For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Blitz and I’m one of the Sim Team Leads. In light of the re-sim of SHL Round 1, I wanted to offer a peak behind the curtain to highlight some of the things that we’ve done this season and offer a look forward to what we’re workshopping this off-season.
It’s been a mess this season in both leagues. I totally understand the distaste and frustration with the state of things. Corey and I came in a lot later than we’d have liked to, and then instead of getting to really dig into what was already available, we were scrambling to make sure that we had access to all of the appropriate tools and resources. It’s been an adjustment period, as we’ve been getting our bearings, getting to know the teams and how they work from up close, and then the changes we’ve been throwing at the team and the GMs as the season has gone on. I’m not sorry, because I believe in the work that we’re doing and that it’s part of the territory, but I understand the frustration. It’ll probably still be a touch messy next season as we get into the bigger changes we want to make. I know it’s hard to enjoy as a viewer, but we’re working on it and hopefully it’ll make the experience of watching our sims better in the long run.
While there are practices that we see working and we don’t want to scrap, we’ve been looking at the procedures and process from the ground up. It’s allowed us to look more at the things we have the power to change and come up with some alternative ideas on handling the things that we can’t (sorry y’all, haven’t figured out how to make the sim as pretty as Football Manager).
The first big thing that we’ve introduced is a consolidated Sheets-based tool for tracking goalie starts and changes. Before this, each team has had a lines thread that they post the goalie starts in before every sim day. It’s been a problem to keep track of for simmers because you can end up juggling 20 extra web pages or an extra notepad or something. There’s still a few ideas in progress to make it better, but we’ve been using it in the back half of the season to track goalie starts. GMs can set the entire season at once, 10 games at a time, or however they want to do it as long as there are starts listed for simmers to work from. I’m working on a filterable daily view so it’s a little easier to see day-by-day which games are happening. It’s giving me hell, trying to figure out how to get the criteria sorted, but I’m excited to tackle the challenge. I also want to shift to a more open satellite sheet system so that each war room can access their sheet as the GM sees fit, as opposed to an email-based sheet protections system while everybody’s on one sheet. The hope and the slowly-emerging trend is that by having changes highlighted and listed in one place that we can cut down on the number of missed goalie starts as simmers and GMs get more comfortable with this system.
The next big thing is not quite as far along in the build process, and that’s an illustrated manual on simming that gets into the minutiae of basic requirements and process, as well as basic troubleshooting. It’s a little slower going, but it’s coming together. I haven’t had a ton of time to devote to it, but I’ve been working as consistently as I’ve been able through the season. You might be thinking that there’s a ton of information that gets exchanged when you start simming, and that’s not been the case. There are documents that exist for simmer training, but there are a lot of gaps. Part of the way that the problems in simming have developed is that everybody on the teams has been left to plug those gaps around the other moving parts of a sim by themselves. It’s kind of like, “A little of A, make sure you’ve got B, and POOF! A sim happens!”. I don’t have a lot to say at this time because a lot of the content is in discussion right now, since we’re talking about the future of what our sims are going to look like on the level that I’m writing to. It should move a little faster as we get through the off-season and start to answer those questions.
The first question that I know a lot of people have been interested in is the response to the events that led to the re-sim of the SHL Round 1 games. As soon as a path forward was charted, that person was no longer a member of the sim team. The decision was made based on previous patterns of behavior, the effect it had over the league and the sim team, and the explanation given. We’re not interested in a public shame display, so no further details will be provided. This has informed some small changes and we expect to move forward and be better.
First on the off-season checklist is to get all of us on the same pages for ice graphics and sounds. If you’re a GM and you don’t have ice for FHM 8, I’m sliding into your DMs at some point. Please make my life easy and get after it sooner rather than later. We’re working with HO to get some rules put in place around those things. Ideas like limits to mid-season changes, HSL limits on ice and decibel limits on goal horns are in discussion. I want to start next season with consistent stream graphics and rink sounds. It’s so simple and yet it’s been one of the noticeably ugly parts that we should have more control over.
The biggest one, though, is going to affect a ton of stuff. There are a few different systems that Corey and I have been bouncing off of each other mainly for simming that we’re starting to discuss more seriously. A lot of them revolve around cutting the number of sim days per week down to 4 or 5 instead of the current 6 day schedule, and there’s a lot of interest in streaming full length games and quick simming more games. We want to make the sim easier to watch and understand what’s happening, streamline the simming process for our team and everybody we interact with, make scheduling easier, and ideally be able to add some extra flair in with it a little bit further down the line. There’s a lot of process detail questions coming up as well, like whether or not to pause for goals and whether Fast or Normal is the better approach. We’ve been discussing this on and off through the season and now we’re getting to really throw ideas at the walls and see what sticks. I’m excited to really get into this part of the job, and I’m optimistic that the way forward will be as good as it can be.
To wrap up, if any of this is intriguing to you, if you’d like to learn about simming and streaming, we could still use a few more sets of hands to help out next season. There have been a couple of pretty strong applications to our hiring thread, but I’d love to have more people. If you have any questions or ideas, I’ve been a little busy lately but I’m happy to chat.
enormous thanks to Blitz and Corey for all the work they’ve been putting in here. I know on the surface the status quo has been rough this season, but I hope others have as much confidence as I do in y’all’s ability to put together something really cool here now that you have the time and breathing room to do it. <3
No matter how annoyed I am at losing my round 1 stats (as i finally had a decent 1st round compared to the rest of my regular season), I never meant to take it out on any of you and appreciate the work you are doing.
Keep on doing a good job, I'm sure we can avoid these scenario's in the future with the steps being taken.
Great read, love the transparency, and the last few points were all things I was pondering as I wet my feet once again in the SHL.
Thank you for all your hard work, Blitz (and Corey, but I can't praise him too much, ya know)!
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