08-18-2022, 06:39 PM_Blitz_ Wrote: I think the best understanding of awards that I've had was a Trips article that included notes from members of the committee on their thought process. It's been some time since I've seen something like that.

Speaking as the J Awards head (though I'm sadly on my way out since I'm GMing), Awards are tough, voting is tough, and the rationale behind each committee member's vote is different. In my time on the J committee, I've made it a policy *not* to share ballot results, because I don't think it would do anything but create unneeded controversy and take away from celebrating the award winners. I'm not opposed to what you're referencing either, but a few things would absolutely need to change in order to make this happen.

First, the awards committee, while an awesome job to have, is not a lucrative job. The pay for a season of awards work is about the same as 1-2 media pieces a dedicated user could write up in a few hours. That's not to say the committee doesn't work hard on their decisions, but that many committee members are spending their SHL time working on other jobs or media to make sure they earn enough to keep up with training, coaching, and their trading card addictions. Committing to more extensive writeups to back their award ballot decisions would take a lot more time, and would *need* to be backed by additional pay to justify the expected work. It would also likely delay getting results out to the rest of the site. While the decision process begins at the end of the regular season, we also each have players invested in the season, streams to watch, and many of us have war rooms to participate in, which get much busier during the playoffs, when we're also hard at work discussing awards and filling out ballots. If the expectation from the committee is to write some in-depth analysis, it would either need to delay the awards presentation by another week or two (something nobody wants), or it would need to be a separate task to be done during the early stages of the following season (again, adding an extensive amount of expected work).

I love this kind of analysis, and maybe this *is* the direction we want to go, but if it is, please be patient with your awards committees. And also pay them more.