Beketov

First one went over well. Give me more questions and I'll get to recording a new one soon!

Glad you guys enjoyed this, I'll try to get another recorded soon.

Many phone decided to give the Americans a new logo; I like it.

Processing is done. Not sure if it's 1080 yet (not at my computer to check) but it'll at least play

That's also an option. I think I want to record though in case I want to do some edits. We'll see though.

It was estimating an hour so I'd say 40ish minutes it'll be ready. Keep in mind this is processing an hour of 1080p footage.

As of posting this the video is still processing so give it a bit of time; just wanted to post in case I don’t get a chance to later. Posting it as a Podcast since it’s much closer in style to that than a regular video PT. Still ran into a few technical issues; mainly that I realized my Elgato software can live stream my facecam but can’t record it. In the future I’ll load up Bootcamp and use the Windows version to have the facecam but in this one it isn’t present. My microphone quality also might be a tad iffy, I think I was peaking pretty bad., I have also gotten that sorted out now so we should be good to go in the future. Also, as you can tell by the title and the video itself, ironically enough, the first CoDCast doesn’t feature CoD. I explain in the video I believe but essentially there was a 12GB update I didn’t have time to download so I played battlefront instead.

I think that's more than fair. The chances of anyone even hitting a cap of 3 or 4 consistently is pretty low; even if the amounts needed stayed the same. Last month or so aside I don't think I've gotten over 4 before and even getting 4 was rare. It is fair that we shouldn't be able to replace a PT fully with grading (I'll be honest after finishing grading 6 TPE worth I was probably pushing a bit further than needed) but I think being capped at only 2 is a little extreme when obviously in low times we get way more than that done.

And that's being done but why not both? Turnaround on PT Staff is very high, right now it's GFX but a few months ago it was Writing that was taking the hit which is why Dollar wound up with so much banked. Definitely more people are needed and the application is open but why does that fact negate the simple fact that imposing a limit, especially such a strict one, just doesn't make sense. When the staff is understaffed a limit simply incentivizes us to work less. Why should I do 6 TPE worth of reviews and get paid for 2 when I could just stop at the 2? When the staff is all working well, no one will ever claim more than 2 anyway so that crowd stays happy. However, when the inevitable instability of the job catches up and we are understaffed the ones who are doing their job get a little (and still capped) incentive to keep doing good work until more help arrives.

I'm with you in this. I like Phil's idea to split it up further but it's a logistics nightmare with all the old indexes being erased. 50 is a solid milestone to do it at and isn't just an arbitrary number so if it's going to be done now makes sense.

With a proper GFX staff that would easily be the case as well. Things get graded faster and no one hits more than 2 TPE a week anyway. However right now we are understaffed and therefore overworked. Upping the limit would allow for a bit of time to hire and give the graders who remained active an incentive to tackle the overwhelming list of things to grade.

I think that's kinda what Milholt is suggesting here but on the basis of starting at S50 since it wouldn't be nearly as hard to do as going back to S30. As an old fart of the league part of me wants to keep the old records; however you are right that they are untouchable. I'm not sure exactly what made the early seasons so different (sliders maybe?) but we aren't ever going to see those kind of numbers again. I think as long as we keep the old record books around this could be a good idea. Obviously trashing all the old records and starting fresh 50 seasons later makes no sense but having unattainable records doesn't make much sense either.

So essentially it's an archaic limit that has only sporadically been enforced. Why again do we need it? Tons of rules have changed since S1 and we've already established that this has been basically bypassed depending on who was updating at varying times so it hardly seems necessary to keep around. Like I said before, at he very least it should be increased to 3 or 4. Those wouldn't be the easiest to hit but would give decent incentive if they were.

Gonna try and record this now. Going to keep the same title because it sounds good but will be doing this one in Battlefront since CoD has a huge update to do. EDIT: Roadblock 1, apparently Elgato’s mac software is more crippled than I thought and can’t record with a webcam. Don’t have time to boot to windows so no webcam for this one.

Oh hey there Toronto.

How is it Calgary scores at least 1 goal on me out of 10 shots but I get a SO facing 24? Oh well, I'll take it.

People aren't active and grading, I know GFX just opened up for more graders. The system has nothing to do with it, if people aren't reviewing it won't get done regardless of the system. Not to point fingers but I think on the GFX side @701 and I are the only ones to have graded anything this season. Part of the reason I brought this up. Offers incentive aside from just banked points which usually end up just being used on weeks where nothing gets done. For example, I have 3 weeks worth of grades banked. How fast would things get reviewed if I just used those banked for my TPE for 3 straight weeks? Some people have way more banked than me so incentivizing them to not work doesn't help much.

Even though a lot of the time it is haha

I'm not sure who on the PT staff isn't doing what you just described? Honestly, most if not all of us review things in the exact same way that we graded them, just without the number. I can't speak for the MS side but I know the "Look" category in GFX was the only one that ever got more than 5 words anyway so reviewing is really the exact same thing without adding "I can see the effort here" for effort and "yup" for creativity as most people did. Honestly because I save time not having to copy and template in, decide a specific score for each section, and do the math (not that it was hard) I find I can give better reviews than I did with grades because I'm solely focuses on the piece at hand rather than the grading template and being worried if my grade is deemed fair; both on its own and in relation to other grades.

Gotta love the anti-vaxxer view of cause and effect relationships haha

How would making people wait for grades make things more active? I think we have found that people are more likely to do PT's when they have a guarantee of points.

That depends on the customer. A lot of the ones I've found just want to vent their frustration at anyone, regardless of if the person has control of it or not. Cashiers usually get the brunt of price issues for example even though they have literally the lowest amount of influence. No amount of telling customers that we have no control over things will get them to accept that head office does whatever it wants. What I did find often worked though was to blame the technology. A lot of times our cashes could do basically anything if you have the authorization (which I did) including things that we were supposed to do. For example, a return can only be put on the same payment method that was used (doesn't need to be the same card, just the same type so credit can't get a cash refund). People liked to argue this one with us so I usually just told them that the system doesn't offer us any other option (showing them on the screen that the options were greyed out). Thing is, I could press 3 keys and change that but I wasn't supposed to and they didn't need to know it haha. People are often more okay with blaming technology than blaming the cashier running it. Plus it doesn't pass the blame onto anyone else.

That would at least be more reasonable. 3 would at least allow PT Staff to hit the cap with a PT and their job rather than requiring something else on the side like VHL this week or an article.

This is part of what I'm trying to figure out, when did this come into play? I was never upset at Kendrick for enforcing the rules, that's fine and is his job, but when did this rule show up and why? It definitely hasn't always been the case hat you could only claim 2 per week. I k ow I used to claim 3-4 if I could get a lot done and it was fine. Why is it suddenly not? Like I said, putting a limit on it just kills any incentive to do more than what's required for 2 TPE because the points will go nowhere unless I choose not to do my job. @Kendrickas I said, I'm not upset at you for enforcing the rules but I am curious if you might be able to pinpoint the time when it went into place. Graders, both head and non, have clearly changed since then but you've remained stable so there must be some point that you were told to start enforcing this.

Great...so in an attempt to make my life easier I instead kept the same regulations in place regarding the limit but doubled the work requirement to hit that limit? This is what I get for voicing an opinion I suppose.