Gustav

Screw it, night phase. Gustav is fine but can't taste anything. Maybe I'll start to understand Midwest food. (Fun fact: ironically, the last meal I had that I actually tasted was from Sheetz). Tomorrow's day phase to start whenever I roll out of bed. List of living players (15)

I said I wanted to be entertained, not that I wanted you to be smh

*Coughs* A lot has happened for me to finally get this off the ground. Our timeline is: April 21: ToS2, the real one, is officially announced by BlankMediaGames May 13: Gustav finishes exams or some shit and suddenly has the time to draw up a draft rule list May 26: BMG officially releases ToS2 August 14: Gustav's power goes out and he has nothing better to do than to sit in Starbucks and stare at the VHL. This leads to our more official rule set September 12: Gustav is busy and isn't even thinking about running a forum game September 13: Gustav gets sick and tests positive for COVID September 15: Gustav is incredibly bored and wants you to yell at each other on the forum for his benefit That's how you get things done, though, isn't it? Find the time for it even if that's a complete accident. You know what? Everyone playing has done it before, so I'll skip the copy-paste and just hit you with the important links. Rules Discord Gameplay Video Role list: 1x TOWN PROTECTIVE 1x TOWN SUPPORT 2x TOWN INVESTIGATIVE 1x TOWN POWER 3x RANDOM TOWN 3x COVEN 1x NEUTRAL APOCALYPSE 1x RANDOM NEUTRAL 2x ANY Player list (15) @Adrest245 @Advantage @Alex @Berocka @Doomsday @eaglesfan036 @GoodLeftUndone @jhatty8 @Lemorse7 @omgitshim @Ptyrell @Ricer13 @rory @Subject056 @vincentlg2007 Expect day phases to start whenever I start them and end around 10 PM Eastern unless stated otherwise.

I feel like it might also work well to track averages earned per week (among active players) and see if there's a point where players might get less active, as opposed to inactive. I'm also curious if there's a stronger correlation between time spent in the league and going inactive or TPE, and which league a player is in, and going inactive. I couldn't possibly imagine!

List of sign-ups: Adrest245 Advantage Alex Berocka Doomsday eaglesfan036 GoodLeftUndone jhatty8 Lemorse7 omgitshim Ptyrell Ricer13 rory Subject056 vincentlg2007

*Becomes more dedicated to various real-life commitments* *Devotes less time to sim leagues* *Gets COVID* Shit. I'm back I guess. For the first time ever in our realm of sim sports leagues, we're going to play a little bit of Town of Salem 2. If you're new, stupid, or otherwise unfamiliar, ToS2 is a spin-off of Town of Salem, which we've played exclusively up to this point (and so, as far as I know, has everyone else on forums). We're going to try ToS2 here, and if it's successful, we'll probably integrate it as a game mode! The rules that we will consider official are here. I word this the way I do because some cases require modifications to run on the forum. Also, ToS2 isn't as well-documented as ToS, so we might be running with some mechanics that differ from reality. For our purposes, what's in those rules goes and whatever isn't might just need to be a judgment call. PLEASE PLAY TRIVIA THIS TIME. I intentionally made it easy because I want you to look over the rules and answering some easy questions will help with your understanding. The link to trivia is here. Let's make this fun! I'd like to start this up Friday, so I have something to do while I'm trapped at home--so sign up quick.

I updated this here and also added it to other role-guessing roles (ex. Doomsayer). I'm thinking about adding Jailor to the list but not sure. I didn't know this and now it's fixed. I have this in there for now. Maybe it changes when we learn more about it but at least the standard is set. Added all the rest as stated.

Hi everyone, and I hope your week has gone well! As I do sometimes when writers' block is particularly present, I took the chance to open up the index and start poking around for interesting points that I could talk about here to fill up my word count. I found one or two (in case you're curious, all of the bottom 12 in +/- play for either Warsaw or Chicago!) and then got stuck as I found a couple other things related to one player in particular. I looked a bit deeper, and I think I certainly have enough to write a .com on why I think DC's Ryuji Sakamoto (@der meister) is currently the VHL's weirdest player. I already knew this and I'm sure it was intentional, but Sakamoto's STHS attributes are left at 40 in both PA and SC. I'm not sure I've ever seen this both ways for an experienced player--and someone who builds with the Hall of Fame in mind would never even consider it--but he's managed to be a reasonably desirable player nonetheless. Some people play physical, some people play physical. I tried seeing if we have anyone with more penalty minutes than hits, and we don't (at least not among those with any notable number of hits), but the closest I found was Sakamoto, who has 91 hits to 87 penalty minutes. On the other hand, Calgary's Rip Wheeler is second in the league with 170 hits and has only put up 65 penalty minutes. And maybe you'd think that the 87 includes a lot of gooning, but so far Sakamoto has never been in a fight this season. Sakamoto currently leads the league in assists...but has only scored 6 goals. This isn't his first time playing for DC, although the first (in S88) never involved any playing time. He's spent every season since S87 in a different place (including four different teams in S88) and logged ice time for a total of 7 teams. That's more than I've seen in my entire time in the VHL. In a league where the "best build" has been collectively decided upon by most of the members, Sakamoto shows that it's possible to do OK (and be interesting) without listening. And though depreciation is taking over now, we'll see if the rest of his career gives us any more interesting facts.

I went to an Indian place in my area for the first time and I ended up with more biryani than I knew what to do with. Dinner today, lunch tomorrow, same difference. I kid you not, this one. Either that or last year. Both times (once because I'm bad socially--plus covid--and the next because I moved) I went from zero friends to developing hugely positive relationships with people I now really care about. But a year into my grad program and it's fun--that's more than I ever could have asked for. I'd say wins, but I haven't lost 10 times yet so I'll go with shutouts. 1. Which VHL award (other than MVP) do you most want to win and why? 2. What's your favorite thing to cook? 3. What's a VHL team that you like other than the one you play for and why?

Alternatively you can make everything just right and no one will read it--the one article I'm most proud of and that required the most work led to maybe a couple informed instances of feedback as to its actual contents and a bunch of people who didn't read the article and took a somewhat related concept as an excuse to rage in the comments. I've been having trouble coming up with good ideas for a long time now and I refuse to go down to the level of just listing my own player's stats every week and filling up the word count. But I guess there's that price to pay if you want to make good content. It takes work and feels good when it's out.

If you have specific examples of this happening in the M, feel free to DM me. Anyone can have any perception they want about how we run things, but I know that's not something we believe in. For our part, we've introduced rules to make it impossible to stay in the M for a whole career and continue to enforce rules about keeping inactive players on rosters. You should also feel free to bring up other ideas if you think they'll be helpful. But I think that on the administrative end, we've taken steps to address some of the larger issues that existed in what you might call the old days, where some forms of anti-progression were perfectly legal and even encouraged.

Art Vandelay

Literally nothing, but the analysis for this efficiency-wise is actually quite a bit simpler. Just add to OV until it becomes more expensive to increase SC with it than it does with SS or WS, then upgrade SS and WS evenly until that flips back, then repeat. ...unfortunately, all this means is that eventually you just spend 675 TPE maxing out SC with all three of those attributes at 99 (and your actual SC caps out at 93). But there are definitely times on the way up to that where it makes more sense to upgrade it with one thing than another. Combining this with the 95-DF build mentioned here gets you a player who only has 56 SK but who is really good otherwise...all for the low price of 1262 TPA. Which is doable for a max earner but I'll always encourage people to build how they want.

Art Vandelay

Art Vandelay

Curiouser and curiouser...

Art Vandelay

D - Callum Murray G - ART VANDELAY @Enorama

So in this case I'm arguing for a mitigated 9th season depreciation over a complete lack of one. I hope that makes sense--any depreciation at all in that regard is more than what quite a few max earners end up getting. Yes, 9-season players will be able to have more applied, but the hypothetical "peak" build is currently one that's reached with an 8-season career. Take that difference away, and the peak goes down because you close the loophole of staying down to completely avoid a hit. I'm not quite sure what you mean about rosters becoming overcrowded. I can see isolated incidences of what you're describing going down, but I'm not sure that's a huge issue. I hardly think that (and I know this isn't what you're saying) max earners staying down are simply doing what's right for the lower earners.

Ironically, this is exactly how I would explain "I don't think you should be able to earn well enough that there's a legitimate place for you in the VHL and then choose to back out of a big depreciation hit by not taking it." There are just different perspectives out there on what exactly that cake is and how one would go about eating it. You're correct about this, but I think there's something to be said about how this affects non-competitive earners as well. Giving competitive earners the chance to shoot that much higher also makes it so the highest-TPA players in the league will be even higher up than they would be in a system that treated them, IMO, fairly. I think someone with 400 TPE is just a little bit more valuable in a league where the top isn't 1400 but 1100 or so.

These two are active, too. Do better.

I really like this at first glance but then it brings in the thing that people think progressive taxation is--why have a 96 in something when you can have a 95? I think you have a good idea but it would also have the unintended consequence of builds changing in very specific ways to better fit depreciation.

Sure, you won't be absolute garbage in your 9th season, but if you're trying to make the HoF, then why would you accept 300+ TPE off your total (and lots of money out of your finances) if you can just as easily...not? Especially if what you're giving up isn't a season that really ever plays into evaluating people for HoF worthiness. I don't even buy the argument that being up that extra season helps with stat padding, because per-season averages will presumably go up and I'd imagine that a 550-TPE rookie is better situated for ROTY than someone at 350. IMO, the "difficulty" in skipping the E should be limited to lying in the process of skipping the E in the first place. You've earned enough? Cool, you've gotten past that difficulty. "Depreciation should be realistic" is fine, but loses its meaning when you can cheese your way into making it not work that way. ...what if we moved the "you don't depreciate for time spent in the E" back a season or two? For example, players who take one season in the E are hit with the same schedule as players who don't, players who take two seasons get out of that last-season hit, players with three seasons in the E are exempted from depreciating in their last two seasons. It removes the incentive to take one season down intentionally after the draft (because there's far less reason to take two at that point) and still caters to players who naturally take much longer to come up. And if we don't like the strength of depreciation under this system, then who says we can't adjust it back down a little? The highest TPA out there will still probably be lower than it is now, because we don't have people who don't need to avoid depreciation doing so untouched. ^I think I prefer that to other things I've brought up here, so please consider it.