09-12-2023, 05:02 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: So, the thing is - while parity and grading speed are certainly something we can look at, the dev team building the portal does not prevent those things. I don't think making our team of developers (who are contributing volunteer hours of skills that they get paid to use in real life) grade media instead is the most efficient use of their time - there are plenty of other people who can do that job if we need them to. That's not to say that we can't look at the speed of grading, or talk to the media team about hiring more graders, but it's not as if things are getting graded slowly because the dev team is working on the portal instead.

There is some minor overlap between the dev team and head office (Teddy is definitely very active in both of those things, I very (very very) slightly dabble in dev stuff like style updates), but on the whole, these are two different teams with completely different responsibilities and skill sets. Developing a portal is not detracting from those people doing something else. If people want to do dev stuff, that doesn't mean we can just shuffle them around and give them jobs they aren't interested in doing because we think that thing is "more important" - at the end of the day, this is all volunteer work and people are going to want to do the stuff they are good at and are passionate about. By that same token, if we can attract new users by making it easier for them to get started, we will gain new users with new skill sets, many of whom might be able to help out with other site jobs, like grading media. Those issues are important, and we can address them, but it isn't a "this or that" situation. It's two completely different teams, doing two completely different sets of jobs. We didn't decide to build a portal instead of grading media, we didn't allocate resources to the portal that could have gone to media grading instead.

On the parity front, we are simply never going to be able to do anything to completely fix teams actively tanking. Teams in real life cannot tank the way teams here can, because they have financial obligations to sell tickets and put butts in seats, and other concerns that a sim league team simply will never have. We did switch to FHM8, which, while admittedly garbage visually, has resulted in six unique cup winners in the seven seasons since we switched. There will never be a real life equivalent to how aggressively teams tank here, but that's just the nature of the beast. Comparing the SHL to the NHL is always going to be a flawed comparison because while we are all here because we like real hockey, this will never be equivalent to a real life league. We are a league where probably 90% of people want to be Ovechkins and McDavids, that is never going to accurately emulate a league where the Tanner Glasses of the world are happy just to crack a roster. I would argue that we have seen a lot of upsets recently:

Atlanta won the cup as the regular season champs in S66, but their opponent was a seventh place Seattle team, who upset three higher seeded teams to get there. Seattle won the cup as the fifth place regular season team in S67, and on the other side of the bracket, Manhattan fought their way to a final from seventh place in the regular season, and on their way, they beat a third place Atlanta team, and then beat Montreal in the conference final (who were there after being thirteenth in the regular season and beating the second place team). In S68 we saw the same matchup, which again saw Manhattan battling their way to a final after finishing thoroughly middle-of-the-standings during the regular season. In S69, a fifth place Philly team beat a first place Winnipeg team in five games. In S70, a sixth place New England team beat a first place Winnipeg team. Last season, a fifth place Buffalo team beat a first place Winnipeg team in six games. When Winnipeg finally got it done this season, it was from second place, beating the first place team to do it. It's been less than ten seasons since we switched, but in my opinion, we have seen a LOT more in the way of this elusive parity than we saw in the past. But I don't think we're ever going to get to a place where a team that is actively tanking, a team with an average of less than 1k TPE, is going to have some Cinderella run to a cup, and I also think that is okay. The focus (in my opinion) has always been to make things more competitive for the middle of the field, where that randomness can happen, not to put things in a place where a team can put the equivalent of a juniors roster out there and luck into massive success. We want a little randomness, we don't want building a good team to be completely pointless.

Also, there is never going to be a world where we forcibly randomize rosters by making top teams offer their players up as tributes to teams that are tanking (even if we did have fourth lines, which we don't).

''Plenty of can do that job if we need them to''. Are you for real? Because I've heard many excuses about media, GFX and PT grading that there just isn't people who wants to do it. It was like last season, but does everything have changed that much? And the key is that there are users who wants to do it, but they don't give them a chance. I am here from S26, as you understood, and I've been applied for updates, upgraders and other roles multiple times. Never game me an opportunity. Of course, dev team won't grade everything, but these were just two examples. There's plenty much of other stuff to improve and I don't know if portal was the primary one. I just mentioned two examples, because someone asked me to.

Six champions in past seven seasons isn't anything special either if we talk about parity, because ''Aurora'' was in four of the last Finals. It's like saying that NBA had three different champions in five seasons (2015-2019) without mentioning that all of those Finals had Golden State ''Warriors'' playing and four of them had Cleveland ''Cavaliers'' playing. There is multiple options to do to improve parity. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if anyone is doing anything to make that happen. There is a lot of stuff to improve in this league. The key is - which one of them they decide to improve.

And no disrespect to @downer who made a portal. There isn't any major bugs and yes - it's easier to update. But we've seen a couple people in this thread too who says that they enjoyed the process. This a big community with a lot of users and they all have different opinions. For example, I think that VHL had an automatic updates back in the SHL S20's already and I joined them both. VHL was too easy and boring, so I came here where you actually need to put in some effort with updating. And still after tens of replies I haven't heard why we don't have at TPE earns descriptions link to exact place where we received those TPE. However, good job programming wise. I respect your work, but I personally do not enjoy it yet. Hopefully, it will change and we will have that much users that we will be able to expand the league in couple of seasons.