Nykonax

idk I think in vhl there's no reason to ever just be competing for a playoff spot. irl sports there's benefits for fans/merch/ticket sales stuff like that but that's just not a thing in vhl. otherwise if you're just playing for a playoff spot you're never really good enough to win but you're also not getting top picks to work with so you're kind of stuck in a middling spot that's only decaying as players age. i don't necessarily hate this move in context of malmo. I think that obviously something has to be done and getting 1st overall is an amazing start not even for a rebuild but just having a valuable asset that can be either be committed to for competing or in 2 seasons flipped as a valuable sign and trade. depends on the rest of the off-season tbh. it does give malmo a longer time horizon instead of just being screwed in a season or two. Just depends how the rest of the team is managed in the future because it is a key move

malmos competing for 1st (overall)

Winnipeg Wheelbarrows Roster Forwards: Logan Ninefingers @Scurvy Adi Dassler @BOOM George Richmond @badcolethetitan Diego Machado @Dadam30 AJ Williams @AJW Mikko Borisyuk @PacifistKit17 Defense: Lucy Leitner @LucyXpher YaBoi Oven @Doomsday Marcel Janser @Morcar80 Narnia Shaw @Dabnad Adam Joy @MrMom Goalies: Ondrej Vencko @Mutti Chad Powers @dylanjj37

idk man these 4th round picks are what's making the deal happen. gotta sweeten it

Ok I'm wrong, but still think it's extremely dumb. I mean yeah but I don't think that's really worth considering. I can already start my back up like 6 times vs. Chicago and boost them somewhere if I wanted to. It's already an issue with the automatic +2 points to the tanking teams (they could've already won that backup game) but I think in this case it's so small and not worth considering. Teams already get unlucky/lucky with the games they play vs. backups in so I don't think it really changes anything.

But the rule is you have to doing your best to compete, not you have to play your backup exactly 8 times. I don't even see how they broke the rule.

But that's a different rule. It's just the Louth Rule that you have to start your backup 8 times. That's black and white and just has to be done in fairness to all the other teams. If you make playoffs while starting you're backup more than you need to, you're literally only handicapping yourself. The rule violated here is spirit of competition, which makes sense to punish tanking teams for if they're playing a backup to tank harder. If you're a playoff team and play a backup extra games you're still competing, you're just dumb and fucked up lol. I'd like to see the rule at least changed going forward so that Spirit of Competition can't be violated unless you miss playoffs or you're obviously tanking for a lower seed in playoffs (wildcard buff anyone?) which makes sense to me. But Riga or Lemorse isn't even punished here. The way I see it is Riga didn't do anything deserving of punishment, and then now another team is being punished. It just doesn't make sense to me.

But you're the commissioner and can decide the punishment. Obviously there is subjectivity to it but nothing is stopping you from being subjective about it? Like I think this is totally a case where you can just go "they broke the rule, but there's literally 0 intention or harm in breaking it" and just fine a week of GM pay out of principle. Then there's some aspect of favouritism accusations or whatever, but anyone should be able to see that it's so clearly a different case than other instances of the rule.

tbh this seems kinda weird especially when they made playoffs by a mile, not even like they tanked for a better seed. feel like the point of the rule is anti-tank but if they're making playoffs it's just unlucky that their starter gets to play 1 less game (and if thats deserving of a punishment then shawnglade needs to be banned for benching me a game 30 seasons ago) edit: the starting goalie is also @Lemorse7's own player? so not even like he messed with another user. all this does is punish whoever holds the pick for literally 0 reason.

maybe because you couldn't even make the wildcard

time to start the "Gustav works for big STHS Morale and is rigging his spreadsheet sims to push a pro-wildcard narrative" psyop.

3rd year of a math degree and all i can do with it is making fun of you for generating 20,000 random numbers in a spreadsheet. Maybe I am still 14... But unironically though I think (and you've concluded) morale is just cope. I didn't really read much into the statistics you've done but I also don't think it really matters. I think people in general (not just VHL but like humanity as a whole) just has a really bad understanding of randomness. Especially in the VHL, the sample sizes are so small that any randomness is going super rampant and also super memorable just by nature of there being stakes to it. Intuitively I would say that the wildcard record is pretty well within like an interval of what would be expected. If wildcard teams were like 19-1 or something then it'd be surprising, but it being slightly in favour of wildcard teams is surprising for sure, but it's also not that insane when parity in the league makes playoff games decently close to a coinflip. There's even arguments to be made that the #1 seed isn't actually the "true" #1 seed. For instance this season maybe Vancouver/Malmo had 5 lucky wins which propelled them to the #1 seed, but if you simmed 10,000 games instead of 72 maybe Calgary or Moscow are the actual "true" #1's, and if you take the "true" wildcard vs. the "true" #1 that record is much worse for the wildcard now. It's just such low sample throughout the season and playoffs. It's pretty similar to people thinking meta is unbeatable just because they saw Vancouver threepeat with it. However most of those series were coinflips when simmed over large amounts of games, and it was a lower than 1/16 chance Vancouver actually threepeated. But we saw the 1/16 universe so the hybrid system was implemented. (sidenote meta was broken for reasons relating to salary cap and build cost than sths power). I also don't think its a factor of changing lines or anything, cause most changes are going to be essentially neutral, nothing you do is going to boost your odds by like 10+%. From experience the only swaps that made improvements was like switching which line was 1st and 2nd but even then it wasn't a huge difference and sometimes made it worse. Overall people are just bad with understanding randomness and morale isn't a system that is making wildcard teams OP.

Imagine monte-carlo'ing instead of just using a negative binomial distribution.

just wait until X Æ A-Xii makes the NHL

$25

Any 5 random numbers is good

I think this is an important part that people missed, Warsaw/Chicago/Malmo all definitely targeted meta-adjacent players in the late 70s, they were just never as outright explicit about it as I was with Vancouver. No matter what, some team was eventually going to end up full meta. Lmao tbf I was the one who asked him. I'll admit I did it in a bad way, but thought it was fine cause it is a pretty common question in other sim leagues if you're willing to like reroll a player. This was also when I was like AGM of Vancouver in S78 or S79 and @fonziGG rightfully gave me shit for it lol. I will say I don't think I ever told someone to build a specific way. If people asked me what to build, I'd just tell them that like low passing high sc is the best, which I think is a valid answer if you're asking for advice on "how do I make my player as good as possible". I just traded for/signed players who also were meta or wanted to build themselves meta (which Chicago/Warsaw/Malmo were also doing at the time). I agree people should be free to build whatever they want, on your note about checking I'm definitely one of those checking purists, but I totally understand someone just wanting to lay people out in the sim and try to go for the hit record. As a GM though, I wanted to build the best team possible and win, and I personally have fun min-maxing and optimizing things. So I had fun trying to build a good team, sign people who would fit that vision, and whatnot. If someone wanted to be a hit player, or a pass player, or any player that had like a conflicting vision, I totally understood that and felt like that they can just totally do it on a different team. I figured that people who got enjoyment from traditional success in the sim would target the top playoff teams, while someone who wanted to just get a bunch of hits or something could find a role on another like "roleplay" team. Looking back on it now though, I definitely see how it becomes unfun for those other people when they realise there's just 0 chance of them winning at all, doesn't matter if they expect to win or not, but knowing there's no hope is unfun. I still think meta being stoppable is somewhat true. We had like ~50% win rate vs. Moscow in cup final tests, and I think like sub 50% vs. LA or Chicago one year, but they got upset by DC and we did good against DC. I think there was an element of luck that people overlooked, and since they saw Vancouver win 3 cups and top the league 3 times in a row they thought it was basically 100%. It was however absolutely dominant vs. shit teams, but I think each year there was definitely 1 or 2 teams that could relatively fairly compete. I think the main problem with meta was just how achievable it was. You could get 400/500 tpe welfare players basically come "online" in like a season or two and be 90+ point players, plus you could fit so many of them under the cap. You could spend seasons making good GM decisions to build a team like Moscow, or you could get a few draft picks and sign some decent clickers and compete with Moscow in the span of a single season. The like effort:reward was very unbalanced. Seeing how hybrid played out I think it's an okay solution to the problem. My biggest problem with it is just how bad it feels for low-tpe welfare people now, under it I don't think you can ever have like a top player if you're a welfare earner. Which maybe is valid, the people putting in the effort should have the top players, but I know it's definitely sort of killed my interest in the league when it takes like a week or two just to get +1 in a single attribute in the sim. I agree though it has killed meta, and I think is a better alternative to just a simple "can't be more than 15 apart", which is what the SHL put as like a stop-gap while they switched to FHM (and I'm not sure it really worked, cause I think Hamilton still won the cup). I definitely agree with all these points, especially the third one. It feels like people want to make changes just for the sake of making big changes, instead of just focusing on what the key issue is and how do we fix that as simply as possible. The first two I think are issues as well, but I can't really speak on them since I'll self-admit I also contribute to them. Overall great article, and my bad gang.

yes: @BluObieZ no: @Dil

still cant believe Quik or who was running the draft thought I was trolling when I told him to pick you when hedge was sleeping for draft, and then you had a HOF career. hedge my goat though o7

I mean it's probably not bad, will just help you reach protein goals for the day, and if you're taking too much protein you'll just shit it out. I think a lot of it is pretty fake or you don't need it at all. Only supplements I've heard good things about is like creatine/magnesium. I'm not an expert, but think basically creatine just helps ATP production so helps you get like a few extra reps when you're working out, which leads to more muscle development. Also makes your muscles store more water so you look a little bigger. Also think there's some studies saying it helps your brain. However it coulddddd lead to hairloss (some study found it increased like blood DHT levels or something, and DHT levels at like hair follicle sites is linked to hair loss, however the DHT levels in the study were still way within normal ranges. So it's probably like if you're at risk of hair loss it might speed it up a little, but there's not really any conclusive studies saying it does cause hairloss). Magnesium I don't know much about, just know anecdotally a bunch of people says it helps with sleep. Only things I take are just protein powder and creatine. From what you said about your goals, probably no need to take creatine unless you're super serious about the gym and like tracking calories, weight, volume, and getting good sleep. Otherwise your not really getting full value from it and you'll get more value from just starting to focus those other things. Personally I just use protein powder and creatine.

BladeMaiden leading her Reaper troops into battle against the Houston Bulls (S66 colourized)

the madlad finally did it

every student union does it

didnt this guy scam like @Enorama out of a graphics card a few years ago or something... no idea how he even became a blue in the first place. absolute incompetence by Badketov to hire this fraud. Gorlab would've never let this happen.....

does being an actuary count, aka math for insurance pricing, it's thrilling. but have a co-op for it this summer