Gustav

This just in: Insofar as the mechanics of your role go in this game, at least. I hope that's good enough for some of you to get over those intrusive thoughts of yours. It's time for yet ANOTHER round of Town of Salem! Perhaps the league's higher-ups hope that with every death in this game, my motivation to be here dies a little bit too--but they could not be farther from the truth. Town of Salem isn't the constant it was years ago, but there is also no reason to say that I do not still run it. Case in point--Game 31. Let's get going. I have executive-ordered this game to be STANDARD MAFIA, after a few circumstances of its setup made that make a lot of sense. Your role list is as follows: 1x TOWN PROTECTIVE 1x TOWN SUPPORT 1x TOWN INVESTIGATIVE 1x TOWN KILLING 3x RANDOM TOWN 1x GODFATHER 1x MAFIOSO 2x RANDOM MAFIA 1x NEUTRAL KILLING 1x RANDOM NEUTRAL 2x ANY ROLE Your player list is also as follows, and there are 15 of you: @Adrest245 @Advantage @Da Trifecta @Doomsday @eaglesfan036 @GoodLeftUndone @jhatty8 @Lemorse7 @LucyXpher @N0HBDY @NSG @omgitshim @Ricer13 @SleepyPlayz @Spartan Tell me if you didn't get your role or if I otherwise screwed this up. Now, on to our fabled copy-paste. As per usual, if you'd like to complain that you can't read it because you're in light mode, I will plastinate your body and make it permanently salute me when I come home from work every day. Rules are here The wiki is here -JOIN THE DISCORD SERVER! YOU'RE REQUIRED TO! HERE'S ANOTHER LINK! -I'm going with my usual starting and ending times as a general guideline: WHENEVER THE HELL I WAKE UP marks the start of each day phase, and 10 PM EST marks the start of each night phase. Those will be the times that I'll aim for, but, officially, the start of one phase and the end of another comes whenever I make the announcement. You'll be pinged. I will do my best to give out expected announcement times, but I reserve the right to kick off any phase at any time. -No talking in this thread during night phases. That goes for everybody, regardless of role. I have no power to lock this thread at night, and there's no official penalty for talking in here at night, but if you see one of your fellow citizens doing so, please yell at them for me. I CAN LOCK THE THREAD AT NIGHT, AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! If for some reason I forget, or if you have mod powers and can comment in locked threads, please keep the "no talking" rule in mind anyway. -Do not edit posts. I've been relaxed about not yelling at people who have, but editing is a sneaky way to take out potentially incriminating information. If you say something stupid, too bad. Don't change it. -If you are reasonably able to be online at the start of the night phases, please make an effort to do so. The JAILOR (if there is a Jailor) is able to speak with you in their own Discord channel at night, and that is when I will put the Jailor's target in said channel. If it is within your power to do so and doesn't present a huge inconvenience, please be online when the night phase starts and please join the server out of respect for the Jailor and their time. If you know you won't be around at the start of the night phase, it might be helpful to give me a message to forward to the Jailor during the day phase should you be placed in jail that night. -DO NOT PM ANYBODY. All communication must happen in this thread, unless you have already received an invite to a Discord server where you may speak as well. If you haven't, keep everything here. Should you wish to contact someone directly, too bad! Whispers don't exist in this format. -STAY ACTIVE. If you do go two day and night phases in a row without speaking in public, speaking in a private Discord, or sending me a night action (or specifically telling me you do not want to take a night action), I will swing the Mighty Gustav Hammer of Death. You do not want the Mighty Gustav Hammer of Death, and neither does anybody on your side. -NO ROLES ARE OFF THE TABLE. If you play the online game, you may be familiar with a Classic mode being the default, where many of the newer roles are not used. In these games, if the evil faction is the Mafia, ALL roles which are not members of the Coven may be used, and vice versa. This includes Any All and Town Traitor. -Last but not least, friendly reminder that no discussion relevant to this game in particular is allowed in the #general channel of the game server while this game is running. -Just kidding! Actually last but not least--IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO CHECK YOUR DISCORD CHANNEL FOR NOTIFICATIONS PRIOR TO EACH DAY PHASE. It might not end well for you if you don't! -And last but not least for the third time, if you choose to change a night action, please, please, send a new message rather than editing your old one. I've missed changes because of this before as an edit doesn't give me any sort of notification if I've already seen and missed the first one...so make sure I've got it right by separating your submissions!

I think a fair way to put it that I surprisingly have never put down anywhere is that I care a lot about the things I can control. I care about what my build looks like, I care about my earning, I care about the quality of the content I make, and I care about what I put into my interactions with people. I do not care about scoring the most points or getting the most likes, because I can’t control those things and they’re just numbers on the screen anyway. It’s nice when it happens, but it’s not going to make me want to quit when it doesn’t. At this point I think I care a bit less in general, because I think the work I’ve done to build myself up is done. I don’t have to worry about getting what I want out of the league from a personal standpoint because I don’t want anything else. But that’s all a product of having cared before, and I still value that.

Yeah I definitely did the same, but I say that as the one who pushed the current system. I have never said that it was perfect and I don’t disagree with anyone missing the personal element. It’s something we tried to mitigate by letting GMs customize the statement that comes with their offers on the portal. Along with making life easier for GMs (which was more crucial than some may realize during a time when we had issues attracting lots of high-quality candidates), there are some things it does to make the M more equitable. A team doesn’t have the choice to NOT make an offer (which I think we can agree was something too many were guilty of back in the day). It also serves the players by letting them pick whichever team situation they would like to be a part of while stopping GMs from misrepresenting how much someone would be used. We’re always open to suggestions for how to improve waivers. Having seen the way it works for a while, I really do like its benefits and would still take it over the way it used to be. The main (fair) complaint is about the personal aspect, and I’d be all for ways to increase that so long as it doesn’t mess with the other parts.

Good to see you back!

Veterans Day! Veterans Day! Big parades with guns and soldiers! Veterans Day! What's there to say? Do all your shopping--at Walmart! Gustav has a 3-day weekend, and Town of Salem is BACK! Both new and returning players are 100% welcome to join in, and I'd love to see us all have a great time with this. I have one small game update, which I have placed in the update thread (reminder of the other update I put in there from last game as well). Please familiarize yourself with it--the Escort and Consort roles have been renamed. I'll try to (possibly slowly) replace those names wherever it's relevant. Vote for your preferred game mode up top, which I will run with if I happen to feel like it. Once again, trivia is back as well. Rules are here The wiki is here CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU'RE NOT IN THE DISCORD SERVER JOINING THE SERVER IS REQUIRED FOR ALL PLAYERS! Non-players are welcome as well. Remember that ALL game-related notifications will be given on Discord! Make sure you join the server, and check it BEFORE speaking in the game thread each day. Also, do your best to be there at the start of each night phase! If you're new to the game, read up on some roles on the wiki and go through some old game threads in this subforum. TRIVIA TIME: HERE IS THE LINK TO TRIVIA! -If you won the last game, you have an automatic 30% chance to receive a role of your choosing, if you'd like to request one. The winners of last game are listed below: @Ptyrell @Doomsday @Ricer13 @rory @jhatty8 @Advantage @Da Trifecta @Lemorse7 @NSG -If you didn't win the last game, you can still request a role! Play trivia, and for each correct answer, you'll earn a cumulative 5% chance toward a role of your choosing, for a maximum chance of 20%. -If you won the last game, you can still play! This possible 20% chance will be added to your 30% chance for a maximum of 50%. -No, you do not need to do this if you don't want to. -If you'd like to play without requesting a role, simply write "Random" in the role request box. Vote for your preferred format up top and sign up down below, as always.

Another change to go into effect starting in Game 31: The roles of ESCORT and CONSORT in original Town of Salem are now known as TAVERN KEEPER and BOOTLEGGER, respectively. That name change will be adopted here as well, for consistency across our forum and the wiki--I'd imagine that a new player looking for the Escort page may have a tough time. No mechanics of either role will change; this is just a name switch.

I just tracked this down. Apparently what I said was: ...which is actually hilarious. I had no idea I called it that directly. I'm going to take credit for that moving forward if you don't mind.

I don't remember this specifically, but that sounds about right. This was still back when I knew every single new member because I was scouting them. I'm not sure I was ever suspicious of anything, especially since I definitely had a positive impression of Horcrux at first. I felt that there were definitely times down the road where things got a bit more...confrontational, I guess? I distanced myself a bit at that point and I feel like that's part of why I was never directly caught up in everything that followed.

I can't believe that the VHL thinks it's as funny as they do to wait for me to write literally everything I can think of about my own personal experiences in the VHL, and then to ask me to do exactly that for theme week right after I've just done it more extensively than probably anyone ever will. I considered a few things for theme week. Do I make a full #31? I could, but I wasn't lying when I said that I had written everything that I thought deserved its own article. Do I do my best to explain some story I've heard things about but wasn't around for? I could also do that and I think I could do a pretty good job of it, but chances are that one of you old nerds would complain about some weird little inaccuracy. I could also just decide that my job pay is my PT this week, but I think that's really stupid. It's not like I've never done that, but I try to avoid it when possible. I should still actually be active despite my job, especially in a setting where "active despite my job" is not already assumed. Because I'm out of ideas, because I did all of those things, I'm going to comb back through and see if there's anything I missed. Have fun with some of the extra fun facts! My first article in the series never goes into the origin of my name. My original name was GustavMattias, which isn't my real name at all, nor is any part of my real name either Gustav or Mattias. It's actually another example of 19-year-old me being uncreative and naming things after musicians I liked. In this case, it's a rearrangement of the name of Mattias Gustavsson, bassist for the Swedish band Dungen. Eventually, I shortened it to just Gustav because that's cleaner and less to remember, and because that's how everyone here knows me anyway. I'm very OK with staying by a fake name around here (to most people, at least) and still having it be a "human" name keeps things personal in a way I really like. The toxic Houston-Philly rivalry I mention in #2 was probably when I first realized that I was actually invested in the VHL. I remember being in the middle of a shift at work and realizing that I'd been working for a really long time while constantly thinking about some stuff that people had said to each other in one dumb argument or another. I realized that that was weird. It's likely that that was also the first time I consciously decided that I wasn't going to let sim league drama affect me in real life. I describe my computer becoming corrupted in my first attempts to run STHS in #3. I also mention trying to get credit for an assignment I had to miss for that reason and I say that the professor probably didn't believe me--I don't think I ever got credit for that assignment. It was also the only time I went into my school's computer lab to do an assignment (and the last time I'd ever get to because they converted it into a gaming room very soon after). Fixing the lottery and commenting "#fixthelottery" in every game thread wasn't something that happened without pushback. I think this was really the only time I was thought of as the annoying new member rather than just the new member, because I remember lots of comments from people who were annoyed that I was doing it. Ironically, the lottery guidelines also explicitly prohibited just commenting #fixthelottery, so I'd make a normal-sounding comment about how many shots on goal my player had and then add the hashtag at the end. Interestingly, one of those things still got much more attention than the other, which I think proved my point a little bit. Something I never mentioned about learning graphics was the influence of a couple informal leaguewide graphics contests held by @Nykonax at a time when I had nothing better to do. I was still horrible when these happened, but I remember taking a little extra care to try new things and pay extra attention to detail. Pretty soon after these was the point when I started to make some acceptable things, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I guess I can give a piece of lore about Gustav 30 in 30 itself. I genuinely had no real reason to start it, and it was more of an "I just felt like running" situation than anything else. Perhaps contrary to popular belief (and contrary to a few more comments to this effect than I wanted), I never wrote it in some weird attempt to tell all of you how great I am as a person or to hear that from you. These were just stories that I knew I could fill up lots of words writing, and it was also really cool for me to experience writing it because it dragged up lots of things I thought I forgot. So, nice try, but I guess I've still got enough left for an article. Catch me next season with some other idea that's along exactly the same lines as my last media spot and see if that does anything for you.

You just stole my theme week reveal smh I just now noticed this. Considering that Anderson did come back and apologize a few years or so ago, and get banned after a review, I do think that it would be at the very least interesting if that were the case. Certainly an all-time case of VHL lore because THIS iteration of me hasn’t done anything bannable and I’d imagine what to do with me would probably be a matter of debate. Good article and not one I was expecting to see.

Both of these need to go IMO. I loved dropping both of the things that correct to them. If you touch the circus monkey though I riot.

Blues out here waiting until I run entirely out of ideas and finish this exact theme week times 30 before dropping this on us smh

I don’t personally listen to a lot of metal, especially in the sphere you seem to be describing. But you would be surprised at how much of it throws together legitimately great songwriting and technical ability, and how much of it is influenced by things like classical music. I’m not going to debate you on whether it’s appealing because that’s a matter of opinion. There’s just also so much metal that isn’t just screaming that probably doesn’t match your perception of what the genre is in the first place. Give Leprous (for example) a shot sometime.

Art Vandelay

With the conclusion of this series, I once again give the people of the VHL what they want. After a season or so longer than I'd originally hoped, which shouldn't surprise you, and a lot more words than I thought, which shouldn't surprise either of us, it's time to close out Gustav 30 in 30. This series at times saw multiple articles per week, and at other times saw multiple weeks per article, but what's most important to me is that it's super comprehensive and a successful completion of my most ambitious individual project ever. I'm not entirely sure there's even any more to talk about than what I've given you--checking out my other articles really should give you the full Gustav experience. Spending lots of time wondering if I've forgotten anything, from the time I first made my list of article ideas up until now months later, has given me nothing of any importance. So, here you have it: the very last bits of thought about my time in the VHL that I've left unwritten. I'd like to delay the weird personal recap a bit by first talking about my current player, Lazlo Holmes. In keeping with my run of naming players after something I find fun, Lazlo is named after the reporter in this SNL sketch. I pay practically no attention to SNL in general, but it was a video I'd seen years ago and liked. Plus, I can identify a little bit with Lazlo Holmes--I really like hockey and I do my best to watch my teams play when they're on, but it just isn't my favorite sport and sometimes I feel a little out of place talking about the NHL with people here who know how to evaluate a player beyond "does he score" and can tell me more about my team than I know myself. So, perhaps because I hadn't played the position for the longest time, and perhaps because I wanted to make up for the abject failure of my first player to do it, I created Lazlo as a defenseman. I came into this career with a lot of publicity, retiring Art Vandelay in an "Art Vandelay"-filled thread and bringing in Lazlo by offering VHLM GMs the opportunity to offer to my player old-style. I ended up going with Halifax, who wasn't going to make the playoffs but gave me lots of opportunity to see what was possible. It turned out this was a lot, as I went point-per-game with very respectable defensive numbers in the rest of S92. S93 was very interesting and very fun. I was drafted 3rd overall to Saskatoon by GM @Dadam30, who ran a fun locker room with lots of active players. It was my first time ever playing for the Wild, and we were really good. Lazlo wasn't top of the top on the board from an individual standpoint, but I was still excited for his future and I was having a fun time. That fun only increased when I did something I've never done on any level of the VHL and won a championship--some might say it's "only" the VHLM, but that doesn't stop it from being something I'm proud of. My draft season came up next, and I was ready to make a difference. The two players I'd managed who I'd seen drafted by someone other than myself went 1st and 7th overall, and I'd earned well enough with everyone I've managed to back up that draft position, so I thought I had a shot at cracking the top 5 in a stacked class. As it turned out, I went 10th in a stacked class and came after a few people who played the same position and were a bit better at earning that extra uncapped TPE than I was. Prague and @Tetricide had themselves a pretty good deal. I played S94 in the E because there was really no point in wasting a season of depreciation to join Prague's roster that season (as much as I have to say about that). My GM was @Doomsday, who did a genuinely great job of managing the team and shifted my perception of the E a tiny little bit. It's not that I ever stopped hating the E or that my opinion ever changed about it being something the league should get rid of at its earliest convenience, but it is that I was glad to have a positive experience there and wasn't as worried for the sake of anyone who found themselves playing for Stockholm. Lazlo responded to his promotion to the E by putting up just about identical numbers to his last season in the M (including exactly equal goals and assists and hits/SB both within 10 of the season prior). After this, Lazlo graduated the E and moved up to the bottom-feeding Phantoms. It was here that I led the league in a category (SB) for the first time ever, blocking even more shots than I took myself in an effort to make Prague look semi-respectable. Granted, this failed most of the time, but it really wasn't anyone's fault given the state of the team's rebuild. That rebuild, unfortunately, proved to be a little bit of a roadblock. Going into the draft, and in all of my discussions with every team, I promised that I'd be pretty easy to convince to stick around if I had a clear picture of why the team could remain competitive enough to support that. And this was true going into this offseason, but still--and I will repeat, this is no one's fault--Prague had a plan but not too many pieces in place to be a competitive team. So, I chose to do something that I've very rarely ever done, which was to ask a GM to wait on the question of me re-signing and get back to me later once things had worked out. Now, it's in all likelihood that I would have re-signed eventually. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that building a team up and getting players to buy into something unproven is very difficult, and I was sure that there was a real honest effort to get better, which is usually really all I ask for. But it wasn't too long after I had that talk that I was informed I was on the block and could be moved depending on interest. Not too long after that, I was traded to Seattle after spending just one season up in the VHL. I left Prague on what I like to think are pretty good terms, and things all worked out anyway--they essentially turned a mid-1st into a probably-earlier 1st, plus a 2nd and 3rd, plus future-1D-and-someone-who-will-definitely-outearn-me Pan Daffleck was their #1 pick this season. The rest of Lazlo's story remains to be seen. He's a bit underwhelming this season, but with me finally adding to Scoring with a defenseman, is a Valiq in my future? I've been recently adding to Checking--could I win the Wylde after missing it by one vote in S68? Could I even win a Labatte? Or a Kanou, or even my first-ever Continental Cup? I have no idea and maybe at some point down the road, I'll be able to read through this and smile as I read this and remember when I thought about it. That's something that I really think will be important to do at some point in time. When I came into the VHL, I was a quiet first-year college student with decent grades and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I'd never lived anywhere outside of the house where I grew up, and the VHL was really one of my first-ever forays into meeting people on purpose. Now, I earn my own living in my third year of grad school in a different state, I'm president of my department's student organization, I have ideas of what I like but still not much idea of what I want to do with the rest of my life, and I'm up to lots of things that would have surprised me five years ago. Gustav 30 in 30 is actually wrapping up tonight because I have a flight at a weird time for a conference across the country tomorrow, and I decided I'd rather just suck it up and try to sleep on the way. I've learned so much about my field, my hobbies, and even just the world in general over the time I've been here, and I think I'm a very different person than I was back in the day. That being said, I love that I still love the VHL. I could have very easily lost interest, like I've done with some things. I think it's helped that lots of hobbies I have come with the idea of working up to a reward. For example, I like to write music in my free time and recently finished something I've been working at for a long time, which is nowhere near as good as a pro would put out but is something I'm proud of. Luckily, doing things like long media spots combine something I'm good at with something that I can work at for a long time if I want to, that is rewarding when I do it simply because I have just decided it to be that way. Just as much as for the sake of getting you to talk to me about things that I wrote that I find interesting, which is something that in and of itself is fairly satisfying, I put hours of my time into trying to make high-quality media on the forum for the enjoyment that I get out of simply doing it. Often, this is a piece of work that I don't really have to do, and I think that freedom and the fact that I do it when I decide I want to makes it what it is. I think that goes for lots of things in the VHL, and it goes for lots of things I've done that aren't specific to PTs. From the start, I broke my computer trying to figure out STHS, and then eventually got into GMing, and then got really good at building team servers, because I wanted to do all of those things. I started things like Town of Salem because I like being a part of them. I advocated for things like the end of the lottery, portal waivers, and the end of the E, and became M commissioner and helped overhaul the way it works, because I saw those things as things that would work differently if I had anything to say about them--and I did have something to say about them, and now they are different. I even started Discord gags like those related to Kranch and the Horny Police because they were things I wanted to see people having fun with, and I spent some time over COVID putting up those introspective reflection threads partly because I needed an outlet but also partly because I wanted the people around me to get what I had gotten out of thinking about those things. What I'm saying is that I've logged on to the forum with intention for years on end now, and I think the spirit of the league itself is just a little bit more "like me" than it would have been otherwise, because I willed it so. It's not that no one else has ever done this, and obviously lots of people have done that quite a bit more than myself, but I think I can say pretty confidently that I'm one of the people who has. But anyway, I don't think I need to hang about that point for too long, especially since @Victor referred to this series months ago as "an act of ego-stroking" and that's stuck with me enough that I've tried to make sure that most of what I put into it doesn't go too far that way. Up until this sentence, Gustav 30 in 30 contains 51,544 words over exactly 1,900 sentences (yes, I checked), with an estimated reading time of 3 hours and 7 minutes. It also contains 169 instances of the word "VHL," and somehow 308 of "time," which I guess is fitting for the amount of time that it took. I have to say that I think that time was worth it. I've written about lots of things I completely forgot until I went back to write about them, and I think I've learned a lot about what my work here has meant in the broader context of what eventually evolved from it. I'm not going to tag everyone who's ever meant anything to me here, because I'm not sure we have space on this forum for another 51,544 words. But if I matter to you in some way, then chances are that you matter to me just as much. The VHL has been a huge part of my life, and I'm glad if I could have given you any amount of enjoyment along the way. You may have noticed that most of this series was written about things I did a long time ago, but I'm not at all done yet--and I think there's lots of room left for me to discover quite a bit that I never thought I'd come across on this site. As for Gustav 30 in 30--it's over! Go home! And finally, for the first time in months, I can write other media spots. Read my other articles for the FULL Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE #26: Mint Jams #27: It Ain't Easy Being Green #28: Art Vandelay #29: Oh My God! They Killed Kenn-E!

FWIW I do agree with this. One thing that annoyed me about the "kill the E" argument was that it often came without much to back it up and it was mostly just something that people said because they wanted it. I like to think I did try to actually back it up when I could, but I would understand not taking it entirely seriously for that reason.

Is it that surprising? I held the opinion from the start that it was necessary but when it wasn’t I would be open to changing things. Up until that point I didn’t see it as a necessary discussion. Kinda yeah. I knew this was your opinion on it but I figured that the ball would have started rolling from someone who actively hated it more. I really didn’t mind it at first but the more I thought about all the ways that lower level would have been gutted for the sake of the upper team the less I wanted to deal with it. Not that we couldn’t have worked with that, of course, but I feel like at that point it became a matter of that versus the other option that I liked better anyway and didn’t feature those issues. I am super glad we test simmed regardless of outcome. I feel like prior to that point, we had a lot of assumptions going both ways about how it would work, and they were ALL unfair with nothing to back them up at the time.

Yeah, ultimately no one cares about the most popular post in my original thread. This wasn't even about killing the E at first, but I was more than happy to oblige when the discussion took a turn in that direction. Gustav 30 in 30 #25 was going to be my only article about the VHLE. I've only played in the E for one season, which I really didn't hate, and it was at the point when I started this series a foregone conclusion for me and BoG that the E was going nowhere. It really wasn't for lack of trying, mind you. From the day the E was conceived, I hated it, but I knew that the number of players we had in the league didn't justify its removal. So, I chose to sit back and make it very clear that my ideal future for the league was one where we hypothetically could delete the E and chose to do so. The first time that perception flipped for me was S89's theme week. Then, the wonderful people up at the blue team decided to ask the wonderful people of the VHL what they would do if they ran it for a day. Of course, in my case, asking what I'd do if you made me commissioner wouldn't have been nearly as smart as just knowing what my answer would be and giving me the TPE to shut up. My response to that question was one of my best media spots ever, one that aggregated roster size data and compared multiple different E-less scenarios to analyze whether we could get rid of the thing. For my model, I purposely made generalizations in ways that would approximate larger VHL roster sizes so any conclusion that the E could be deleted couldn't be claimed to be the result of personal bias. And guess what--I found that it would be just fine. Everyone knew that the size of the VHL's prospect pool had declined since the late S70s, but this did absolutely nothing to stop large parts of the league from maintaining that the VHLE was still necessary. It also did nothing to stop me from agreeing with them if we weren't able to accommodate any overflow from getting rid of it. I really hadn't known the answer to that question for sure up to that point, but I had my answer there and I was ready to take the next step. So, in S91, I followed up with exactly the same analysis and reached exactly the same conclusion. This wasn't unprompted and was even the result of a different theme week. This time, it was about recruitment, and the reason for that was hardly a secret. Right at the start of the S90s, recruitment had been just about entirely nonexistent for a few seasons on end. Draft classes were super thin, and so was the VHLM as it depended almost entirely on recreates. And even though my updated media spot showed practically no difference in VHL numbers from S89 to S91, something it didn't focus on as strongly was a dramatic reduction in VHLM numbers. Recruitment was a controversial topic, some of the reactions weren't so friendly, and it doesn't take too much intellect to realize that a declining VHLM also means a declining VHL eventually. The Board of Gustav went to work on discussing VHLE Society and Its Future the next season in a thread (surprisingly) started by @Beketov. By then, decreasing M numbers had started to hit the VHL more evidently, and the idea of nuking the E had become appealing to much of BoG. There were relatively few disagreements on that topic from a group that had previously instituted the system (I wanted to roll it ALL the way back to a cap of 250 and the old depreciation system with 8-season careers), and the thread wrapped up with a conclusion to kill the E. Until: Until, that is, recruitment decided to do something. The S93 class had 64 picks to S92's 31, with lots more active players as well. The decision to shut down the E was as made as anything has ever been in the BoG, and it fell apart pretty much immediately after it was made with a successful recruitment drive that filled the M back up and re-justified any "the M has enough players so we don't have to do anything" arguments that had been made in the past. I still hated the E, and the number of players we had in the league had nothing to do with my feelings about it. I was a bit disheartened by the last failure to make things work the way I wanted, and it was still a bit too soon to suggest that we do the apparently unthinkable and get rid of the E, so I decided to propose an alternative. My alternative was very clearly labeled as pure speculation, but I suggested that perhaps VHLM teams could be directly affiliated with VHLE teams. There were lots of intricacies to how this might have worked, but in short, I wanted to pair two M teams to each E team, therefore getting rid of lots of awkward transitions between the M and the E. I reasoned that, under a system like this, first-gen players would be far less confused with one of their drafts eliminated and far less displaced with an organization that could be run all as one community right up until that player went up to the VHL. Interestingly, this took off far more than I thought it would. The thing was, I wasn't super crazy about my idea in the first place and just wanted to test the waters on alternatives to the current system. To me, there were downsides of my way that were very evident as well in that GMs in both the M and the E would find their abilities handcuffed by the other teams involved in the matter. Plus, I still definitely didn't like it as much as just getting rid of the E, but who cares about that when the idea that you might just went out the window? I watched as the thread took off and built up steam and eventually snowballed into something entirely different, which was Bek's idea of having the development league be just one all-encompassing level managed by the same GM, where the upper level could be managed as the GM chose and the lower level would be meant more for newer, lower-TPE players. This was quite a bit simpler than my original idea in the sense that it got rid of having three cooks in the kitchen of one organization, and I didn't hate it at first. A couple things got in the way of the idea that I might support it: one being that I thought inconsistent roster sizes would lead to a more stable upper division at the expense of a bot-filled lower one that wouldn't be friendly to lower-TPE players, and the other being that it was also being floated out there by this point that we could just make things simple by deleting the E and calling it a day. Well, that was interesting. I'd (quite accidentally) relit the flame and gotten the ball rolling again on my single favorite topic. BoG was very interested in the latter affiliation system, in my opinion because (as stated in #22 of this series): This led to my thread eventually becoming a poll between the three options that had been covered up until that point, and the results indicated that we may be headed toward a whole new thing that I didn't really like: Even though deleting the E was simpler and accomplished everything I meant to accomplish from the start in suggesting that we overhaul the system, a couple things about the affiliation system were more appealing to a lot of people. It was touted as promoting league stability, as the natural stopgap between the lower and upper levels would allow the size of the league to ebb and flow without requiring that we adjust the number of teams (despite other concerns of how this would affect the lower level). Plus, having 30-TPE players right up against 400-TPE players was seen as just too much for those 30-TPE players (eventually, test simming would refute this point. Keep in mind that 30 versus 250 under pre-hybrid attributes was quite the difference and it worked fine). Discussion took off on the affiliation system, and the more ideas people had for it, the more complicated it seemed, until we were at the point where we had something that was going to operate on a huge string of technicalities. I was actually very much checked out by this point, because I'd accepted that it was going to go some way I was going to like less than the E. Later on, though, I clicked back into the thread and saw posts by people like @Berocka and @v.2 (and others I don't remember) opining that the proposed system had become too complicated, it really was less desirable than the E, and we should either just take the simple way out in nuking the E or do nothing at all. Which, it just so happened, I agreed with. I rejoined at this point, but it was mostly just a matter of jumping on board what had become the third entirely different end goal of the discussion. A separate thread was put up where the voting results were now heavily in favor of simple E deletion, and we set that in order very soon after. It really wasn't my doing, but the thread I started was ultimately what ended up getting rid of the E. After the lottery, it was the second time I'd brought up an issue with a league institution, watched BoG fight over it, and eventually saw it disappear entirely once everyone decided they were done fighting. Perhaps that's just the best way to go about things. On a personal note, I'm very glad that I was slow enough with my articles that this happened while I was still writing them. Gustav 30 in 30 was originally going to be mostly a 29 in 30 with a stupid filler article shoved into place of this one, because I could only think of that many ideas, but one more thing just had to happen that was memorable, and here it is. Plus, I haven't seen the behind-the-scenes perspective of this anywhere out in public yet, so it's quite possible that it's the first time lots of you are finding out how it all went down. By itself, I think that's a story worth telling, but it's also a perfect addition to my series. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE #26: Mint Jams #27: It Ain't Easy Being Green #28: Art Vandelay

Yes hi hello I still haven't forgotten about Hall of Not Bad and I'll definitely keep it going (I have numbers ready to go for a couple different players). Milo may be the best one left though. I think that if we can get Jannula in, Milo has a decent shot as well. The line between Milo and Felix Peters is practically nonexistent.

I knew it was someone who had been here longer than me but my guess didn't feel right. Congrats on making the best Vandelay meme though!

I don't remember who made this image--somehow I think I remember @CowboyinAmerica, although I could be wrong--but Art Vandelay made a name for himself early on in his career by absolutely wrecking both Chicago and DC for some weird reason. When I started in the VHL, I set out to create a defensive defenseman. After that, I switched positions to a goal-scoring forward and then experienced a full career as one. So, unless you consider offensive defenseman a separate position, I'd gone over all the viable options by the end of my second career. That is, all the options except goaltender. With my career ending and the first season of my recreate also being the first season of hybrid attributes, I wanted to play the one position I never had before, and I was pushed farther in that direction by a desire to hold on to the past. So, Art Vandelay came into the VHL world, and in a more awkward fashion than I may have wanted. I created right at midnight on trade deadline day, the first player in the S84 class--except the portal hadn't flipped yet and I actually ended up as the last player in the S83 class. I got made fun of for this, of course, and I remember someone saying something way more mean than the situation warranted to me on Discord, but all was well as I caught that and got it sorted out right away. Perhaps somewhat ironically given their sudden exit from the M later that year, my first GM with Vandelay was @diacope, and my first team Ottawa. This was the only team that offered me any playing time at all, and I delivered on it with four wins in as many games. The next season, I had enough TPE to go up to the E, but I think you can take a good guess as to how I felt about doing that. As it turned out, the M would be Vandelay's stomping grounds for an amazing S83 campaign in Miami under GM @Ledge. Running away with VHLM goaler stats, Vandelay took the team to a 48-17-7 record with a .924 SV%, a 1.88 GAA, and 11 shutouts. I'd never won any VHLM awards, not even after Taro had an amazing campaign in his time, but Vandelay took it to the next level. Not only did I win the Devereux for being the M's top goaler, I was the VHLM MVP. Miami faltered a bit in the playoffs, but it was still a successful campaign that culminated in me being drafted #1 overall to the Stars in S84. I'd been familiar with @InstantRockstar for quite some time by that point, because he's continuously been a GM since we were both hired into M roles at the same time in S66. I'd never played for him, and after a decent talk over DMs, that changed a bit. LA had the first and third picks in the S84 draft and chose to honor me with #1, something that I was very proud of. I was also very proud that I said long in advance that I never wanted to touch the VHLE, and LA let that happen by calling me up right away. Art Vandelay was officially a 9-season player. Something I'd be a little less proud of was the state of LA that season. Logically, I never needed to come up right away, and it hurt my TPA trajectory to do so. Still, I'd made the VHL and I was a starter right away. Vandelay almost won 20 games in his rookie season on a roster that had started a rebuild, with a surprisingly high .927 SV% putting him in the running for Top Rookie. This was something that I'd lose to the legitimately better choice in IR's Augustus Kennedy (who consistently beat Vandelay in head-to-head matchups throughout his career), but with one season that was about as good as I could have hoped given my and my team's low TPE level, I was looking forward to the rest. Vandelay had already gained a reputation as an up-and-comer, had been a thorn in the sides of a couple better teams (hence the meme up top), and had a personal brand built up. In every game thread where Vandelay either went 2-0 or recorded a shutout, I'd simply comment "Art Vandelay" and others (mainly @jacobcarson877 but others too) were happy to follow. S85 went surprisingly well from a team perspective, and Vandelay came close to putting up his first winning record. I do remember being a bit frustrated around this time by the team's performance in overtime and particularly the shootout, and my 8 OT losses seem to reflect that. Despite starting Vandelay twice more than was legal, LA didn't make the playoffs, but that was OK. We were on track to do nicely in the future. Maybe, though, "the future" would have to wait a little bit longer. Vandelay's third season was his worst up to that point, with only 16 wins and a career-low SV%. Ironically enough, Vandelay was started four fewer times than he could have been in S86, sparking BoG speculation that LA was tanking the season after they supposedly tried to sneak out a few more wins. I do suppose that it could be fair to want to watch Art Vandelay as closely as league administration did, but this was never true. LA didn't even own their first-round pick in S87, so we couldn't have logically tanked on purpose anyway. On top of this, the first-round pick that we did have was used on a player who went to free agency before ever making it up to the VHL, making the S87 offseason a big waste of time. More or less, LA needed to worry about developing their core first and foremost. Vandelay re-signed prior to S87, despite no team success to that point (not that I've ever been used to that on a rookie contract anyway). Luckily, this worked out great. With a 41-win season and a career-high SV%, the Stars were back in the spotlight and back in the playoffs. Plus, Vandelay was right at the center of it. I got my first-ever nomination for Top Goalie and my third for MVP. This was an MVP race I'd lose (for the first time ever), thanks in some part to @FrostBeard's Sirdsvaldis Miglaskems being LA's top scorer and the eventual MVP winner that season. Miglaskems' 54 goals in the midst of an insane era for goalers propelled the Stars into postseason standing, where Vandelay reversed the usual course of my players in the playoffs and did horribly. I only had to wait until S87 to make the playoffs, but it turned out that it would be a little bit longer before I got my first playoff win. That first win came just the next season, when LA made it to the playoffs yet again off the back of 35 wins and a .928 SV% from Vandelay. I'd yet again be nominated for the two big awards, and I'd yet again lose pretty easily. It was another baby step forward for the Stars, though, with two playoff wins in a close wild-card series. Finally, it seemed like LA was consistently at least decent, and Vandelay was a big part of it. S89 was a little step back, and it was Vandelay's first in a while. Don't get me wrong, the team was still decent, but the numbers dipped quite a bit to levels that really weren't very good for the era. LA took the slightest dip possible afterward, with just one playoff win instead of two, and you can tell that what that means is that we were once again (predictably) out of the playoffs early on. In S90, though, the team turned a corner. We had a new superstar (and a new MVP winner!) with @KRZY's Todd Cooke, right on top of a lineup that held the bare minimum number of players but pressed its finances right up against the cap. In other words, we were stacked in exactly the ways STHS favors a team, all with Vandelay running the show in net. S90 was the best Vandelay had ever done up to that point, with a whole 45 wins more than making up for his early career failures. The playoffs rolled around, and Vandelay did what he never could before: win a series. More specifically, LA swept DC in the first round. We had officially gone from competitive to really good, and we were one series away from the finals. The NA championship against Toronto, who were built in much the same way we were and were arguably better on paper. Any lineup where one of Ronan Lavelle, Mac Atlas, Tomas Sogaard, or Jimi Jaks wouldn't be able to crack the top line was stacked, and that was the exact lineup that Vandelay needed to make his way through to make it to Cup contention. The Legion went up 2-0 early on in the series, before LA rebounded and tied it up at home. The series went back to Toronto, where they won, and then came back to LA, where the Stars saved their chances with a win of their own. Game 7 was in Toronto, in a series where neither team had lost at home, but LA finally reversed the trend. Rookie Gregger McKeggegger scored the go-ahead goal in the second period, and Vandelay held on for the rest of a game where the Stars were outshot. We were in the finals--only my second trip there ever, my first since my Nighthawks got swept by Seattle way back in S68, and my first time ever winning a NA conference championship. Where, as it turned out, we would get swept by Prague. I have now been in the VHL for five and a half real-life years and have still never even won a single game in the Cup finals. Pain. Anyway, you can tell by that that Vandelay would never achieve that ultimate goal. LA remained as good as ever in the next two seasons, but S90 was as far as I would ever get. They're practically not worth mentioning because they're basically the same minus the playoff success--super good regular season, 43 wins followed by 45 again, don't get any consideration for awards because the era was absolutely insane to goaler numbers and other people were still better. Rockstar gave everything he had to give us one last chance at winning it all in S92, but Vandelay was done after then and so was everyone else. Much of the team retired, putting LA in the hole it's still in today, but I like to think that all the memories we made in that time justified that to some extent. I never required that someone keep me around for a full career, but I'm glad that it happened to me once. VandeLAy was one of the greatest Stars of all time. Art Vandelay is currently the winningest goaler of all time to not make the Hall of Fame, and as he was never even on the ballot, it's very likely that we're talking about something that will never happen. But, I managed to make a pretty darn good player for the second time in a row, and the impact he had on the league in his time cannot be understated. Art Vandelay Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE #26: Mint Jams #27: It Ain't Easy Being Green

G - Red Panda @leandrofg

F - Toby Kadachi F - Diego Machado @hylands