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Myspace · 11-14-2022, 02:01 PM

Just to give a bit of background before I start, I am somewhat familiar with sim leagues having played a few many years ago. Goallineblitz, which is somewhat similar to this but in a football form, and some other wrestling feds back in the TV Tuner days before streaming where we'd have to download and watch the matches Laughing

. But after Discord killed most of the bigger community forums it became harder and harder to find these types of games. I was lucky to find PBE first and from there find SHL as an affiliate, which has been a great experience. So I'm not a complete newbie, and I had the opportunity to figure out TPE in the PBE first which helped a lot, but I am new to this particular system of updates, drafting, player development, etc.

Starting up with making my player, I thought having the national team player suggestions listed there was a great help particularly for me, as I didn't know exactly what kind of player I wanted to make and it gave some initial direction. I do wish there was more information about the WJC there and how the teams are separated. To explain, I liked the introduction Latvia had written so I decided to base my player out of there, but I only realized later on that they only have a national team. I believe Latvian players are part of team world instead, which would of course make it more difficult to ultimately play WJC. I'm fine with that as I still like the Latvia guys and I can always be up for selection regardless, it just probably would be more useful for new players to have an idea of the status of the WJC teams (if that's possible) since that's more immediate to them. IIHF play could be up to a real life year away I'd estimate off the top of my head? WJC would be on the radar a lot sooner than that.

I think it might also be useful to have some examples of the different player role archetypes from the league historically, one or two of a top Goon / Dangler / Crease-Clearing Defenseman etc. available to see in the new player section where you are introduced to the archetypes. While the archetype suggestions tell you the meaningful attributes relevant to it, it can be hard to extrapolate that to how it could look statistically on the ice. Seeing some examples of players for the different archetypes might make some of the less immediately tantalizing archetypes more interesting if you can see examples of players who still get points / get a lot of checks / etc. For example, I might be interested in making a Goon type player, but I'm worried about how useful my player can be offensively and defensively if I'm putting lots of points into fighting and aggression. Seeing a player who fights a lot but still has a bunch of assists and decent defensive stats would kind of answer those kinds of questions. I know there are changes between sims / versions of the game that might make these difficult, but it's more about the showing the potential and the idea of the archetype than perfect accuracy.

Once I made my player, I was lucky enough to get confused by the naming structure of the draft class discords and end up joining the S68 discord before I joined the S69 version. This ended up being a hilarious and pleasant accident as I joined right in the middle of a great conversation and was unofficially inducted into the tribe. As a new player as we got closer to the draft, it was pretty interesting to see the difference between the draft class discords. Not that any one is "superior" than the other, but with a lot of new creates on the S69 server there was a lot more excitement around the SMJHL draft (as there should be!) and discussing possibilities, while the other had more talk about the future in the SHL and getting closer to the TPE cap for minors.

I feel like scouting went fairly well, as I don't think I had a "bad" conversation with any particular GM. Some were of course more formulaic than others but I can understand trying to get a sense of 60~ different users over the span of a couple weeks or so can be quite difficult, so I didn't mind. S68 had some scouts and GM's in it as well, which I'm sure played a part in how I was drafted, but even without that I did feel out of all the interviews that I had the best one with Ruggsy in terms of just having a good conversation, it wasn't scripted at all and that was something I appreciated about it, so when I was ultimately drafted by him it wasn't a huge surprise. If I was smarter I would have put myself to his first or 2nd pick on my mock, and I did end up going with his first pick.

The draft experience was pretty fun, and the two hosts did a great job of keeping the energy up. There was a fun bit at the beginning when there was still some preparation being done and one of the hosts did some light "roasts" on the people in the youtube audience. Interaction is always fun in these kinds of things. One thing PBE does that I don't think SHL does is a "prospect tournament" where the newly created players are put on teams with inactive low TPE / etc. and they do a small round robin into a streamed playoff and/or final. This is pretty new over there but until the draft hit I didn't realize that I signed up almost 3 weeks ago and it will be another week or two I assume before I start seeing my player in action. Even if the games are meaningless, it's nice to have that little spotlight for the players. There were some errors on the slides for a couple of the players which some of us laughed about, but it was still a great presentation. Things like the major and minor attributes being wrong or 0, or too high for what's allowed for that position. Pretty similar to the scouting problem though, it's a lot of players to get through in a short amount of time, and the errors didn't really take away from the presentation at all. The hosts did a good job with it moving things along.

I was luckily enough to go 6th to Raptors

, partially because of my interview and partially because of the s68 guys, which I believe is the highest a new player went in the draft. Hopefully I can live up to that for the S69 class in the minors going forward. My mock was pretty much mostly wrong, however I was surprised at where some of the S69 guys ended up going, particularly Matthew Leclaire who I think went really late in the draft when if you've been paying attention to the S69 draft discord is one of the most active guys, has recruited a couple people already, has been watching streams, just seems really tapped in to the community already. I imagine a lot of teams just work off the private interviews and don't have time to read all those mundane conversations in the draft discords, so maybe if you have kinda quiet interviews some people might miss out on that. Anyway, if I had to pick a player from the class to rise the most ranks between now and the SHL draft, it'd be that player.

I did join the "Meet the GM" discord for a little bit, but it was kind of hard to follow and I ultimately don't think I did much chatting in there. I'm not sure how successful (or unsuccessful?) people were reaching out to teams through there. Maybe if there was some kind of showcase or event where I could come in at a specific time to hear what teams are about and ask questions in response to that, or vice versa for players to take the podium in front of GM's. Maybe that did happen and I just didn't see it? Just some kind of "live" event would be nice, or perhaps it didn't need to be exactly live and could be stretched over hours or days if it was formatted properly.

Ultimately overall I think creating your player and getting into the draft is a decent process so far. I think it could be improved at some points, in the S69 discord there have been lots of talks around a "player page" or some kind of central location for your player which is along the same lines of some of the earlier stuff I discussed. Just things that either clear up potential confusion or help keep interest flowing all the way up to the draft and when you finally get to join a team, which is where the community really starts to be able to carry your interest.

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***Anthique*** · 11-14-2022, 02:57 PM

That's some interesting suggestions! Thanks for this.

Happy for you that you got picked this high Smile

~~Zap~~ · 11-15-2022, 12:51 AM

Great article!

*Carpy48* · 11-15-2022, 06:17 AM

Just because you mentioned it, the SMJHL used to have some prospect tournaments in the past, I don't know what happened with them though. I can remember some in the late 40s and they're still in the old index forum.

***sve7en*** · 11-15-2022, 08:03 AM

11-15-2022, 06:17 AMCarpy48 Wrote: Just because you mentioned it, the SMJHL used to have some prospect tournaments in the past, I don't know what happened with them though. I can remember some in the late 40s and they're still in the old index forum.

The work behind them got worse when we moved to fhm iirc

I actually also had my first sim league experience in GLB, way back when. It was a lot of fun and the memory of thst definitely caused me to latch on to this so readily.

I'm glad your overall enjoyment has been there, though I agree on the meet the gms discord aspect and get what you're saying regarding a landing page for people to see what's relevant to them until they get invested. Generally there's been a cyclical feedback of MTG is less popular so people pay attention to it less so it gets less popular. It's also class dependent though, since there were so many recreates in the class the MTG and scouting as a whole was weird. I've tried to make Hockey Talk Tonight a "Meet the GMs" episode a few times, and it's done well for that, but it's less effective having moved to Tuesday when a majority of the 1st gens get recruited in the following days.

On the new player onboarding side, we have the rookie mentors, but it can feel unapproachable to some and the checklists and tutorials could use some interaction overhauls for sure, but idk how feasible it'll be.

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