As the league came up with a host of events and activities to celebrate its tenth anniversary recently, one of the most intriguing promotions I noticed was that "any new recruitment referral [on Tuesday and only on Tuesday] is worth 5 uncapped TPE." This is unique, as usually recruitment drives only offer such large rewards once the recruit has amassed a certain amount of TPE. In cases where TPE is awarded upon player creation, I recall that the compensation is usually only 1 TPE. With such a large opportunity looming, in the five or six days between this announcement and July 18, I had approached a significant amount of people asking for the favour of creating a fictitious hockey player in a fictitious hockey league online, in return for various favours that range from me doing chores for my sister to being a "corrupt piece of shit" by giving one of my subordinates two consecutive Mondays off.
With my past reputation of creating multis, the 75 TPE that I earned from this promotion was put on hold at the request of the Board of Governors. While I do not see any rules I have violated, I do admit that this can be considered somewhat shady, as even I was surprised I managed to convince 15 people to create a player. 75 TPE is quite a lot, and I can see how some members may be frustrated at me suddenly having amassed this amount of TPE in one day.
First, if I was really making multis as I have been accused of by some, I could have easily made 316 multis over the course of 24 hours, and updated Birkir Holm Gudnason to 99 in every attribute aside from experience. Okay, maybe not as that would mean I would have to make one multi roughly every four-and-a-half minutes for 24 hours straight. Whlie it is easy to maintain that pace, that is definitely not sustainable for 24 hours. Point being, if I wanted to make multis to abuse the 5 TPE bonus, I could have, and would have, easily went beyond 15 players.
Second, aside from my efforts, I believe the total number of recruits we got on July 18th can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Both hands AT MOST. Those who are complaining didn't even bring in any recruits themselves. There was nothing stopping them from recruiting their friends, coworkers, or even the most frequent recruit - a buddy from another sim league, who makes a player, and often never shows up again.
At this point, all I want is closure. The VHLM has now been updated twice since, and all I've been told is that Corco has been instructed by the BoG to hold off on updating my players. There has been no timeline of any news, nor any communication made directly to me about the progress of such talks. In the mean time, my advice to the league is to not again offer such generous rewards in future recruitment drives. Perhaps instead of restricting TPE to be awarded until a recruit reaches 75 TPE, the first milestone could be lowered to something like 50 TPE. Even such marginal deduction would mean that a new recruit would either have to do the autobiography and rookie profile, or a couple weeks of point tasks before they could reach 50 TPE. A couple weeks is enough time for a new member to immerse themselves into the site and decide whether or not they would like to stick it out for the long term. Instead of 5 TPE at 75 TPE and 10 TPE at 200 TPE, maybe the rewards could be staggered out more. 15 TPE woud still be the maximum one recruit could net you, but maybe 3 TPE at 50 TPE, 3 TPE at 75 TPE, 3 TPE at 100 TPE, 3 TPE at 150 TPE, and 3 TPE at 200 TPE might be worth a look?
Oh, and if we do give away TPE again in the future just for player creation, maybe a hard cap would be a smart thing to do.
For Rudi Ying