05-18-2023, 08:00 AM(This post was last modified: 05-18-2023, 08:12 AM by RomanesEuntDomus. Edited 3 times in total.)
Hey everyone,
Super general question, but I'd be interested in hearing what everyones general thoughts on the state of the SHL and their personal enjoyment of the site are at the moment. I have some thoughts myself and am curious to find out how much of that is exclusive to myself and how much is shared by others. So yeah, please just fire away with your general thoughts . Everything else in this post I about my own opinion , so feel free to disregard this wall of text that is to follow and just post your own thoughts in here!
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And now to my own specific thoughts, if you are interested. Because for me personally, there are two competing lines of thought at the moment. The first one is that on an administrative level, the league is probably in the best state it has ever been. It has had competent leadership for years now which does not just stem from one or two super engaged individuals, but has been institutionalized and is wielded by groups of league leaders who work well together, can share power, move on and get replaced, without any major problems or dips in quality of site leadership. So big props to everyone who has been putting in work in that regard, it does seem to work very well, at least looking at it from the outside.
On top of that, the sim-side of things has seen big improvements as well over the years and ever since the switch away from STHS which was met with some well deserved criticism at the time in my opinion. We have a more complex and in-depth sim now, with better visualization, more variety in player building and a better system to split up simming duties. Our sim and the administrative work around it objectively are in a better state than ever as well and things like an index as well as bots and other tools have been added.
With all that being said... things are still feeling quite stale for me at the moment. And I'm wondering, is it a league-thing or is it a me-thing? It could very well be the latter: priorities in my life have been shifting and I have been in the league for more than 10 years now, not changing teams very much during that time, so burn-out on a personal level would not exactly be a shocker. However, I have seen this creep up on me more and more over the last few years and it wasn't nearly as big of a problem eight or nine years into my SHL-career.
I have identified two main things that contribute to this kind of staleness for me at the moment: Parity/competitiveness and TPE-tasks. The first issue is by far the more complex one but also one that has already been discussed extensively, so I won't talk about it too much. But the gist of it has remained the same, even with a variety measures taken in recent years to create more compeititveness all around: Seasons are too predictable, you know where you stand basically a few sims into the season, there are few if any upsets playoffs and a large majority of the league finds itself not in contention for anything. If you are rebuilding, you are expected to be shit for a few seasons, but even the midfield-teams find themselves dominated by the top teams pretty much every series. It feels like things have gotten slightly better in recent seasons, with the #5 and #6 seeds winning the last two cups, so maybe there is hope. Still, if you look at the playoff trees, you will still find the higher seeded teams winning what feels like 80-90% of the series, especially in the early rounds. But yeah, as I said, it's an issue that has already been discussed a lot and I don't wanna beat a dead horse. It just feels like something that has definitely contributed to the boredom for me, even with all the measures that have been taken.
The second issue however is one that I haven't really seen discussed much, if at all, and that has started bugging me in recent seasons. Our TPE-earning system has started to really feel stale and like pointless busy work to me in many ways. Many of its aspects have not been touched in years, and barely changed at all literally since the earliest seasons of the league. Many aspects of it might have made sense early on, but have longe since outlived their usefulness. Things like...
- Mock Drafts: They haven't been actual mock drafts where people try to predict things for years now, but exercises in "who finds the best mock to copy". If you actually do it yourself, as the task was originally intenioned, you'll likely have a huge disadvantage. Plus, it also gives a disadvantage to people who aren't online in the final hours or even minutes before the drafts, to update their mocks for any last minute changes, or who don't know the right people yet to copy.
- Championship Week: Might just be a personal pet peeve of mine, but after having done like 40 of these now, boy do I hate CW nowadays. Yes you can do it in like less than an hour, but it just feels like an annoying chore that returns every six weeks. And I always feel bad for the people who actually put a lot of work into coming up with interesting prompts, it's not their fault, it's just the concept at a whole that find flawed and boring. Also, in a league with arguably not enough parity already and a very top-heavy system, forcing everyone who had no chance during a season to now celebrate the two best teams who already got to dominate on the ice feels especially counterintuitive.
- Other Prediction Tasks (Season, Playoffs, Awards): Not particularly exciting but also not terrible. Could probably be improved, but not the most pressing need atm.
- Weekly Tasks: Contrary to what you might have expected after my write-up so far, I don't actually mind the weekly stuff all that much. It's actually better than most of the seasonal tasks in my opinion. The weekly tasks provide some decent variety and are done quickly and you feel like you put in some small work for decent rewards. It would be nice to see some more experiments here, as you can always try new small things for a season and scrap them again if they don't really work. But overall, that aspect of the PT-system is working fine enough for me.
Generally speaking, I think it would be a good idea to take a look at our TPE system on a bigger picture level. The way I see it, our PT-department has a set amount of TPE available that they can/want to dish out each season to keep TPE-earning more or less consistent between years. So every task we have "uses" up some of those scarce available TPE. I think we should be asking ourselves: Do the tasks we have right now actually use this scarce ressource efficiently and squeeze the most fun out it? When I talk about getting rid of CW, I'm not talking about getting rid of those 16 TPE. I talk about freeing up 16 TPE that can then be dished out in new, fresh and exciting ways to create more activity. Same goes for Mock Drafts and other tasks that might not work anymore. Eliminate those "bad" tasks and suddenly we have like 30 TPE or so available every season that we can use to steer activity in ways that we think is beneficial. New tasks or higher payouts for existing weekly tasks to make things exciting again or cater to active users? Or go a different route and make activity check or training camp payouts higher to help lower activity users? League management would suddenly have extra tools at their disposal to steer the league in the direction that they find beneficial.
So yeah, tl;dr: Re-work at least parts off our PT-system.
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Okay, so much for my personal thoughts. Do you agree with the issues I raised? Are there other things that are bothering you? Or ist it more of a case of "Old man yells at cloud", which I acknowledge could absolutely be the case here. That's why I wanna hear thoughts from others, to get a feel for where I stand here compared to the rest of the league. How do you enjoy things personally right now? And how is it compared to the past, if you are someone who has been here a while?
05-18-2023, 09:29 AM(This post was last modified: 05-18-2023, 09:30 AM by RomanesEuntDomus. Edited 1 time in total.)
05-18-2023, 09:16 AMRangerjase Wrote: There is a portion of what you were talking about that HO has been working on with the relevant departments.
PT's did change up with the transition to both Slash and leviadan which is still somewhat recent in the grand scheme of things.
Dm's are always open to discuss as well!
Appreciate it! I chose to make this into a public thread and not go the DM-route because I'm legitimately not sure if these are valid concerns or just personal factors, that's why I'm curious about the general league sentiment.
I don't think PT-heads or the transitions between them are the issue however, they generally do a fine job. The issue seems to be on a grander, more structural level and I'm not sure if it's complacency, a feeling of not having the autority to change this, or people actually still liking the system, which is keeping it in place. But it feels like an issue that falls between the cracks, the PT-department is mostly focused on smaller scale stuff, filling the existing system with interesting prompts or coming up with small new tasks but not touching the overarching structure, while HO doesn't concern themselves with it either, I assume in oder to not interfer with the PT-team.
Parity comes down to GMs. There's about 4 shl GM's I'd entrust my player to if I wasn't a GM. We've seen multiple GM's in recent seasons give up max retention on contracts for little more than a pittance. For me a lot of teams lack detailed planning or direction or quite simply lose patience and scupper their long term success for a short term all or nothing gamble. There's ultimately no silver bullet for this issue outside of people learning from their mistakes which is about as likely as me winning the euromillions.
Credit to Ml002, King, Wasty, Carpy, Bruins10, Rum_Ham, Turd Ferguson, Ragnar and Enigmatic for the sigs.
05-18-2023, 09:31 AM(This post was last modified: 05-18-2023, 09:31 AM by luke.)
You need to check out the eastern conference then. How many people picked Philly winning last year. NEW winning this year? Eastern conference is a lot of fun to be in. Well maybe not for my heart but for the league yeah, but maybe I’m positive about it because we won
05-18-2023, 09:30 AMAcsolap Wrote: Parity comes down to GMs. There's about 4 shl GM's I'd entrust my player to if I wasn't a GM. We've seen multiple GM's in recent seasons give up max retention on contracts for little more than a pittance. For me a lot of teams lack detailed planning or direction or quite simply lose patience and scupper their long term success for a short term all or nothing gamble. There's ultimately no silver bullet for this issue outside of people learning from their mistakes which is about as likely as me winning the euromillions.
It's tough for me, I definitely think parity is a big part of the issue, but it also feels like it has been discussed to death already. I'd probably have a bunch of counter arguments or additions to what you just said, but both your and my points have been made so many times already, everyone seems to be aware of the problems and HO treats the issuet seriously and has tried lots of things, yet we aren't really much closer to a solution.
05-18-2023, 09:31 AMluke Wrote: You need to check out the eastern conference then. How many people picked Philly winning last year. NEW winning this year? Eastern conference is a lot of fun to be in. Well maybe not for my heart but for the league yeah, but maybe I’m positive about it because we won
Yeah the last two season could be a sign of things pointing in the right direction parity-wise, lets hope it ends up continuing like that.
However, the fact that one or two teams seem to have been able to go on cinderella-runs a bit more lately still doesn't seem to have changed the fact that the midfield as a whole gets pounded, most first round series aren't close at all etc... But yeah, baby steps, might be worth to be more patient here and see how things develop. A few encouraging signs are there at least.
05-18-2023, 09:41 AM(This post was last modified: 05-18-2023, 09:42 AM by CampinKiller. Edited 1 time in total.)
Eastern conference is pretty wide open. Western isn’t since Winnipeg is like 200 tpe on average above every other team, but they still choke in the finals so.
Edit; I do agree with you on PTs and some of the other points though. I think we are in a better place in terms of “true” parity though, with the Cinderella runs actually being possible
05-18-2023, 09:37 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: Yeah the last two season could be a sign of things pointing in the right direction parity-wise, lets hope it ends up continuing like that.
However, the fact that one or two teams seem to have been able to go on cinderella-runs a bit more lately still doesn't seem to have changed the fact that the midfield as a whole gets pounded, most first round series aren't close at all etc... But yeah, baby steps, might be worth to be more patient here and see how things develop. A few encouraging signs are there at least.
Well when 16/20 teams make the playoffs because that’s the best playoff format, you’ll have shit teams making the playoffs. Especially now looking at how many teams are actively trying to tank. 1st round you’ll have one or two close series in which the 3/4 seed are battling. But the 1 seed against the 8 should be a cakewalk because the 8 seed is mostly trying to tank or is in the weird middle ground. It’s not like STHS where you have teams trying to tank but STHS wills them to the playoffs like Toronto S50. You have to plan teams a lot better, which goes back to what Acsolap said. Gms have to be better with team planning.
Like the best example in my mind is S50 Toronto and NEW. Toronto trying to tank, NEW trying to compete. STHS had Toronto make the playoffs, NEW didn’t. NEW had a way better team on paper, but STHS randomness had Toronto make the playoffs. It’s just not going to happen in FHM. The tpe matters too much for FHM. You can actually spend your tpe on attributes that matter unlike STHS that after 1400 tpe you’re pretty much capped out.
And you saw parity increase when we switched the tpe it costs for attributes too. The last couple years allowed the 5-10 teams actually win cups or do a lot better.
Also for the playoffs, in STHS for a long time it was just top 8 makes the playoffs. So that’s why you saw closer games(along with randomness that STHS had). If you look at the 2nd round and beyond, it’s a lot more competitive. So those top 8 teams that make it, you see a lot more closer series, because for the most part it’s the top 8 teams in the league instead of the top 10/12 teams and then 4/6 rebuilding/tanking teams
05-18-2023, 10:43 AM(This post was last modified: 05-18-2023, 10:47 AM by RomanesEuntDomus. Edited 1 time in total.)
05-18-2023, 09:49 AMluke Wrote: Well when 16/20 teams make the playoffs because that’s the best playoff format, you’ll have shit teams making the playoffs. Especially now looking at how many teams are actively trying to tank. 1st round you’ll have one or two close series in which the 3/4 seed are battling. But the 1 seed against the 8 should be a cakewalk because the 8 seed is mostly trying to tank or is in the weird middle ground. It’s not like STHS where you have teams trying to tank but STHS wills them to the playoffs like Toronto S50. You have to plan teams a lot better, which goes back to what Acsolap said. Gms have to be better with team planning.
Like the best example in my mind is S50 Toronto and NEW. Toronto trying to tank, NEW trying to compete. STHS had Toronto make the playoffs, NEW didn’t. NEW had a way better team on paper, but STHS randomness had Toronto make the playoffs. It’s just not going to happen in FHM. The tpe matters too much for FHM. You can actually spend your tpe on attributes that matter unlike STHS that after 1400 tpe you’re pretty much capped out.
And you saw parity increase when we switched the tpe it costs for attributes too. The last couple years allowed the 5-10 teams actually win cups or do a lot better.
Also for the playoffs, in STHS for a long time it was just top 8 makes the playoffs. So that’s why you saw closer games(along with randomness that STHS had). If you look at the 2nd round and beyond, it’s a lot more competitive. So those top 8 teams that make it, you see a lot more closer series, because for the most part it’s the top 8 teams in the league instead of the top 10/12 teams and then 4/6 rebuilding/tanking teams
My issue isn't so much that the #1 seed beats the #8 seed, but that the #5 to #7 seed seem to not really have a chance either, even when those teams are decent and not just bad teams who got a spot in the postseason due to our diluted format. Especially in the West where things seemed very static for years even outside. Calgary and Edmonton kept turns dominating each other in the 1st round only to then get dominated in the 2nd by Seattle. And every conference finals since S66 were two our of SEA, WPG, CHI. But yeah with some rebuilds starting and cycles ending, I expect this to change now. The East might be more competitive in the later rounds, but over the last two seasons the higher seeded team won every first round series, and we have go back three or four seasons to find the last case of one of the top three seaded teams being beaten.
I really dislike the narrative that comes up so often in these discussions and in your post as well (I'm not blaming you for this obviously). This is NOT about bad teams being bad, or teams that got into the playoffs due to our generous playoff format, who then naturally have no chance against the very best in the league, as they should. Nobody argues that they should artificially have their chances inflated to create random upsets. For me the core of this discussion is the middle-tier of the league. The teams roughly in the #7 to #13 range, who should at least have a fighting chance, but usually don't.
My very subjective gut feeling is that is what has had the biggest impact on my and potentially many other peoples enjoyment of the league. In the past, be it due to the STHS-randomness or other factors, for most teams there was that feeling of "Let's play decent regular season, get into the playoffs and then everything is possible. We might not have a big chance to go deep, but we have a chance. Let's make the most of it and maybe we can win, as unlikely as it is." But in todays SHL, my impression is that for more and more people the realization is setting in that this chance is simply not there anymore. People in the midfield know that they won't win, and it doesn't take until the playoffs to figure that out, they know it early. Everyone knows that 5-6 teams at most will play for the title and you will realize after a few days of simming if you are on one of those teams or not. After that, it's just riding it out for a large portion of the league. The tanking teams tank while the midfield plays for the right to maybe get knocked out in the 2nd round instead of the first. But yeah as I said, I acknowledge that there seems to have been a slightly positive trend over the last season or two, but the 15 or so before that have left me scarred at this point. Also, this could very well be a personal issue as well where I'm not as objective as I think, because I was on those kinds of midfield teams a lot. And boy does it grind you down after a while...
I also hate that "GMs just need to get better" argument because it takes all the agency away from the players. Most of the players in the league are on teams whose GM isn't top-tier, it's a simple numbers game. There isn't enough room for every player to play for a top-GM and even if there was, we wouldn't want every player to flock towards the same handful of teams because those teams have the best GMs. This is NOT a GM league, it's a player league. GMs are important but they should not be the sole factor that decides everything while the players are passenger and mere pawns in the battle royale of a few great GM minds. And again, it's not about giving shitty GMs random boosts to create upsets. It's about the fact that even decent to good GMs tend to be outclassed by the very best. As counter-intuitive as that might sound to many, GMs have too much weight and power in my opinion. In my ideal world, GMs would still be very influential in building a good roster, drafting well and creating a LR atmosphere that draws people to their team, but their influence on the results through lines and tactics would be greatly diminished.
Naturally, in any competitive league, only a certain relatively small percentage of users can be on the best team. That's not the issue, that's normal. The issue is that we need everyone who is not on those teams to have something to fight for as well, and that hasn't really been the case for the last decade or two. Combine that with the fact that our seasons are so quick and short these days that there is a ton of downtime for everyone whose team doesn't go deep in the postseason, and you will find a large portion of the league simply having nothing going on and no games to follow for more than 50% of the time.
But yeah, I'm getting dragged into another parity discussion which probably isn't super useful. Some of these things are just points that annoy me whenever they come up because they try to frame this in a way that misses the core problem. But yes, things might be moving in the right direction after all, I'm willing to give it some time.
05-18-2023, 10:55 AM(This post was last modified: 05-18-2023, 11:00 AM by RomanesEuntDomus. Edited 1 time in total.)
05-18-2023, 10:52 AMRuggsy Wrote: Obviously still love this place as I just went for rookie head mentor..... But sure as hell not because of the fake hockey anymore
I've been here for 2.5 years and I have found a whole bunch of great friends and an even bigger pile of disappointment
I agree though I think administration in all leagues is at a high point which is why I have no worries
Yeah it could very well just be a case of everyone being content with focusing on the non-hockey aspects of this community. I would find that a bit sad because to me it would feel like losing something, but you sure as hell can't argue against people finding more value in the friendships and community aspects of the SHL than the gameplay-part.
RomanesEuntDomus
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