12-04-2021, 03:53 PMnour Wrote: Hey everyone, so we in HO have spent the last 2 days listening to feedback and trying to figure out what the exact problem points are from those who have taken issues with this new regression scale. I think a big part of it has been a lack of clarity in our original post. It's on us to be as clear and as thorough as possible, so we hope this follow up response paints a clearer picture as to why we’ve arrived at this point. Let's get into it:

The Short Notice
The biggest and most valid concern we’ve seen this far has been from users, particularly those from the S53 class and some GMs, has been about how sudden these changes feel and that they feel a sense of whiplash from regression hitting harder and faster than they were prepared for. For starters, we’re empathetic to these feelings and we can understand why you all feel this way. I’d like to share our perspective in Head Office, in hopes that it’ll broaden your field of view to see why it’s shaken out this way. For starters, this was a discussion that has been really in conversation for a very long time now. Having it out sooner would have been ideal, but when we’re dealing with systems that impact the entire site, and stand to make a large impact, these decisions can’t be rushed. The discussion, research, and testing has to take its due course until it reaches a conclusion we’re happy with. That all said, some of you may still say that even if all this is true, why not just push back these changes going into effect until next offseason, as opposed to getting them out immediately with the coming offseason only weeks away. The answer there lies in the problem these regression changes were implemented to address: parity. A lot of users have made note of the fact that these regression changes are killing their enjoyment for the site, which I can understand, but nothing has been more detrimental to the enjoyment of the site than the league’s parity (or lack thereof) over the last almost 15 seasons. 8 of the last 14 cups have been won by the same 2 teams, our  playoff runs have grown stagnant, and we’ve heard concerns from more than enough people that don’t play on the league’s juggernauts regarding just how poorly this has shaped their view of the league. It has killed people’s drives to be competitive, to care about their team’s success, and has instilled a feeling of hopelessness in a large majority of the league. The simple answer is that we couldn’t afford to wait. We’ve expanded twice, we’ve made changes to contract minimums, reworked the update scale, increased the number of teams making the playoffs, broke up the Great Lakes to restructure the divisions, and still the parity problem has been a dark cloud over this site’s ability to be enjoyed. These are changes that have happened over the course of over a year now, and still the problem persists. Delaying this new scale to next season means we’re enduring another 2 seasons of this status quo before changes go into effect, and potentially even longer than that as these changes ripple out. We don’t believe that was sustainable for the health of the league at large.

Why Increase Regression in the First Place?
This is a concern we haven’t seen too much about (I assume because Tommy detailed our goals in the original post), but it’s worth elaborating on again for the sake of clarity. I delved into it in the section regarding the short notice, but continuing from there, the good teams and players on this site are remaining good for far, far too long. Rebuilding teams spend so long rebuilding that by the time they’re closing in on some semblance of a competitive window, they’re still barely scratching the surface of where the league’s top tier teams are at, and at that point their players become fed up, either walking in free agency to these powerhouses, demanding trades, or going completely disenfranchised with the site altogether, and this has been an issue since we moved to FHM, closing in on 2 years ago at this point I believe. While these regression changes aren’t the be all end all fix to these issues (we have other ideas in the work that we intend to poll you all about in the coming offseason poll), encouraging increased player movement and SHORTENING (not completely eliminating) the peak of players should see a massive impact in roster turnover, league wide, by both allowing players to be called up earlier with an increased chance at being viable, or by having users retire and recreate sooner, giving more users a chance at the top.

Why Does Regression Start at Season 9 Now Instead of Season 10?
This is another pretty common concern we’ve heard, and again I think it comes down to us not properly elaborating on why this change has been made. The reality of the situation is that TPE-earning is at an all time high right now. Users on the site are surpassing or closing in on 2k TPE in their draft + 8 or draft + 9 seasons, who are competing against players being called up in their draft + 2 or draft + 3 seasons. S59’s top earner is sitting at 875 TPE, and the majority of call ups are entering the league at around 650-700 TPE. All this taken into account, this means the league’s absolute peak (around 2300 TPE), has the best players on the site at over THREE TIMES the TPE that rookies entering the league have. Should the league’s best players be way ahead of rookies? Absolutely, they’ve worked hard to get where they’re at right now. Should they be 3x ahead, and able to maintain that gap over multiple classes of rookies before regression seriously hits them, seriously harming their ability to be viable? Absolutely not. The problem isn’t the gap, its how large the gap is. These changes are bringing the ceiling FOR EVERYBODY down, to something that we think will make for a much more competitive product for everyone, not just the site’s elite.

If people are earning too fast, why not reduce TPE opportunities (like participation TPE)/Reintroduce a TPE Cap, alongside maintaining regression starting at season 10, but harsher, as opposed to adding a 9th season?
This was a really great suggestion and it was brought up to us when we first pitched these regression changes to the GMs, so we want you to know it is something we liked and seriously considered. Obviously we ultimately didn’t end up going with it, and I’ll elaborate why. For HO, there were 2 main issues that soured us on this idea. Firstly is that it’s our belief that limiting TPE is limiting engagement on the site. Whether its a seasonal TPE Cap that forces max earners to skip tasks towards the end of the season, or the removal of participation TPE, we had concerns that these are changes that actively ask players to engage with the site and it’s systems less, on top of adding back some tedium to updating that we saw as a benefit to remove at the start of the FHM era. The second reason, and the one that I think is the most important, is again that these changes needed to go live as soon as possible. Whether its adding back the TPE Cap, or removing participation TPE, at best these solutions will reduce the max amount of TPE you can earn per season by about 12-18 TPE. Over time, and over the course of a full career, this will obviously add up to a lot of TPE reduced, especially for younger and younger classes, but the heart of the issue is that we don’t have the luxury to wait and see how impactful these changes are over time. We can’t wait 6+ seasons until these changes really start to make a dent and then see what the league’s competitive field looks like. The health of the league is in such a poor place right now and we needed something that would hit harder and faster. The solution we opted for does just that.

Does this change really help anything?
Yes it does! While it maintains the gap between the league’s top 10% and the league’s bottom 10%, it makes that gap much less staggering, as well as adding some much needed turnover at the top. Players can no longer be consistently, absolutely dominant over the course of 6 seasons at their peak, which gives new players a chance at the top, and makes for a playing field that is shifting and moving at a pace that is far more interesting than the one we have in place right now. Players gradually rise to the top, experience a modest, but temporary time in the spotlight (ideally with more than 4 teams being able to viably provide these results for a player), and gradually fall over the course of a career. The graphs in the original post show that we’re not completely knee capping players, even during the fall experienced through regression, you’re still able to maintain a competent and serviceable player well into regression, we’re just stopping people from being the absolute best for a period that is frankly far too long.

I’m upset about my chances at hitting 2k TPE being taken from me
We completely understand that 2k TPE is a milestone that everybody wants to hit, it's something we all dream of when we join the site. It’s fun to be in such a prestigious club, and get the badge, and hit a milestone so few have hit before, and while we’re empathetic to players' desires to hit that mark, I think we also need a bit of a reality check regarding just how prestigious 2k TPE really is. Through our research and discussion, we found multiple instances of players on this site who went inactive for months at a time, and managed to claw back to either hit 2k TPE, or within 100 TPE or less away from it. Buffalo right as you’re reading this post is fielding 8 players who are at or just outside of 2k TPE. We don’t say all this to be dismissive of 2k as a milestone, it’s extremely important to us too, but the reality is that while 2k TPE is still viewed as being a prestigious milestone, in the league’s current state, it simply isn’t. 2k is a milestone that should be reserved for the cream of the crop from every class (hitting 2k is still very possible under this new system for max earners by the way), it shouldn’t be something you can claw your way back to after not being here for an extended period of time. We can’t continue to call it a prestigious point in someone’s site career, while also continuing to allow it to exist in it’s current state. These changes aren’t to kill 2k’s attainability, it’s simply to bring it back in line with the difficulty it's been associated with. And if you don’t care about the badge or the career milestone and just want to be at the top of the league? You have even less reason to be concerned, as the ceiling for the entire league is coming down. You’re not being denied a chance at the top, we’re just preventing those who DO hit the top to be there at such a large gap from everyone else, and for as long as they have been over the last while.



We hope this addresses some of the major talking points we’ve been seeing over the last little while, and lets you all in a bit on where we’re coming from. Your feedback and criticism is genuinely very important to us and we want you to feel heard and have your questions answered. We’re just doing what we can for the health of the league. I’m at work right now but should this follow up provide more questions, we’ll do our best as a group to get back to you all when we can.

On behalf of the SHL Head Office
nour

Hey nour, I appreciate you looking to give a comprehensive response. I know that you guys have acted in good faith with respect to having the league's interest at heart, but I also think that the conversations in HO initially and in the last few days have been insulated from the userbase's (both GMs and players) perspectives. I'm going to break down each of these topics and responses you set up, including my own questions and ideas.

Re: The Short Notice (the first part, not the talk about parity)
You guys acknowledge the relative urgency in making changes. There are issues facing the league and you guys have plans to fix that, to implement them any time later than immediately would be flawed of course. This ignores a few components of this category of complaints, and touches on other complaints as well. There's a general frustration with the ability for HO to actually manage the timing of their announcements, the proximity of the announcement to the end of the season isn't ideal, and the logic you use for immediate implementation is rooted in a boogeyman argument that you've set up in a way to be resolved by these changes.

The current and recent HO's have left a sour taste in the mouths of many users after the last few waves of punishments, specifically in the last few and the timing involved in some of these. The punishments this year related to Toronto, Winnipeg, and Montreal all came down the pipeline late, the latter two having additional ramifications in the draft that will have perpetual ripple effects. I believe HO has acknowledged that these delays were an issue, but if they were or weren't that complaint was definitely raised. HO's tendency to leave a decision until an inopportune moment to announce it has been a problem recently, which plays into this other idea that the decision to change the scale has been in progress for a while and it's finally revealed and immediately put into effect just weeks before the offseason. This timing hurts players in S53/S54 who have had long term plans and are losing massive amounts of TPE as well as GMs of teams who have been planning out seasons in advance and are now suddenly seeing a season of that time vanish - for better or worse. 

Re: Why Increase Regression in the First Place?
I overall agree with this one, in that the update scale change was going to have this effect. Shortening the length of the plateau is reasonable, and while it hurts to be a team missing out on some of our expected plateau (S51-S54), the math checks out - something I referenced early after the release on HTT and something that most GMs agree on (because it seems like that's what the conversation with GMs was about, and nothing really was discussed about implementations while also having backlash about moving it to 9 season regression). Overall, the math and scale makes sense, and I think that does help deal with an issue that people might be playing a single player too long.

Re: Why Does Regression Start at Season 9 Now Instead of Season 10? and If people are earning too fast, why not reduce TPE opportunities (like participation TPE)/Reintroduce a TPE Cap, alongside maintaining regression starting at season 10, but harsher, as opposed to adding a 9th season?
Despite complaints about unfair effects of implementation, you look to focus on the overall TPE inflation and the gap between young and old players. This is frustrating because it ignores the complaints that the classes of S53 and S54 have, ignores alternative solutions that have been implemented before to positive results, and ignores alternatives that could have been used. As I detailed HERE, and HERE (to an impressively quiet response) these changes affect S53 and S54 in a different way. Each class before and after these two classes will have two seasons at the peak TPE possible in the league, but each of these two classes only have one season. This function of moving the regression forward a season is fundamentally unfair and alienating to everyone in those classes. This is more difficult to swallow because we've seen other ideas for dealing with the gap between good and bad players be suggested and some of them even be noted by you in your post as successfully being utilized. I understand the logic behind not wanting to limit TPE earning because that might hurt the levels of engagement if people start to check out by then end of the season when they can't earn (I also think this is mitigated if every team has closer to 50% win rates and can actually engage with their team's performance, but I understand that's a risk you might not be able to take). The idea of allowing for a peak season and frontloading regression - I've suggested that 18-20%, something that you're actively planning to do to S53 - allows for an identical scale to the one you want to implement while also allowing for a single peak season in the 10th. Alternatively, we've seen the positive effect and successful implementation of an update scale change, something that we know can be used to bring rookies closer to the players at the top of the league. Both of those are more reasonable options than deleting a season from the timeline of the league. TPE inflation is a failure on HO and PT teams to manage the earning available per season, but as I said before I can understand why you're not interested in pursuing these pathways. It overall is a poor argument for moving the regression calendar earlier though, when better scheduling and update scale changes could have a similar effect.

Re: I’m upset about my chances at hitting 2k TPE being taken from me.
I think this is a fair argument, but I understand both sides. To have the league celebrate an individual milestone like that to the point where there's an all time leaderboard that represents your commitment to a player, team, and league, makes it an incredibly attractive goal. TPE inflation has made this easier, and max numbers have been climbing, but when a person who has no concept of TPE inflation joins the league and sets their sights on that, earns for 7 seasons or so at a pace that will let them hit that mark, and then get told that they won't be able to make it there because of a decision in the context of all the other flaws facing it, they're more than validated in being pissed. In your response to them you even allude to the idea that you left it there because you recognize it's value, yet instead of managing a TPE schedule or implementation other changes already mentioned it appears to many that a crude and lazy solution was chosen.

Re: Does this change really help anything? 
Finally, my biggest issue with this is that it begins to set up the idea that this will help parity. Parity has grown into this buzzword used by different people to mean different things, but the general premise of this is that teams that are good have a stranglehold on the league right now, which you reference. This change to the regression scale does two things, the implementation of the new numerical scale demands a traditional season of heavy regression and makes older players worse and the transition from 10 season regression to 9 season regression removes a season from the timeline of players and GMs (just not for contracts). By nature of the old scale, the teams that have been successful for a while generally have had older players, the youngest might be Buffalo who has 4 S53 players and 4 S50-52 plateau players about to be affected by this, Chicago has 10, Hamilton also has 8, Chicago has 9, Batlimore (the newcomer who has rebuilt during the last few seasons) has 7, and Tampa (the fringe threat) has 6. Kneecapping these old players while also advancing the TPE timeline of the leauge by a season is setting HO up to call this a successful change when you define this issue just on cup winners and division winners over the last few seasons and is only treating the symptoms of parity while doing nothing to actually address the core cause of parity - the effects of competitive advantages that teams have are notably increased in the FHM era. Teams who are good at tactics, good at testing, good at acquiring TPE, or good at drawing and retaining talent are more powerful than they once were and are more powerful when compared to dominant teams in the NHL or other real sports. The top teams in the SHL are dominant to a point where the odds of winning are incredibly slim sometimes, and the lack of randomness leads to incredibly deterministic results where the teams with these ever present or current advantages win more than anyone feels like they should be able to. This change doesn't affect that, it only scrambles the existing situation while ignoring the likelihood that the league will quickly re-stratify to this once again. Pressing fast forward on the league won't change anything long term.


Nour, the math makes sense, I'm not denying that. I can see where the increased turnover has it's benefits both in game and in the community. To push crude changes that didn't consider the effect that it had on the career paths and timelines while continuing to insist that this will help parity, is offensive to the point where people who would recreate might not and are causing people deeply committed to the league to leave it behind either for other leagues or other hobbies. The unfortunate reality is that the league might not be able to move from the 10 season regression formula without losing a substantial part of the userbase affected by this move. There are solutions that do help career length and turnover, and many of us are for them, I just want to see it done with fairness in mind, not parity misconstrued as such.