State Of The Union (WIS)
8.5.21

Hey everyone,

We haven’t provided a community wide update in quite some time, so wanted to take the opportunity to do so. I have always promised and preached transparency, and will continue to do so. The following is an update of how things are going, and what the future holds.

The future for WIS has never looked brighter than it does now. Things drastically changed for WIS a little over 8 months ago when our reliable and tireless sole staff member and developer (seble) had decided to move on to a new career after a life-long dedication to WIS. SportsHub was faced with a decision on WIS’s future, and with direction of the departing Seble, they agreed to double the staff size from 1 to 2. In December 2020, Adam Lorenz and myself were officially brought on as new staff, to take over and run WIS, assuming the roles of Program Manager and Software Engineer. SportsHub fully entrusted us to run this entity and gave us full autonomy to enact our prospective vision.

Since coming aboard, the community’s support has been overwhelming. I would like to think it was our energy and excitement helped reinvigorate hope on the evolution of games. But I know this community is a welcoming and passionate one, and would have been positive to any new staff, and are always willing to lend thoughts or a hand. The WIS community is supportive, passionate, helpful, and extremely bright, and I am happy to now be a member of it. I sincerely thank you all for your kind words of encouragement, energy, support, and feedback throughout the process.

I would be lying if I said everything has been positive, we inherited exactly what we expected, or the last 8+ months has been an easy road. We were/are facing prehistoric codebase, much of which has not been touched since its creation around 20 years ago. This copious amount of technical debt leads itself to a more time-consuming issue: technical support. Things often don’t work correctly, or if they do, sometimes they are not intuitive and need explaining. This leads to a morning (including weekend) of error logs that require technical intervention, or 20+ CS tickets a day, explaining something went wrong, or asking why something happened. As it was just Adam and I to sort through them (and answer timely), much of our day was consumed. Which meant momentum on quality life updates, and new development, was heavily impacted by the lack of “free” time. Furthermore, any new features were that much harder to implement, because need to be incorporated in an application that is 10-20 years old.

But we pushed through, and grinded out 60-70 hours a week for 6 months. We put out monthly quality of life patches for games. In that period some games saw more updates in our first 6 months than they had seen in the last 6 years combined. Some updates were small, some large, some welcomed, some not (sorry GD). But the community at large became reinvigorated. Even if their game of choice wasn’t getting big updates, they knew the prospect was there, and it would soon be their turn. This made the long days worth all the while, as we were excited to make changes, and even more excited about what the future would hold.

But even with these updates we felt we were on a treadmill in terms of desired progress. We were still working in the confines of and old codebase, things were taking twice as long, we still were dealing with 120+ CS tickets a week, and we had to question: “are we truly doing what is best for our users and games, and will we ever gain momentum?”. Thankfully the excitement of the community was contagious, and SportsHub management also caught on to the excitement. With a reinvigorated community they supported us in bringing on two new staff members: Jacob, and Jordan. Jacob is our newest and second developer, and Jordan is our very own WIS specific CS representative and community outreach manager. Within 8 months we went from one staff member to 4, a major upgrade. You as a community are to thank, as your passion and buzz solely contributed to these additions.

While new staffing was exciting and would help us move faster, we knew we were still in a sub optimal position. Rather than 1 person on a treadmill, we would have 4. But having the extra staff freed us up to handle some much-needed housekeeping. We were able to fix consistent errors, automate frequent manual tasks, and provide much needed tools for our CS reps to support us in ways that was limited to developer technical intervention before.

We have spent the past 6+ weeks completely repairing these frequent issues, or enabling tools for CS intervention to fix them. I am happy to now say 90-95% of all major reoccurring technical support issues are either nonexistent, or a simple button press fix from our CS reps or Jordan. This means 95% of Jacob and I’s time can be solely focused on development. I am not just talking about building out new features for games, but building out completely new games and features in modern technologies as well.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room. Unfortunately, with the added staff we also suffered a casualty. A little over a month ago Adam was offered his dream job unsolicited by Riot games. Adam has said it was one of the hardest decisions he has made. He is still extremely passionate about WIS, and 100% agrees with our direction, excited about our future, and knows we will succeed. Unfortunately, at Riot, he is able to fulfill his dream of managing multiple teams and game projects there. We keep in touch often, and we will continue to keep him involved in discussions and future feature development. He wants nothing more than our success, and has absolutely loved working here, and developed many close bonds with many of our users. I am sure he is going to make a post to everyone at some point, but I told him I wanted to craft this post up first. But even with this sad news, I am also extremely excited about the momentum we now have, and our vision is now realistically attainable. We have added two awesome and bright staff members to our army, and I can’t wait to show you all what the coming months hold in store. You will not be disappointed.

So the question you are all thinking since reading this lengthy post, what does the future look like?

We will now be working full time in two distinct paths. New development, and existing game features. The patches will look a lot different then the previous 8 months. Instead of a dozen updates a month, you will see 2+ Major fundamental changes, for each existing game a year, until that game is rewritten and modernized. New development will consist of either major upgrades to the core site, or completely new game releases.

Here is a layout of how these two parallel branches will work, and their priorities.


New Development:

1. Core Site Upgrades (starting Aug 2021)

Shared services, or core WIS components will be updated/modernized. This includes:

• -WIS Mobile app: with push notification reminders of major game timelines and outcomes, messages, & more
• -New “Chat” feature: where you can send real time messages to other users, groups (will replace sitemail)
• -WIS social media component: where people will have ability to have friends lists, set up groups for communication, and have profiles with achievements/medals/badges/unlockable based on merit, time on site, and other major milestone achievements
• -New forums: updated to meet 21^st century behaviors, and be easier to search, and interact with in a more modern technical format.
• -New Shop: improved WIS store with more rewards options, and updated merchandise
• -Ordering: streamlined ordering process for all games, including new site credit system, and user referral codes
• -Communication: outside of chat, improved email and SMS messaging integration
• -New SimMatchup/Dreamteams: New user interface, updated engines, ability to run bulk sims for more statistically accurate samples
• -Daily Fantasy Tools, Gameday Betting Integration: new tools to build fantasy teams, and integration with sharplink sports betting

1. New Game Rewrites (starting dec 2021)

We will be announcing more details in the coming weeks, in terms of order of precedence of game rewrites and why

Existing Game Features: (2-3 updates per game that are major)

Hardball Dynasty

1. Injury Updates (Fixes transparency between budget allocation and injury prevention)
2. AI auto-sign ml (AI auto signs depleted rosters, assigns penalty for empty rosters, performance bonuses for ml playoffs)
3. Park Updates (updating parks/factors, introducing ability to choose parks on franchise selection)
4. New awards/accolades for coaches

Hoops Dynasty

1. Firing Logic (scrutiny for elite teams, minimum qualifications must be met to keep job)
2. RS2 introduce a twist in RS2 to allow talent infusion
3. New awards/accolades for coaches

Gridiron Dynasty

1. Introduction of playoff format D1A
2. Firing Logic (Scrutiny for elite teams, min qualifications to keep jobs)
3. New awards/accolades for coaches
4. Engine Updates

Simleague Baseball

1. Dynamic pricing
2. Negro League Introduction
3. Stadium Updates
4. New awards/accolades for coaches

Simleague Basketball

1. Dynamic Pricing
2. State Farm Fix
3. Fixing some historic player ratings
4. New awards/accolades for coaches

Simleague Football

1. Dynamic Pricing
2. UI Upgrades
3. New awards/accolades for coaches

Thank you everyone again for your continued support and feedback. I welcome any and all suggestions and truly love what I do here, and enjoy interfacing with each and every one of you (well... most ). I can't wait to show you all what we have in store, and am glad I get to work with you all to help us build WIS to what we all know it can become.

Regards,
-Chris
WIS

Thank you for this. Looks and sounds awesome to me.

While I am very sad to hear about Adam, this is very exciting news, and can’t wait to see this unfold. The vast majority of my time on WIS is on my iPhone, so to hear a mobile app is inbound has me extremely excited!

thank for having ears on the ground

I’m a big fan of the possibility of an app. What I’d like to see (and y’all tell me if this is unrealistic) is Sim LIVE coming back and being a main feature on said app. That way we can sell it as a game on the App Store, with people managing and simming real teams like the 97 Yanks, and them possibly seeing the Custom teams us users build, and possibly heading over here to join an OL or Theme League.

Devastating news about Adam.

Posted by d_rock97 on 8/5/2021 9:21:00 PM (view original):
I’m a big fan of the possibility of an app. What I’d like to see (and y’all tell me if this is unrealistic) is Sim LIVE coming back and being a main feature on said app. That way we can sell it as a game on the App Store, with people managing and simming real teams like the 97 Yanks, and them possibly seeing the Custom teams us users build, and possibly heading over here to join an OL or Theme League.

Yes! Live will certainly be returning. Including casual quick matches and new game modes!

This is fantastic. Super excited for the app. Love that the admins listened about injuries and playoff boosts in HBD.

sim league hockey gets nothing (but doesn’t really deserve it).

This is great news...

I'm sad to see Adam go, but he deserves the opportunity, and I couldn't be happier for him!

We will miss Adam, but we are extremely lucky to have Chris, Jacob, and Jordan! Thank you for all of the work you have put into WIS, and it's certainly great to see a community on the rise!

Super excited for WIS mobile app. Getting a push notification for when recruiting starts would actually be awesome!

For HD:

"RS2 introduce a twist in RS2 to allow talent infusion" is just great. I just went through a brutal RS2 at Stanford where I couldn't even spend a single cent!

Posted by hockey1984 on 8/5/2021 9:39:00 PM (view original):
This is fantastic. Super excited for the app. Love that the admins listened about injuries and playoff boosts in HBD.

sim league hockey gets nothing (but doesn’t really deserve it).

Oops. Hockey is definitely on there it must have not survived the copy/paste from word. I will revise and add tomorrow. It will get a UI upgrade as well as some reworked engine logic. Maybe make it flexible for a future dynasty game ;)

Posted by Ccobb12 on 8/5/2021 10:04:00 PM (view original):

Posted by hockey1984 on 8/5/2021 9:39:00 PM (view original):
This is fantastic. Super excited for the app. Love that the admins listened about injuries and playoff boosts in HBD.

sim league hockey gets nothing (but doesn’t really deserve it).

Oops. Hockey is definitely on there it must have not survived the copy/paste from word. I will revise and add tomorrow. It will get a UI upgrade as well as some reworked engine logic. Maybe make it flexible for a future dynasty game ;)

Sounds great Ccobb. Thanks for the follow up.

also Hockey dynasty? Don’t tease me with a good time!

Simleague Baseball

1. Dynamic pricing
2. Negro League Introduction
3. Stadium Updates
4. New awards/accolades for coaches

There's been a lot of discussion among the community on the best way to tackle #1 and 2 - can't wait to see the path you all have chosen.

Intrigued on Stadium updates. Will this include more detailed explanations of what the hit modifiers mean/do exactly? This has been a very contested discussion over the years.

This is all very interesting. I'm intrigued at what all of these changes mean. I only play SimLeague Baseball, but I love it, and today is the first time I've felt like the owners/managers of this website were truly invested in the future. Thank you!

I absolutely love all the HD stuff. Really sorry to see Adam go, but I totally understand following the dream. The future is indeed looking bright. Keep up the great work gentlemen.