11-17-2021, 05:58 PMPremierBromanov Wrote:

11-17-2021, 03:28 PMThatguy91 Wrote: While I don't directly disagree with what you are saying, I think we need to consider as a community what level of commitment we expect from our GMs. I think we can all agree that in recent years, Buffalo and Hamilton has set the golden standard for what successful management looks like, but should we really expect the whole league to follow an example that currently only 20% of the league is able to attain at this moment? If yes, then I think we'd need to see a pretty radical turn-around of GMs and GM culture and I'm not sure thats even realistic. And if we are already experiencing a lack of GM applications, what will that look like after we effectively ask even more of a GM in terms of a very niche part of the GMing experience? Additionally, if we continue on this heading the teams that are already ahead will continue to build on their already superior knowledge and testing systems, making it even more difficult for new GMs to break in and be successful.

Expecting teams to not only have knowledge regarding automation but also have an active group of a handful of testers isn't something we should be striving for imo, I think thats setting the bar too high and I don't see that as a sustainable system for 20 teams. That would require what, upwards of 20-25% of the total league population to take active part in testing and that seems way too high.

Maybe I'm just overthinking things, and obviously everyone has different ideas of what is reasonable and what they want to experience in the league but I tend to lean towards simplifying things rather than making the system more complex.

I also realise that a lot of these points are probably making me sound like a whiney GM that wants easy success, but in all honesty I think that if we continue this 'arms race' its only going to lead to greater stratification in this league. I don't like the idea of making changes that punishes the success of teams that have set up proven systems, but I do think we should seriously consider and discuss (just like we are doing at the moment!) what level of commitment we expect from our GMs, if that is sustainable and/or realistic and what effect it has on the overall health of the league.

i think everything you said is reasonable, i guess I would just say that the competition is good, no? There are folks who will invest as much time as possible before there are diminishing returns and I'm glad those people are around. I think its all well and good that there are gms who put in less work and are rewarded less and the same goes for players as well. But people play for all different reasons, so I would hate to punish more invested users to reward more casual users in the name of...something, i dont know. Not every user is here to win, and that's fine. We shouldn't expect the level of parity in the NHL, for example, since we're not getting paid and our victories are less meaningful.

I would also echo @LordBirdman 's sentiment: I don't want to GM either. I'm glad there are folks who have the time to manage a team, even if they don't have the time to run hours of sims every season.

That said, I don't really know what an alternative would look like, but a PT pass certainly frees up more time for managerial duties.

There is a reason why most competition based games match players by a rating system. If you have a mix of people trying to enjoy their time on the site/chat/have fun and another set trying to go hard into metagaming and sim engine exploits, it's not going to mix well long term. And that gets compounded further when we are a player driven league that has turned into being way too reliant on manager time/effort to drive team (and by proxy player) success. A good GM should be able to manage the room and handle their teams personality and keep things moving there, but ultimately their whole objective ends up being gated by test sims and basically getting their whole roster to clone each other ratings wise as much as possible. That isn't even going into how much more people who could help out other teams, just don't move around much from what I can tell.

There is a very clear break point where competition is not a good thing in the SHL and that is when a GM can either consistently overcome TPE gaps from their experience/resources (like HAM seems to know how to do) or have no hope of overcoming TPE gaps. The teams that know what they are doing look like they have some kind of cheat code, where as everyone else (like TBB) flounder around trying to figure it out despite having a clearly challenger TPE level roster. I mean seriously, you can clearly see the impact FHM has had on the site when people are earning way more TPE because every mock is giving out more tpe than it used to just cause it is obvious what teams know what they are doing. That noticeable increase in TPE literally is because the league has stagnated and is about as interesting as a paper bag at this point if you are on any of the have-nots.

I don't really know what the point of ever being an SHL GM is for most people if you could just play a normal FHM save (or FM22, OOTP, etc, ) and have more fun without having homework of test simming.

The biggest problem I personally have is that any time you bring up anything about parity you get deflected into some minor topic that isn't going to fix the core issue. I consistently hear "but regression will fix parity" when I can pick out about 5 to 6 other HUGE issues that are also working against parity in a massive way. Lots of people want small changes, when the reality is we made a huge change to the league with the engine and made very little adjustments elsewhere since to fix everything it broke. We even have changes made since I started in the SHL that are working against parity in pretty obvious ways I am not even sure how they ever got put in place.