2024-07-15, 01:18 PM - Word count:
Please excuse the cross posting…well no in honor of the Cross Sim Charity Event, I have decided to do a cross sim review media article. I am not sure if this has been done before or how each different sim will grade this for it being on other affiliates, but you always say write something pertinent to the league and that you might enjoy so here is what I came up with for my article.
To begin with I am a relative newbie at almost all of the leagues. For those of you who read a couple of my artiles on either PBE or ISFL, you will know that I have been a die hard sportsfan for almost 40 years and love all things sim for almost as long.
Background
So, to begin with, exactly what sims will this involve and what do I plan to accomplish. Well, I think I will start with the second point first. Why write this article? Well as I said I am a newbie, but I really love sim sports games. I have kind of two thoughts in my head on who the readership might be:
1) The HO for the leagues. They might see what are the items in their league to highlight to bring in new players and also what things can be worked on from the others leagues that really make the playing experience for the users that much better. Now, I have no idea the behind the scenes time sink that goes into running these leagues, but I am sure it is massive and I thank all of the people who give their time to keep them running. There might be very good reasons why one league can do one thing that the other leagues don’t use. And this in not going to be a “hit” piece on any league. I hope it will be positives that you can see from the other leagues that you might be able to incorporate.
2) The players of the leagues. I would say I am finding a lot of players that are in multiple leagues. But there might also be some that are in one and either don’t know about the others, or they might just think well I don’t have time for more or I am not sure which would be next to join. Well, maybe this experience will help you think on that.
3) Oh, I thought of one more and that is for me the newbie. There might be some things while I am righting and researching this article that I realize I have no idea how to do or didn’t know I was missing something, and you the great readers will say, “Hey knucklehead, that is easy just X,Y,Z and viola.” So, please ready comment.
Next, what leagues are involved and how much will I be going to include in this article (this might be the first of a couple depending on how well it is received).
I am currently playing in 4 leagues (and looking into another). It is basically the ones considered the Big 5 in America. I should also say that I know these leagues are based off of an actual similation game. I have extensive knowledge of OOTP Baseball and Football Manager. I actually believe I had the first iteration of FM and have been getting it off and on over the years and have been using OOTP Baseball for at least the last 5 or 6 years. I had no idea that there was an actual Simming community out there based on these games until I found twitch with the laund of OOTP25 this year.That let to hearing about the Professional Baseball Experience on these streams and the PBE was my gateway drug. It took me a couple of weeks to actually decide to join, but I am glad I did. The other leagues I joined in order are International Simulation Football League (ISFL/DSFL), the Simulation Hockey League (SHL,mSHL), and the Simulation Soccer League (SSL); I am considering the Simulation Basketball League (SBL), but haven’t created a player yet I am seeing how the first 4 go to see time constraints.
I believe for this article; I am going to try and cover three main processes (maybe a fourth) of the sim experience: 1) Player creation; 2) Updating and keeping up with the character; 3) The playing experience (i.e. wating the player, ability to track stats and such); 4) and maybe extraciricular side items.
First up player creation. I guess this will also have to deal with why/how I came to join the league. Now, let me say perhaps I am unique in that I am not an any of the reddit boards or sports communities that seem to be the heart of recruitment. But, to start on a positive note I am going to give the one thing from each league that lead me to really join and start to play:
A. PBE: as I said I am a big player of OOTP and the #1 thing that PBE might have going for it is having a great background infrastructure from the sim game they are on and the twitch community that is a part of it. The first place I heard of PBE was on an EVCinNYC2 stream and then I kept hearing it from others and checked out their stream and finally joined.
B. The next one I joined was ISFL. And it was their promotion of the 50 year that was actually posted to the PBE affiliate announcements that was the big push here. Great job by their “outreach’? team. They just made it too enticing for me not to join.
C. This led me to look at the others. And if you read my first Deep Dive here you will know that the thought of having an international tournament between seasons really clinched this one for me. Having a second group of teammates and a different playing tactic over a season just sounded cool. There was also their portal, but I will save that for updating section.
D. I joined SSL last, but they really had an advantage over all of the rest. Soccer/Football is by far and away my favorite sport and I was very familiar with their engine they use. So, since I was having so much fun with the others in a short time I joined them as well. I also do like their cup structure, which is build in to how soccer works.
Now for the actual player creation portion of the game. (aside: I just realized this might be harder than I thought to go through as I don’t want to get bogged down in minutia or a lot of links graphs, but that never stopped kdr before). I would say that it is very very similar in all of the communities with a couple of tweeks for each one. The main process is pick your position and archtype and then use the base TPE to create your player. Most of the leagues do a good job with this and have extensive tutorials and places to find things like current number of players at each position and what each trait means. For this section I will highlight one item that two of the leagues are using that I liked very much. When creating a player and choosing a role in both the SHL and the SSL it will highlight those ratings that are most important for the player archtype you want to play. It doesn’t lock you into anything, but it was nice to know this. Especially because one of my first experiences in one of the leagues I learned that the archtype and position I choose for PBE might not work and for my ISFL player I learned after that one rating I thought would be very important for my chosen archtype wasn’t all that important.
All of the leagues have scouting which is a really fun part of the league I think for new players. It allows for the GMs to not only get to know you, but you can also learn about the league itself and what each GM/team is thinking on tactics. When they ask you if you have questions always ask about how the league works from their perspective. I am scouting for ne of my teams so see how it works from both sides. And here is my suggestion for each league HO. You all have some type of rookie tasks to get a player started on easily earning TPE. Well, make one of these some type of draft combine because there is a core set of questions all teams ask about. Just put this in the combine let all the teams see the answers and if the players even do this and then they can do the secondary scouting from there.
Ok, we have created a player and how you get on a team varies by when you join the league, but it is pretty much the same for all of them. You go into the developmental system and then get drafted by a minor league franchise your first year and then the following year you go into the majors draft. In one league I created later so my original draft was missed on I was a waiver claim.
Now, we are in the updating and player building section and first I will mention that all of the leagues do get together and know they are a bigger community by allowing for one of their main weekly TPE earners the PT (not sure what PT stands for, anyone?) but all allow for you to crosspost your PT from one affiliate to another. So, it is less time spent in total.Pick the one you like the best and it is one for all.
Next, I have my big shout out of the entire article. @SHL for their player portal. This is the best experience I have in any league for time savings. Basically, there is no more player updating pages or posting links to check. The portal is basically point and click and everything is done. It looks like the SSL is also moving to this type of portal. If possible for the leagues to investigate that don’t have it, it makes the time needed for your core TPE earning tasks miniscule and so so easy.
The updating process itself, for SHL it works through the player portal and again is a breeze. I will say a possibly downside to this is the elimination of some money earning position such as updater and auditor (which I am in PBE), but hey automation right just make sure we don’t get to Terminator Ais. Both the PBE and the SSL have a tool similar to the player creator that helps you update and make a uniform output for you and your updater. I don’t believe ISFL has anything like this so far and is all manual, but not too bad unless I am missing something. IT might be something for their HO to look into .
Most of the leagues also have a weekly checklist on their forum t make it easy for you to go through and see what you have done and still need to do and the banking number is right in your profile. @PBEers this is the one thing I feel I am missing from your experience. So, am I missing something. I have taking, as my updater knows, to running my own checklist below my updates. Also, the only way I can find to check my bank account it to use a discord bot or go into the bank spreadsheet. Help here.
And since I just called out the PBE, here is something I think they do a good job of that is easy and maybe the others can look into. When drafted all players (should) want to get advice from their new team on how they should progress their build or input on how their player will be used. Well all team discords normally have a #build help channel. However, PBE discords have a channel for each individual player for this type of communication. So, my help doesn’t get lost when I want to go back to it in all of the other advice.
The tasks: I will just say that all of the leagues have pretty much the same core task for TPE development: and Activity Check, a seasonal equipment purchase and perhaps a weekly training. Along with normally the PT mentioned earlier. Normally about 10-15 weekly earning. I will save the other items for the #4 peripherals if I do that part now. They are pretty easy and you can put into them however much time you want to. For the PT most have a word counter build right into the page which is helpful when they normally have a word count requirement.
Now we come to what I am calling playability. Like I said this is the place that will deal with the actual fun stuff like what is happening to your player tracking teams and stats and such. For this I think I will just highlight some of the aspects I find the most important in my fun so far.
Game Streams: Well this is the one standout place so far. 3 of the leagues use youtube to host and stream their games and one PBE uses twitch and I find it to be no contest. Watching and listening on twitch with the ability to chat with the others watching it right in the stream is by far the best experience I have had so far with a stream. And more importantly for those who like me can’t watch live very often, but like to catch the replay stream, their announcers stay on the replay. Honorable mention to SSL. I have not been able to catch a live stream of theirs yet, but I rewatched the draft and I thought it was very well done and it had a chat reply. Now, I looked at a replay of a match day and it says chat replay disabled. For the Hos my point here that makes it fun especially for those of us who are not available when you stream live, keep the announcers on. My one problem with both ISFL and SHL right now is that when I watch the streams it is just music playing for the game and they are hard to follow.
I do think from what I have seen SSL has the best engine to view with a very close second being PBE. But that is simply as one person during a scouting said that they are by far the two best sports sim games going today. But all of them keep the fun if you can follow where exactly your player is in the field.
Another positive I will highlight is how SHL treats their minor leagues and major leagues. They are the only league from what I can tell that treats them as totally individual entities. What I mean by this is that they have different weekly tasks depending on what place you are in. I find this a nice touch, but I am sure it leads to more work on the back end. Maybe this is how they offset the loss of “money” paying jobs with the portal, but it is a nice touch and makes me feel like I am really progressing up the ladder.
Lastly, for this portion, I will deal with tracking how your player is doing. In other words, how are the stats given can you tell what exactly your player did over the season, historically etc. So, I think all of the leagues do a pretty good job and all have an “index” where you can find this kind of information. Maybe it is because I have used it the longest, but the PBE seems the cleanest to me for navigation and finding a blend of individual player stats with teams stats and historical stats. I would also give an honorable mention to how SHL handles their stats because in my first playoff run with the team, it was really fun for me to watch the stream and then go to the index check the boxscore and see how I did in the game. I could sort a lot of information on their index and made it easier to find what I was looking for. Again for ISFL and SSL I might have just not used it as much and they do have a tone of information on their index.
I will conclude here now and maybe leave peripherals for another article in the future. Except to say one thing. And that is the #1 item that makes all of these leagues the most fun to play are all of you in the community that are reading this article and producing media and graphics for all of the other players to read and enjoy. Epsecially those that have given their time to be the infrastructure of the league, that run departments and are GMs. I am sure all of you casual players have noticed that if you need help with anything have a question and you post in the discord of any of these league you will have an answer and a lot of times it is not only in under a minute, but withing seconds. I just don’t know where they find the time to do this, but I thank each and every one of you that has made it fun for me to play so far.
So, if you are only in one of these leagues and are having a really fun time with it think of trying one of the other ones, you don’t even have to know the sport or sim game that well because you will find a host of players waiting to help you out just like you do in the sim league you are in now.
Kdr signing off
PBE: Murphy LeSwift AMA/OBX (Braves fan)
ISFL: JamesIsRunning Wilder Portland (Bucs fan)
SHL: Gordon McFisherman QCC (Islander fan)
SSL: Puma Superhoops Tokyo SC (QPR fan)
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To begin with I am a relative newbie at almost all of the leagues. For those of you who read a couple of my artiles on either PBE or ISFL, you will know that I have been a die hard sportsfan for almost 40 years and love all things sim for almost as long.
Background
So, to begin with, exactly what sims will this involve and what do I plan to accomplish. Well, I think I will start with the second point first. Why write this article? Well as I said I am a newbie, but I really love sim sports games. I have kind of two thoughts in my head on who the readership might be:
1) The HO for the leagues. They might see what are the items in their league to highlight to bring in new players and also what things can be worked on from the others leagues that really make the playing experience for the users that much better. Now, I have no idea the behind the scenes time sink that goes into running these leagues, but I am sure it is massive and I thank all of the people who give their time to keep them running. There might be very good reasons why one league can do one thing that the other leagues don’t use. And this in not going to be a “hit” piece on any league. I hope it will be positives that you can see from the other leagues that you might be able to incorporate.
2) The players of the leagues. I would say I am finding a lot of players that are in multiple leagues. But there might also be some that are in one and either don’t know about the others, or they might just think well I don’t have time for more or I am not sure which would be next to join. Well, maybe this experience will help you think on that.
3) Oh, I thought of one more and that is for me the newbie. There might be some things while I am righting and researching this article that I realize I have no idea how to do or didn’t know I was missing something, and you the great readers will say, “Hey knucklehead, that is easy just X,Y,Z and viola.” So, please ready comment.
Next, what leagues are involved and how much will I be going to include in this article (this might be the first of a couple depending on how well it is received).
I am currently playing in 4 leagues (and looking into another). It is basically the ones considered the Big 5 in America. I should also say that I know these leagues are based off of an actual similation game. I have extensive knowledge of OOTP Baseball and Football Manager. I actually believe I had the first iteration of FM and have been getting it off and on over the years and have been using OOTP Baseball for at least the last 5 or 6 years. I had no idea that there was an actual Simming community out there based on these games until I found twitch with the laund of OOTP25 this year.That let to hearing about the Professional Baseball Experience on these streams and the PBE was my gateway drug. It took me a couple of weeks to actually decide to join, but I am glad I did. The other leagues I joined in order are International Simulation Football League (ISFL/DSFL), the Simulation Hockey League (SHL,mSHL), and the Simulation Soccer League (SSL); I am considering the Simulation Basketball League (SBL), but haven’t created a player yet I am seeing how the first 4 go to see time constraints.
I believe for this article; I am going to try and cover three main processes (maybe a fourth) of the sim experience: 1) Player creation; 2) Updating and keeping up with the character; 3) The playing experience (i.e. wating the player, ability to track stats and such); 4) and maybe extraciricular side items.
First up player creation. I guess this will also have to deal with why/how I came to join the league. Now, let me say perhaps I am unique in that I am not an any of the reddit boards or sports communities that seem to be the heart of recruitment. But, to start on a positive note I am going to give the one thing from each league that lead me to really join and start to play:
A. PBE: as I said I am a big player of OOTP and the #1 thing that PBE might have going for it is having a great background infrastructure from the sim game they are on and the twitch community that is a part of it. The first place I heard of PBE was on an EVCinNYC2 stream and then I kept hearing it from others and checked out their stream and finally joined.
B. The next one I joined was ISFL. And it was their promotion of the 50 year that was actually posted to the PBE affiliate announcements that was the big push here. Great job by their “outreach’? team. They just made it too enticing for me not to join.
C. This led me to look at the others. And if you read my first Deep Dive here you will know that the thought of having an international tournament between seasons really clinched this one for me. Having a second group of teammates and a different playing tactic over a season just sounded cool. There was also their portal, but I will save that for updating section.
D. I joined SSL last, but they really had an advantage over all of the rest. Soccer/Football is by far and away my favorite sport and I was very familiar with their engine they use. So, since I was having so much fun with the others in a short time I joined them as well. I also do like their cup structure, which is build in to how soccer works.
Now for the actual player creation portion of the game. (aside: I just realized this might be harder than I thought to go through as I don’t want to get bogged down in minutia or a lot of links graphs, but that never stopped kdr before). I would say that it is very very similar in all of the communities with a couple of tweeks for each one. The main process is pick your position and archtype and then use the base TPE to create your player. Most of the leagues do a good job with this and have extensive tutorials and places to find things like current number of players at each position and what each trait means. For this section I will highlight one item that two of the leagues are using that I liked very much. When creating a player and choosing a role in both the SHL and the SSL it will highlight those ratings that are most important for the player archtype you want to play. It doesn’t lock you into anything, but it was nice to know this. Especially because one of my first experiences in one of the leagues I learned that the archtype and position I choose for PBE might not work and for my ISFL player I learned after that one rating I thought would be very important for my chosen archtype wasn’t all that important.
All of the leagues have scouting which is a really fun part of the league I think for new players. It allows for the GMs to not only get to know you, but you can also learn about the league itself and what each GM/team is thinking on tactics. When they ask you if you have questions always ask about how the league works from their perspective. I am scouting for ne of my teams so see how it works from both sides. And here is my suggestion for each league HO. You all have some type of rookie tasks to get a player started on easily earning TPE. Well, make one of these some type of draft combine because there is a core set of questions all teams ask about. Just put this in the combine let all the teams see the answers and if the players even do this and then they can do the secondary scouting from there.
Ok, we have created a player and how you get on a team varies by when you join the league, but it is pretty much the same for all of them. You go into the developmental system and then get drafted by a minor league franchise your first year and then the following year you go into the majors draft. In one league I created later so my original draft was missed on I was a waiver claim.
Now, we are in the updating and player building section and first I will mention that all of the leagues do get together and know they are a bigger community by allowing for one of their main weekly TPE earners the PT (not sure what PT stands for, anyone?) but all allow for you to crosspost your PT from one affiliate to another. So, it is less time spent in total.Pick the one you like the best and it is one for all.
Next, I have my big shout out of the entire article. @SHL for their player portal. This is the best experience I have in any league for time savings. Basically, there is no more player updating pages or posting links to check. The portal is basically point and click and everything is done. It looks like the SSL is also moving to this type of portal. If possible for the leagues to investigate that don’t have it, it makes the time needed for your core TPE earning tasks miniscule and so so easy.
The updating process itself, for SHL it works through the player portal and again is a breeze. I will say a possibly downside to this is the elimination of some money earning position such as updater and auditor (which I am in PBE), but hey automation right just make sure we don’t get to Terminator Ais. Both the PBE and the SSL have a tool similar to the player creator that helps you update and make a uniform output for you and your updater. I don’t believe ISFL has anything like this so far and is all manual, but not too bad unless I am missing something. IT might be something for their HO to look into .
Most of the leagues also have a weekly checklist on their forum t make it easy for you to go through and see what you have done and still need to do and the banking number is right in your profile. @PBEers this is the one thing I feel I am missing from your experience. So, am I missing something. I have taking, as my updater knows, to running my own checklist below my updates. Also, the only way I can find to check my bank account it to use a discord bot or go into the bank spreadsheet. Help here.
And since I just called out the PBE, here is something I think they do a good job of that is easy and maybe the others can look into. When drafted all players (should) want to get advice from their new team on how they should progress their build or input on how their player will be used. Well all team discords normally have a #build help channel. However, PBE discords have a channel for each individual player for this type of communication. So, my help doesn’t get lost when I want to go back to it in all of the other advice.
The tasks: I will just say that all of the leagues have pretty much the same core task for TPE development: and Activity Check, a seasonal equipment purchase and perhaps a weekly training. Along with normally the PT mentioned earlier. Normally about 10-15 weekly earning. I will save the other items for the #4 peripherals if I do that part now. They are pretty easy and you can put into them however much time you want to. For the PT most have a word counter build right into the page which is helpful when they normally have a word count requirement.
Now we come to what I am calling playability. Like I said this is the place that will deal with the actual fun stuff like what is happening to your player tracking teams and stats and such. For this I think I will just highlight some of the aspects I find the most important in my fun so far.
Game Streams: Well this is the one standout place so far. 3 of the leagues use youtube to host and stream their games and one PBE uses twitch and I find it to be no contest. Watching and listening on twitch with the ability to chat with the others watching it right in the stream is by far the best experience I have had so far with a stream. And more importantly for those who like me can’t watch live very often, but like to catch the replay stream, their announcers stay on the replay. Honorable mention to SSL. I have not been able to catch a live stream of theirs yet, but I rewatched the draft and I thought it was very well done and it had a chat reply. Now, I looked at a replay of a match day and it says chat replay disabled. For the Hos my point here that makes it fun especially for those of us who are not available when you stream live, keep the announcers on. My one problem with both ISFL and SHL right now is that when I watch the streams it is just music playing for the game and they are hard to follow.
I do think from what I have seen SSL has the best engine to view with a very close second being PBE. But that is simply as one person during a scouting said that they are by far the two best sports sim games going today. But all of them keep the fun if you can follow where exactly your player is in the field.
Another positive I will highlight is how SHL treats their minor leagues and major leagues. They are the only league from what I can tell that treats them as totally individual entities. What I mean by this is that they have different weekly tasks depending on what place you are in. I find this a nice touch, but I am sure it leads to more work on the back end. Maybe this is how they offset the loss of “money” paying jobs with the portal, but it is a nice touch and makes me feel like I am really progressing up the ladder.
Lastly, for this portion, I will deal with tracking how your player is doing. In other words, how are the stats given can you tell what exactly your player did over the season, historically etc. So, I think all of the leagues do a pretty good job and all have an “index” where you can find this kind of information. Maybe it is because I have used it the longest, but the PBE seems the cleanest to me for navigation and finding a blend of individual player stats with teams stats and historical stats. I would also give an honorable mention to how SHL handles their stats because in my first playoff run with the team, it was really fun for me to watch the stream and then go to the index check the boxscore and see how I did in the game. I could sort a lot of information on their index and made it easier to find what I was looking for. Again for ISFL and SSL I might have just not used it as much and they do have a tone of information on their index.
I will conclude here now and maybe leave peripherals for another article in the future. Except to say one thing. And that is the #1 item that makes all of these leagues the most fun to play are all of you in the community that are reading this article and producing media and graphics for all of the other players to read and enjoy. Epsecially those that have given their time to be the infrastructure of the league, that run departments and are GMs. I am sure all of you casual players have noticed that if you need help with anything have a question and you post in the discord of any of these league you will have an answer and a lot of times it is not only in under a minute, but withing seconds. I just don’t know where they find the time to do this, but I thank each and every one of you that has made it fun for me to play so far.
So, if you are only in one of these leagues and are having a really fun time with it think of trying one of the other ones, you don’t even have to know the sport or sim game that well because you will find a host of players waiting to help you out just like you do in the sim league you are in now.
Kdr signing off
PBE: Murphy LeSwift AMA/OBX (Braves fan)
ISFL: JamesIsRunning Wilder Portland (Bucs fan)
SHL: Gordon McFisherman QCC (Islander fan)
SSL: Puma Superhoops Tokyo SC (QPR fan)
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