05-20-2023, 07:05 PM_Blitz_ Wrote: 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.

You are easily my favourite user on this site and I have so much respect for everything you do here <3