11-04-2021, 01:06 AMSDCore Wrote:

11-04-2021, 12:58 AMcaltroit_red_flames Wrote: I completely agree that doing this would be a huge undertaking. There'd be a ton of time and effort involved. I also think there are a ton of people who agree that this is an issue for the league who would be willing to put in the time to help fix it.

PBE has a department specifically for testing build balance. Creating a similar department here could be a good first step to getting this to be a reality. The commissioner of PBE Hummus God is always willing to talk about this sort of stuff, I imagine he'd be willing to talk about the sort of responsibilities their balancing department has and the steps they go through each time they implement changes to the archetypes.

Couple quick things, I can address them further if you'd like. First off the switch to FHM had to happen. There was no way to salvage any relationship with STHS. Look at the league that still uses it. The SC/PA/DF meta is real, not saying we don't have a meta issue, but player agency isn't A BIGGER issue in FHM. It's that players want to win, so we find a funneling of builds in one way or another.

Using PBE as an example, they have 100% meta builds even with archetypes. It doesn't eliminate the meta, go look at the top players. TOP - RP are almost always Flamethrower, SP are almost all Junkball. Catchers are all Handyman. 1B/DH are all BMOC. It leads to MORE builds but just the same amount of diversity in builds if not less.

This is coming from experience as I both helped the FHM transition, the PBE archetypes, and was a (mostly failed) head of the balancing committee. Balance/Parity are one of the hardest things to achieve in sim leagues as you will always have someone who is going to break the mold, find the meta/best for their team to win, then you will have teams copy them from regression builds, rookies, or w/e.

I'm not saying changes need or don't need to be made. Obviously there is a *strength* at the top, but also there are other factors that come into play. You do however have teams, like BAP, TEX, and TBB that broke the mold and worked from the ground up. All this to say, maybe? I'm not sure Arch are the salvation as, you will see 3 Danglers, 3 TWF, 3 PF/Screener on every team. You won't gain more agency, you'll actually put more people into a box, imo.

I assume you're saying this for the benefit of other people? Like I said, I was literally in the Save The SHL server where we talked about all of this. I know STHS wasn't salvageable, in fact I was happy it was going away. I tried making NSHL because I hated STHS so much.

PBE definitely has meta for certain positions as you stated, but I personally see a team with magician at C/SS, BMOC at 1B/3B, streak at 2B/CF and freak at LF/RF as incredibly varied as opposed to what we have right now in SHL where every player is just defensive read/checking to 19. Hell, I can go look at the top TPE right now in PBE and see the top TPE players.

1.) SP - Billy Grier - Control Freak
2.) SP - Lucky El Charro - Junkballer
3.) OF - Arno Drachenberg - Streak
4.) 3B - Dubb City - Streak
5.) OF - Nicky Dimes - Streak

Is it perfect? Of course not, but it's definitely better than what we have here right now.

And I think the issue of 3 danglers, 3 two way forward, 3 power forward/ screener on every team would be fixed with rebalancing. That's what the new department would be for. It's really hard like you said, but that's certainly no reason not to try.