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Gustav
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Posts posted by Gustav
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1 hour ago, Spartan said:
Do we need to have any discussion on Acyd before voting here? Realized we've had no discussion about him at all other than the nom, which is unusual.
Honestly, once we're down to a yes or no on someone, it would be a really bad look for anyone to start pushing hard against it. I've already voted yes and have no issue with that. I think the weirder thing this season was that we just jumped right to that point (rather than no discussion after).
That said, I don't think recent history has followed the practice of inducting people just for the sake of it. It will be interesting to see how things shake out with our "newer generation" or whatever you want to call us.
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On 4/29/2024 at 2:24 AM, Berocka said:
50% pay for your 2nd job.
I don’t know how I missed this going up initially but out of everything in here I really like this one (as well as the cap of 6 in pay). I don’t like it when people stop posting because they no longer have to post.
That’s part of the reason why I still do media spots—I like them, first of all. But I also feel like if I can’t still pull the weight of earning mostly as normal, I shouldn’t have the job that assumes I can.
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I have been a member of the VHL since February of 2019. I have played 29 seasons as a player, with three full careers behind me, and spent (I think) 14 or so as a GM. That's 43-ish seasons in total.
Before today, I could have said that I have never won a championship on any level of the VHL. Not as a GM, not as a player, not at all in general. I don't even think I've won stuff like the World Cup and WJC. But I can't say that anymore--thanks in large part to the management team of @Dadam30 and @dstevensonjr, Lazlo Holmes and the Saskatoon Wild are your S93 Founders' Cup Champions.
It's a bit fitting that my first championship came in the M. I think my VHLM tenure as a GM was much more special than my VHL one, and some of my most exciting Cup chases on both the player and GM end have come in the minors. But I'll still have to point out that I've never won a championship in the VHL. Could Holmes be the one to break the curse, and might GMs be less hesitant to pick him now that he's shaken off said curse on some level so far? We'll have to find out when the draft comes up.
- Frank, jacobcarson877, dstevensonjr and 1 other
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Pictured: my experience trying to talk to @gorlab about graphics as a beginner.
Anyone who's joined the VHL over the past couple years knows of my tendency to write some big articles. Heck, I'm putting everything I've got into making Gustav 30 in 30 what I want it to be by the end of next season, and we're heading full speed for my halfway mark. In Gustav history, we're right around S71. I'm trying to do these mostly chronologically, and that's pretty convenient right around this point because my first Town of Salem game started in March of 2020. That's also when I made this:
That might not look all that impressive--and it isn't; that was just me swapping out a logo, putting in a blank dark background, and abusing the Color Dodge tool--but I still remember everything about making it even though it was over 4 years ago. It was late at night, everyone else in my house was asleep, I was by myself on the floor of my bedroom in the very same spot I was when I first clicked the link to the VHL, and I had just purchased a subscription to Photoshop after hearing all about how I wouldn't be a real graphics person until I did that. I remember being a little disappointed by how much nicer Photoshop felt, because I'd previously sworn by just using Gimp for free, but considering that this was just a few graphics ago...
...one could say that I was pretty happy with the output. I'd been doing my best to get into the wonderful world of graphics for a while, starting out in Mississauga when I tried to crank some out for my players, and the wonderful month that was March of 2020 also gave me lots of nervous energy that I used on things like...oh, I don't know, being the founder of VHL Town of Salem. As well as a lot more graphics.
Before that point, I knew a couple things and could work my way around some basic commands. I could cut out a player's picture from a background (I didn't yet know what remove.bg was), I knew what opacity meant and what a layer mask was, I'd learned how to color swap and jersey swap and all that stuff (which is surprisingly not difficult to get on a basic level). I'd used the graphics channel on Discord as a resource, and at the time, it was a great resource to get extensive advice given mostly by @gorlab. Taking things and applying them and mostly just spending lots of time clicking buttons to see what worked made me feel proud of everything I made, even if it didn't look all that great. I'd made more and more for the VHL and was starting to explore affiliate leagues more closely too.
For the most part, I found that I really only wanted to do VHL graphics when I had nothing to say that week. I've always been more of a writer in sim leagues (and a "takes a long time to explain things" type in real life; I'm sure that's no surprise) because I feel that I always have lots to say about things that matter to me. So, especially with the understanding that I could just direct people to better sig-makers, I'd really only make something occasionally and my progress was slow.
Something that took off for me, though, was shamelessly doing my weekly (or in some cases, monthly) Player Brand in the EFL for affiliate checks here. In the EFL, it was almost the opposite of the reason why I didn't really catch on with my graphics here. I didn't follow the EFL all that closely and really had nothing at all to say--so weren't graphics the perfect thing to do? I got to work and was pretty happy with some of the output. Here's my favorite out of the ones I made of my own player when I was still a beginner:
Which isn't perfect, but it's better than either of those I've shown you so far. It was only a few graphics into my time out there and I started making real improvements just about every time I opened Photoshop.
I won't harp on my time in affiliate leagues too much (especially because that's a story for another installment), but most of my best work happened outside the VHL. I made a graphic here and there, and lost a league contest or two...
Made for a "make a recruitment graphic" contest. I was really proud of this, posted it on Discord, and was immediately told that everyone looks super yellow--fair point.
...but that's mostly it as far as the VHL is concerned. Digging through my old folder, I'm finding that a really surprising amount of my best work was made for the IHL, a now-defunct GM league created by @enigmatic at some point in the late S60s that I was invited to at some point in the S70s. We were only 8 or so members at any one time, but people really seemed to love it when I made them a graphic and I got more positive feedback than I did on most of my stuff in larger communities. I've got a big lineup of images that I'll dump in a future article, but (in my opinion) the best graphic I ever made was this one for the IHL:
Clearly better than the Justin Graves one that probably led to Justin Graves almost immediately going inactive on me.
I bring up my history with graphics here because it's a huge example of a real-life skill that the VHL can give someone. I have certainly improved as a writer in my time here, but why bring up a list of my favorite articles? I've also built up lots of spreadsheet skills, but why bring up my favorite spreadsheets? Graphics are convenient. They're visually appealing. I've got all of them in a folder in chronological order. And it's easy to see improvement. I never touched the top tier of sig-making, but what I have in my folder (140 sigs, maybe 40 of which are duplicates before and after lighting adjustments) is about the equivalent of making one thing a week for two years. I'd imagine that more would have been reachable had I not burned myself out of affiliate leagues at one point, but I'm glad what I've done. Because, honestly, you would not believe where basic Photoshop can take you in the real world. I'm Vice President of my student organization off the back of a campaign poster I made myself, I design flyers for that same organization for events, I helped my lab get recognized in a photo contest, and I've developed a reputation for making memes that would not be possible without ever having opened that software. Graphics, somehow, have made me a little bit more popular.
Ironically, disappearing into the Internet to escape real life has taught me lots of things about real life. If I'd never joined the VHL, there's absolutely no way that I'd have ever learned how to edit a photo. I'd also never have learned how to organize data until school forced me to. But being a nerd led me to learn nerd things for sim league purposes, which just made me a better nerd. And I'm not sure whether I'll ever consistently make graphics again (and I know for a fact my skill has dropped off a bit), but it's something I put lots and lots of time into that fundamentally affected my perspective on both sim leagues and real life over that time. I think that deserves to be talked about somewhere at least, and I'd encourage you to reflect on the ways what you've done here has carried over into your life as well if you haven't.
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?
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I promise this image made perfect sense in context.
The game of Mafia was invented in 1987 by a student at Moscow State University who has definitely never heard of the VHL. That student probably never envisioned
Among Usthe lengths to which the world would go to study the game, from profitable spin-offs to home-brew versions to even real mathematical research devoted to its analysis. Playing a game like Mafia requires intuition, wit, and lots of knowledge of game mechanics.And running one takes even more.
My first exposure to Mafia came much earlier than I thought it was, when @Nykonax floated the idea of a game way back in May of 2019--this would have been S66. He ended up getting a decent-sized player list and making a game happen. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Not much that was being said in the game thread made much sense to me, and I walked away from the experience considering it largely forgettable. But, I was now aware that this was a thing that could be done on forums.
I must have retained that knowledge pretty soon after that, because I remember playing a game in the SBA right around the time of our affiliation fallout. That changed not much of anything about what I knew about the game, but I had retained the basic idea of talking during the day and doing things at night. I'd also joined the EFL (which I will openly admit was fueled by wanting affiliate checks), and in one of those affiliate leagues, I had my first exposure to Town of Salem--a game that you can find on Steam (although I've never played it) that is essentially just a fancy version of Mafia. It turns out that, as a fancy version of Mafia, Town of Salem (or ToS) is readily adapted to a forum game. I still didn't really know what I was talking about in the EFL, but they had a long rule thread and I was more comfortable hanging around there with it being a league that I knew had nothing against me being VHL-first.
By this point, it was clear to me that--even though I was clueless--the Mafia concept had managed to stick around for more than just a one-off in our affiliate leagues, and I'd also watched lots of people in those leagues play the games and like them a lot. It was something the VHL was missing, and I was bored--so I figured I should take matters into my own incompetent hands.
For those of you who are unfamiliar by this point, Mafia (in general) is a two-sided game consisting of an "informed minority," or an "evil" group of players who plot with each other behind the scenes to kill the others, and an "uninformed majority," or a "good" group who must use their own skills and find out who the bad ones are by talking out in the open (where the bad ones try to blend in and mess with their plans). There are lots of variations on this, many with more unique roles than others. I wasn't confident, so I eventually found myself digging through rule sets on some mafia game forum and settling on a game called Cult in the Jungle Republic where 12 of the 19 people who would end up playing were just residents of the town with no special abilities. We played the game, but most people didn't really like it for that reason--why would you want to play the game where you really couldn't do much aside from following votes? So, it was clear to me that to keep this thing going, we would need to go full Town of Salem--where every single player has a job to do and there are lots of layers to the game beyond just Town and Mafia.
Did I establish by this point that I had no clue what I was doing? Whatever. In any case, I relied on two things in equal measure to learn the game, without either of which the game would not be possible. The first was the Town of Salem Wiki, which has every possible role extensively documented with enough information that a game can be run if you read closely enough. The second was @omgitshim, who has every possible role also extensively documented in his head, as well as enough patience that a game can be run even if you're stupid. I spent lots of hours over lots of days dealing with both of those until I felt that I got the point, and then I finally put up the sign-up thread for the VHL's first-ever game of Town of Salem, just over a year after I joined the league and about four months after Cult in the Jungle Republic flopped. Check out the date on that one--is it really a surprise to anyone that we all had the time in our lives to get the game off the ground?
ToS #1 was a success, all in all. It took forever--no other game we've played has even started to approach Day 13--but it was a big learning experience for lots of people (myself included) and I had an absolute blast every time I started the night phase and got to see in real time who was taking shots at who. I stuck with asking OMG everything for the most part, but made it through my first game ever without a major crisis.
I knew I'd run lots of games at the start, but I had no idea just how frequently I was doing it and I could never pull that type of thing off today. Within a week, I was signing people up for Game 2, and we'd run up 10 games between the end of March and the end of August--that's one game (which itself took just over a week on average between sign-up and last kill) about every two weeks over that time. I'm honestly shocked that we were able to maintain our player base that constantly, but I suppose that's all we had going on over the summer of 2020. In a way, I wouldn't doubt it if COVID was what gave us the amount of interested people to begin with, or if it was the reason why ToS caught on.
Regardless, lots of those interested people deserve my mentions. My handy-dandy stat tracking sheets give me all the info I need to tag those who have been involved the most--obviously OMG, but he and @eaglesfan036 have been considered our nastiest, most competent players from the very start. @Doomsday, @Ricer13, @jhatty8, and @Berocka can also all claim to have played just about every single game we've run (with Eagles, Berocka, and @Devise both running their own spin-off versions of ToS at one point or another). Some others who have stuck around consistently for a long time and are still active in our threads today are @Spartan , @Advantage, @N0HBDY, @rory, @Alex, and even @Ptyrell, who has never had a VHL player but has posted over 1,000 times on our forum for ToS and related games (including his own creative project, Town of Pallet). All of these and much, much more have made Town of Salem what it is, which is an awesome way for the community to really feel like a community. I've had so much fun watching everyone go at each other over the past four years (!) and I'm looking forward to a lot more.
To bring it back to being a point in the series about my own personal history, this wasn't the first time I decided to just do something fun for the community rather than waiting for it, but it was the most work I'd ever put into that. I think the league would be a much better place if it had more "just doing" in it, and Town of Salem is something I'll always be able to point to as an example of that. Even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the sim hockey part of the league (and therefore is just one of the "intangibles" on my record), I consider it one of my biggest VHL accomplishments and really feel that it deserves a solid place in this 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?
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Who's someone you've never played with but would like to?
Do you ever find yourself having to explain hockey to people who know nothing about it? How does it usually go? Have you ever gotten anyone into it?
Who are some big names in cricket today that I should know about, and why are they special?
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2 hours ago, ShawnGlade said:
Oh phew, it had been a couple months since my Davos stint was mentioned, I was starting to get worried
Jokes aside, I will say I think both sides could've done better. The site has seen multiple users pour their hearts out in posts about how shitty it is to be the butt of a joke or have your entire existence being memed, and those users have gotten support.......except I was told to suck it up. Some other GMs who I worked alongside (who will remain nameless) were actually kinda dicks about it too. People can question my trades and whatnot, but truth is I did what I thought would be best.
Something I see people bring up a lot is that I traded my own player through Davos to contenders for personal gain. Without context, sure that seems to be the case. Except both times I traded for my own player, I gave up Davos assets because my player was the exact player Davos needed. People forget that in the mid-late seasons of my tenure, Davos was a playoff team, in fact if memory servers, we were one win away from a finals appearance at one point. Those teams were offense heavy with subpar defense, and my player was a top dman in the league at the time. Figured I'd trade for myself and BOTH stints he had with Davos sucked, so he was a deadline deal both times to recoupe something. Yes, my player went on to win a cup both times he was traded away, and honestly for that I'll just call it blind luck.
ANYWAYS, it was shitty to go through what I did, I didn't even wanna log on to the site or discord anymore. With the drafts, what had happened was I wasn't available to make the time for a draft one season and instead of trying to find a different time like we usually did when the league was smaller and had less schedules to work with, but I was pretty much told I was fucked and I had to be there. Well I was on vacation so didn't have a PC to sit there forever and make it a list, so I just typed something up on notes and sent it away, and put "BPA" at the bottom when my list ran out, which is what happened. Sure enough, the next season I couldn't make the live draft again, and was again told I was shit outta luck. So I figured, what the fuck ever who cares then, and no showed. I could've handled it better, but it was a not-so-secret that I was on the chopping block regardless of the draft, so I figured I just didn't care anymore. Not justifying what I did and ultimately it was wrong, but it's the truth.
I'm pretty much over it now. It was an overall shitty time in my life and I was happy to move on from something that brought me no value. I just can't get over how public everything became. Did my best to keep things private and behind doors, but everyone in the community knew what was happening because nobody really kept their mouth shut. It's pretty damn hard to do ANYTHING when that kind of info is out there, but GMs like Bush can get away with being genuinely MIA for over a season. Just felt like every little thing that happened to me was some big story that had to go public
Anyways, rant over
EDIT: Yikes, I forgot about those threads I created. Oof, yeah I don't have much to say about those, those are pretty bad and cringey to read looking back
Oh, for sure. I think most of what I've written here so far can be read from the standpoint of "there are real people on the other end of the screen." That can be positive (as in, "you wouldn't believe the difference you can make it some people's lives here") or negative (as in, "stop being assholes to each other"), and I think you caught a lot of the negative. You're not the first person I've seen saying that a lot of what went down in the S60s did not make you want to stick around too closely, and I understand that.
I think that isn't something I picked up on as a new player, but I hope I didn't contribute to it too much. Looking back, it was definitely more normal to go after specific teams or people--not even to be mean, but just because that's how it was and that was how you could be seen as funny. I definitely think you had it worse than I did in this regard, but it did hurt to really try to make things work and then open Discord to find people talking about how I sucked as a GM.
It's also really hard to lose a negative label as a GM once you get it. I remember lots of people wanting to play for me at first, even wanting to sign with me in FA, and that's something that disappeared as I kept losing. Well, that's fine and people get to do whatever they want--but then isn't that another obstacle when no one wants to sign with you? That's just a practical aspect of it, too. It isn't fun to watch people not even take your moves seriously because "there he goes again" or whatever. I'm not convinced I'll ever want to GM again, and that's a big part of why.
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I could have been DC's GM if it weren't for you meddling kids--who knows what would have happened?
I also would have had way, way less to say about my time in the VHLM if I ended up being promoted in S68 with the addition of a couple new teams. The BoG toyed with the idea, but eventually they'd decided that
they hated mesome others were better fits at the time. But I was pretty darn good, after all...Spoiler
At least, according to most people...
Most people are also classy enough not to bully me on my birthday.
...and my time was going to come eventually.
Cue @ShawnGlade fucking up.
I mostly joke because I think I would have been moved up sometime not far from S70 anyway. At one point, I was the one @Advantage wanted to take over Malmo eventually, and had the league known that he'd be giving up the team right after S70, they definitely would have waited a little bit on hiring me and done that instead. I almost could have flushed Malmo's hopes and dreams down the toilet too--could you imagine? At least two franchises should be glad I was unlucky.
But anyway, back to what I said earlier. When I joined the league, I knew Shawn as the builder of a solid player and a passionate GM in Davos who made a lot of moves that people questioned. Davos got made fun of a lot, even when they were good on paper. So did Shawn, by extension. Even when the team was good on paper, they just couldn't seem to piece it together. Which, by itself, wasn't a negative reflection on his management. With that being said, it certainly meant that when there was an actual shortcoming, the league picked up on it and ran with it.
After pinging Shawn, I hope I can keep it clear that I like him a lot while also fairly saying that I don't blame league leadership for considering it a red flag when he missed a couple drafts in a row without notice. Which is essentially all that presented a serious issue to the league. Things happen, and sometimes things matter a little more than this website--so when that runs to enough of an extent that the league has to BPA your picks and your players start leaving in free agency (future HoFer Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen was a big loss), it's enough for the league to also consider that maybe your team could use a bigger loser with more time and energy to devote.
I came across the BoG thread on the matter a couple seasons later when they let me in, and it actually started out as a discussion about (deservedly) removing Bushito as Calgary's GM after the Wranglers were functionally run by Dil and/or Blade for a few seasons on end. But S70's draft came and went with that thread up, and with Davos discourse becoming very public afterward, the topic quickly shifted. To be honest, things went into "who should we hire" pretty soon after that, and it was @Rin who pretty soon after that managed to avoid a lot of debate and lists and whatnot by recommending me specifically for the job. Really, the only bump in the road was Advantage bringing up that maybe I could run Malmo at some point--which he walked back later on saying that he wasn't sure what his plans were yet. So it was settled--I'd known myself that I was the heir to the Nighthawks and was a little bit disappointed to find out that it wouldn't be working out that way, but I've also mentioned before that S70 wasn't very happening in Mississauga and I was really excited when Beav contacted me to offer the big-league job. It was also cool to watch my then-both-former-and-future AGM @Berocka, who had just been hired in Halifax and made a questionable trade there, be moved over to run the Hounds because the personal connection we'd both built with the franchise was strong enough to warrant it.
With all the hype around me moving up, I was also a bit conflicted because I really didn't want it to happen the way it did. I'd seen Shawn's resignation post (the league asked him to quit instead of announcing it officially, but it was no secret) and subsequent discussion thread, and really did feel a bit bad. I also wasn't really sure how to approach the situation from my end. Here was someone I really had no issue with, whose team I'd inherited and would have to work with, who was a rostered player on that team, and who also probably was not a fan of me in that moment. I did reach out and we talked briefly, but we mostly gave each other some space at the start.
Something that was really important to me was the buildup of team culture. Davos was not in any position to win games in S70, and I'd heard a lot about how the team's community needed work. I didn't really want to deal with figuring out what that meant or how true that was, so I almost immediately created a new team server altogether. I followed the same exact strategy I had in building a locker room in Mississauga (which was mostly a carryover from my first season in Houston), which was to try to focus discussion into publicly accessible channels as much as possible and try to create a mutually beneficial environment for the team and the rest of the community. With the Hounds, I'd never had the need to bring in people who weren't affiliated with the team (and there were some cases where people would join the team for this reason!), but with a gutted and mostly demoralized roster, and no alumni network in my newly-created server, I decided to invite a handful of people who had been particularly good to me up to that point. I especially remember people like @Doomsday, @GlowyGoat, @McWolf, and @Esso2264 at the start, some of which would stay active in that server through my entire tenure even if they never made it onto my roster. On the roster itself was...really not much. We had the ever-reliable @Ahma on defense, and right around the time I was hired was when @Brrbisbrr (one of the nicest people I've ever met on this website) decided to make a comeback. Samuel Ross was my first Davos goaler, and he faced the absolute barrage of pucks faithfully in S70.
As you might guess, the biggest event of S70 was my hiring. I won't act like we won much of anything (we finished last, of course). My GM tenure had gotten off to a rocky start. I could have just thrown lines together and checked out until I finally got to draft in S71. But I felt that it was worth putting the time and effort into making a team run, at least a little bit, and I felt that our server benefited from that. I was really proud of some of the ways I felt appreciated by my new team, and haven't quite forgotten this article that's over 4 years old at this point.
My first year with Davos reinforced a lot of what I already knew--that running your VHL team like a VHLM team and actually trying to see that your players have a positive experience instead of zoning them out and doing your lines when you have to is something that pays off. I'd much rather have the record I did in S70, and know that my team had a good time getting there, than have no connection with them and win a bit more. And while it's unfortunate that I couldn't do both of those things at once, you'll see as I cover the rest of my GM tenure that I don't regret it.
Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:
#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name
#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?
- Ahma, Doomsday and jacobcarson877
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Currently sitting at work at...Ohio State. So
have fun never getting a GM jobI have had lots of reasons to think about your team recently. I spent most of my life not caring at all about college football, but getting involved with a big football school has changed that over the past couple years. Now I can't get enough of this shit.I am legitimately curious how the next few seasons will play out for Michigan though. I won't act like I know all your players, but out of the ones I do know I think all of them are going into the draft. I'd imagine that there will be lots more obstacles this season compared to last one.
OSU was an interesting case last season. McCord was okay at QB but I felt like he didn't step up as much as some others (painfully, McCarthy is an example) when he had to. Harrison was absolutely incredible to watch and I'd argue he was our MVP despite his position. I felt like we didn't have too many single players who stood out on defense, but the combined effect of having lots of very good players who were all obviously very well-rehearsed turned out very well. I feel like they didn't get enough credit.
I'm optimistic overall for this year because we'll have a pretty solid transfer player (Howard) at QB with a couple top recruits (Noland and Sayin) in the room, still a legit #1 receiver (Egbuka) and a new recruit (Smith) who's already impressed--along with last year's top receiver recruit in Tate. Our reputation as WRU should not be at stake.
We also got lots of players who left Alabama when Saban retired (and if you want a team who may have more questions to answer than yours, there it is). Offense and defense benefited from this (can't wait to watch Caleb Downs) and I think we look scary.
Sincerely best of luck to you guys this year, because I want our matchup to stay exciting.
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One of many posts I came across back in the day that featured someone who was really important in one of our affiliate leagues saying negative things about ours in their league's Discord server. Did we deserve it? On some level, yes.
Most people know that there are things you just shouldn't say anymore. Maybe not everyone agrees what those things are. Maybe some people aren't quite up on what means what and how those meanings have changed. But you've got to be living under a rock if you aren't aware that much of the Western world has fairly recently come to terms with how our choices of words can affect others, intentionally or otherwise. Whether with any intent to hate or not, lots of words are out there that once were generally accepted in most casual settings and have since been looked at with a bit of hesitation. "If I were a member of this group, would I appreciate this word being used in this way?" is a fair question that's made lots of people reflect. If you're over 20 or so, chances are that you've had both the exposure to such things being common and the life experience to question it. I'm sure you know the sorts of things I'm referring to, so I don't think I need to keep explaining. I won't act like I haven't cringed at a thing or two I've said or found funny in the past.
I'm also not going to act like the VHL hasn't, either. Talk to any super-old member, and you'll probably hear a whole lot about how the league used to be the Wild West of the Internet. I've read lots of "if you think this is bad, you haven't seen anything"-type comments, and I believe them. I've seen members attack each other personally and drop comments that really aren't OK in general. But by the time I'd joined the league, it was a good bit tamer than it was. And it's a good bit tamer today than it was then, as well.
The single most impactful day in the history of "what is and is not OK to say in the VHL," though, came about after I'd joined. October 31, 2019, should have been a really cool day for the VHL. That morning, @Beaviss, who had revolutionized league recruiting and brought it back from the brink of nonexistence by reeling in the great classes of the S60s, was hired into a very deserved role as league commissioner. The VHLM was in the middle of their Cup finals in S68, with a Game 6 slated for that day that could have given the Houston Bulls their first ever championship. And it was Halloween! What's not to like?
There was a lot to like in Houston, that's for sure--that Game 6 I'd mentioned went their way. The season was over and the M had their champion. But the story didn't end there--in fact, this one starts at this point because one comment that responded negatively to the game did so with a choice of words that would not be accepted in the VHL today. Though you can find the thread easily, I'm not going to link it for a couple reasons--mainly, what was said initially came from members who I genuinely believe are good people, who apologized for what they said and took accountability to settle their own business. I consider the start of the situation much more their business than mine, so all I think is absolutely necessary to know is that one of those "ways to describe things that used to be common and now are considered less fine to say" made its way onto our forum. It isn't OK now and wasn't OK then--but it's also a matter that has been settled.
Houston, interestingly, was helped quite a bit by deadline signings. The VHL had recently rolled out a strengthened affiliate program (the one still in existence today that gives a free 12 TPE to the super important people in our affiliate leagues), and much of the SBA's leadership had created right at the deadline and signed with the same team. With that being Houston, and with a full weekly cap claimable by all these players, all of SBA leadership saw the thread when they won the Cup--and that also meant that all of SBA leadership saw what was said.
At the time, the SBA's guidelines for personal conduct were very different from ours (and much more strict). I had been in their league for a very short time at that time as a very casual affiliate member and never had an issue with anyone there myself, but I was familiar with a few stories that at I thought were ridiculous (I really don't remember most of the stories or most of the details of what I do remember, and it's also been almost 5 years, so I'm not sure if my opinion is any different now). But being a league with stricter guidelines, I can understand where some people may have been shocked to see things posted that they would have dealt with personally on their own website.
I'm not going to say that the SBA response was entirely in the right. Our league wasn't given much opportunity to officially respond to a fairly aggressive pushback, and later on that same day, the SBA had removed their affiliation with us entirely. Their justification for this was (legitimate or not is up to you) that the VHL had generally held relaxed standards that the SBA was not interested in promoting, and that recent events had made it clear that the VHL was not interested in changing them. One day in the books for Beav as commissioner, one affiliate partner lost, and one serious dialogue that hadn't even begun to reach a conclusion--what a start to a job (and an admittedly funny one).
This was something that made lots of VHL members mad--myself included, and I had nothing at all to do with that game thread. From my perspective at the time, the entire community, just about none of which I felt were actually hateful people and most of which really didn't go around regularly dropping off-color words, had just been punished over something that probably never would have gone down the way it did had
the Hounds been able to win a few more playoff gamesthe finals been anything at all other than the team with the SBA's entire BoD up against the team that dropped the first comment. I had a lot to say about this, mostly on Discord, and although I remember being very opinionated and openly saying that I thought the whole thing was pretty stupid, that was about as far as I ever took it. The first few days on the VHL end saw some reactions from our members, though, that certainly didn't help the situation. Some people went to their league to call them the same sorts of words that lit the fire, and not only got banned for it but became shining examples of people the SBA could point to and identify as parts of the problem. I remember disliking some people I'd never talked to personally, and I felt that even though my own disagreements never broke any rules (written or otherwise), I felt that I was disliked by some people as well when I made them known--something I confirmed much later on when I joined BoG and found a screenshot of the list of people the SBA had a problem with, with me on it.Things were pretty quiet after the first few weeks or so, though. We kept observing the affiliation agreement on our end because we didn't want to punish any regular SBA users who had nothing to do with the situation, and while the topic kept coming up (it was huge news!), it didn't ever turn into people going at each other's throats. The only differences were that VHL tasks weren't claimable in the SBA, and lots of us had grown to distrust one another.
After five months of sitting around and passively disliking each other, though, the VHL was informed that affiliation was gone forever. The league had been working behind the scenes to try to work out a set of policies that were agreeable to everyone, and it was eventually decided that this was no longer realistic. VHL leadership claimed that this decision was made unilaterally, and you can read the thread I linked there to try to develop your own opinion on the matter. That was one of the more interesting arguments featuring really important people on both sides that I've ever seen, and it relit the fire on our end. Lots of people made it clear how much they still hated the SBA then--I think I did too, but I don't remember.
Something that made me think about things a lot, though, was this post made by SBA member @Beowoof a couple days after that announcement. What was detailed in that post didn't fully line up with what I'd seen or my own perception of the situation (I was in BoG at that point and had access to all the primary sources of info), but if I tried to look at it from the SBA's perspective, I found the thoughts laid out there pretty reasonable and could see how someone on their end could have viewed things in that way. I also liked what @okochastar had to say there and thought a bit about how I'd gotten to know a handful of people from the SBA in the past months and really liked them. The sim league world was really a better place once we stopped wondering how we could run around shit-talking each other and got past all the stupid league identity stuff to just have a little bit of fun together in our free time. Plus, I'm sure the VHL wasn't perfect then and isn't now--but the league had taken a harder stance against the sorts of things we were called out for in that time and I really didn't miss seeing them.
Why, though, is this in Gustav 30 in 30 instead of just being a recap of the league in general? I'm mostly describing things done by other people, and the most I was ever connected to the situation was that I complained about it a lot. Well...I talked quite a bit in my second installment about how I'd been part of a very tribalistic team-versus-team drama in the VHLM and how that shaped my views on having basic respect for people. I think that did quite a bit in terms of adjusting how I dealt with people I knew I'd have to see again around the site. But I think that sort of tribalism popped up again on the level of the entire league, had real league-altering consequences, and sucked me back into the mindset to some extent. I was important enough as a VHLM GM that the league knew who I was, and so now I had to make sure my league was taken seriously. The SBA, much like any other league, has tons of good people in it that deserve my respect whether I've met them or not. I think this was the last time I jumped on any "my group is better than your group" train in a sim league as blindly as I did, and I think I learned a lot by watching things go down that helped make it so I wouldn't jump on things like that again.
Also just like any other league, following incentives for benefit takes priority. Reddit recruitment was pretty much the only source of new members for either of us at the time, and the SECOND our accounts were reported and blocked from a bunch of communities, guess whose affiliation was magically back.I will also clarify that I have NEVER believed the VHL to be a hateful place in general. At the end of the day, now that I'm done caring about it, I think this was an unfortunate situation featuring lots of immaturity both ways that somehow eventually ended up changing the vibe of the league a little bit for the better. For the most part, I think we had good people who had gotten used to a certain environment and evaluated how they did things once that environment was challenged. To some extent, that was eventually me too. I did some growing that I'm almost glad happened as a result of staring alone at a screen instead of saying something wrong in real life and hurting people close to me. That isn't to say I learned to be offended by everything, or that I'm now whatever cartoonish representation of "woke" some people have in their heads over things like this (in fact, I really couldn't care less about that sort of mindset). There's a huge difference between that and just having respect for people and treating them normally--and I think the VHL has largely learned to adapt in those ways. I'm not sure that I'd say I'm glad this was a big chapter in VHL history, but I'm glad that we're past the negative parts.
Enough of that--it's time to have fun with what's left of my Wednesday night.
Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka):
#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name
#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?
- Frank, okochastar, jacobcarson877 and 2 others
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Welcome back! I don’t think we’ve had much to do with each other since we were teammates in Malmo but it was great getting to know you then and sad to see you go.
Crazy that I’ve been here longer than your kid has been alive now. Every now and then I get handed some VHL perspective that makes me think for a minute.
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The Hounds would have benefited from a slightly better TPE distribution in the S69 draft. Ironically, BigHARDCORE32 would go to Saskatoon--but sadly would never earn again.
#4 in this series covers the beginnings of my time as a VHLM GM, and I like to think that my last article does a good job of covering some of what happened with some of my more notable first-gens. But the players I had put their time into growing and developing did so in hopes of seeing it pay off on the scoreboard, and seeing as that's work I put in as a GM as well, it's fair to us both to tell that story as completely as I can.
I've covered S66, in which I did what I could with what I had with no real plan other than to pull a couple wins out of my hat and put together a respectable season. But all good things must come to an end, and trading away my first-round pick that season led to me a bit light on assets in S67. It was here that I decided to take my management strategy that was "what the VHLM should be" and turn it into "what the VHLM actually was" and tank for as much as I could in future seasons.
None of this was to say that I checked out or that I stopped caring about people who played for me. I wasn't in the business of losing games for draft position, just in the business of getting rid of anyone who was worth anything for quantity of picks. Of course, the latter led to the former naturally, but I'd still try to field the best lineup I could make in every sim. Plus--and too many people don't realize this--having good players to trade away in the first place necessarily means that you have to have put in the time to help them get to that point. So, while my notable S67 draftees (Keven Foreskin/Jeff Downey/Jaxon Walker) all finished the season in different places, I'd still push them to be the best they could be while I had them. I still stayed on top of waiver signings, and I like to think that the Hounds stayed a good place for new players even when we weren't winning. Some new names that signed with me despite knowing they wouldn't win a championship included Nate Telker (@Telkster's precursor to HoNB #8 subject Brendan Telker), Balentine Kidd (@TukTukTheGreat), Yeet Dabberson (recreate of my former AGM @Radcow), Block Buster (@Banana2311), and one of my favorite locker room additions in Jacob Perry (@Liberty_Cabbage), who ended up as a lower-end role-filler for a few VHL teams. While none of these players became VHL superstars, all made me glad to have them and I like to think we were a good place for them at the time.
But the "not much" that was S67 turned into a competitive season in S68. First off, the draft was awesome. The Hounds headed into the draft with the #1 overall selection--which I traded straight-up for #2 so I could pick @Beaviss, but not at #1 like he wanted (a move that I kind of cringe at today but one I found funny in the moment). We followed that up with a string of picks that would define both that season and the next. First, we brought back S67 signing Balentine Kidd at #9 (because smart places promote from within). The second round saw Jerry Wang (then the second VHL player ever to be named Jerry, after mine a few draft classes earlier) and @ColeMrtz, a returning member who stayed fairly active for a bit and briefly made it as a VHLM GM. In the third, we picked first-gens Guy Sasakamoose (@Cxsquared, an underrated longtime Riga defender) and Patrik Tallinder (another underrated longtime Riga player managed by the recently returned @Patrik Tallinder). Our string of good picks would continue all the way until our selection of @Ricer13's Kris Rice at 43rd. Funnily enough, that last selection only happened because I traded up in the draft intending to select a player who I was surprised was still on the board...and then found out that the player I had my eye on had already been picked. Who could I have had instead of Ricer, you ask? None other than the biggest one-hit wonder I've ever seen--Sven Nyckel, who joined the league, dropped a 2300-word media spot, and disappeared immediately after the draft. Luck works in weird ways.
We were pretty good, but after having depleted the entire roster, we were still mostly just a solid core lineup. We had holes on defense and at center, and I did my best to fill them. This was first addressed when I traded for @DizzyWithLogic's Finnegan MacBurn (who would unwittingly benefit us by going inactive right at the cap, at a time when such a player didn't have to be released. I don't want that to be the main point of Dizzy's time with us, though, because he was a great person to have around when active). I'd also never had a huge recreate signing yet, but this would finally change when none other than @Beketov signed with us at the deadline with future Hall-of-Famer and perennial Boulet winner Mikko Lahtinen. It's also worth pointing out that my original Houston roots still ran deep--our hole in net was filled by signing Aleksandr Aleksandrov, managed by my former teammate in @aleks. We had a legitimately good team--maybe not quite on top, but very good and a sneaky threat to make a deep playoff run.
And then we lost right away, with an embarrassing series against Yukon featuring practically no scoring. We were shut out twice by my former player Block Buster, including a 1-0 Game 5 to end it all. It would be best not to dwell on that too deeply, though. We had all the draft capital in S69 that we did in S68, and this time I had players returning. Before making a single selection, I had Rice and Tallinder up front and MacBurn on defense. All would spend just about all of S69 fully capped, and we were ready to get down to business.
Here's the thing--so was Saskatoon. Where we had #5, #8, and #11 in the first round (our maximum of three first-rounders!), they had #1, #2, and #3. Where we were picking at #20 and #22 in the second, they had #13 and #14. And that meant a lot when there were exactly 19 active players in the draft and we only half-hit on two of our first-rounders. The Wild would go 5 for 5 with their early selections, while our two seconds, two thirds, two fourths, fifth, sixth, and two sevenths translated to zero players who meant anything and our first round essentially just amounted to the solid choice of Jimmy Spyro (@DarkSpyro), who under us would blossom into a capped goaltender and well-known member. That was really disappointing, but the core we had in place already was still enough to make our roster look good. And as it turned out, a good roster in a season with a thin draft class is powerful.
Because of all of these circumstances, Rice, Tallinder, and MacBurn absolutely exploded in S69. I reached out to San Diego and traded for Will Clarke (the last player I remember @Will managing before his current one), and we looked pretty good to go. But, again, so was Saskatoon. They went on a run managed by GM @Peace that I've never seen in any league of the VHL since, winning game after game and carrying a crazy undefeated streak deep into the season. Nobody could figure them out, not even in overtime, and they were destined to be the Cup champions.
50 games into the season, and the Wild had just been figured out. And while this was just once, it was a flicker of hope. Across all my time as a GM, there isn't a single game I remember better than this one.
Saskatoon also had a full roster where we didn't, and my solid reputation as a GM combined well enough with our regular-season success that we had a super strong pull on recreates at the deadline. Kyl Oferson (@Nykonax), Ola Vikingstad (@Dil), and Roque Davis (@Josh) all signed with the Hounds and had earned well enough to serve legitimate purposes in the playoffs. We beat Saskatoon again before season's end (and so did Mexico City--the Wild only lost 4 times, and it was twice to each of us). But it wasn't the win-50-games-in-a-row situation that it once was for them. They were still easily favored on paper, but we had a fighting chance and the balance of power had been somewhat adjusted.
That wasn't before we got past the Kings, though. We'd finished second overall in the standings, but they weren't too far behind and were the only team that could realistically pose a threat to us before the final (we blew past Ottawa in the first round and I had to look at the index to even remember that). That said, we did have to go through them. We'd done better with recreates, though, and Nyko volunteered to obsessively test-sim for me behind the scenes. This led to a fairly decisive series win in which I got cocky and set all the strategy sliders to zero for the game that closed it out.
And then there were two. You get one guess as to the other, and it was the team that hadn't lost a game in the playoffs yet.
And we took it to Game 5!
That's about all I'm going to say about the S69 finals. You know what happened and you know I didn't win it. But we still handed the Wild their fifth loss of the season and could claim that we were more of a speed bump to them than anyone else. I wasn't even disappointed! Luck wasn't on our side in the draft, but the players I'd hoped would get a second good look in S69 did end up with that chance and it was only because of a weird combination of not having active players to pick that the chance wasn't better. It was my best season as a GM to that point, and it would remain the deepest I've ever taken a team in their playoffs.
This was, of course, the VHLM, and what that meant was that after a couple seasons of buying, it was time to burn down the team again. S70 was uneventful, underwhelming, and unmotivating--and that would also be when I moved up to GM Davos not long into the season. That is, obviously, a collection of stories for another time. Functionally speaking, my time as a VHLM GM spanned 4 seasons between S66 and S69. I never won a Cup and I never won the top GM award, but I sincerely believe that I was one of the M's best of the time. Now that Gustav 30 in 30 has closed its book on what I did in Mississauga, I hope you'll agree.
Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka):
#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name
#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?
- N0HBDY, DarkSpyro and Patrik Tallinder
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18 hours ago, Berocka said:
there is almost 6 months of you not seeing your player do anything.
Gee, I wonder where I've seen that in the VHL's development system before
As much as I'm against relegation for practical reasons, I also like that it would make our last-place teams actually care about winning. I think term limits for GMs are also a good idea on principle but I don't like that it would probably lead to people burning all future assets in their last season and leaving the next one up with nothing to work with (and probably a nice side of relegation if we had both of those things).
I do think that (E or not) only getting 8 games as a backup is kind of dumb. As far as I understand it there isn't a way to make fatigue matter between sims in a way that builds up over time, but I wish there were because it would make GMs really think about how to manage starts and incentivize having a decent backup.
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21 hours ago, Victor said:
For what it's worth we've brought Chouinard and Szatkowski Jr back to the ballot and inducted them in relatively recent seasons. So I don't think we need a separate mechanism and I think need to be worth it.
Take away Jannula, who I am still not fully convinced by, and I'm not sure we have many players who need the special treatment anyway.
I don't think we have huge amounts of people sitting around who have been FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY either. I think the point of my HoNB series is not to advocate for people to be inducted but to figure out where the line seems to have been in past votes and figure out whether it's clear that a player is really below it.
That also leads to some interesting reasoning at times, because lots of the time it just comes down to a comparison between a borderline player who snuck in and one who didn't. I think my article on Milo is an example of this--I think Milo deserves to be in because of Peters, but had we never inducted Peters I'm not sure I'd be able to say that. In the case of Jannula, I think we have someone who was just as good as many of the others and just ran into a few unfortunate circumstances (and eventually people stopped caring).
I also worry that if we were to put something in regularly, there would be a perceived pressure to need to induct people when in some cases doing so would just raise what-ifs for lots of other players. So I guess I think it's best left case-by-case if we can actually fairly handle those cases. I think this vote will say a lot about what I think about that, one way or another
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I have never said a word beyond "hi" to my next-door neighbor and I don't even remember the last time I did that. I never even saw my other next-door neighbors in person before they moved (though I heard them a lot) and their unit has been empty ever since. I don't know whether I like that or not.
I think it would be interesting to go anonymous on the forum for a while, but people would figure it out pretty quickly if everyone kept just writing about their own player. Even things like writing style (I'm aware that mine rambles on in ways that most others don't) would mean something to people who know each other well.
But I do think that there's an interesting motivation here and that's the fact that I'm sure username does dictate a lot of how someone's content receives interaction. I like to think that I usually look for things based on first impressions of title and things unrelated to author, but I'm sure some people click on both my stuff and your stuff because we wrote it. I wouldn't mind writing something generic and seeing the kind of feedback I'd get under those circumstances.
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Reducing VHL unemployment since S65.
It's true that I have an important job. It's true that I have a lot of posts, that people have liked those posts a lot, and that I'm a big fancy old guy who can
make targeted attacks against you and your player specificallyinfluence league policy through both my job and my role in the Board of Gustav. But I still find it hard to claim that I'm any more influential than I used to be. Maybe I'm a little more respected as the portion of people here newer than me continues to grow, but influential? I think I was at my peak as a VHLM GM. That influence stayed within our own team for the most part, while others just heard about it--but I've never been able to say that the work I put in to interact with people helped to shape them into active members quite as much since then.I won't tag everyone who played for me and eventually ended up in a management role of some sort, because that would be a few too many tags (
). Instead, I'll point out a few who started on my teams and made it really far. I like to think that the work of @Ricer13 and @Berocka speaks for itself, and while I take zero credit for anything that's happened since S68 or so, I still think about their beginnings with the Hounds--Ricer as a then-pass-first forward who initially described himself as a "lurker" in our server after we drafted him late, and Berocka as a waiver signing who didn't even join our server at first and who we had to pressure a bit to talk to us. I think both of these were cases where the VHLM can really change the course of a person's involvement--I described in my first article here how I was very hesitant to say or do much at first, and the teams that go beyond a simple "welcome, tell me if you need anything" can make lots of things happen.
VHLM GM is also the one job I've had where I feel no need to self-deprecate. I never won much on the VHL level, I've done some unpopular things and been less visible as a commissioner, there have been times where I've said things I now disagree with in BoG, and my heart was never in updating during the time when I did it. But I was really good in the M and I believe that on some level, the league has seen activity from people other than myself that may not have necessarily happened had my team been run by some other GMs of the day.
This led to me writing up a statistical article a few seasons in where I concluded that people on my teams were more likely to get hired than people off of them. Looking back on the first one, this wasn't even true. It's a long story, but my analysis showed a p-value of about 0.2 and most stats people don't care until that goes under 0.05. Some of the comments I got weren't incredibly friendly, either--I managed to make it funny by joking about it on Discord a lot, but it definitely rubbed some people the wrong way. It was still a joke about 6 months later, and I still occasionally caught some snarky comments about it at that point, so I ran the numbers again.
This time, it came with a better understanding of calculating statistical significance (along with a better understanding that maybe I shouldn't tag 27 people in passing mentions to get my point across). I had the right p-value in mind and put together an updated list. And lo and behold, after a few more seasons as a VHLM GM, it had become super-ultra statistically significant. In fancy statistical talk, our "null hypothesis" was "Gustav does not positively influence a member's chances of being hired" and the results pointed to strongly rejecting that statement. Like anything in stats, though, this isn't direct proof, and I also think that the multiple layers of interpersonal relationships and luck and whatnot that are separate from the numbers don't make any test like that definite. But I'd done my best to quantify it in a way that I've never seen anyone else do, and I think that in the end it is a real testament to my own effect on the VHLM (however seriously you want to take the results).
In the end, 15 people who were either my teammate or a player I had GM'd (mostly the latter) got jobs as GMs or AGMs between S65 and S70--not counting three hires I'd made on my own terms by making my players my own AGMs. At a rate of about three hirings per season, I think that's pretty solid. So I hope you can forgive the ego stroking in this article, because it's kind of what I have to do to make it a readable piece about what I've done for the league's first-gens. What happened to these players on my teams is a different (and less biased) story from the player and team end, and I'll be happy to tell it soon.
Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka):
#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name
#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?
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20 hours ago, Doomsday said:
I'm also interested in seeing if there could be a senior committee of sorts that searches for players like Jannula that should have been in the Hall, but were missed for whatever reason.
15 hours ago, Victor said:That's Gustav
It's beyond the scope of this thread, but I've wondered if there might be a point in having a once-every-5-or-10-seasons discussion where we try to decide on some players who haven't been inducted after however long. It would help prevent the sorts of "this player deserves it but we're going to vote for whoever is best out of everyone who just retired" situations that have kept people out for too long in the past.
I think out of everyone super old, Jannula is the most obvious candidate though. I can totally see uncertainty leading to hesitancy in voting way back in the day, but I also have no clue why he still wasn't a good enough choice.
I said this last season, but Lasse Milo is also a HoF player if Felix Peters is--my article on him shows that they're basically exactly the same player, and one is in while one isn't. But Peters took until S52 to get inducted (a borderline case by himself) so I'd venture a guess that Milo could be a bit of a battle.
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In which @Advantage accidentally offered me a $1 bonus, which I purposely accepted, which made the portal look like we were in cap trouble.
Expansion was the name of the game back in the day. S65 saw the founding of the Moscow Menace franchise, along with two additions to the VHLM in Houston and Philly. I'd played for Houston and was fairly intrigued when I saw that the big league would be expanding again right in time for me to join it. The Malmo logo looked cool, the limited impressions I'd had of inaugural GM Advantage seemed positive, and I just really liked the idea of being a team's history rather than simply adding to it. They were also one of a handful of teams to actually scout me, which is something I don't care about as heavily now but did as a first-gen.
In the days leading up to the draft, I had a good time taking in the new member experience. I remember @MubbleFubbles writing a mock draft that said some nice things about me, and I took that idea and made what's still one of my favorite articles ever--my own mock draft, 50 picks deep, that taught me everything I needed to know about every player when I was writing it. I really knew nothing ahead of time about who was going where, but correctly speculated on a bunch of things. Some that I'm proud of were Julius Freeman over Shane Mars to Vancouver at #2 overall, Apollo Hackett to Riga at #16, Edward Vigneault at #33, and Rhys Chism at #39--oh, and my very own Jerry Garcia, 7th overall to Malmo and the first player ever to be drafted to the Nighthawks.
My mock was weirdly accurate with Malmo picks in general. I ended up joining Rusty Shackleford (@K1NG LINUS) and Nacho (@Nacci25), picked 17th and 37th overall in both my article and the actual draft. Also of note were goaltender Juan Jaundice (@Jus) and monster goon MORPHEUS DESTRUCTIOUS (@Abaddon), as well as Blake Laughton and @Grape, my VHLM teammate and the only other member of Malmo's inaugural draft class to be active today. I knew some of these people already, and the time that all were active was enough for me to get to know the rest. Our locker room was super active and a really fun place to be in general, removing quite a bit of the doubt that many players have when they leave the M. But of course, we were an expansion team that finished last in S66. Garcia played just-OK and wasn't really anything special despite having lots of empty space on the roster to stand out from.
These trends would continue in S67, where the team got marginally better and so did Jerry. Worse, we already had a couple of our S66 picks go inactive. There was some sort of foundation built, at least (we drafted @Phil's Phil Marleau and @fonziGG's Michael Johnson, players that stuck with us at forward and in net for a while)--and we figured it wouldn't be too-too long before things started going the right direction.
And go the right direction it did in just the next season--not only did we pick @OrbitingDeath 's Condor Adrienne (the best defenseman of the generation) at #1 after winning the draft lottery, but @Beketov's Matt Thompson (the best player of the S60s) signed with us in free agency for his last season. A few things happened in S68 that were really nice. First, Garcia had his best season on defense. His stats (60 points, 154 hits, and 150 SB) may not mean a whole lot to anyone used to the standards of the S90s, but they were pretty solid for that time and got me nominated for the Jake Wylde Trophy. And though the vote had solid support, it fell one short of winning. I still haven't won an individual award not named Campbell, and this was the closest I ever came.
But I digress--S68 had a whole lot more going on as far as the team was concerned. We went from the VHL's basement all the way to the top, finishing first place in the standings and taking home the Victory Cup in just our third season of existence. At some point in our first few seasons--and I think it was here--Advantage became the first VHL member to ever hit 1000 wins as a GM. All of that was cool, and we carried that success into the playoffs, where regular-season MVP Thompson played so well--shooting at somewhere around 20%--that it drew accusations of sim rigging and the strongest demand for live sims up until that point. That's the reason why we have live sims today, actually--it's not a special event as much as it's proof that the simmer isn't cheating.
The playoffs went very well, and we made the finals with the chance of becoming the earliest championship winners of any expansion team in the league's history. The finals had been simmed live before S68, so doing them this way was as much common practice as it was the result of peer pressure. So, we did them live--and although I never once believed that the sims were being rigged, the people who thought they were certainly had something to laugh at when we got swept by Seattle (whose core by this point was made up of multiple players who used to be my own first-gen players in the M). It was my first finals, and would remain so for quite a while.
After S68, my player success (and my team success) declined steadily. I don't remember a whole lot about S69-71 as a player, to be honest--S69 was my best run as a VHLM GM (as I'll talk about in a future article), and I remember S70 being absolutely dominated by Moscow. Also during this time, Garcia somehow acted as Condor Adrienne's kryptonite. He didn't even steal stats, either, because his totals went down a little bit even as I kept adding to his TPE. But after S71, Advantage stepped down, @FrostBeard took over as GM and started the team's first rebuild, at the start of which he was gracious enough to give me a fair deal to move Garcia out to the Davos team I was then running. That's also a future article, but the long story short is that I made Jerry a winger and enjoyed a couple seasons of being half decent on my own underachieving team before retiring.
Jerry Garcia would eventually finish his career with 420 points (an amazing coincidence). He never won a Cup or an award and was never really the top player on any of his teams. He doesn't even come close to making my own Hall of Not Bad series. In fact, I believe that he was the worst player to ever reach 1500 TPE back when 1500 TPE actually meant something. But even though his TPE total was his most impressive number, that's still representative of over a year of work that I put into making him what he was, and I have no regrets about it (not even the part where I built Passing over Scoring). Jerry taught me that I could make it in the VHL as more than just a flashy new kid, that I could earn with the best of them and build a player that most people still respected even when that didn't show up on the leaderboard. And I hope no one who played with him regretted it, either. There were lots of players drafted after 7th overall in S66, but none of them can say that they were Malmo's first choice--and I like to think Malmo wouldn't have had it any other way.
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4 hours ago, v.2 said:
Im not really seeing too strong of a case for Jannula at this point.. I think the ship has sailed for him to make it, missing out narrowly.
Out of curiosity, why? I like to think I make one and no one who's taken the time to read it has disagreed.
When he retired, he was third all-time in points among defensemen--behind Sterling Labatte (who played 9 seasons) and Matt Bailey (who was a forward for 4). It's true that he spent a season and a half as a forward, but my article backtracks enough to show that this really didn't inflate his career totals. Jannula actually had a better prime than some other Hall of Fame defensemen.
He also received a minority of votes in the poll that removed him and he isn't mentioned once in the thread that's attached to it. I think it's arguable that administrative incompetence contributed to the ship sailing in the first place.
The main reasons I've come across as to why he's not in, after spending my research on that article digging up everything I can find about him on this forum, are that a.) we're missing each index for his first four seasons (which isn't his fault), and b.) he was briefly a forward. I like to think my article refuted both as valid reasons to keep him out--it seems like it's almost more accurate to say that he's not in because people didn't know for sure how to evaluate him and didn't take the time to check. I think I managed to put together a good enough idea of that picture that it's really not an excuse.
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11 hours ago, MubbleFubbles said:
Hall of Very Good
S93 HOF Discussion
in Hall of Fame Discussion
Posted · Edited by Gustav
I don't want this to be taken the wrong way (nor do I want to make the point too strongly) because I'm aware that I was one of the names Mubbles mentioned and I'm not trying to say that it should have been me or whatever. But it did seem weird to me that we went from "here are a few people" to "ok here's the nominee" over the course of no posts.
Perhaps with a handful of people who joined around the same time, with many probably being similar levels of deserving, next season could warrant a dedicated builder discussion just so we can make sure we have some things said about the group in general? Ideally we would be able to get that done in the normal thread too, but you never know.