05-19-2023, 07:23 PM_Blitz_ Wrote:


But yeah, if you're sitting around in the off-season and you think that those 2 weeks are too long, I encourage you to join an off-season committee, the events team, one of the tournaments in ANY capacity. Join your team's war room as a scout ahead of either or both of the drafts. Join the history department. Be a grader, be an updater. You'll find out that the off-season flies by rather quickly.

I've held a bunch of those jobs for 20+ seasons up until a few months ago, so I hope I'm allowed to speak, oh almighty one?

I think this view is a bit short-sighted. This is not about the off-season being too long, it's about the ratio between season and off-season being off. This season was 4 weeks of regular season, 2 weeks of playoffs and 2-3 weeks of off-season. So we roughly have 9 week seasons + pre-season, which kinda is in limbo and could be counted either as part of the season or off-season depending on your perspective.

- Just by pure numbers, most peoples seasons will end in the first or second round of the playoffs, which is at some point in week 5. This is pretty much exactly at the 50% mark, so even teams that make it into the playoffs and maybe even win a round there, they are only "active" for about 50% of the total season.
- For teams that don't make the playoffs it's even less, they only play for about 40-45% of the season. Yes they are very likely rebuilding, don't have a lot of people on the team and don't care about more games for now because they will lose anyway, but that is a really low number.
- For the teams that make the finals, that number is roughly 66% which isn't super high either, but acceptable.

I actually think that 66% mark is roughly the "activity time" that we should be aiming for not for the last two teams in the playoffs, but the general majority. Most people should have game action for about two thirds of their time here, with the top teams in the playoffs having a bit more, and then about 25-33% of the season as downtime for everyone to recharge. Yes, for most people in this league the community aspect is more important than the fake hockey aspect these days, and that's fine. But we have slowly become a sim league where there is surprisingly little sim leaguing and game action going on for most of the time.

I think there are two relatively easy solutions for this, that don't cut down on peoples well deserved relaxing time. Number one: Simply stretch out the regular season a bit longer. Make it six weeks intead of four. Have a bit fewer games per sim day and adjust the weekly-TPE payouts accordingly to make sure we don't run into any inflation problems. Obviously this comes with some possible downsides, like rebuilds taking longer than they already do, but also additional positives. One of them, for me, is actually about inflation as well.

People used to talk so much about TPE-inflation, but nobody really talks about game-inflation. We used to have 50 game seasons with 6-8 week turnarounds, now we have 4 week seasons and 66 games. The result is that nowadays game days come at you in bulk, with regular three or four game sims, whereas in the past you usually had only one or two games per sim day to look forward to. This inflation has de-valued the individual games, we just follow our players overall progress through the various stat tools but barely bother with the games themselves anymore. Cutting down on the speed with which we rush through the season might help us appreciate things a bit more again. Also, less work for the simmers per game day.

The second suggestion is something that others have already made in here and which I have conveniently left out of all my calculations so far: Increase the importance of IIHF, so that it feels like an actual part of this leagues core game action and not just some addendum that just... happens. I think one way to make this happen is to include IIHF more into the rewards structure of the league. Have more money or TPE-payouts connected to it, have more PTs that are specifically about IIHF, like running our regular set of weekly tasks (written, predictions, primetime) for the two weeks of IIHF as well, stuff like that.