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qWest · 04-02-2021, 04:53 PM

Hello SHL world!

I don’t expect many of you all to know me yet if you aren’t in the ISFL, but my name is qWest (pronounced like the word 'quest')! Right around the time I was celebrating one full IRL year since joining the ISFL and learning all about sim leagues in general I decided to take the dive in joining one of the ISFL’s affiliate leagues and, with the teams that I’m involved with there bringing in a number of SHL players and with a lot of my ISFL friends joining the SHL recently I thought I’d give this league a try over the PBE. Hockey isn’t a sport I’ve ever really been around or followed, but at least I now have a pretty good familiarity with the sim league experience in general, so I was excited with the potential new experience here. I wanted to go ahead and take the opportunity with double media to write my first piece as a recap of my first experiences here over the season and as a look towards the future with the draft rapidly approaching. So here we go:

First Impressions

One of the first things that I’m interested in when it comes to sim leagues and really sports in general is branding. As Deion Sanders would say: “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good.” Sports iconography has been a huge part of popular fashion in my lifetime and I think it matters a lot to make a sim league team feel legit and cool to play for. When I was looking into the PBE and the SHL ahead of creating I was really impressed with the quality of the logos and jersey renders in the SHL compared to either the ISFL or PBE. Overall (Sand Lions aside), the people here do a killer job with branding and that makes for a great first impression. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised though, since I’ve seen the graphics work that is done in the SHL passed around before, especially from guys like catroit_red_flames who always kills it with his work.

Jumping into creating a player was a throwback to a year ago when I first joined the then NSFL. Opening up the forums, making a new account, trying to adjust to how the forums are laid out and then opening up and seeing the long Rookie Tutorial page and all of the other big walls of text that are presented to you in that first few minutes is a super overwhelming experience. Especially seeing the 1 to 20 point scale compared to the 1-99/100 of all other sports games I’ve seen in the past threw me off a lot right at the start. Combine that with seeing like 40 stats for each player and my utter lack of knowledge about hockey and I went running and crying to my ISFL/SHL friends. They quickly pointed me straight to something I’d missed in my few minutes on the site, the “Create A Player” button in the top banner. Opening up that was a revelation. This form, coupled with the “Role” guides do an amazing job of making the creation process for the league a million times easier. After opening up this form it really smoothed out the rest of the experience and I was set up with my player page and my update page in a few minutes. If I were to make any recommendations to this “Create A Player” form, it would be making the player roles a little more idiot proof. As a hockey noob I found myself just trusting the role that I selected to help me invest my TPE properly into the different highlighted attributes, but I later found that the TPE that I spent to get my Faceoffs attribute up to 12 points was probably much better invested elsewhere for a LW. Maybe specializing and specifying roles to specific positions would help fix this. However, thankfully, there seems to be an excellent policy of allowing rookies to redistribute a significant amount of TPE at the end of their first season which is great to see!

Next Steps

One thing I find super important for player engagement and retention early on as a former Developmental GM in the ISFL is giving players a good number of ways to start getting involved and doing tasks early on. Not only is it great to give players an opportunity to earn a significant amount of TPE at the beginning so that they can start contributing and competing, but it also gets people used to the things that they’ll be doing throughout their player’s career and just gives them something to do as they wait for the draft. The SHL does a pretty good job of this!

The rookie tasks in general are pretty solid, I especially like that they specifically involve making players get involved with making graphics, as it feels like the graphics for this league are one of its strongest assets. I almost wish that this task was a bit more rewarding to higher quality graphic submissions though, but I understand not wanting to put pressure on rookies to make up a signature on par with the quality of some of the more seasoned PS users on the site. I found myself taking a 10 minute break from making the signature I use regularly now to make a super quick slapped-together graphic for the task as I wanted to get the signature that I was spending a lot more time on to be graded instead. I do think it was cool to do these tasks for money instead of straight TPE. The combination of these tasks and a rookie’s contract is great to give them a head start on being able to pay for training and even coaching early on. The other task that I really liked here was the task to watch a game and report on it. It’s always good to point players towards watching and getting into the games, especially when it’s the hype playoffs matches going on.

SMJHL Draft

Before getting into everything leading up to tomorrow's draft, I also want to talk about my Js draft, especially since I’ve probably invested most of my time in the ISFL into working as a DSFL GM and war room member. I think that being in leadership for a minor league team is one of the most important jobs in any sim league. The first few days and weeks in a new user’s time in the league are some of the most important for getting that player interested and invested and, thus keeping them in the league long term. I’ve found it extremely important to build a strong culture in those minors locker rooms, and a big part of doing that is by doing diligent scouting. I would think that, especially in a league in which players may spend quite a few seasons down in the J’s before getting called up, it would be really important and highly prioritized to reach out and try to get to know all of the prospects for the draft, even more so with the added pressure of the draft being done live in one night. All this to say that I was quite surprised to only hear from 3 out of the 12 SMJHL teams leading up to draft day. I created not too long before the draft took place, yes, but I figured there was still enough time to get on GMs radars to at least talk to. In the end, after speaking to two additional team representatives during the draft this total went up to 5 teams out of 12, but it’s still crazy to me to think that more than half of teams didn’t reach out to me at all. I’d heard before when I was scouting SHL players coming over to the ISFL or just when talking to them in general that there was a tradition of using “Interested Prospects” threads in order to get some of the basic questions out of the way and I figured that teams would use that to their advantage to get as much good information as possible on potential prospects. I found, instead, when I went to go do the class wide IP task that several of the questions were goofball queries, with most of the questions in this thread seeming generally irrelevant and unhelpful to helping teams see and grade prospects. Furthermore, I’m not sure if GMs even used or checked in on the IP thread, as no GM mentioned anything from my answers and none of them seemingly looked to reach out to follow up on the people that did respond. I say that second part because, looking back on the 5 people that I did end up talking to before or during the draft, every single one of those people knew me or knew of me from my time in the ISFL.

Anyways, I did have a few nice conversations from out of the people that reached out to talk and at that point I was specific and up front about having jumped into the SHL a bit on a trial period. I said to them, as I have to SHL GMs since, that the SHL is a secondary league for me and that my priority remains in the ISFL. I said that I’d be fine to claim my affiliate PTs and do the prediction type PTs and that I’d probably be okay on training, but that coaching was unlikely. With this in consideration and with consideration to the fact that I jumped in relatively late to the process, I wasn’t surprised to see that I was dropping out of the first couple rounds at least.

Before I get into the draft outcome, I want to talk a bit about the draft experience in general. I’m sure people that have dipped their toes into both leagues or just heard about it in general, but the ISFL and the SHL have much different draft processes when it comes to both how things are run behind the scenes and, in turn, how that results in the product and presentation that we all see. When I stuck to my ISFL bubble I usually only heard that people generally much preferred the pre-draft style to SHL’s live draft format, but I’ve heard a few opinions more recently, such as Anaheim GM turned London CB Ace, that they much prefer the live draft here. After going through the process once, I’d have to say for myself that I’d have to prefer the process in the ISFL by a wide margin. There are a few reasons for this. The first reason would have to be the timing of everything. When watching drafts IRL (my only real experience for this is the NFL Draft), though the process plays out over the span of three separate days, they do a good job of making that process into a television event with experts and production teams that fill just about every spare moment (sans commercials) with discussion and analysis. When your team drafts someone in the 3rd round that you’ve never heard of, people are there to tell you a hundred different things about that player and what they think of the pick. This goes a long way to make a three day process generally enjoyable to watch when you tune in. For the SMJHL Entry Draft, though I appreciate what the two presenters did bring to the table and talked about during the lengthy three hour process, there was a lot of dead air and not much to say outside of the top few prospects. Comparatively, the drafts in my time at the ISFL feature a number of GMs on the broadcast that are able to announce their own picks. Because the whole draft has already been completed behind the scenes, they can be there to talk about why they made their pick and what they think of the prospects in general. GMs that aren’t on the broadcast typically send in their comments and thoughts on their picks to others that are on the broadcast so they can still be spoken for. It makes for an amazing experience to hear your next GM call out your name and get excited to have you join the team. Of course, seeing the GMs being able to talk about all of the prospects would probably require them to scout all of the prospects… But yeah, overall doing the draft ahead of time gives the events team a lot more tools to make the draft stream and experience incredible, with every draftee getting a personal draft card with a render and, for the ISFL draft, a pretty decent jersey swap done too. And there’s a lot to be said for being able to complete the stream in a third of the time. Additionally, in my time as a GM, I couldn’t imagine being able to find and set up a timeframe with all of the other GMs to fit in this three hour event. The other GMs that I worked with were participating in the process from four different continents and probably like 10 different time zones. With that being the case, there wasn’t a chance that we’d be able to find a three to four hour window for people to be live and ready for without leaving a significant number to stay up til ungodly hours of the night or just get stuck sitting out entirely and that would suck immensely.

Okay, that’s not to say that I don’t see any interest or merit in the live draft. Stepping into a GMs shoes (especially one in like EST or some basic ass time zone) I think there would be something extremely fun to sitting down and experiencing the excitement and challenge of doing everything all in one go. It’s always annoying to sit down and watch a team take a few hours before the next pick comes in and I think it’d be super enjoyable to get through the whole process with the clock ticking on each team. Additionally, I think it’s really helpful for GMs to be able to reach out and talk to prospects mid-draft and ask them targeted questions based on how you’re adapting to the draft. One GM was able to reach out to me after finding a number of forwards earlier on falling to them whether or not I’d be willing to move to defense for them. In the ISFL there’s sometimes a: “well we like the guy, but we drafted another player at their position to fill our hole, but I guess we can hope he switches for us?” There’s also been plenty of issues and punishments related to leaks, including a player this last draft publicly posting the entire results of the first round and subsequently getting banned. Obviously, though there may be “leaks” and rumors flying about what prospects teams want and will look to draft, that all goes up in the air when the clock starts. Overall, I’m excited to participate in both leagues and get to experience both types of draft!

Back to the results of the draft! Again, I wasn’t surprised at all to see my player drop out of the first couple rounds. Though the S59 class wasn’t as gargantuan as my 260+ player ISFL class, it wasn’t small. With a good 60 or so prospects, I figured I was on the lower end of the top half there. I thought there would even be a possibility that a team that knew me well would take a chance on me earlier than I might expect. And so I was a lot more surprised to see round three pass on by and then eventually the whole of the fourth round went right on by with it and I still hadn’t been picked. At the end of the day I went at the top of the 5th round at 49th overall to the Colorado Raptors. Birdman was one of the few to reach out to me before the draft and we’d had a good chat so I certainly wasn’t blindsighted by the move at that point, but I was surprised for certain to be on the board that late in the draft. Though I’ve definitely amped up my activity a bit higher than I cautioned SMJHL GMs I may be at, I don’t think I’ve exceeded my own expectations by that much. Looking at the Player Analyze 2.0, it appears that my 292 TPE as of the last update is good for 21st in the class. I hold that position tied with two other players and one TPE behind me at 291 TPE is my teammate Fedor Sotakov, a player drafted 47 spots ahead of myself at 2nd overall. Out of the 12 players drafted in the round before I was drafted, the 4th round, none are currently ahead of me in TPE. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and TPE isn’t everything, I hadn’t really done much to show to GMs at that point whereas sota was quite active in a variety of places around the league, but I’m quite proud of the value I’ve given to Colorado so far as a 5th rounder!

Last couple notes on this long ass draft section, boy were there some bad glitches in the whole draft stream. I’m only remembering this after looking back now, but a lot of the picks and slides and images were bugged out or misclicked. Just a bit of a mess, but I can’t blame them much with the whole live process. But it was also really weird to get a DM from Birdman that I was on the team while I saw on the stream that I hadn’t been picked yet and that Colorado didn’t pick for like twelve picks. I guess there was something going on where the thread that they make and announce the picks in is just done publicly and the streamers just announce them on their side when they get to it? Maybe I was missing something but it seemed to me like a weird and bad idea when you’re going hard with this live format of the draft to not have the picks made privately and then announced on the stream instead of having people just refreshing a thread to get the news of it. Again I might have screwed something up on my end with the stream but I think it would’ve been a lot more exciting to hear the pick on the stream and be surprised with it that way.

Rookie Season

I had a great time jumping into the Colorado locker room and getting to know a lot of the vets and fellow rookies there. Jumbo and Birdman have done a great job of getting my player’s build in a better place, not to mention getting the team as far as we did! The whole 66 game season was a bit overwhelming to me. I’ve only ever followed the NFL when it comes to IRL sports, so going up from 16 games is a lot. The SMJHL stream schedule this season was thankfully usually a lot more forgiving to my GMT schedule than the current ISFL schedule, so I was able to watch a few games, but I was able to get really invested when the playoffs rolled around. The seven game format is a whole lot more fun to go through than the ISFL’s one and done matches! It was really fun to watch the streams with the team as we made it through our round one matchup and got set to go up against the Quebec City Citadelles, a team that I’d heard was quite good. And, of course, I’d definitely heard of this team before, as it’s the team with the greatest number of players on it that I know quite well and interact with regularly in the ISFL. Honestly, it’s the place I expected to end up in the SMJHL Entry Draft. So that meant it was time for the glorious and time-honored tradition of ruthless shit talking. I had a great time pinging up Flex and zEagle in our DSFL LR and tell them how stupid their owls are! Even though we didn’t end up with the win for Colorado, it was a whole lot of fun and it was really cool to be the only team to bring QCC to game 7 in the playoffs. Congrats on the cup you dumb stupid owls!

Another fun part of my rookie season was getting involved in graphics a couple of times! Getting into making signatures and learning about Photoshop has been really fun over the last year in the ISFL, but there’s definitely a whole different style and aesthetic to making signatures over here. I made a signature for my player in my first few days in the league that I’m super proud of in order to make some big money off of that 2x draft bonus. I wasn’t planning on making another graphic so quickly, but the graphics team roped me in with a contest to make a signature for a Colorado or Winnipeg player featuring their new branding and so I had to make a sig for my boy Angus McFife XVIII! It was a great chance to try out a lot of different things technically and stylistically, and I got a pretty nice payout by coming in second in the contest (should’ve been first ez). These graphics contests are a super cool way to get people involved in making cool and interesting things for the league and it made me some pretty nice cash!

SHL Draft

Alright, so now to the good shit. The draft is tomorrow night. I’ve got myself a couple of tinnies so I can stay up until 2 AM or however long it takes me to get drafted this time around. So far, SHL GMs have done a lot better in the scouting department! Not only have I talked with ten different SHL scouts so far in the process with the opportunity for more to reach out and talk in the next day (wink wink), but those conversations have been a lot more in depth and enjoyable than my talks ahead of the SMJHL draft. I’ve had a couple people puffing me up and saying I’ll go in the first, but I have no idea where I could go. Realistically for myself I think it’ll be around the middle of the second round but I’m excited to find out whatever it is that happens tomorrow night. I definitely wish this draft was at a much better time for my schedule like the last one, but we take what we get.

I really enjoy the difference in the amount of buzz and media and talk around the league when it comes around to the draft for the big leagues compared to the dev league. There’s a lot of excitement around the league and with everyone in the S59 class. The discord server has been popping off with talks and speculation about how it’ll go. In my first go around in the ISFL we never had a discord server just for our class, so it’s cool for us to have a space that’s just us, I find people are talking a lot more freely about how the process is going for them and what they think will happen in the draft for their player or for others. I learned through that chat that my ten scouting interviews so far is way on the high end for our class. There were some people with only three or four interviews. Go get out there and talk to the prospects GMs!

There are a lot of people in this class that I have experience with so I’ll take the time at the end here to puff up a few prospects for the draft in case the GMs are spending all that time not scouting reading media instead:

Raven: I don’t think I have to say much here. He’s at the top of the class in TPE and he’s like the Tom Brady of sim leagues when it comes to longevity and earnings. I had the pleasure of drafting and having Raven on my team before and it was a great decision!

Memento Mori: I didn’t get to spend a lot of time playing with him in the ISFL, but he’s a great teammate from my experience and really knowledgeable and talented. He’s done a few fun media things here and I’m excited to share a class with him in both of my leagues and to see how he does here.

Blasoon: I could say a lot of the same things about Blasoon that I did about Mori, but Blas screwed me over in a Survivor game on discord a year ago so fuck him. (Blas is great)

gucci: gucci is as brash as they come but he’s always told it to me straight. He’s got experience in a lot of leadership roles in the ISFL and would have a lot to bring to whoever drafts him here on top of his performance on the ice.

LB3737: LB is someone that I’ve interacted with closely in Portland in the DSFL and he’s always been really great for our team there when he isn’t getting punished for tampering. LB is basically just a better zEagle1.

micool132 and sota: micool and sota are both people I’ve only gotten to know after being drafted with them to Colorado. These guys are great and lots of fun in the locker room. I’d be super hyped to join either of them on the same SHL team.

WildfireMicro, yonggarius, Mooty99, and ValorX77: All of these are guys that I’ve had a fair bit of interaction with in the ISFL, either as competitors or teammates. All of these guys have done really cool and great things and are great people to be around from my experiences. I believe in all of these guys and the awesome SHL careers they’re gonna have!

Alright that’s the wrap on this article for me! A big thank you to anyone that reads through everything and sorry to anyone I missed in the last shoutout section, I didn’t plan for doing that until I got to the end there. Watch out for Jack Nishimori in tomorrow’s SHL Draft!

Code:
Words: 4426, Ready for grading

Also not sure if this is draft relevant enough for the 2x Draft Bonus, but it's also my first media so 2x either way please and thank you.

Ruggsy · 04-02-2021, 05:05 PM

Awesome write up, great insight on so many different topics.
Just to touch on this part though:

Quote:I almost wish that this task was a bit more rewarding to higher quality graphic submissions though, but I understand not wanting to put pressure on rookies to make up a signature on par with the quality of some of the more seasoned PS users on the site.

I get what you mean but a 5/5 graded sig is making 1.25 Mil, only 125k more than what you get from the task (1mil for task +125k for default .5/5 payout) so if anything we should make it less rewarding for the lower quality ones......but that's kind of counter intuitive to the whole point of the tasks lol.

qWest · 04-02-2021, 05:11 PM

04-02-2021, 05:05 PMRuggsy Wrote: Awesome write up, great insight on so many different topics.
Just to touch on this part though:

Quote:I almost wish that this task was a bit more rewarding to higher quality graphic submissions though, but I understand not wanting to put pressure on rookies to make up a signature on par with the quality of some of the more seasoned PS users on the site.

I get what you mean but a 5/5 graded sig is making 1.25 Mil, only 125k more than what you get from the task (1mil for task +125k for default .5/5 payout) so if anything we should make it less rewarding for the lower quality ones......but that's kind of counter intuitive to the whole point of the tasks lol.

Yeah that was the wrong way to say it. The payout is amazing for the work done for sure. I just would've like to see rookies going all out rather than putting in minimum effort, but that feels maybe more like something for contests. Would be cool to see a rookie only contest maybe in the future?

Ruggsy · 04-02-2021, 05:14 PM

04-02-2021, 05:11 PMqWest Wrote:
04-02-2021, 05:05 PMRuggsy Wrote: Awesome write up, great insight on so many different topics.
Just to touch on this part though:

I get what you mean but a 5/5 graded sig is making 1.25 Mil, only 125k more than what you get from the task (1mil for task +125k for default .5/5 payout) so if anything we should make it less rewarding for the lower quality ones......but that's kind of counter intuitive to the whole point of the tasks lol.
Yeah that was the wrong way to say it. The payout is amazing for the work done for sure. I just would've like to see rookies going all out rather than putting in minimum effort, but that feels maybe more like something for contests. Would be cool to see a rookie only contest maybe in the future?

Ahhhh yea I see what you mean, I agree that would be cool I'll definitely throw that idea around after we finish up the wallpaper one

JT3 · 04-02-2021, 05:20 PM

Great write-up, Raps rookies are dropping some nice media, take notes GMs

Credits to OrbitingDeath, Tweedle, Incite, Wasty, and Slothfacekilla for sigs!

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***Patty*** · 04-02-2021, 05:21 PM

Good read! Always nice to hear perspectives from recent creates. Good luck in the draft!

***luke*** · 04-02-2021, 06:03 PM

I really enjoyed reading this. To touch upon a couple of things

1 is that I think that your observations about creating a player is true. I think as we grow, especially with getting people coming in from PBE and ISFL where they dont really watch hockey, we need to shift towards being really basic on how we explain some things. If there is anything else in the creation process that you feel that it can be better please let me know. We can always be improving.

And then the 2nd part about the draft part.

specifically

Code:
Last couple notes on this long ass draft section, boy were there some bad glitches in the whole draft stream. I’m only remembering this after looking back now, but a lot of the picks and slides and images were bugged out or misclicked. Just a bit of a mess, but I can’t blame them much with the whole live process. But it was also really weird to get a DM from Birdman that I was on the team while I saw on the stream that I hadn’t been picked yet and that Colorado didn’t pick for like twelve picks. I guess there was something going on where the thread that they make and announce the picks in is just done publicly and the streamers just announce them on their side when they get to it? Maybe I was missing something but it seemed to me like a weird and bad idea when you’re going hard with this live format of the draft to not have the picks made privately and then announced on the stream instead of having people just refreshing a thread to get the news of it. Again I might have screwed something up on my end with the stream but I think it would’ve been a lot more exciting to hear the pick on the stream and be surprised with it that way.

This was the first season having a draft like that(in the SHL and SMJHL), before it was more informal, but with the work of @sve7en we are making leaps and bounds in how we present stuff live. The SHL Draft should be great as well. Hopefully with more time and more experience with us hosting live drafts it can run smoother as well.

As for the live vs not live draft debate, I heavily lean towards the live draft. one is that it puts a time crunch on Gm's drafting, making it a lot more suspenseful and better imo. I think the work that Sve7en has done that puts our draft in the tier of ISFL drafts, then live will always been the preferred format. I want GM's to take 2-3 minutes max on picks, and not have it be offline, it creates more time for people to leak the actual draft and all that hoopla that is just a headache.

But of course, I really enjoyed the perspective, and to anyone that is reading this if you have any suggestions on how to make the SHL better there is always the suggestions subforums or my dm's. Always looking to improve the SHL

***sve7en*** · 04-02-2021, 06:36 PM

04-02-2021, 06:03 PMluketd Wrote: I really enjoyed reading this. To touch upon a couple of things

1 is that I think that your observations about creating a player is true. I think as we grow, especially with getting people coming in from PBE and ISFL where they dont really watch hockey, we need to shift towards being really basic on how we explain some things. If there is anything else in the creation process that you feel that it can be better please let me know. We can always be improving.

And then the 2nd part about the draft part.

specifically

Code:
Last couple notes on this long ass draft section, boy were there some bad glitches in the whole draft stream. I’m only remembering this after looking back now, but a lot of the picks and slides and images were bugged out or misclicked. Just a bit of a mess, but I can’t blame them much with the whole live process. But it was also really weird to get a DM from Birdman that I was on the team while I saw on the stream that I hadn’t been picked yet and that Colorado didn’t pick for like twelve picks. I guess there was something going on where the thread that they make and announce the picks in is just done publicly and the streamers just announce them on their side when they get to it? Maybe I was missing something but it seemed to me like a weird and bad idea when you’re going hard with this live format of the draft to not have the picks made privately and then announced on the stream instead of having people just refreshing a thread to get the news of it. Again I might have screwed something up on my end with the stream but I think it would’ve been a lot more exciting to hear the pick on the stream and be surprised with it that way.

This was the first season having a draft like that(in the SHL and SMJHL), before it was more informal, but with the work of @sve7en we are making leaps and bounds in how we present stuff live. The SHL Draft should be great as well. Hopefully with more time and more experience with us hosting live drafts it can run smoother as well.

As for the live vs not live draft debate, I heavily lean towards the live draft. one is that it puts a time crunch on Gm's drafting, making it a lot more suspenseful and better imo. I think the work that Sve7en has done that puts our draft in the tier of ISFL drafts, then live will always been the preferred format. I want GM's to take 2-3 minutes max on picks, and not have it be offline, it creates more time for people to leak the actual draft and all that hoopla that is just a headache.

But of course, I really enjoyed the perspective, and to anyone that is reading this if you have any suggestions on how to make the SHL better there is always the suggestions subforums or my dm's. Always looking to improve the SHL

I hard agree on the live 1 day vs pre-recorded week draft side of things, especially after the leaks we recently saw in the ISFL. I think both the GM experience is better and the player experience is better, especially with how there's less waiting and downtime to find out where you end up. A recruitment time create can be with his team in hours to days, depending on when they join, which is incredible.

I also agree that there are limitations on the SMJHL side with so many players being unknowns. I think as we move forward more interviews is a clutch way for the J to fill some of that space because not even the GMs drafting have a lot of knowledge on these people. The SHL draft will be inherently better for listeners because of that. Regarding the production hiccups, that's all me both in errors made in building things as well as not properly testing things. We should be much better off for that going forward. Having been around both now I think that our ceiling for the SHL is far above the ISFL, and the SMJHL draft production can get close to the DSFL, but getting some interviews and the lack of a delay in getting a team helps things a lot. I really appreciate the perspective though, and improving the later round experience should be a key focus going forward.

qWest · 04-02-2021, 07:16 PM

@"luketd" @sve7en
Thanks for the comments! I could definitely see some of my current preference for the live format coming down to familiarity. As I said, I really enjoy being a part of leagues that have these separate formats and wouldn't want to change how the SHL does things. I think comparing the two is a good way to see how both could be improved.

luketd: Really appreciated what you said about the time pressure of the live draft. Even though I would worry about time zone trouble personally, it sounds like an excellent experience comparatively. I like that there's that added pressure to be efficient and that we can all enjoy the process of it.

sve7en: Didn't know how much had been changed and was WIP. Excited to see what can be added on in the future to make it more exciting and engaging watching the stream. I especially love hearing more about adding in more interview content and hearing from GMs/people in the know during the process.

***luke*** · 04-02-2021, 07:36 PM

04-02-2021, 07:16 PMqWest Wrote: @"luketd" @sve7en
Thanks for the comments! I could definitely see some of my current preference for the live format coming down to familiarity. As I said, I really enjoy being a part of leagues that have these separate formats and wouldn't want to change how the SHL does things. I think comparing the two is a good way to see how both could be improved.

luketd: Really appreciated what you said about the time pressure of the live draft. Even though I would worry about time zone trouble personally, it sounds like an excellent experience comparatively. I like that there's that added pressure to be efficient and that we can all enjoy the process of it.

sve7en: Didn't know how much had been changed and was WIP. Excited to see what can be added on in the future to make it more exciting and engaging watching the stream. I especially love hearing more about adding in more interview content and hearing from GMs/people in the know during the process.

One thing that always sucks is to make it EU friendly while also making it a time where people in the US can attend if they are off work. That’s why weekends are the best for that, and draft is either 6 or 7 pm to try to make it as EU friendly as possible.

But I think insights of people who first join are always the best because they are raw and give you really good incites. I’ve been apart of the league for almost 3 years now and from that time you kinda get settled in on how processes go, and it is really exciting when people give their honest thoughts because they can take different angles that I haven’t thought of, so thank you

DollaBill · 04-03-2021, 12:52 AM

+1. Great work on this!

If I had it my way, Sotakov and Nishimori are again linemates in the SHL.

Asked Madden · 04-03-2021, 05:29 AM

Reading this feels like you were inside my head whilst writing it. I agree with 99% of everything you've said here.
On the draft side of things I think the one think needing changed to make it almost perfect would be to keep the draft thread private during the draft so that the picks aren't spoiled for those choosing to watch the stream.
Being traded up for and picked by NOLA was incredible. But the only thing that couldve made it better was finding out on stream as opposed to being congratulated in my J team locker room. I think this is something they've mentioned they're changing and I look forward to seeing it.

qWest · 04-03-2021, 08:19 AM

04-03-2021, 05:29 AMAsked Madden Wrote: Reading this feels like you were inside my head whilst writing it. I agree with 99% of everything you've said here.
On the draft side of things I think the one think needing changed to make it almost perfect would be to keep the draft thread private during the draft so that the picks aren't spoiled for those choosing to watch the stream.
Being traded up for and picked by NOLA was incredible. But the only thing that couldve made it better was finding out on stream as opposed to being congratulated in my J team locker room. I think this is something they've mentioned they're changing and I look forward to seeing it.

Definitely agree on this! I might put away my discord while I watch the stream so I don't catch it too early.

***luke*** · 04-03-2021, 09:19 AM

04-03-2021, 05:29 AMAsked Madden Wrote: Reading this feels like you were inside my head whilst writing it. I agree with 99% of everything you've said here.
On the draft side of things I think the one think needing changed to make it almost perfect would be to keep the draft thread private during the draft so that the picks aren't spoiled for those choosing to watch the stream.
Being traded up for and picked by NOLA was incredible. But the only thing that couldve made it better was finding out on stream as opposed to being congratulated in my J team locker room. I think this is something they've mentioned they're changing and I look forward to seeing it.

This season we are actually doing that. Everything will be run through the stream instead of the stream running through the thread. Im glad you enjoyed last seasons draft!

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