(S23) - PT 5 - A New Leaf

[Billybolo53]

PBE CW

[DonnoMania]

SHL PT

[Sutj]

I haven't been part of this league for very long, but I have so far been impressed by how fun this actually is as someone who has never been a part of any sort of simulation league in the past whatsoever. However, as a brand new player, it was very difficult for me to figure out what to do, even with the rookie guides that were provided. The system was very confusing and I honestly only figured out how to buy things and earn money and all that by the end of my first season. I think there could be a better system put in place for new players to make it easier to start them off in the league, though I don't really have any ideas how you would go about doing that. I also think it should be a little easier for more casual players to compete in the two leagues. I would honestly consider myself quite active, making sure that I do every PT, Trivia, weekly training, and activity check. However, someone who can't be bothered writing up 200 word paragraphs or writing huge articles for money so that they can buy equipment and weekly trainings, will fall behind very quickly as they will really only be able to earn about 6 TPE a week - activity check and trivia if they are bothered to ask for the answers. All in all, I think the league is going well but there are small things which could user improvement on. I do also like the new name even though it will be hard to get used to going from saying NSFL to ISFL

[GoonerBear]

Until it happens, the number one thing I am always going to harp on is a new sim engine suitable for what the ISFL brings. As it stands, I have had several long-standing beefs about how Draft Day Pro Sports Football 2016 handles football logic. What is going out of bounds? What are timeouts? What is a two-minute drill? What is a Hail Mary? What is not running the ball up the gosh-darned middle every single time with goal-to-go?

And the number one thing which still ticks me off to this day is how the sim determines your player's field position. The ball carrier is marked down at the point where the rightmost pixel on the dot is. This is consistent for both teams. This very much favors the home team since they always go left-to-right and the away team always goes right-to-left. It appears as though the home team has barely done anything and gains at least a yard or two. The away team does the same thing, and they lose yards. Having home-field advantage is one thing, but that makes it feel pretty blatant.

While I was going back through old indices for an article, I recalled one particularly dubious call as well. It was the S13 Ultimus, between OCO and COL. Down 3, with 1:10 to go, COL kicks it deep instead of attempting an onside kick. A real football coach who did that would have been executed in the streets, never mind fired. And the heaps of run plays called when a team should be all-in on the pass in desperation mode. Those will never cease to infuriate me.

I am totally okay with playing the game and losing. Even losing a lot if that's just how the team's rolling that year. DDPSF16 makes it feel a lot like robbery, a black box which forces certain outcomes enough times that I would hope there's been an ongoing search for a sim with the game of football as we understand it in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty.

[SomeSay...]

Written Option: The league has made a major change recently, one which will hopefully prevent future accidental Discord incursions by neo-Nazis getting confused by our less-than-appropriate name. In your view, what are some other changes you think need to be made to the league, its rules, or how it runs? Are there any pressing changes or issues that you think should be fixed?

Well as someone who's not versed to much into the rules of the league I don't have to many complaints when it comes to the rules. Overall, I feel it's fare, I would like to see something possibly done to Free Agency to make it a bit more fun for the players. I think relaxing on some tampering rules and making a news outlet to keep things spicy could be fun idea. You have a source who is trust worthy to turn items they hear from HO and GMs into news articles on Twitter or youtube, almost like our own little sportscenter. Honestly, but with how strict some things are I don't know if it could work. But hey, nice idea in my opinion.

Generally, I feel everyone has done a good job running things since I joined. Now, obviously there's some hiccups but that's excusable. I would like to see things done in a more timely manner on certain items. Media/GFC grading. If someone is in a pinch money wise and needs to purchase something before a update or what not. Having a quick turn around on those items would be beneficial. But mostly HO listens to the environment and bases changes of off feedback which is all you can ask for.

As mentioned above those are only things that could possibly use some improvement but overall there isn't any pressing issues in my opinion that warrant immediate action. We all have lives and we all dedicate time. And as long as those who have important roles understand what type of time is required and can give that time. There's not more I can really ask of anyone.

[Number 82]

Possible changes? Well something that tends to get brought up by new users is the player creation process. I know that we have the player builder tool which is very helpful and if that could be integrated to new site and be the start of the player creation process. A possible enhancement to the tool could be to have the ability to export the attribute values from the builder tool so you could just copy and paste it, that could be something that may help newer members to get started as I've seen instances where a user has miscalculated or not applied their TPE.

Going a step further, perhaps the player creation process on the new site could move away from a forum/text to something resembling a form. This way errors or missing information such as player weight which sometimes people forget to add could be flagged with users being made aware of required fields/information should they have left something blank. Structured as form you could have fields such as Player Name, whilst having a dropdown to select between the Positions/Archetypes which could display the initial starting attributes. Something like this could help new users as the current process is to find the position, then the archetype, copy it and the paste and edit the info.

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[yonggarius]

This league had gone through several big changes lately, and I like them so far. I think the name change will provide the league with renewed vigor (along with its original purpose of avoiding being filtered), and the new trading cards will give users a new content to play with. And to suggest an additional change to the league, I think a change in the sim will be the best suggestion.

Currently, we're living in an era of broken sim. Speed is everything, and many player archetypes- especially in skill positions- with lower speed caps are being abandoned. A good example of that is possession wide receiver. While it has clear upside of 100 hands, the possession archetype is not popular due to its cap speed being only 90, and having lower max height/weight than red zone threat archetype, which has the same cap speed (although red zone threat is another unpopular archetype). So that lead to most of wide receivers to select either speed or route runner archetypes. Other positions also saw one or more archetypes effectively abandoned because of speed. This phenomenon decreases the player diversity of the league, and will harm the fun in the league if this teend continues. So I think we need to decrease the value of speed by either reworking the archetype or move on to a new sim engine in order to break off from the iron fist of speed.(239)

[Thor]

I'd like to see a review of the TPE scale and archetypes to see if the caps/minimums potentially need to be adjusted to make for a wider gap in the skill of players at some positions.

I'd love to see a long term answer to the way the games play out, and the obvious one is some kind of new sim engine that nobody seems to have created yet - there are so many frustrating sequences in the current game engine that can mostly be attributed to unfortunate sim logic that see nonsensical things happen in a game like:

Timeouting into a punt late in the half
mysterious rates of 'going for it' on fourth down
A severe lack of general situational awareness
Speed ratings being all over the place
Other weird thresholdy things
Outdated rules and weird penalties

I know people meme about it and I'm sure any engine we use is bound to have some kind of frustrating features, but I've got nothing else to write about and this has to be one of the annoyances of so many people. It would be incredible to be able to see things in a better format and hopefully eventually someone will produce a game we can use to better emulate what is happening.

[juniped]

There are a couple things that I can probably talk about the people have mentioned. People have talked about discussing the communication issues sometimes where issues are communicated to users. Maybe I can talk about ways to make the casino, but honestly I probably shouldn't even be allowed there. So instead what I'm going to talk about is something I agree with and my teammates wrote an article about. Free agency is weird, and seems to favor extensions more than new teams. This seems to results in players never leaving their team and free agency being mostly ignored. I think it would be really cool if there is some more kind of free agency coverage in the league, maybe cool pieces of media are podcast with free agents talking about what they want, where they want to go, so on and so forth. It may be interesting to track who the big free agents are each season and who they might be in talks with. Then again I'm not sure how to make this happen, besides maybe long-running media pieces on the Forum which can sometimes be hard to keep up with. Maybe someone can make a sheet tracking all the free agents each year and teams they've signed with. it's probably a lot of work and not worth it but I just thought it was something interesting sorth examining here

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[enigmatic]

I don't care much about the name change, it's obvious we weren't a neo nazi forum or whatever and we existed for years before that "issue" was ever brought up. But some people felt it was important so yay I guess?

I'm an old timer and the thing I would want the most would be for forum locker rooms to make a come back. I like discord for quick 1 on 1 conversations but to develop a team spirit, nothing was better than forum locker rooms. Even if I couldn't follow discussions all day, I'd be able to catch up at night and give my opinion on things that my teammates talked about hours or even days before. I just wanted to mention that but I know it won't happen.

Something else I'd like to see implemented is an automated upgrades system. I made a tool to help on google sheets but that's where my programming skills end I'm afraid. How cool would it be for people to just be able to assign points and it automatically generates a file for simmers to use? Updater is by far the worst league job ever and it would help limit errors as well. It would cut on a couple of league jobs but we could hire more graders for example to make up for it.