is unfortunately just where things have to be since GMs are so important to this decision.
I'm hoping that I'm clearly explaining this, I'm kind of rambling it out, but effectively it's that while there are a lot of European users, there still isn't a majority, and we can't really make decisions to benefit a minority at the expense of the necessary parts of the league. I don't know the way to solve for this, but no amount of planning changes that we have 28 GMs who are North American based and will prefer times that don't take them from their children or from work or otherwise and a lot of that ends up not being european friendly. This is definitely a good discussion to have, but one that on most occasions there won't be a path out of. Nonetheless, every single time we discuss it, it is always brought up to try and accommodate as many people as possible and we do honestly do our very best to accommodate everyone, it's just legitimately extremely difficult to do.
I agree with most of what you say specifically regarding the EU times. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is. The only compromise is weekends, where EU people have a better chance to stay up later, but even here someone will have to compromise (like yourself, who tends to work them).
In terms of planning ahead, the point about it is that people can then put expectations that they might not be available for other things, or book other plans that might collide with say the draft. Sometimes life will simply get in the way for some GMs, and that is impossible to plan around. The goal shouldn't be to plan the weekend around when the GMs are there, but more so set it to a weekend so that they know when it will be.
My suggestion is simply this for a schedule (durations etc. are just examples):
Regular season week 1-4 week
Playoffs 2.5 weeks
Draft: that weekend
IIHF/WJC immediately following the draft.
And as I've said before, I don't know the timeframe of things on the point, I'm just suggesting putting down a schedule that is more set in stone, and plan things around that.
As for unforeseen circumstances/delays, there are always gonna come up solutions and in that case you simply have to postpone certain things. It sucks but it can happen.
And as for things to do if the delay from playoffs -> draft, it doesn't have to be something super serious. It could be a competition in a small random game, or about anything that nets a small amount of money. Maybe someone wants to run a marbles tournament where the winner gets 50k? Just writing the first thing that comes to mind really.
It could simply be my preference of having as much as possible planned ahead when it comes to stuff like this, or my inexperience within the league to really understand what is the best solution. I think it would help with some of the issues that you guys could face when deciding draft date late, or the recruitment. I've got experience in running leagues in other games/communities, so a lot of my arguments and personal experiences will naturally be drawn from there.
This definitely seems to be a problem with no real solution. I get that and luckily I'm not a GM myself so it doesn't really concern me, but perhaps there is a way where draft times could alternate a bit every now and then? One in every few seasons make it earlier AND on the weekend? If I look back to all the drafts that have happened during my 'career' here there was only one or two that I could actually watch because they happened early, I believe they were J drafts. I didn't watch my own drafts either, I just woke up the next day and found out which team I was on both times.
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