(S23) - PT 5 - A New Leaf

[Gwdjohnson]

Like a few people in this thread, my responses are more or less based on stuff already in the SHL, because that is where I'm most active, but there are a few things that seemingly need changing in the league.

First of all, there's the sim engine. In the SHL, our old engine, Simon T Hockey Simulator, was exposed as having awful coding for how attributes interacted with each other, and it became clear that you could easily just min/max a player into being one of the best in the league at low TPE. In ISFL, the current engine at least from talking to people seems to be similar. Attributes publicly known to be overpowered and certain attributes causing issues or not working as intended. Many people don't like the engine, and with SHL when that was the case we only lasted a season before moving elsewhere. Maybe there's a lack of alternatives here? I dunno, but the quality of the engine is part and parcel of a thriving league.

Secondly, and I've already seen this mentioned, is an automated bank. When I first started on SHL, the bank functioned the same as the one here, and it SUCKED. No one was really keeping track of everyone's wallets or anything and it was just a pain in the ass to use. When we changed to an automated system, it made everything ridiculously easier and was another change that the SHL made to the benefit of many, that ISFL should really push to look into as well.

(257 words)

[StamkosFan]

I would like to see trivia run on a google form, as well as predictions; it would make it both easier for the PT team to grade, and easier for players to submit and make changes. Speaking of predictions, they were great TPE for casuals like me, I don’t know why you guys got rid of most of the weeks this year; please, bring it back! Weekly predictions were one of the things that kept casuals involved with the actual games, but now it’s quite sporadic when they have a predictions PT.

It would also be nice to have an automated updating system, so that manual update threads no longer have to be a thing. For ISFL, you don’t even have to start from scratch, you can just copy the portal that EFL already has. It saves a lot of work on everyone’s part; update threads are a nuisance to maintain and a nuisance to process. With a portal, all you have to do is paste a link and click a button to upgrade your stats; no room for pesky math errors or update scale confusion.

Third, I’d like to see more double media events! The draft should be double media, not 1.5x media; there should be more hearty and sufficient bonuses for events like that all the time. Make it worth the effort.

[Jiggly_333]

My first suggestion is to not ask this question as a PT because no one actually reads PTs. And many people when pressed to give an answer like this in a PT will whip out something dumb that doesn't really need to be changed. There's this old marketing experiment where Prego was trying to sell more pasta sauce. They did a survey and found that a ton of people wanted spicier sauce. But when they actually sold it, the numbers were average. The level of satisfaction wasn't to the level that was expected through the survey. Instead, they sold extra chunky sauce, something that had very little support in the survey, and it outsold all expectations. People were presented with choices and while they made a choice for what they thought they wanted, they actually wanted something else.

So my suggestion is just to crack down on harassment and bullying. I've asked for this for forever and it still hasn't happened, mostly because people willfully ignore it as it's happening. Sure, the name may have lured some assholes in, but there's many more assholes that we just sort of allowed to hang around. I will never not talk about the fact that we allowed multiple horrible people run around with no consequences until they got tired and left. Fix that.

[Forty Jordy]

PBE Affiliate PT

[Ry_]

PBE Championship Week

[puolivalmiste]

As Im pretty new in league and haven't really been active on the site or discord because this has taken clear sideshow role as secondary league after I got even more involved in SHL as such I think most things I notice are more on the technical side specially when comparing it to the SHL. Though I think that forums as communication format are outdated they serve both leagues well enough, but anything tailored just specially for leagues needs would be welcome change, which might be what was teased in announcement. There is so much that could be done but resources aren't there as this is in the end just a hobby for the people.

Some stuff I would like to see brought over from SHL is a bank that is usually up to date and shows any pending requests that need to be approved with automatic purchases for training and equipment. Doing trivias and predictions as they are now hasn't been an issue but I think that to make their grading faster possibility of using google form or similar platform could maybe be explored.

Ofcourse in some wild dreams I would like to see for example automatic updates or like interface where you can easily add gained TPE and update your player.

[Shiznit19]

As far as changes to the league goes, I am fairly new still so I am not totally sure on all the logistical stuff that goes on behind the scenes. So with that being said, I feel like I cannot really comment or knock any of that. Everything seems to work pretty well and those with league jobs seem to do a good enough job getting everything done. The thing I would change, and not sure how feasible it is, would be the SIM platform. I think some of the outcomes tend to be very inconsistent and in the DSFL it seemed like home field advantage carried a huge weight. Another thing I would love to see with the sim was a more realistic visual approach. The dot bros are fun enough to watch scrambling around but feel like it would be great to have some Madden-esque visual players. Even if that means blocky looking dudes Circa 2001 or so. I think if the visuals improved during the sim games, it would get a bit more attention outside of the league and result in more users which would also be cool. Also would make watching the games a bit more exciting, again, not that the block bros are boring. They are actually quite the thrill to watch. Other than that, it has been a fun experience so far and I am excited about the name change.

[hotdog]

PBE Affiliate

[nunccoepi]

well I'm sure like a solid 85% of the PTs will be about how our financial system needs fixing, and quite frankly, I agree. I think changes are being made that are going to address that, and I think we still need to encourage other changes, but for the grader's sake I'll pick on something else. I think we need to be better at job professionalism. To me that includes three specific areas: turnover, onboarding, and accountability. Now, I know that this is just a hobby for some people, so those people will be very against those of us that want to take it so seriously. But to that I say: "the future is now old man." In all seriousness, I think we've shown by now that we want this to be a serious task, so if you arent up for the commitment then don't apply. I think that's the direction we're moving in, and I'm here for it. But despite that, we still do a relatively poor job of keeping the right people in the loop when someone leaves a job which includes hiring people and making sure the right information is disseminated and the job still gets done. Additionally, when those people do come on board, we do a poor job of preparing them to do the job--there's still too much on the job training which hinders efficacy. And finally, we need to require those with jobs to be more accountability with the work they are doing so that we can expect and demand higher quality or better respond to those who are maxed out.

[Troen]

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?

The obvious matter to consider is money. Writing and graphics give enough money that the payout from contracts is almost inconsequential, meaning that the best/most active players can afford to take minimum contracts, helping the better teams stay better. There's not really a possibility of luring a high-profile free agent over to your team because you can pretty much only offer money in the contract. Others have written to suggest the issue is also with the inability for teams looking for free agents to negotiate with them for very long and I could see that helping, but the incentives to move are just very low if you like where you're at and you're on a team that's winning. Team salaries are capped while media income isn't, meaning that anyone who is devoted can get an arbitrarily large amount of money via media. Capping media income could help with that issue, but then the likely result is less media which I doubt is what the league wants. So, I don't have any solution that seems like it would help the money problem without causing other issues, but I do think it is a problem.
Additionally, at least in the past it was wildly more lucrative per unit time to work on written media rather than pictures. Written media pretty much gives money based on time spent, while the grading scale of pictures means that spending 2x the time to go up 1 grade is never worth it. The incentives result in lower-quality work being a better ROI. I haven't followed it since the grading scale changed and so it may have improved, but I did strongly notice the imbalance when I first started.