05-20-2023, 08:45 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: I've held a bunch of those jobs for 20+ seasons up until a few months ago, so I hope I'm allowed to speak, oh almighty one?

I think this view is a bit short-sighted. This is not about the off-season being too long, it's about the ratio between season and off-season being off. This season was 4 weeks of regular season, 2 weeks of playoffs and 2-3 weeks of off-season. So we roughly have 9 week seasons + pre-season, which kinda is in limbo and could be counted either as part of the season or off-season depending on your perspective.

- Just by pure numbers, most peoples seasons will end in the first or second round of the playoffs, which is at some point in week 5. This is pretty much exactly at the 50% mark, so even teams that make it into the playoffs and maybe even win a round there, they are only "active" for about 50% of the total season.
- For teams that don't make the playoffs it's even less, they only play for about 40-45% of the season. Yes they are very likely rebuilding, don't have a lot of people on the team and don't care about more games for now because they will lose anyway, but that is a really low number.
- For the teams that make the finals, that number is roughly 66% which isn't super high either, but acceptable.

I actually think that 66% mark is roughly the "activity time" that we should be aiming for not for the last two teams in the playoffs, but the general majority. Most people should have game action for about two thirds of their time here, with the top teams in the playoffs having a bit more, and then about 25-33% of the season as downtime for everyone to recharge. Yes, for most people in this league the community aspect is more important than the fake hockey aspect these days, and that's fine. But we have slowly become a sim league where there is surprisingly little sim leaguing and game action going on for most of the time.

I think there are two relatively easy solutions for this, that don't cut down on peoples well deserved relaxing time. Number one: Simply stretch out the regular season a bit longer. Make it six weeks intead of four. Have a bit fewer games per sim day and adjust the weekly-TPE payouts accordingly to make sure we don't run into any inflation problems. Obviously this comes with some possible downsides, like rebuilds taking longer than they already do, but also additional positives. One of them, for me, is actually about inflation as well.

People used to talk so much about TPE-inflation, but nobody really talks about game-inflation. We used to have 50 game seasons with 6-8 week turnarounds, now we have 4 week seasons and 66 games. The result is that nowadays game days come at you in bulk, with regular three or four game sims, whereas in the past you usually had only one or two games per sim day to look forward to. This inflation has de-valued the individual games, we just follow our players overall progress through the various stat tools but barely bother with the games themselves anymore. Cutting down on the speed with which we rush through the season might help us appreciate things a bit more again. Also, less work for the simmers per game day.

The second suggestion is something that others have already made in here and which I have conveniently left out of all my calculations so far: Increase the importance of IIHF, so that it feels like an actual part of this leagues core game action and not just some addendum that just... happens. I think one way to make this happen is to include IIHF more into the rewards structure of the league. Have more money or TPE-payouts connected to it, have more PTs that are specifically about IIHF, like running our regular set of weekly tasks (written, predictions, primetime) for the two weeks of IIHF as well, stuff like that.

I fired off a response to your personal criticism in the LAP LR, and I'm prepared for bygones on that part of this if you are. I will observe that, after thinking about it, I vaguely recall being put in my place about anger and misconceptions I had about the Awards process in the late S50s. I'm fairly sure your response was longer, but I don't recall if it was more graceful.

25-33% off time is about where we're at, with 2 weeks out of 6 total weeks for the scheduled games. I think it's difficult to place a balance on activity time for the season against the time it takes to do things (which is my biggest complaint), against how long people think a career should last. It starts to get into the argument of "How long does a person keep their attention focused on their player?" or "How long should a player last?". We can argue that it should take a little over 3 years to go 20 seasons, but then, how do we get 6 seasons in a year? If that priority has shifted, then we can open up on rolling the season out further. I don't control that, though.

This season was shortened. One of the ideas that the Sim Team talked about very seriously last season, in hunting ways to lighten the sim load and keep our people from burning out, was to do a 4 day sim week in a 5 week season, dropping Friday and Saturday sims since those were the hardest days to find availability. We were told that we had to stick to the laid out 4 week schedule. One of the factors cited was along the lines of "people want more seasons in a given year, so we have to have short seasons". So, we went to a 5 day schedule and only dropped Saturday.

I agree with your point about game inflation. If I could get away with it, I would be inclined to at least try a 6 week schedule, because you're right; it does make the days significantly shorter. If we could get sims to less than 1 hour, it might boost engagement. At the very least, it makes simmers' lives easier since there's usually anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes in prep time before the sim and right around 10 minutes after it to do the file drops and some other stuff. Our current average time for a sim is somewhere around 60 minutes. Spacing that out by half, we could probably get down to around 35 minutes and get prep time to a more consistent 20 minutes. So you go from 100 minutes down to 65, which is great, but there's still a staff availability issue.
We cut down from 48 sims (6 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to 40 sims (5 days x 4 weeks x 2 leagues) to cut down on the number of schedule slots to fill. This job currently pays $14.5M, a weekly PT Pass, and a CW Pass, and I still can't get people to want to sim once a week for 6 weeks, including playoffs. Even with a pay raise to keep up with the inflation, I don't know that our team could staff a 6 week season with 2.5 weeks of playoffs (I got in a bit of trouble for forgetting that playoff predictions were a thing). It might be a lower average amount of time per person per day, but it would skim 10 minutes per sim, maybe. That's not accounting for 2 extra weeks of PTs, more file work, or more GM work. There's also a lot of people who don't know their schedule more than 2 weeks at a time and whose schedules aren't consistent more than 4 weeks at a time. It's been a problem that we're getting better at working with, but still has a lot of room for improvement.
It's something that if I could get a couple of extra people to have on-hand, we would at least have a proposal to try it. I don't see a problem with longer seasons for shorter sims, aside from how it makes us look next to other leagues.

As for IIHF, I don't know how much more can be done to make people who don't care about the tournaments, care about the tournaments. Between S65 and S69, I went big on schedule posting and format testing and a bunch of other things within my wheelhouse. I did a few surveys and a lot of the answers I got were to the effect of "Lol idc", "my team's not good enough to watch", "I'm bored". There are several great people who get involved, a few more who watch the games (Shoutout @slothfacekilla <3), but there's a lot of days where there's no one watching. If SHL dailies are around 25 views, the IIHF is around 10 and I'd be surprised if WJC is more than 5. It sucks, and so many problems would likely be easier to manage (not resolved, but easier) if IIHF had more draw. It's gotten a little bit better with more energetic fed heads that've come in and a better IIHF HO organization with Canadice and now Arty and MikeLiut, but the numbers and interest aren't there. I keep hoping that there's a "yet" on the end of that sentence, I want it desperately. I love the IIHF, it was one of the first places where I felt at home on the site. I think it's a matter of getting people to care about the regular season first and then bringing more focus to IIHF.