Gustav

HAPPY NEW YEAR DAVIDS For the week ending 1/10: 1. Last season's draft had, per an article by Victor, a very large concentration of stupid player names. What's the dumbest possible player name you can come up with? 2. Last week, I asked you how you might change your own username. If you had control of my username for a week, what would you make me? 3. What's the most realistic plan for Davos this season? What sort of moves do you think we should be aiming to make? 4. What's the number one thing you value in a GM--not necessarily me, but with any GM in general? 5. What's a movie you've never watched that you'd like to see at some point? 6. What's your favorite sports moment of all time? @Jer_Lefebvre @studentized @Sonnet @Velevra @McWolf @Big Dee @Lefty_S @Ahma @Advantage @Grape @PadStack @Berocka

*Gustav noises again* @Lefty_S died last night, at the hands of a JUGGERNAUT. He was a TRAPPER. I'm off work for a bit now, so expect night phases to come more or less on time. List of living players (17)

If you check the spreadsheet, Pines is below the 10th percentile in thiccness and comes in as the league's 192nd-thiccest player.

Week 2

Gustav wakes up feeling refreshed and fairly late to the party. That's because he's both. @WentzKneeFan036 takes a hit, probably to the knee or something, from the MAFIA. He was a PSYCHIC. Last will: @Doomsday goes down as well, this one to a JUGGERNAUT. He was the GODFATHER. Tonight's results either coming on time or about the time I gave them to you last night. No guarantees one way or the other. List of living players (19):

*means of production noises* Gustav is home again, so it's night phase time. Nobody died today...will anybody die tonight? Prepare for sleeping Gustav tomorrow again (and pretty much every day, actually). List of living players (21)

*sleeping Gustav noises* The Grand Poobah rolls out of bed late as hell again. It's time for your morning results! ... Well, that was fast. Day 2 begins now; I'm at work until 11 and can attempt to post from there if there's some level of significant demand for it...otherwise phase change coming late tonight. List of living players (21):

Supply chain noises Gustav is doing this from work on mobile. And since he’s a boomer, he can’t figure out how to do it right. I tried to copy-paste the ping list but it wouldn’t let me...so I guess I’ll just make the role list correct and rely on the double ping upon edit. Night 1 starts now, with Day 2 kicking off whenever I roll out of bed.

REAL GUSTAV NOISES

For the record this should be 3x Random Town. Don't want to double ping.

Hi! We've done 14 of these, something that's a bit hard for me to believe given that I barely knew what a mafia game even was when I started. That's still true! We're in here with our first Town Traitor game since the infamous 44-page Game 8, and as much as I hate everything there is to hate about Town Traitor, we're going to have fun with this one--myself included. You saw the announcement in the sign-up thread, but once again, @Blazzer is helping me out this game as co-mod. Double the mods means double the fun, right? At least, that's what they told me about genchat. Another thing that I'll mention for this game (and probably forget to add to the copy-paste next game) is this: if you change your night action, STATE YOUR NEW ACTION IN A NEW POST ON DISCORD RATHER THAN EDITING THE OLD POST. Last game, I missed someone's change of mind because I got up early and just ran through the list of notifications once I saw no new messages--and ended up missing something as there was no new message but there was an edited post. Thankfully, the outcome of the game was practically decided at that point, but please, for the sake of both of us, don't set me up to miss something subtle like that and change this game or any future one to any significant extent. Time for the copy-paste, because I should probably shut up at this point. If you use light mode, too bad! -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 9 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. -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! Role list (Town Traitor included among Town roles): 2x TOWN PROTECTIVE 2x TOWN SUPPORT 3x TOWN INVESTIGATIVE 2x TOWN KILLING 3x RANDOM TOWN 1x GODFATHER 1x MAFIOSO 2x RANDOM MAFIA 1x NEUTRAL KILLING 3x RANDOM NEUTRAL 1x ANY OF THE ABOVE Player list (21): @BarzalGoat @Berocka @bigAL @Caboose30 @Devise @Doomsday @JeffD @jhatty8 @JigglyGumballs @JorgTheGoat03 @Lefty_S @Mike @MMFLEX @Mr_Hatter @omgitshim @osens @Ptyrell @Ricer13 @solas @Spartan @WentzKneeFan036 This day phase begins now and will go until...well, sometime around this point tomorrow night (possibly a bit later). I may be trying to do it from work on mobile, with possibly disastrous results. I may not be. We shall see.

Cutting off sign-up here! This is officially a Town Traitor game.

Sad face. Sljppers was a really promising prospect, hope all is well.

As some of you know, the past few offseasons I've taken up my "I need to do a .com article because there's no trivia" space with a bit of an interesting look at the index. It's not offseason yet, but since THERE WAS NO TRIVIA LAST WEEK, here I am. -Leading the league in +/- was none other than Tim Waters (@Siddhus), Warsaw's lowest-TPE defender at not even 400. One might think that being at this level generally wouldn't contribute much to positive scoring chances or great defensive plays, but the chemistry is there and it's working. -Though Vin Calia led the league in fights won with 4, we'll also have to take a look at Mickey Dickson (@Brewins15), who only lost one fight, didn't win any...but tied in 9 of them. Good at not getting beaten up at least... -As players go inactive, it's no surprise that they'd be taken out of the lineup. However, most inactive players are slotted into the extra spots on a team, as they're still a good deal better than the bot players. A great big shoutout here goes to inactives Kasey Tamm and S Kuchar (@kesytamm/@S. Kuchar) of Chicago and Bo Burrows of Seattle for getting less ice time on their teams than their team's bot players at their positions. -This seasons "most points with a negative +/-" award goes to Toronto's Joseph Gainer (@joeg), who tied for 10th in points with 91 but still managed to finish the season with a rating of -25. Taking the fact that power play and penalty kill don't factor into +/- into account, Gainer put up 62 even-strength points...and therefore had at least 87 scored against his team when he was on the ice. -The best save percentage for all backup goalies belongs to Davos' Kunibuni UnGuri (@Berocka), but second-best among backups (and third-best GAA among backups, and a tie for best record out of those who got in 8 starts) belongs to ß-CHI G, who outperformed six user-created backups in both SV% and GAA. I'll probably do this again in the offseason, when there is again NO TRIVIA and the earth crumbles beneath our feet. For now, that's the word count, so I'm out.

For the week ending JANUARY 3RD, 2021: 1. The forum decides to suddenly reject your username, and you have to make a new one. What's your new username? 2. With the NHL kicking off in a couple weeks, which team do you think has the best shot at winning the cup? 3. Who's your favorite NHL player? 4. This week's press conference came a bit late than usual. At what point would you as a player think something is up when the questions haven't been posted yet? What's weird and what's normal? 5. Your best friend knocks on your door, puts a briefcase full of money on the ground, and runs away. What's the first thing you do? 6. Which sports figure from a sport other than hockey would you like to see give hockey a try? Which position do you think they'd play? @Jer_Lefebvre @studentized @Sonnet @Velevra @McWolf @Big Dee @Lefty_S @Ahma @Advantage @Grape @PadStack @Berocka

Get dabbed on Simon I have things reasonably well set up to look at goalies too, but I figured since he straight-up says it doesn't do anything (and the sample size is comparatively low), anything I'd put out would be more misleading than helpful unless there's somehow a super close correlation.

I planned on starting off this article with a bunch of screenshots of people asking how height and weight affect sims and stats, but when I searched it up in the league server I found out that the bot displays a player's height and weight when one does the .player thing and that filled up just about all the search results I got for either term. So, just picture a series of screenshots here. Now that you've done that, let's talk about being THICC. I saw a Reddit post a while back ranking NHL captains based on thiccness (height divided by weight). I then thought, hey, why not do a VHL article on this? I can make a spreadsheet, talk about what I found, and get some sweet-and-spicy TPE dropped on Taro for the next few weeks. Let's get on with this--oh, and for those wondering, Alex Ovechkin would be the VHL's 4th-thiccest player. For anyone who wants to just look at the sheet and doesn't care to read my article (shame on you), the sheet is here. No, I'm just messing with you. It's actually here (if you just clicked the first link without continuing to read, then double shame on you!). The second page is very messy because that's where I played with things to generate the charts that will come later, but the first should be fairly presentable and easy to follow. For those who don't care or don't understand, I'll use the rest of this article to go over the highlights. From what I have heard, weight has a slight positive effect on checking. I've also heard that height has zero effect whatsoever--we'll see how true that is. The general trend, if it's present, should be shown reasonably well by thiccness, as more weight = more thiccness in general (we'll also take a sample look at weight later on, and see if numbers are influenced more closely by weight than by thiccness). Choosing maximum height and maximum weight for your player (6'8"/250) will get you pretty high up on the thicc list--in fact, you'll be in a nine-way tie for 5th. Let's highlight the league's thiccest, and see how their careers have progressed until this point. 4. Jared Spaz | | @Spaz Height: 5'10" | Weight: 220 lb. | Thiccness: 3.14 lb/in Spaz came along after the S69 VHLM draft and played that season and his draft year, S70, in the minors, before making the move up. An underrated player and the third-highest in TPA among Helsinki forwards, he's hit the point-per-game mark twice, hitting a career high in points and goals this past season. One might think that being thicc would lead to a physical build here, but that's not the case--with 40 CK, he's been less than noteworthy in the hits column and has primarily focused on offensive output. 3. Joe Proto | | @Proto Height: 6'3" | Weight: 236 lb. | Thiccness: 3.15 lb/in Proto came into the league as one of the most promising new members in recent memory, max earning from the start and finding himself in team management positions fairly quickly. A first-round pick in Vancouver (perhaps the first red flag given the history of first-round picks in Vancouver), he disappeared altogether from the league soon after over some personal disagreements. Playing for five teams over his four VHL seasons, his career has been up-and-down, reaching a career high in points in S74 with Davos and Vancouver but being relegated to a depth role this season in London and seeing limited production as a result. He hasn't put up much in the hit column, save for S74, but that's likely more due to number inflation than thiccness as he hasn't shown up to nearly as great an extent in any other season. 2. Edwin THE Encarnacion | | @Tagger Height: 6'2" | Weight: 235 lb. | Thiccness: 3.18 lb/in Encarnacion came along as one in a line of many incarnations of legendary Blue Jays power-hitting meathead Edwin Encarnacion, and being a top earner from a respected player agency, went first overall to Calgary in S70. Putting up a respectable career as a defender until this season (breaking the point-per game mark in S73 and 74), he switched to forward to fill a positional need for the Wranglers and put up a career high in points this season yet again. Yet another player who wasn't built to hit, Encarnacion has been relatively unimpressive on the stat sheet when it comes to checking, and as such also cannot be looked at as a player whose two-way game has been helped significantly by thiccness. 1. Micah Adrienne | | @Poptart Height: 6'6" | Weight: 250 lb. | Thiccness: 3.21 lb/in Yes, the VHL'S THICCEST PLAYER is Micah Adrienne. The Wolves' top defender went 3rd overall in S73, and has played fairly consistently since--each season has registered between 53 and 58 points. Something interesting to look at, though, is the fact that he's the only player in the top four to actually have Checking upgraded to even a semi-significant extent. So far, Adrienne hasn't put up anything eye-popping, but this may be something to keep an eye on in future seasons--if thiccness has a positive effect on checking, Adrienne could be one to have in your predictions. That being said, though...it's not like the top of the board as a whole would make one think based on a look at the stat sheet that thiccness is helpful at all. None of these four run away with any category, and it's not like the builds of three out of the four would support any kind of physical game by themselves. What we need to do now is to take a look at the data. I'd first like to preface this statistical analysis bit by saying that in no way does anything I'm about to say prove anything. Correlations are very loose and any "effects" which may be hinted at or speculated on are very slight. In fact, it is my personal opinion that effects are slight enough that this is not something even worth mentioning when talking about player builds. R-squared values are practically nonexistent, and for anyone who doesn't know what that means, we cannot draw any sort of conclusion from this set of data. Anyway... Something that I found interesting, before we get into the physical aspect of things, is that thiccness may have some very limited positive influence across the board--the trendlines for goals, assists, and points for each position group have a positive correlation to thiccness. These trendlines are more extreme for forwards, though this is likely due to the fact that forwards simply put up more points, so an increase of, say, 3 points per season is more significant for a defender. Here's an example: Distribution here is very close to random, suggesting that thiccness has no effect on goals.. HOWEVER! This does not mean that thiccness is the cause--it could just be TPE. I'm too lazy to do anything beyond the eye test, but simply looking at the distribution on page 1 of the spreadsheet makes me think that higher-TPE players tend to be more on the thicc side--the top 10% of players by thiccness have a good number of players who I know to be high-TPE veterans, and just about all high earners in the bottom 10% are young enough that they're still lower in TPE as a whole. This could simply be the league's TPE distribution at work, rather than thiccness. But what about the physical part? That's what I mentioned in the first place. Can we say that, as a player gets more thicc, they become a better checker? An initial look suggests that this might be the case: But we do have to take into account that there's something else influencing hits as well, that being the lovely stat of checking. What if we do our best to take checking out of the equation--say, by dividing hits by checking rating to get us a stat that's more independent of the influence of CK on hits and allows us to evaluate the influence of thiccness more purely? ...yeah, that's less promising. What little there is left of the R-squared value gets almost divided by six, and the trendline flattens out significantly. An uneducated opinion might be that yes, thiccness influences checking, but the distribution we get by actually taking checking rating into account just about proves that it doesn't. ...but Gustav, you said you thought height is completely worthless, and thiccness involves height! You're correct! Let's take a look at this distribution, but with pure weight substituted for thiccness. Even more worthless! R-squared is even less, and the trendline is even flatter. So, to conclude, height and weight do not matter. New people ask all the time and are told many different things about it. I'm here to tell you, perhaps more definitively than ever before, that it will not do anything for your player. Go forth and be thicc (or not, I don't care). 1,509 words/3 weeks

I can take this into account I suppose. @omgitshim your post kind of implies the same thing; I can do this with that if you'd like but I'd probably have to take a vote off of any all as well.

List of those signed up: BarzalGoat Berocka bigAL Caboose30 Devise Doomsday JeffD jhatty8 JigglyGumballs JorgTheGoat03 Lefty_S MMFLEX Mr_Hatter omgitshim osens Ptyrell Ricer13 solas Spartan WentzKneeFan036

Gustav noises You know what it is, it's Town of Salem time! A couple new things for this game... -As much as it kills me to say it, I have added Town Traitor back into the poll. I despise Town Traitor, but if the people will it to be so, I shall provide. -I have a co-mod for this game! @Blazzer expressed an interest in stopping me from screwing up getting an administrative look at the action last time, and will be serving as a second Gustav (and hopefully one with more common sense and attention to detail) this game. As is always the case when a co-mod is present, treat her with the same respect you treat me--i.e. "make her regret finding out that the Internet exists". That's all that's different, now it's time for the copy-paste (with apologies to the light mode crowd): Rules are here The wiki is here A fair description of my mod abilities may be found 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: @JigglyGumballs @Ptyrell @JorgTheGoat03 @Spartan @JeffD @BarzalGoat @jhatty8 @Doomsday @bigAL @MMFLEX @osens @Ricer13 -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. Target start date: late as hell Saturday night! Not too concerned about timing as Day 1 is the extended one.

Title explains it all. I don't think there's a single one of us here who's going to look back on 2020 and think "good times" overall. Life sucked for all of us, and that's something I can relate to--I was in my worst-ever mental state early on this year and had my entire social life destroyed right when I was just starting to build one in college. Summer plans were destroyed and I went through a fall semester in which I had next to nothing to do with anyone in real life and felt worthless and unloved more often than I'd like to admit. I'm sure just about everyone here can relate to this on some level, some to an even greater extent than I can. But what's good? I find that it's nice whenever I'm feeling that life is slapping me in the face to think about what's good in my life and what I've been blessed with. Of course, I could go with the usual general things, I'm actually doing pretty well for myself in terms of school and personal development (even though I don't feel like it), I've got a roof over my head, clothes to wear, food to eat, I have a job that I've kept through this whole situation. That by itself is more than a lot of people can say and I'm lucky to be able to say it. I wrote this up looking forward to hearing from the rest of you and reading your responses--and I am looking forward to it! But when I posed this question to myself halfway through writing this, I realized...I've got no clear answer myself. So I guess here's a short list of things I've done or been gifted with this year that I'm happy about. Bought a Netflix subscription and have kept myself busy enough catching up on everything I've been missing for years Got very into golf, somehow even managed to convince a friend with no interest in sports that it was fun too Improved my guitar playing and wrote the best piece of music I've ever written Got a hell of a lot better with photo editing (thanks, sim leagues?) Finally found out that I do enjoy what I'm studying because I finally took enough classes to be able to judge it fairly--learned a lot as well! After the aforementioned poor mental state in the spring/early summer, I'm in a much better place now and genuinely consider myself happy with who I am I guess that's about it because everything else was either too general or too cheesy or too weird or too whatever. But what's good that's happened in your lives in 2020? I feel like we could all use a dose of positivity.

FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY

Yyyyyyyeeeeeeeeep. Called it, he's not gone forever. Welcome back @TXC