I just want to comment on a few items as someone who has been here through a lot:

1. I don't think the sim situation did the league in as much as it is the straw that broke the camels back. Enough of a situation that I think it revived just how in the dark the SHL has been, and how much they have been floating on the status quo. I do want to note to people saying everything was for naught because they had a pass first build:

I have only had pass first builds. My hierachy in fact for my two forwards has been PA/SK/SC, so scoring has been my weakest att. I put up 70 points with my first player, and Bent was a near PPG forward for a while despite being pass first and only being 1k TPE in a time of 2k TPE first liners. Stop relying on test sims, STHS is a garbage random number generator and has always been an awful sim engine with huge flaws. It took us 50 seasons to find the biggest flaw

2. The largest issue with this site has been the leagues inability to stop the formation of cliques and fragmentation. Back when the SHL was at peak activity all discussion happened on the boards. From fights, to NHL talk, to mock drafts, etc. It was damn fun, I remember it fondly, and having such a large community all commenting in one place made for some hilarious afternoons/evenings of discussion. Everything moved almost at the pace of a Discord but with 50-60 active people viewing the thread

Chatzy came along a little bit later, but it couldn't really kill of activity. After all Chatzy was a chat room that only allowed 10 people at a time and wasn't permanent. Much discussion still revolved around the league, locker rooms still existed.

The league obviously couldn't do anything about Discord. People had tried Slack, Skype, I was even a part of some MSN messenger chats back a long time ago, but nothing really stuck like Discord. There isn't much you CAN do either as it is killing a lot of forum based places on the internet. Discord was easy, unlimited channels, members, and most of all they were permanent so they were still there when you came back. You didn't need a link, all your channels were saved. What happened was a harsh fragmentation of the member base. Despite this forum being as big as it has ever been, Discord allowed for cliques and fragments to be formed. Honestly, as I was playing as Bent and involved in management in Texas, there were times when I didn't know many users on the forums. Dan would come to me with a trade idea and I did not know who this person was. This wasn't ignorance as much as it was that I had just never shared a Discord with this person. You can fragment this league hard this way, and while the league has a discord, it just... Isn't fun... A vast majority of members don't talk in it, and everyone flocks to their own favourite discord with their own SHL friends.

And honestly this has broken up some of the fun debates and interest there was in the forum. You don't come onto the forum anymore to see an interesting thread in general discussion. You come onto to forum to do a job, or update your player, and then you leave and head back to Discord. I remember the debates and arguments, and the jokes that we had between members that I had never played on a team with. I never once played with Maxy or Dion or Merica but I knew these guys and I had fun with them on the forum. For some people, like myself, there just wasn't a need to come to the forum at all anymore... You could just go to Discord and talk to your friends and now all of a sudden you are no longer updating a player. And with the sim issues and people feeling in the dark, this is going to happen more and more. People are going to realize they don't need to come to SHL to update their player because they are disenfranchised... And really that was the only reason to come here anymore. They can just go on discord instead and hang out with the friends they met already

This is pretty stream of consciousness and rambly, but my point is basically the league fragmented into hundreds of different discord channels and the activity and comradery went with it. The forum is dead, and now there is no reason to come here unless you want to build a player. I've done a lot of that already and I'm kind of tired... And there is no activity to keep drawing me. I think that's why we see a lot of veteran members leave.

I don't know what the SHL has in store for the future, but I think the member base is big enough they will be okay. It just isn't the same, discussion just isn't there, and it feels like nothing happens. The status quo has been followed. And there is nothing wrong with that. It works. I just don't personally find it fun anymore