05-20-2023, 07:05 PM_Blitz_ Wrote: I fired off a response to your personal criticism in the LAP LR, and I'm prepared for bygones on that part of this if you are. I will observe that, after thinking about it, I vaguely recall being put in my place about anger and misconceptions I had about the Awards process in the late S50s. I'm fairly sure your response was longer, but I don't recall if it was more graceful.

25-33% off time is about where we're at, with 2 weeks out of 6 total weeks for the scheduled games. I think it's difficult to place a balance on activity time for the season against the time it takes to do things (which is my biggest complaint), against how long people think a career should last. It starts to get into the argument of "How long does a person keep their attention focused on their player?" or "How long should a player last?". We can argue that it should take a little over 3 years to go 20 seasons, but then, how do we get 6 seasons in a year? If that priority has shifted, then we can open up on rolling the season out further. I don't control that, though.

This season was shortened. One of the ideas that the Sim Team talked about very seriously last season, in hunting ways to lighten the sim load and keep our people from burning out, was to do a 4 day sim week in a 5 week season, dropping Friday and Saturday sims since those were the hardest days to find availability. We were told that we had to stick to the laid out 4 week schedule. One of the factors cited was along the lines of "people want more seasons in a given year, so we have to have short seasons". So, we went to a 5 day schedule and only dropped Saturday.

I agree with your point about game inflation. If I could get away with it, I would be inclined to at least try a 6 week schedule, because you're right; it does make the days significantly shorter. If we could get sims to less than 1 hour, it might boost engagement. At the very least, it makes simmers' lives easier since there's usually anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes in prep time before the sim and right around 10 minutes after it to do the file drops and some other stuff. Our current average time for a sim is somewhere around 60 minutes. Spacing that out by half, we could probably get down to around 35 minutes and get prep time to a more consistent 20 minutes. So you go from 100 minutes down to 65, which is great, but there's still a staff availability issue.
We cut down from 48 sims (6 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to 40 sims (5 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to cut down on the number of schedule slots to fill. This job currently pays $14.5M, a weekly PT Pass, and a CW Pass, and I still can't get people to want to sim once a week for 6 weeks, including playoffs. Even with a pay raise to keep up with the inflation, I don't know that our team could staff a 6 week season with 2.5 weeks of playoffs (I got in a bit of trouble for forgetting that playoff predictions were a thing). It might be a lower average amount of time per person per day, but it would skim 10 minutes per sim, maybe. That's not accounting for 2 extra weeks of PTs, more file work, or more GM work. There's also a lot of people who don't know their schedule more than 2 weeks at a time and whose schedules aren't consistent more than 4 weeks at a time. It's been a problem that we're getting better at working with, but still has a lot of room for improvement.
It's something that if I could get a couple of extra people to have on-hand, we would at least have a proposal to try it. I don't see a problem with longer seasons for shorter sims, aside from how it makes us look next to other leagues.

As for IIHF, I don't know how much more can be done to make people who don't care about the tournaments, care about the tournaments. Between S65 and S69, I went big on schedule posting and format testing and a bunch of other things within my wheelhouse. I did a few surveys and a lot of the answers I got were to the effect of "Lol idc", "my team's not good enough to watch", "I'm bored". There are several great people who get involved, a few more who watch the games (Shoutout @slothfacekilla <3), but there's a lot of days where there's no one watching. If SHL dailies are around 25 views, the IIHF is around 10 and I'd be surprised if WJC is more than 5. It sucks, and so many problems would likely be easier to manage (not resolved, but easier) if IIHF had more draw. It's gotten a little bit better with more energetic fed heads that've come in and a better IIHF HO organization with Canadice and now Arty and MikeLiut, but the numbers and interest aren't there. I keep hoping that there's a "yet" on the end of that sentence, I want it desperately. I love the IIHF, it was one of the first places where I felt at home on the site. I think it's a matter of getting people to care about the regular season first and then bringing more focus to IIHF.

I already answered you in Discord, but absolutely no hard feelings from my end. I didn't like the way you made you argument in the post but my answer wasn't the nicest either and obviously I have no problems with you as a person and greatly appreciate all that you have done for this league and are continuing to do!

Now that we have both laid out our thoughts a bit, I think there is actually a lot of common ground. While I was unaware of how dire the situation seems to be for the sim-team right now, quite a few of my suggestions were actually aimed at making things easier for them and absolutely NOT meant as criticism towards them. Simming is a such a hard job especially because of the consistency and time-critical nature with which the tasks have to be completed. As you are saying, this seems to have made it almost impossible to find people who are willing to take on these jobs nowadays.

So we need to make the job easier and less scary. If you are saying that cutting down on the live-sim aspect would be a viable way to do that, then we should absoutely go for it. No more live-sims for the regular season or only for some highlighted primetime games, boom, done. Less time committment per sim for the simmer and more flexibility in scheduling seem like huge gains we could make by that kind of change.
If it were up to me, we didn't need any sims on YouTube in the regular season at all, if that helps the simmers, but that's probably a minority position. The viewing experience doesn't warrant the effort that goes into it in my opinion. And I hope the reason we have those "live" streams isn't just to keep tabs on the Simmers and catch every single mistake they make live, because that would be rather unhealthy too and another possible factor that contributes to the job not being attractive to people.

Also, more rest days for simmers by going down to a 4 day week? Absolutely, yes please. Having more rest days within a season is actually "good downtime" in my book, because it makes people look forward to when there are games again instead of taking them for granted for 4-6 weeks and then having none at all for weeks after that. Three sims on Monday-Thursday and then one at some point on Friday-Sunday that fits the Simmers schedule would sound ideal to me, but if you want weekends to be completely free then by all means, go for it.

If you say that 6-week regular seasons are not feasible right now due to lack of personnel, then that is a good and acceptable reason not do it and much better than those off-handed dismissals by some other people in here who didn't even seem willing to consider the point earnestly. I just have to repeat my core point once more because it seems to be so easy to miss or misunderstand, and it seems to have caused some frustrations both on your end and among the other people in charge. I am NOT demanding a shorter off-season and I don't think I've seen anyone honestly demanding that for years now. What I am looking for is ways to find a better balance between game-action and downtime, because as it stands right now most people are essentially alternating between 4-5 weeks of game action followed by 4-5 weeks of downtime. This isn't a very good rhythm not just in regards to having fun following your player/team, it also seems to contribute to Simmer burnout as well if we force them to crunch so much for the 4-6 week season instead of allowing a slower pace, more breathing room in between and less extensive individual sims.

I'm also wondering if the higher frequency of re-sims in recent seasons has contributed to the problem. Re-sims are a really bad thing in general not just because they inevitably nullify the achievements that some peoples players had in those specific sims, but because they put a huge spotlight on the simmers' mistakes. They highlight the downsides of the job and the possibilities to fuck up, which makes it look like a really daunting position. Updaters and Simmers have always made mistakes, it's part of the jobs, but instead of accepting those mistakes as necessary concessions, it almost feels like putting a knife in the persons back sometimes when we drag them out into the open so prominently by announcing big re-sims over relatively minor problems. Obviously there are some issues that require re-sims, major file mistakes that would lead to additional problems further down the line, mixed up lines or goalies in the playoffs, that kind of stuff. But those same problems in the regular, or a chunk of updates not being implemented in time for the first game of a round? Just suck those things up and move on, it's really not that big of a deal.

In regards to making the IIHF more meaningful, it might sound a bit cynical, but I think the best way to get people more involved is both through more activities and simply through more rewards. People will care if they can get something out of it that also helps their player outside of IIHF, money, TPE, whatever. Also, diverting some late season PTs away from SHL topics and towards the IHFF could help too. But of course we also have to be realistic here, we will probably never reach the same levels of engagement as in the big leagues, largely because of the limited player agency. Players have less control over which team they play for, they can't easily join their friends or transfer away from a GM that is only doing the bare minimum, so many will react to those kinds of situations with passiveness. I don't think that's a bad thing, ultimately thats what the IIHFs identity is all about, the fact that you are "born" into a nation and have to live with that, we should absolutely keep all that. We just have to manage our expectations accordingly.