While I'm not planning on doing these every season or for every little change that happens around the PTs I think enough is changing to keep you all in the loop.

During the season SHL Head Office and SMJHL Head Office agreed that to merge the PT teams and that is going to take full effect starting from next season. For most of you that changes nothing, but we aim to have both progression paths to be more uniform and with expanded team have better opportunities to cover for each other when life happens. I want to thank @BadWolf for their work in the SMJHL PT team over the seasons and have welcomed rest of the SMJHL PT team over to new combined PT team.

While merge should mostly affect things on our side, there are several planned changes to PTs that I feel like sharing with you (for feedback and such) and will go through them in order they are expected to happen.

Written prompts for Championship Week and All-Star Week are all now flexible on word count, including old Grab Bag. 1 TPE for every 50 words, up to 4 TPE from one prompt. This should let you to pick the topics you feel most like writing. But to not make it huge pain in the ass for the graders, PLEASE, Include at least prompt number (prefereably whole title row), wordcount and TPE gained to each of your answers If most of you can manage to do that then we can keep having nice things. Scale below just to drive the point home.

50-99 words, 1 TPE
100-149 words, 2 TPE
150-199 words, 3 TPE
200+ words, 4 TPE

Top 10 Mock will make its return, last season draft went off rails pretty early and thus top 10 ended up outperforming classic for most people. We will keep tracking how they compare to each other in future seasons and make adjustments to TPE values if needed.

We have felt that Awards Predictions aren't really feeling rewarding most of the time as it is so hard to actually pick the players who win at the beginning of the season (Though shoutout to @Toast who got 6 right on S76 predictions) and while huge changes are not in works we will try out awarding 0.5 TPE for every pick that gets nominated even if they don't actually end up winning the award (I need to still work on some math to see if we will also include top 3 for scoring and other stat based awards). This should increase average TPE gained from Awards Predictions.

I didn't like how most of the TPE on Playoffs Predictions was on getting first round right, so the plan is to change it from direct TPE for each right answer to point system that lets us value later rounds more heavily. For example currently 1st round is 53% of the TPE and under new system it is expected to be about 32%, while finals go from just under 7% to 15%. We are also adding back the prediction for number of games in each series. All these changes increase max TPE available but should bring the average down a bit (hopefully about as much as we increase average from Awards) while increasing deviation from the average.

Also I want to remind people to host their PT images on sites that keep them visible for time of the grading (so don't use discord), any grader reaching out to you about missing image on PT submission is doing so because kindness of their hearths and as more time passes from the change more likely you are to just lose out on that TPE.

Finally to all people that are to gain average from any prediction tasks for jobs they have or have offseason passes, you will need to post to threads to get the TPE.

I think that is all for now, if I forgot something I'll edit in later and pretend it was always there. Feedback on any of this is always welcome. Have a good day/night!