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?

Cheers, RED