So, I'd like to just take a minute here to point out a couple of things. Over the course of the past season, a few things have been vocally and publicly criticized:

• The seasons are too long. People don't want to spend three years on one singular career.
  
• The seasons are too short. People want to care more about the regular season, so we need to stretch it out more. (In my opinion, making the season even longer is just not an option here. We already only make it through ~6.5 seasons in a year. It takes people at least two real years to get through one full length career, and that's a short one. Realistically, most of them are closer to three years. If we push the regular season to any longer, like six weeks, we're talking about a 10/11 week full season, around or less than five seasons in a real year. That starts to push a full length career past three years, and a long one closer to four years.
  
• We are not transparent enough with announcing changes. (At one point, we were asked whether we could mass PM everyone on the site every time we have a SOTU address.) 
  
• We are too transparent with other things. (if we announce re-sims publicly we're shaming the simmers. I will say, we have made significant efforts to be transparent about those things without publicly shaming anyone. Simmer punishments are no longer announced on site; we keep a private log of them and they're dealt with when we do payroll at the end of the season. It has never, ever been our intention to publicly broadcast the identity of any simmer who commits any infraction, whether it results in a re-sim or not. It's not hard to figure out which simmer was simming on a particular day, since the GMs know and it's not a state secret, but that is not something Head Office will ever name and shame here on the site). I'd also like to point out here that when it comes to re-sims because of the wrong file being used, "suck it up and move on" isn't really a viable option. You either re-sim with the correct file, you make the filework team do an entire update cycle over again on the file that WAS used (in a very short turnaround time to get back to simming), or you tell everybody that the updates they worked hard on for that week are pointless and not going to be input at all for that week/playoffs. In basically any other situation, we're generally in agreement that re-simming isn't the best course of action, but when the wrong file is used (which is the reason for most of the re-sims we've done recently), re-simming is really the option that results in the least loss of work for the most people.
  
• People don't care about IIHF and think it's a "waste of effort"
  
• People DO care about IIHF and think we need to put MORE effort into it to make people care (I'm in this camp. I love IIHF and I think it's so much fun but I don't think enough goes into promoting it, and I don't really know how to fix that without stepping on any toes. I've put in a lot of time and effort for IIHF and a lot of it it hasn't been especially well-received, so if there's something we can do to make that better, I'm all for it but I'm not going to insert my opinions there any longer). 
  
• Regression is too harsh now and should not have been changed
  
• Regression is not harsh enough and needs to be made harsher because careers are too long
  
• It's no fun when the stacked team wins every time and you already know what's going to happen before the season starts
  
• It's no fun to put real years of work into building a team that is the best in the league only to get slapped around by "randomness" and never see anything for all that effort
  
• GMing is too much of a learning curve for new GMs, we need to make it more accessible
  
• The steps we've taken to make it less of a learning curve have made it not as much fun for GMs who like the nitty gritty ins and outs and sliders and toggles and used to spend hours testing and if people want to be GMs they should simply get good.
  
• The live sim experience sucks (yeah there's no counterpoint to this. We know the visual product sucks. We don't really have better options for that, so we've been working with the sim team to try and identify ways to make the experience around the sucky visual product more fun. Even the most garbage movie in the world can be fun if you're watching it with your friends and laughing about how awful it is together.)
  

You can see just from these few things that I threw together over the past five minutes that the viewpoints on even these few things are wildly contrasting, and that goes back to what I said before about different people wanting different things out of the league. I do think that the best course on most of these things lies somewhere in the middle, because the opposing ends of the spectrum are generally the loudest but the majority of people land in between, and we want to try to provide something enjoyable for everybody.

I think there's a ton of stuff that we can work on here, and I hope people bear with us because this league is a constantly evolving thing. I always want to listen to people's concerns and suggestions, I just hope that people realize how vastly different (and often contradictory) the opinions and suggestions we're getting are.

At the end of the day, any hobby can get stale when you've been doing it for 10+ years like many people on this site have. I've only been here for four and a half years and I will honestly say that my interest and enthusiasm has fluctuated. And that's okay! To me, like a lot of people in here have said, it's not really about the fake hockey. I love the fake hockey, of course, I love writing my little characters and telling little hockey stories and letting the sim engine feed me results that serve as prompts for those stories. But none of it would be fun without the other people in the league, and that's why I'm here. That's why this is by far my most time-consuming hobby, and one that is often a decent amount of work before I get to "play." Like I often tell people - if it wasn't about the community and the human element here, I could just go play an NHL game alone in my basement or with randos online, I could just go play FHM (no) by myself. I choose this hobby because of the people, and the people are the reason I want to put my time in to try and make it better.