12-05-2018, 08:59 AMArGarBarGar Wrote: I am not sure I agree with the concept of the league being more casual. Twitter is the only thing that has really been added in terms of money, podcasts have gotten slightly stricter, the update scale has increased the max required TPE, regression has been made more difficult, etc.

The biggest addition since I have joined to make things more casual is the affiliation, which still requires a person doing work somewhere to utilize.

Maybe we are looking at different timeframes/scopes here. In my experience some things have definitely gotten much easier/casual and PTs are the prime example imho, it just didn't happen super recently but a while ago and in multiple steps. Way back when (I think before you joined), PTs uses to be around 500 words each, this then got lowered to around 300 words, which is what it was still around in the late S20s. Then the word requirements kept dropping, first to 200 words and then to 150 in the mid S30s. And now we implemented the affiliation system quite recently, so not everyone has to do the 150 words anymore. That is a huge drop in effort that people have to put into their players and something that helps casuals a lot because PTs aren't just for the try-hards anymore, as they used to be.

I'm not a hundred percent sure about the money but afaik, media payouts have fluctuated greatly over the course of the SHLs existence. They used to be super low at the beginning, then got raised multiple times until they were extremely high, then got dialed back a bit again and I think that's where they have been for a long time now. Twitter was one addition that you mentioned and Podcasts actually are another one, they simply didn't used to be a thing a few years ago, or at least doing them wasn't an option yet for most people. And I'd argue that in the beginning their payout was quite excessive, so I think it made sense that it has been lowered since. Sure, if you want +5 trainings every week plus equipment then you still have to put in some work, but that is pretty much the only thing that separates the super-actives from the casuals at this point, so I don't see it as a problem.

There is one thing though that I just realized when looking through this, and which I think is quite remarkable. There used to be so many changes over the first 25 or so seasons of the SHL, changes to the monetary system, the PT-system, update scales, regression scales, expansions etc... But ever since the last big update scale/regression change in the late S20s, things have been virtually the same. It has been almost 20 seasons of pretty much no major systemic changes and it is just crazy for someone like myself to look back how much turmoil and how many changes they were before that compared to after. And I'm not quite sure what to make of that. If you want to see it positively then it could be because we have hit a sweet spot, a point where things generally work quite well and where no drastic changes ares needed. We put a stop to TPE-inflation, have found good reliable recruitment venues and have stable simming, so good job! Or, if you want to see it more negatively, then you could say that we as a league have really failed to evolve, develop and adapt to changing circumstances. Maybe we've gotten lazy or we are too conservative and afraid of change, we have enough sims and shitstorms to keep us busy, but there isn't anything that resembles a vision for the future. As I said, I don't know which interpretation is the right one, but it's quite an interesting question imho that does deserve some further evaluation.