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***WannabeFinn*** · 11-17-2022, 09:18 AM

SUB 155 TPE PLAYER AUTO-RETIREMENT
Starting next season (i.e. with the S69 regression post), all regressing players that drop below 155 TPE will be retired regardless of whether they played the previous season. We don’t think this should affect anyone dramatically; the contract tier for a player below 155 TPE is the same as a player with 300 TPE so there’s no reason for a team to play a sub-155 TPE player. 155 TPE is the starting point for all players when they create; it should be (and is now) considered the minimum amount required for play.

GM GUIDE
Z-Whiz (and Arkz during his HO tenure) have put together a guide for SHL GMs (adapted from the guide for SMJHL GMs). We’ve had a good amount of GM turnover, and have GMs taking the reins with less experience under their belt, and we hope this will be a helpful resource to new GMs as they step into the role. The new guide can be found here and will be a constantly-evolving document; if you are confused by any of the wording, think anything significant is missing, or find any inaccuracies, please let us know!

CONTRACT ADJUSTMENTS
S67 saw the implementation of the contract adjustments mentioned in the previous SOTU address. We realize that there was some confusion over the exact details of this originally, and we are well overdue in adding this rule to the rulebook, so we’re including the new wording of the rule here as well for clarification:

Section 1, Subsection E, Rule 3, will be reworded/replaced as follows:

Quote:
3. Players may only extend with their team following the start of the final season of their contract’s term.

Quote:

a. If a player crosses into a higher minimum contract tier prior to the beginning of any season of their contract, all future seasons of the contract will be adjusted up to the new minimum tier they have reached based on their TPE (for information on contract tiers, see Section 1, Subsection F, rules 1 and 2).
i. A player’s TPE for a new contract or tier adjustment of an existing contract will include all TPE required to be claimed in that season’s regression post (regardless of whether that player is regressing).
ii. TPE earned after the cutoff date listed in the regression post will not be included in the total determining that season’s contract tier.
iii. HO reserves the right to review cases of players artificially maintaining a lower TPE prior to the new season.
b. Regressing players may be signed to a new contract of the tier matching their post-regression TPE total (even if they claim additional post-regression TPE in their regression update). Existing contracts will not be adjusted down if a player regresses beneath the tier of their current contract.

TL;DR - the TPE for ALL contracts now is the TPE earned as of regression week. This also means you no longer need to ask your players to avoid claiming TPE after regression to not bump themselves up into a new tier - their contract tier for the upcoming season will be determined by their post-regression total. We hope this will allow GMs to plan ahead more easily without having to deal with surprise issues (like a player accidentally claiming too much TPE and putting themselves into a new tier that could have been avoided.)

FHM 8 ADJUSTMENTS

There are a few updates we’d like to provide here regarding what we’ve learned from our two seasons in FHM 8 so far, and ways we are working to improve our approach to it in the future.

First - We want to thank everyone who has participated in the discussion regarding shooting accuracy for defense here. We’re aware that there are some concerns regarding the big picture consequences to upping shooting accuracy, so we are proceeding with caution here. This season (S68), the shooting accuracy cap for defensemen will be raised to 13. We will be keeping an eye on this to ensure that no alarming trends present themselves, and will revisit this decision at the end of S68 to determine whether any improvement has resulted, and whether it might be wise to pull the cap back to 12 or increase it further to 14. This is not a free or base level adjustment (unlike the recent stamina changes), we are just raising the cap from 12 to 13 and allowing defenders to put an additional 5 TPE into this attribute.

Second - As many of you have noticed, scoring overall, particularly in individual games has increased tremendously to a level we don’t think is realistic (and definitely isn’t enjoyable for goalies, who admittedly already have a rough go of it in FHM). We are still gathering data on the reason for this, and ways to address it, but for S68 we will be decreasing the average number of goals per game from the current value of 6.27 to 6.1 (this is the value used by FHM for NHL leagues).

Third - we are aware that goalies and their usefulness in FHM are a point of contention for a lot of people. We are exploring a few different options to address this issue, and will continue our discussions on those (and potentially involve the community in a discussion for one or more of these options as we progress).

SHL HEAD OFFICE CHANGES

As many of you may have noticed, we have undergone some structural changes within Head Office. As recently announced in the Head Office hiring post for this season, in consultation with the Ownership group, the Co-Commissioner position has been expanded to two seats. We have reworded Section 3, Article 5 in the rulebook to reflect this change, and have added some additional wording that prevents any team from occupying a majority in Head Office.

We are also taking a page from the SMJHL HO book and introducing a new site job - SHL Head Office Intern! It is our hope that this will provide an opportunity for users both new and old to get a glimpse behind the curtain while also helping us with some of the more time-consuming busywork that often takes our focus away from larger site issues. We’re still hammering out the list of responsibilities for this new position, but they are likely to include:

Updating site user groups and permissions and ensuring the “staff” list stays current throughout the season
Maintaining the list of free agents and updating it as they are signed
General forum housekeeping (cleaning up old subforums, archiving old threads, etc)
Participating in Head Office discussions, including but not limited to potential rulebook changes

UNIFIED SIM TEAM
It’s no secret that there have been some growing pains during the process of moving from one very overworked simmer to a multi-person sim team, but we are in the process of forming one unified sim team for all simming responsibilities across the site.

We know that the stream experience is not at the level most of us would like it to be, and while we certainly don’t blame that on the sim team themselves, there are a lot of ways in which that experience could be improved. We believe having one unified team across all four leagues will make communication and standardization of many things a lot easier in the effort to improve that. Over the past few weeks we’ve had some good discussions between SHL, SMJHL, IIHF, and WJC head office and believe we’re ready to move forward with hiring for a unified sim team head to lead this effort (a hiring post for this will be up in the near future).

TWITTER REPLACEMENT

Introducing (drumroll please) - Chirper! Starting in S68, SHL Twitter will be replaced by Chirper, a weekly discussion thread. We’ve had several users raise concerns (which we share) surrounding our continued use of Twitter in light of current events, and we are of the opinion that it contributes very little to the overall SHL community anyway.

We recognize that some users (especially newer users) rely on Twitter as a source of money to afford training, so it was important to us that we find an alternative to replace that in order to avoid cutting those users off from that source of income. We believe that this new discussion format will be more conducive to actual communication between users, and hope it will be a little more fun and easier to remember than tweeting “Tweet for money #SHLHockey” multiple times in a week. More details will be available shortly, but we will be launching this very soon.

ADJUSTMENT TO RETIREMENT RULES
We have seen a few instances recently in which users have retired and unretired their player within a short time frame in order to lower their TPE level for cap purposes. The intention of this rule is to allow users to bring their player back in the event that they have a change of heart or other change in circumstance once retiring their player, not to artificially discard TPE in order to fit within salary cap restrictions. Going forward, a user may still unretire once per player with the 15% penalty, but a second retirement post will result in permanent retirement of the player.

RULEBOOK UPDATES
We’ve made a number of updates to the rulebook recently; some have already been announced previously, and some are referred to earlier in this post. Other changes we have made (or will be making shortly) include:

Removing any remaining “auto-firing” punishments for GM offenses (a GM can be fired at the discretion of Head Office depending on the severity of the offense, obviously, but we are removing any rulebook-required firings that mandate it).
Rewording Section 1, Subsection H (the Waivers section) since it currently only describes waivers situations involving the now-defunct fifth SMJHL season. There are still situations in which waivers apply in the SHL, but the rulebook only currently specifies waivers rules for a fifth J season, so we will be replacing that with waivers rules that are actually relevant.
We are working on rectifying a number of grammar/punctuation/syntax errors that Carpy went to a great deal of effort to find for us several seasons ago during a prior head office tenure. This is an ongoing process, but we are very grateful to Carpy for taking the time to do this even if it’s taken a number of seasons to make use of it.
(Previously announced) - rewording of rulebook language regarding call-ups, updating the SHL rulebook to include some wording that was already present in the SMJHL rulebook.