Gustav

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Week 3

Art Vandelay

Week 2

It's been four and a half years and this is probably the first time we've agreed on "here's a change I think the league should make." Good shit.

With all the options we have to tag ourselves on our account and on our posts, I think it would be fun to give us a tag for our favorite real-life team. Something that would look like this: With most posts taking up tons of room what with menu options and sigs, I don't see anything against an extra line or two. I also just like the idea of being able to connect with people based on this sort of thing. Perhaps I'd say hi to a random Sabres fan I come across or have an easier time avoiding Leafs fans.

You are to the VHL what Iowa is to college football. (also Art Vandelay)

Creative suggestion: the Dudamel Foundation is led by a globally-famous orchestra conductor and aims to bring music education and access to instruments to those without chances at either. Mostly unrelated, but here he is with the Venezuelan youth orchestra--highly recommended, especially the last couple minutes For a bit more standard idea, I'll always get behind a toy drive around the holidays. Every kid who celebrates Christmas wants a dream come true, but not every parent can make it happen. I was always fortunate enough to feel that magic growing up, but so many kids don't have that chance. The Toy Foundation operates globally and year-round, though if we want something more holiday-focused, we could go Toys for Tots (which is American, but there's a Canadian one too).

I will say that there have been one or two isolated cases where I question whether someone is saying what they're saying out of a conflict of interest. I'll keep quiet on the specifics but I've found that I have to wonder why some of our discussions on cap have some of the posts in them that they do. BUT, that's not to say anyone who doesn't pull that sort of thing is too stupid to notice it. We're talking about something I've seen come up maybe twice and it's been called out right away both times. It's not something that means that anyone who has any sort of job should be kicked out. I think it's good overall that we have people who are involved in other parts of the league also involved in BoG. I, for example, have spent over 10 seasons as a VHL GM. I know how the job works and I think I'm qualified to speak on how I think it should be managed in general. But I'm also no longer a VHL GM and I'm usually completely unaware of specific issues that you guys face today until they're brought up. I don't think you'd want to face the consequences of a group of people exactly like me in that regard, where we're doing our best with outdated info but really have no idea what we're talking about. Have fun dealing with policies that don't make sense because they didn't have GM input when they were being drawn up. That's an example of why that diversity of experience is really important. Likewise, I find that I'm generally taken very seriously when talking about the M, and I certainly wouldn't like the BoG deciding they know what's best for the league I run if no one there has anything to do with it. In this situation, how do you fill the BoG jobs with people who are active and involved and worthy of the job but also don't already have a job or are willing to give up other league involvement to get there? Usually those categories are pretty separate. If I were to offer you a BoG spot on the condition that you give up your GM job, I'd imagine you wouldn't be very into that. Honestly, BoG doesn't do enough to warrant that. Also, this is why we raised GM pay. It makes perfect sense to be both team- and player-focused if you're getting paid to do both of those things I think it's reasonable to expect VHLM GMs to reach out to players who need it, and I'd suggest that people reach out to us if their GMs aren't being very helpful.

As far as I'm aware most of us from S66 were from Reddit...at least I was. I've seen YouTube drives work and I've seen them go horribly wrong. Honestly it just depends on circumstances.

I think there are things that work with a wider audience and things that don't. Everyone experiences the league in different ways, and you've always been more into the roleplay aspect of the league than most members. I do think it's fair that that sort of approach isn't going to resonate with everyone that walks into the door, but what was important about Houston was that you applied your personality to giving the people on your team a better experience. The VHLM (and the VHL in general) isn't meant to be a business. We're people, and players are best viewed as people. I don't think I ever cared about team branding or image or player storylines to as great an extent as you did, but I ran my teams in ways that fit my personality and so did you. I think if we tried to switch styles, neither one would be as successful. So I don't think it's necessarily the things that you do as a GM, but it's the things that you do as a GM that matter. If you're running a team so you can have fun pushing buttons and look cool in front of other people, you're doing it wrong. And honestly I feel like the league is lacking in that regard now. We've got a lot of teams that I sort of just see as...existing...and that I don't really associate with any one thing or another. We've got to do better in making our teams communities within the community, not just stops along the way to the next place.

For the record anyone has access to my file and instructions for working with it are listed in that original article. If recruitment wants it they can have it. It does take a couple hours to make it entirely accurate, but I feel like that once a season is justified if you’re getting paid for it. Honestly, you could get mostly the same job done a lot faster by just looking at total roster numbers—though this gives you more detail and lets you come up with E-hating arguments.

Another season, another theme week...wait, it's a good one? I'm not used to that. I feel like it's been a while since we had forum drama. I think it's actually a little fun to log in and watch people screaming at each other over one thing or another--it's a nice little guilty pleasure that gives me reading material and the chance to say something about the situation that basically just amounts to common sense but in far too many words. It's also no secret that this week's forum drama has surrounded recruitment, from unfounded accusations to people being told to shut up to threads turning into long discussions on proper forum etiquette, it's been an interesting read. And now the blues, in their ever-broadening quest for ULTIMATE CONTROL, ask us to bury actual relevant, interesting, and entirely juicy content with endless threads about how "recruitment is good and we should do more of it." No kidding. We're going to have the whole host of recycled opinions this week. We'll have "let's use Reddit again," we'll have "recruitment doesn't actually do anything," and we'll have everyone's favorite, "it would be nice if we had [exactly what the VHLM GMs do already]." And maybe this week will be valuable. I can see, somewhere in here, the opportunity to uncover some new frontier for the recruitment team. But why list ideas? Everyone's going to do that already and I'm not really part of any spaces myself where the league could reasonably be advertised. I don't, however, want the league to lose sight of realism. Just because we've had a forum thread or two that's created a perceived need for more recruitment--and, believe me, it's worked--we don't need to rush right into it yet. Which brings me to the main point of my article: if you look at the numbers, the VHL has neither a declining-numbers issue nor a need to grow its user base. I wrote this lovely article two seasons back and I'm still annoyed that barely anyone took the time to read it through and understand it. There's some awesome stuff in there if you agree with my vision for the league--namely, that we should get rid of the VHLE and move back to the way things used to work, when there were only two leagues to deal with and it wasn't normal to have players taking six seasons after the draft to move up. I'm not going to harp on that point too much (although I'd still like to make it), so I'll move on to explaining why I'm bringing it up. It's an article that also serves as a lovely time capsule for the league because it has lots of data on roster sizes as they were in S89. There's a massive spreadsheet in that article that shows you exactly what I mean and that I've updated for S91 (go check it out! It's in the article. You'll have to get around to reading my damn article to find it--see what I did there?). I'll extract a few meaningful numbers from said spreadsheet, and said article, for your viewing enjoyment: Average VHL roster size in S89: 6.1 F | 3.6 D | 1.6 G Average VHL roster size in S91: 6.3 F | 3.8 D | 1.3 G My hypothetical "delete the E and use 8-season careers with a VHLM cap of 250" situation in S89: 6.8 F | 4.1 D | 1.8 G The same situation in S91: 7.6 F | 3.9 D | 1.5 G (Cap is fine in this situation in either season. Currently, the average VHL team has 1.6 inactive players on its roster, which would mean an almost perfect 10-12 actives per team if this were implemented in S91. Delete the E please.) I also appreciated the chance to look at this sheet again because it's occurred to me (sadly after the fact) that I can copy-paste that summary sheet into a separate tab and have a snapshot of how the league looked this season for future reference. It took me a couple hours to bring the sheet up to date, and I don't have it backed up from the original case, but it's in order now for any comparison to S91 that I might eventually need. Maybe you'll see it again in the future! You know what this tells us? The VHL has not shrunk even a little bit over the last couple seasons. It also tells us something even nicer. The VHL has not experienced a dramatic (and dangerous) growth rate over the last couple seasons either. That's awesome. In fact, VHL rosters are marginally larger than they used to be, and it appears that there are a few more VHL-ready prospects now than there used to be. That is 100% fine and doesn't indicate a poor job done on the part of recruitment. I think this fits an opinion that I've stated multiple times before just fine--that the current league size should be sustained and that we should work to keep our community the size that we want it to be with recruitment serving mostly to guide it to that level. And that's what is happening. The VHL public can mostly chill out over this issue. We aren't crashing and burning and we aren't going to lose the league just because we're not experiencing the type of recruitment blowup that most of us came into the league in the middle of. "But Gustav," you say, "there hasn't been much recruitment lately! I haven't actually bothered to find out, but I'll hop on the latest trend if it makes me look cool! If I had my way, I'd have all of you shot!" My first answer is all of the above. Complete with a "perhaps we could even shrink the league a tiny little bit so I could have more support for an eventual E nuking. If I had my way, you know what I'd do with it!" My second answer, though, is that you're right--recruitment hasn't been great. And that's something worth keeping an eye on, and that's something that does deserve its own theme week with people bringing up ideas and with the team taking them in for consideration. It's also very true that the VHLM is suffering a bit--our numbers on that sheet are considerably lower than they were in S89, and that's something that could indeed lead to smaller VHL numbers in the future if it persists. Currently, that's something we can deal with. It's even something that I appreciate seeing for my own reasons. And I'm not at all opposed to recruitment for the sake of giving us some first-gens to develop. We could try what we can on Reddit. We could make greater efforts to connect with people right from player creation. We could even--who would ever think?--stop advertising on gaming channels and try to connect with people who actually talk about hockey, or make graphics, or do their own amateur sort of broadcasting that this league isn't all that far off from, instead of making our target audience 12-year-old kids who think we're a gaming community and immediately leave. Wouldn't one or two of those things, or even a certain one in particular, be nice? I like to think it would be great for the league and that recruitment has a wonderful opportunity to grow with this week. It could be a wonderful sort of wake-up call. I'd just rather not see us go the way of overcompensating and end up flooding the league again just because we got yelled at a lot over theme week. Going forward, I think the team could use somewhat of a numbers-oriented approach. We could use someone who tracks league sizes and retention numbers and draft class sizes and figures out when would be smart to recruit and to what extent. A guided approach as to what to do, instead of doing things based on instinct, would be great. It's been alluded to that there's been some inaction on the back end in recent times--and that's absolutely true--but maybe there just isn't that sort of guided approach present. Even keeping track of simple numbers like these would be nice. I believe that with enough tracking of numbers over time, we could reach a very good understanding of how large recruitment needs to make the M for the purposes of growth, shrinkage, or sustainability on the big stage. That's my suggestion for recruitment--get someone to dig into the numbers for you, or start doing it yourself. I suppose it's also my suggestion for the community. The next time you see "RECRUITMENT IS TERRIBLE", think critically about it. Maybe it is! Maybe it isn't, and maybe it's a matter of opinion. Maybe you can look at it as convenient for your own little twisted vision of putting GMs out of work. In any case, I hope this is a valuable contribution to theme week and that what I have to say is taken well. 1,503 words | 3 weeks | you'll never AI-detector me because my writing style is too stupid for that

You wouldn't know her, she goes to a different school.

I feel like there's even a way to be fired up and speak aggressively that isn't necessarily insulting. Case in point, a lot of my previous writing (at least, I like to think so). You can probably say whatever you want about the state of recruitment and it won't be taken too poorly. It's just that the second it's made about people and not situations is the second it becomes justifiably offensive to those people. "WE HAVE NO NEW RECRUITS, THIS IS A MAJOR ISSUE, AND I CAN'T BELIEVE THE LEAGUE HAS GOTTEN TO THIS POINT WHILE SO MANY PEOPLE" (speaking generally) "CLAIM THEY'RE DOING EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO HELP" will piss off no one because people who are trying will agree with it and people who aren't either won't notice, won't care, or don't think they're part of the issue. Meanwhile, the things listed here target the people on recruitment team specifically and in some cases puts down the work that recruitment team has done. And also, as a general rule, it's always best to suggest an alternative to a situation if you don't like a situation. Otherwise it's just ragebait. That's why I really like this response. I have the same access to the recruitment team server, and yeah, I'll be honest--there have been a lot of times when there hasn't been a level of activity there that's lined up with a perceived need to stop league size from declining (though given my E opinions I've been OK with that for the time being so long as it's fixed eventually). This points that out, but it goes a lot farther than that by providing potential reasons as to why, offering informed criticism of what's gone wrong, and pointing out where specifically there's room for improvement. Even though it's very clear about the fact that recruitment hasn't been very effective in recent seasons, it's hurtful to no one because what it speaks negatively about is more fact than opinion and it leaves spaces for a fair response. I was in a situation myself recently where I was assigned to lead a team on a project but wasn't given much direction. I (and other team leads) ended up facing criticism over things that we sometimes didn't even know we had to do. And it sucks for everyone when one side isn't given the tools for success and the other side tears them down for not succeeding. I guess I've been the "recruitment team" in that case. I'd like to know that recruitment is trying what they can and it's completely fair that they be held to that standard by the community. There are also just good ways and bad ways to do that.

@Spartan eat butts

G - ART VANDELAY @STZ

D - Deron Nesbitt @wcats

D - Liv Slater @STZ

F - Yaroslav Bogatyrev @wcats

F - Randy Bobandy @STZ @Syzygy DQ'd because of 2 skips (@Spartan )

1. @Jubis F - Jason F - Daryl Dixon F - Landon Wolanin D - Jacob Stone D - Phil Strasmore G - Fuukka Rask 2. @STZ F - John Jameson F - Larry Abass Jr F - Sadie St-Louis D - Pierre Emile Bouchard D - Malum Maellard G - Lachlan Summers 3. @Gustav (GM) F - Leandro Goncalves F - Randy Bobandy F - Yaroslav Bogatyrev D - Liv Slater D - Deron Nesbitt G - Art Vandelay 4. @wcats F - Mac Atlas F - Leonard Triller F - Wann Kerr D - Skor McFleury D - James Marino G - Joel Castle 5. @Zetterburg (filler) F - Todd Cooke F - Tomas Sogaard F - Jimi Jaks D - Jake Thunder D - Mark Calaway G - Jesse Teno 6. @Beketov F - Vincent Laroche-Gagnier F - AK92 Wit da Hoodie F - The Frenchman D - Ryuji Sakamoto D - Brian Kowalski G - Matt Murdock

@Syzygy skipped (1/2); @Beketov on the clock.

Way up in the mountains, in the most populous city in North America... (did you know both of those things were the case? Far too many don't.) ...we're hiring a new GM for the Kings. We thought we finally had an offseason with no movement in management, but I suppose some things are just not meant to be. But anyway, it's no secret that this team needs an active leader--so let's welcome @hylands back to the Mexico City GM role! It's time for Round 2. @VHLM Commissioner

So this might make some people feel old...but I learned that this existed recently. A lot of his stuff doesn't really resonate with me but this is fantastic. Cool chord progression and an amazing vocal performance with feeling.