Gustav

I suck this season and I'm currently writing about that; let me enjoy my good moments

Art Vandelay

Up until a small handful of years ago, you could legally sit in the back seat of a car without using a seatbelt if you were 16 or older. The VHL will never know what it's like to legally make those stupid choices.

Why did the VHL have to turn 16? Could it be to distract the rest of you from me trying to delete the E? I'm going to choose to believe that this was the case and that I am being suppressed, rather than understand how calendars work and start this article in a more celebratory manner. Something that occurred to me was that it is really hard to run a sim league successfully, much less start one. And though I can't claim to be part of any of this from a VHL perspective (sure, I'm partially responsible for the M, but that's a little bit different), I've got firsthand experience being in a few other startup leagues that I think are cool to write about. The SBL: The closest thing to a "complete" league (in terms of large community size) that I've been a part of, the SBL was mostly an offshoot of the EFL/SBA side of our affiliation and (if I remember correctly) was run primarily by @AW13. We've got the PBE out there, but they use a different earning system to ours and this was the only baseball league I've known that worked like ours does. It was fun while it lasted, and a good number of people were on board with it. I myself was an updater and ran some weekly fantasy stuff, and I was far from the most important, so looking back on it we actually had a really impressive amount of people to start it up. Sadly, the SBL would fold after just a season, maybe two--I don't remember two full ones, but I think we made it through one entirely and were at least outwardly preparing for another when the announcement hit. Why this happened: I'm honestly not 100% sure and I'm kind of sad it did because I liked it while it lasted. I don't think I ever saw any SBL-specific recruits, and it was after all just everyone's affiliate league. As that stood, it was clearly an unsustainable model. Plus, things like forum updating were inconvenient, and, again, with it being everyone's affiliate, it was probably really difficult to find people willing to step up and put in effort in a secondary league. The SFC: A very ambitious project run by @Dil and @Beaviss that was very short-lived (and also one of my fastest burnouts in any community; sorry guys). This was a UFC sim built by Dil himself--I remember getting to give my guy a nickname, and I remember that it was "The Florentine Fireball", but I don't remember what his actual name was. It was a cool concept but lots of people lost interest pretty quickly and I also remember some technical issues coming up at one point. I'm pretty sure something had to be resolved and in the short time that took, I just didn't care anymore. Why this happened: Here's the first mention of a common theme: you need lots of support to start a successful league, no matter how good you are at it. I think it's fair to say that building this long-term was too much for two people, even though it was momentarily really impressive. I also remember being a bit confused by the league's structure and I think it would have needed a lot of tuning to work with expanding and contracting league sizes. Various iterations of cricket sim leagues: all started by @Berocka and none lasting very long. We started out as a Discord server that streamed sims run on some console game whose exact name I don't remember, and eventually tried a forum built by @Cxsquared. I was the third member of our "big three" that tried to run things but did by far the least. We did run a season (I managed the Perth Challengers!) but things fell apart spectacularly after that--retention rates dropped off hard with no recruitment and we came into conflict with other GMs who really didn't want to play with the rules as written. Honestly, my favorite out of everything we tried was the first version with the streams--watching those taught me the rules of the game and that's something I've actually been able to apply as I've gotten out into the real world and played a little bit with some people who are from places that actually care about cricket. Why this happened: Maybe we could have caved in and gotten a half-assed second season on the forum if we did what a couple GMs wanted, but that wasn't the reason why it didn't work out. For one, we just weren't marketing to many people who wanted to be in it past the "just trying something new" stage, and it's also fair to say that the league didn't stand a chance with no recruitment efforts. It also happened to catch all three of us at busy times, and I don't think we were collectively in the right place to start up--nor did we have much help with it. But everything that happened with this took a lot of effort to get going--mostly from people other than myself--and it's much respected. The IHL: I really don't want to call this a "failed" community because it ran for a while and I really liked it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I had more fun here for a while than I've had in any VHL affiliate league. This was a small community founded by @enigmatic a long time ago, going through various changes in composition and leadership, and was so small that we were about 8 members strong and could directly recruit people we knew to fill openings as needed. But it was a sim league, and in fact an STHS one--each of us had a roster where we were in charge of which players were played where and how their attributes were upgraded. I ran the Nuuk Nukes (that's Greenland for you--and before you guys started creating as Greenlandic here too), and in true Gustav form never won anything. Things came to a rapid halt at one point, less over systemic challenges than in our other examples. Because of this, I don't really want to do a "why" so much as I'd like to reflect positively on the time I spent there and the connections I made with some SHLers and other "money league" people who I hope are doing well. So yeah, I haven't seen a sim league start firsthand and actually work in all the time I've been in them in general. It takes a ridiculous amount of effort and organization to get things off the ground in a sustainable way, and I know that it takes more of the same, all the time, to keep it that way. For 16 years, no less! It's more than just an annual observance--it's an annual celebration of a legitimate achievement. Here's to many more.

Also, this popped into my head randomly almost 2 hours after I visited this thread... YOU PLAY FOR HALIFAX NOW? Times have truly changed...

I think getting paid extra to create content is called "VSN". And maybe there's something to be said about relatively low volume, but maybe not because it's at least high effort. I certainly prefer it to getting pinged every week because someone there who wants to farm likes passively mentioned my player in one sentence somewhere. I'll also say that the Discord environment does seem to have chilled out recently. It's been a while since I had a strong (and imo legitimate) objection to someone acting high and mighty in there because of whatever color their name happens to be. I don't think this is a realistic idea because I think the responses you thought of against it are valid, and I'd be against it myself because I feel like it would just lead to old-VSN-style spam and people making stupid posts they don't actually care about. But we've had worse ideas and I think this is a fair response to lower post traffic.

To add to this: VHLM GM hiring pools aren’t quite as competitive as they have been in the past now that we’ve got a whole other league STEALING our candidates! We have to deal with people “moving up” pretty much every offseason and we’ll welcome opportunities to cut down on GM turnover. Yes, there is still competition, and we are hiring qualified candidates who deserve their jobs, but the difference is noticeable. That’s an unintended benefit, but I think it’s true that we’ve had unintended drawbacks—even speaking as someone who spent most of a year trying to brute-force the idea through BoG. I think it’s an improvement but I’d love to hear how we can add some more personality back into the process!

Art Vandelay

Week 3 of E deleting

Week 2 of E deleting

So I actually selected all three non-“absolutely not” options. Sometimes I just feel like it and sometimes I have a real reason. But most of the time in a parking lot I just go in forwards. However weirdly enough I always back in at my apartment.

The "cap" in terms of the old TPE scale is actually a good bit lower than it used to be pre-hybrid, so I actually wouldn't worry much about that. It's true that there's a skill gap, but do we need there to not be one? It's perfectly normal to see new NHLers take a couple seasons to develop, even the good ones. I'd hardly think that solving the issue of needing development to succeed in the VHL is something that should be done by making it more difficult to get to in the first place. 100% agreed. I think the E at the very least needs some sort of limits or incentives to prioritize actives. I'm not sure there are enough actives to fill team rosters as is (I wonder why I'd rather just get rid of it) but with nothing in place that would push a GM toward maximizing use of actives and working for retention, things will stay the way they are. We would have some of the super active get a lot more TPE than usual and that's what forced our depreciation system into the less-than-ideal setup it's in right now. I'd like you to consider as well that someone taking 4-5 seasons to get up to the VHL is approximately 8-10 real-life months. That's a lot more development time than really anyone needs. Making it so welfare players have it harder, and the top end earns more, only widens the gap and creates more of that skill difference you talk about in your first point. Besides, if we're increasing the minimum while increasing the amount of TPE available, isn't that effectively keeping it the same? I'm not sure I understand. All in all I think I fail to see where this creates a better, simpler solution than just getting rid of it. A cap of 650 with 15 TPE available is far less reachable than a cap of 250 with 12, and that point alone brings us to my #1 point against the E--the VHL is for everyone, and we need to make it so everyone can get there. To circle back: I don't think it's likely that, given what I know about VHL bureaucracy, the E will be deleted unless someone shows that it is clearly, objectively, worse in every way than any other alternative. I have not done that here--all I have done is debunk the perception that it continues to be absolutely necessary for the league to function. I don't think that means that my opinion cannot be that we should roll it back. After all, we had to prove that it was at the time it was created absolutely necessary to put it through everything (and I have to say that pushing anything at all through BoG can be a nightmare sometimes). If the league had the numbers it did now and someone came along suggesting that we add a third one, they'd be laughed at, because it's not needed. I disagree that we should "make a decision and stop the discussion"--if we have it, we should think about whether we need it. If we don't, we should think about whether we do. It's OK to have dissenting opinions on this, and speaking from experience I really wish "just make a decision" is how things worked. There's stuff sitting in there right now that I think we should have just made a decision on close to a full year ago. And yes, there are mechanisms by which we can easily get rid of it if we ever want to. I've brought this up before and received replies from various individuals along the lines of "how dare you suggest that we would ever consider this", but they exist and anyone telling you otherwise probably also believes that being in BoG means you have to agree with everything that happens in BoG.

Glad I get to post this again:

I'm genuinely curious why you would be more in favor of this over a 2-league system. Obviously you know my opinions on the E but I'm not not open to talking about it. The way I see it is that the E has benefits from an administrative standpoint. I'd agree that it lets us take on a larger community while avoiding massive expansion of a 2-league system--which I also think would have been unsustainable past the point we had it. If your interest is in designing a community that is, purely based on numbers, more capable of standing up to change, the 3-league system is it. But I genuinely think the harm done to the player experience outweighs the administrative benefit and that if we realistically can switch back, we should do it. I hope I've shown that we realistically can here. You're proposing that we work to improve the E--and while it's around, I'm absolutely in favor of that--but you'd have a very hard time convincing me that any system that presents a higher barrier to entering the VHL is worth it. That's fundamentally what the E is and there really isn't a way to make it not that with some systemic change. I found multiple players, sometimes multiple players per team, with half a career or more after being drafted spent...not in the VHL. Davos has an active player in their 9th season who's a rookie--that's over a year spent without ever making it, and retirement coming up the second they do. I don't think that does a service for lower earners at all (and if you had access to the BoG thread where the E was created, you'd see plenty of things along the lines of how this is wonderful for "clickers" and whatnot). There are things that I don't like about the E that maybe we can improve upon. For example, the way our depreciation system works (while harsher depreciation is necessary to keep some of the numbers down) more or less encourages people to not play in the VHL. I don't think there's any world where any player should purposely avoid their own development because it carries an advantage, but here we are living in it. Plus, the "there are lots of IAs in the E" thing goes without saying. But, those are things that we can control. While I have a problem with them, I don't believe they're inherently tied to the E's existence and I do believe that they're things that can be worked on. But in total, I'm still against the E's existence because of the really big thing I don't believe we can control about it. It's just harder to make it up to the VHL, and especially as VHLM commish I like to think our development league's greatest success and sole objective is to put people in the VHL. It's not something that should take half a career or more for a lower earner. Another thing you'd see if you had the same BoG access I mention above is that there was a decent amount of pushback against the proposal because of this alone, before those other issues were even known. This isn't a new argument against it, and in fact it was the original one. If you can think of a way around that, I'd love to hear it, but I'm not sure one exists that can't also be achieved by doing the simple thing and hitting delete.

Rude

"Fold the VHLE/This goes without saying." -@STZ "The VHLE: I suppose this is one thing I'd change, and I'd probably remove the VHLE and expand the TPE allowed in the VHLM." -@nerji "my first thing as commish I would first remove the vhle..." -@comrade cat "Remove the VHLE as a middle league, and affiliate VHLM teams to VHL parebt teams." -@Arce "First off I would Combine the VHLE and VHLM into one league and put the TPE/TPA cutoff up to 500." -@KRZY "Next, I MIGHT consider removing the VHLE and offer players two seasons in VHLM to grow their player." -@Scurvy "First, I would probably delete the VHDE." -@Spartan "Abolish the VHLE" -@Bojovnik Needless to say, I've LOVED some of our theme week suggestions. It's true that I've taken a few of those out of context, but I think it's fair to say that if you're unaware that the E is a major point of contention (and has been since its founding), it's either your first day in the league or you've been living under a rock. It used to take 250 TPE to get up to the VHL--now it takes 400. We've always had issues with players going inactive after the draft, and I'll put right up top that the E did NOT make that worse, but we've never had an entire league dominated by inactives and we've also never had as much objection to the fundamental existence of a league itself by many of those active enough to pass through it. I'll also point to the latest thunderdome thread (can we please use the thunderdome more? I miss it) that didn't really have anything to do with deleting the E but spawned lots and lots of popular support. It is ALSO true that complaining about the E will get a person a good amount of pushback. A good amount of this essentially amounts to "stop complaining", but there are more arguable points in there. Points such as..."the E is necessary" and "you're just deciding we can flip a switch and move all the players into spaces where they can't fit." And, yes, theme week has come with its share of "we should be doing more to help make the E good" points. I'll cite a short theme week blurb that I actually really appreciated here from @JCarson: I'll say here that I completely agree with the basis of this, serious or not: a good number of you guys want to kill the E and don't care about logic. That includes me. I've seen a lot of legitimate complaints about what the E can do to someone's enjoyment--the longer path up to the VHL adds to its inaccessibility, the way our depreciation system works encourages players to stay down and that's against everything we claim to stand for, "I'm stuck on a team where no one is active and my GM doesn't talk to me," you know the deal. Anyone dealing with any of those issues has every right in the world to complain about them, and it's been a lot of people. But, frankly, I've seen a lot of really stupid arguments in favor of deleting the E in my time and I completely understand why someone would be annoyed by those. I'm here to set the record straight. I'm VHL Commissioner for a Day! I have to think critically! I'm here to answer, not the question of "should we delete the E"--because that, like it or not, is a matter of opinion--but "is it realistically possible to delete the E?" If we do decide to just, as one does, wipe an entire league out of existence, will it really "cause damaging repercussions throughout the other leagues"? There was a time, and in fact a long time, when I would have agreed with that statement. I think you can see where I'm going next. Long story short: I believe that it IS realistically possible that, if the VHL wanted to, it could delete the VHLE today with practically no major damage. I have modeled this more accurately and more extensively than I have ever seen anyone do, in public or in private, and I'm going to give you a spreadsheet that tells me exactly what I mean. >>HERE IT IS.<< Tips to make it work yourself: Oh, hey. You're still here. Long story short, you say? Conflict of interest from someone who doesn't like the E, you say? Yeah, I'll admit that. Let's get into the long story LONG--I'll explain how my model works, why it's fair, why I haven't tried to manipulate the numbers to show me what I want, and probably bore you to death in the process. I've also got a lot of places to talk about where the sheet isn't perfect, and I'll explain what makes its conclusions perfectly valid overall regardless. There will be times where we'll need to employ the scientific way of thinking--which boils down to actually thinking about your results, and I'll point those out as well. You're still here? Nerd. Part 1: How It's Made "But Gustav," you say, "backup goalers come at a discount! How on earth do you calculate that?" This spreadsheet will AUTOMATICALLY: Pull in and keep updated rosters for each team from the portal, along with their prospect pools (also, what the hell, Vancouver? You don't have any prospects and that wrecked the auto stuff in a way where I had to rework your tab) Take my own inputs for current season, weeks since the offseason cutoff, and activity status and seasons played in the E for each player (yes, I clicked on every player page for this), and for each player: Project earn rates based on current season and TPA Project depreciation and retirement based on current season, draft season, activity, and seasons played in the E Take rookie and prime salary brackets into account based on current season, draft season, and TPA Estimate each player's TPA at the cutoff (based on weeks since the cutoff) to keep current numbers and projections accurate regardless of which point we're at in the season Assume that inactive players who depreciate below 600 TPE will be cut (because you would agree that a player like that isn't worth much and wouldn't play one over your actives, right GMs?) Assign each prospect a chance of making it to the VHL in any given season based on TPA, current season, and draft season, and assign that prospect a "roster number" where they are worth a given fraction of a player (and of a cap hit) in future seasons. And for each team: Calculate roster numbers at each position Calculate cap Do both of these for the following situations: The current system: nothing much more to say. 9 seasons and the current cap on the E. Nuke the E and nothing else: Keep 9-season careers, get rid of the E, and make the VHLM cap its old mark of 250 TPE. Make the VHLM cap 300: What if bringing more players up is too much? Here, we propose a higher VHLM cap to ease up on VHL rosters. The old way: 8-season careers and a VHLM cap of 250. Making those you call whiny even more so since S80. 8-season careers do lead to more VHLM-to-VHL roster balance--your average recreate will spend 8/9 seasons in the VHL, rather than 9/10--slightly less, and not much less over time, but a double retirement brought on by shortened careers will cut down rosters substantially at first and give recruitment time to adjust the size of future classes. The old way and more VHLM: 8 seasons and 300. Factor in early picks over the next two seasons into roster and cap projections. 1sts and 2nds next season, as well as 1sts two seasons from now, will play into the projections. Figures out the amount of cap space on the roster taken up by inactive players and also finds an "IA-adjusted" cap number for every team showing only the amount of active cap on the roster. "But Gustav," you say, "what about the VHLM?" I've got an answer for you, thankfully--the sheet also pulls numbers from each team's current prospect pool related to the number of players not currently in the M but within its new proposed limits and adds to current VHLM numbers--also fully automated. Everything you need to know for analysis is calculated and nicely bundled up onto the Summary sheet at the start, which (after an absolute metric TON of data entry) shows you all of those numbers, both now and for two seasons to come. Seriously, I probably put in a whole 40 hours making this thing over the past few weeks. I hope you can appreciate it. Part 2: The Limitations, and Why They Don't Remove All Meaning No model is ever fully accurate, and that's absolutely true of this one. My future projections are pretty decent because they keep the overall numbers about the same over time, with retirements, player development, and my best guesses at which players make it up and how often they do it. But that being said, I'm well aware that my trying to make projections that did this defeated the purpose--I think it's a pretty good guess that we'll have about the same-sized league two seasons from now, but I don't know that for sure. And as I said in last week's article, it does not mean anything if you'd like to draw a conclusion and then mess with your own numbers until that conclusion is drawn. Absolutely no real argument that we should kill the E comes from anything I've projected for future seasons--I thought it would at first, realized it wouldn't, and really just finished doing it because I think it's going to help me out in some future articles (and maybe a GM or two would appreciate using it as well). I actually like this because it makes the conclusions less speculative--I'd immediately raise an eyebrow at anyone claiming that we should nuke the E in 2 seasons because their own numbers say roster sizes will decrease by then. Any conclusion that I'll draw here comes from my own projections of what would happen now, with the players we have, and nothing to do with me trying to decide who's creating and when. That's the big point I wanted to address because I don't want people looking at my (lower) 2-season projection and trying to say that my argument is that rosters will decrease. It isn't. I do think it works well to see in general what each team should expect in the future, for things entirely unrelated to this, but that is it. Other things that didn't go exactly as expected, but that would take lots of time for me to fix and wouldn't change any of my conclusions, are as follows: My "start of season" estimated TPA is weird because it uses a formula that works great for future projections but throws itself off for the "what if there's no E" box in the current season if the player has spent time in the E--there's more adjustment that would be needed in that case. Fortunately, this skews the "what if there's no E" numbers in the direction of "there's more cap than there should be" and this works in the opposite direction of "Gustav is messing with the numbers". There's a rule on the books now that players who are up for their first VHL season are in rookie salary brackets no matter what, and this leads to some players being assigned more cap than they have in real life. This also makes cap numbers higher than they should be--which is good, because a too-high number still working out fine means the real one will too. The "old way" never made use of this rule anyway, so it makes sense that any of my proposals would disregard it. In some cases, players have retired early (see Mikhail Kovalchuk) and are projected to be on the roster in the future. I know. This doesn't matter because I don't take future seasons into account for my conclusions. Also in some cases, my start-of-season estimate is further thrown off by players developing in different ways than their projections. This also skews the cap numbers higher in some cases (Seattle is an extreme case with a few million extra), and leads us to more error in the way we'd prefer to have it, but in general it's pretty accurate. And that's about it as far as I can tell. I tried to make sure that the things I was doing wrong wouldn't work in ways that I might have tried to force them to, and by making ourselves look at only the current season numbers, we eliminate most of the "here's my opinion" part anyway. Part 3: The Conclusions I'm going to start off right now by saying that, if we wanted to, I believe that it would be fully possible to eliminate the VHLE. Not all situations work perfectly, but I believe that some will. The average VHL roster, now, contains 6.1 forwards, 3.6 defensemen, and 1.6 goalers. I believe that 6-4-1 (or 2) is the best possible lineup for everyone--every player needs ice time, and everyone would benefit from linemates. So, this works to the benefit of quite a few teams. I don't know if I'd recommend any of the "kill the E straight away" options without any changes to career length. I'm fine with the other numbers involved in either case, but both of these cases would give us more forwards per roster than we want (almost 8). I think that, to an extent, this is an issue that could be addressed with some who are willing choosing to go with position changes, but I'd rather not introduce a situation where that's necessary. I think that either situation where we move back to 8-season careers is workable. Teams gain an average of less than one forward each, and the other positions remain well within the boundaries of realism (6.8 F, 4.1 D and 1.8 G per team with 8-season careers/250 TPE cap, and marginally less for 300). And yes, I'll concede that this might increase after 3 seasons or so because the numbers are cut down by a double retirement, but there's nothing to suggest that recruitment can't work with this in advance to try to keep draft classes about the same. The VHLM is fine in any case--it's a little bit borderline for our 300-TPE-cap situations, but simply flipping back to the way things used to happen wouldn't blow up rosters. Additionally...we used to have 12 teams before Minnesota and Yukon became Oslo and Geneva. Move those two back, and 250-TPE rosters actually decrease below where they're filled to today. Cap should be fine as is. The 8-season adjustment would save some teams some money with whatever early retirements come in, and when some of our rosters "flex" with a good draft class down the road (which, again, hopefully recruitment has worked to mitigate. I wouldn't imagine it would be difficult to recruit less for a season), earlier depreciation brought about by the lack of an E league will cut down on where players can cap out. I don't see any issues popping up here, and I think I can conclude that just from our current numbers. So, should we nuke the E, I would be most in favor of doing so in a way that brings things back to where they were--a cap of 250 TPE, 8-season careers, and give us our two teams back. Finally, please notice that my conclusions do not include a conclusion that we should nuke the E. Even though I'd do that in a second, that is a separate discussion from this and remains a matter of opinion--let the people speak on that one. However, I do think what I've done here is to get things to where they can be a matter of opinion. It's fair to say that many who don't like the E have never done the counting that's necessary to find out whether we can. Now I have, and at least for the time being, I think some of those opinions that mostly just amount to "I do/I don't like the E and would/wouldn't rather have it taken out" are worth listening to. Rosters are fine as is--but if they can be fine without an E, then whether it should exist is a fair opinion and a fair debate based on lived experience. Since this is theme week, and we're talking about being commissioners for a day, though? Delete the E.

I'll rephrase: this whole new job being proposed is pretty much null if VHLM GMs do their job. Which they do just fine as far as I'm aware. I'm proud of the people we've hired and the work they do. This isn't the first time "what if we had people dedicated to retention and assistance" brought up and it won't be the last. If you've got things to say about how the VHLM might be lacking in this regard and how we might change things to help, I'd love to hear them. Otherwise I kind of feel like this thread is creating solutions to problems that don't really exist as far as things actually in our control go. To add--recruitment team used to be AWESOME at new member outreach. Beav used to reply to just about every single player creation thread, just because he felt like it, and there have been initiatives by the recruitment team specifically geared at new members. Hell, there was a time when @STZ made a graphic for every first-gen who made it to 100 TPE (and even took some shit for that for some reason). If the recruitment team doesn't consider new member outreach one of their responsibilities anymore, I'm sorry to hear that (even if I still do believe our GMs do a fantastic job). And finally, not even to recruitment but to the reader in general--if you think the league isn't doing enough for new members, why don't you go do something for new members? There's nothing stopping anyone from doing something nice for some people, regardless of role or lack thereof. I think I see more "the league/other people should be doing more" than I see actual doing sometimes. A lot of us have a lot of VHL energy and there are a lot of really cool ways to use it.

This is something I'm very intrigued by as I dig through everyone's roster for an upcoming article--it's not at all uncommon to see players not make it to the VHL after four or five seasons, and sometimes even more. I've come across multiple 6's, and even one player with eight--an active player too. Imagine spending over a year in our development system and only getting one season in the league that people actually care about. Granted, this isn't an E complaint as much as it's a "you need 400 TPE to make the VHL most of the time" complaint, but the E not being marketed as a development league was a huge mistake IMO. It's not supposed to be one but I think it could benefit from some rules prioritizing actives and rewarding GMs who foster activity as there aren't any currently.

So I posted a status update a couple weeks ago in which I talked about a big project I'm doing...it's not done yet, so I think I'll take the opportunity to squeeze a few TPE out of a progress report (because how hard can that be? At the end of this sentence, I'll already be 14% of the way to the required word count, and I haven't even told you anything). I won't get into the why and the how, but I will get into telling you that this involves projections of every VHL roster. I'm trying to fully automate it, but I don't think I know enough to do that and I've settled for semi-automating it (and maybe at some point I'll be able to plug something in to take care of the rest. I like to think it's possible but I don't know). We're talking roster space, cap, TPE projections for every player, taking rookie and prime contracts into account and making sure we adjust for depreciation where necessary. It's taught me a couple things team-wise, too, because I'm not entirely up on that--Chicago is set to be in major trouble in a couple seasons' time, almost no matter what, and Helsinki has done a better job of resource management than I thought. But I digress. My point here is that math is hard. Even with numbers on my side for this kind of thing (yes, some of you have written articles that I'm going to cite), things still get thrown off. One would expect to see close to what I as an engineer would call a steady-state situation--players enter and leave at just about equal rates, and average roster and cap numbers across the league stay the same. But this is really difficult to capture accurately on a spreadsheet--just about every active prospect has a chance at making it up, but you can't just decide that someone who is earning now will stay earning in the future. So, you go in and assign everyone different "chances" of making it up and hope for the best. The problem at this point is balance--you get roster numbers that look good enough, your cap numbers are also way off. You get cap right, your rosters get screwy. And, most importantly, something else I've realized is this: if you do "assume steady state" (I'll ping @JardyB10 here to give him a flashback or two) and make your projections just about equal the current numbers, then, a) congrats, you've successfully manipulated the data to give you what you want (and, to clarify, that is not a good thing), and b) what's even the point if you're trying to track the average numbers over time? If you knew they were going to look exactly the same when you finished, you could have just said that to begin with and saved yourself the trouble. My second point is that I think it's basically impossible to track the future of the entire league. What I'm doing can be very valuable, and I think any individual GM running an individual team could find their own projections a helpful tool to plan their team's future. It's at the very least a decent guesstimate that I used myself as a GM and that always gave me a pretty darn accurate picture of what would happen to my team. I saw a (no disrespect) pretty bad projection of league sizes a while back and would like to caution against oversimplifying that sort of thing, even if I'm arguably overcomplicating it. But lastly, I'd like to advise people to read carefully because there will be points where it doesn't appear that what I'm saying matches the numbers. There's so much scientific stuff out there that carries multiple conclusions. Sometimes, those conclusions aren't always obvious, and I feel like it's possible to wildly misinterpret the projections as accurate. It will be a good read, I promise--just with some caveats. See you when I get around to it.

I think this potentially explains a few things. We've had four players create over the past week, so "only one" in that time is actually above average and says nothing about anyone's ability to draw in new players. I'm not saying that we've never seen complaints about recruitment (and I'm also not saying that we've never seen legitimate complaints about recruitment), but I'm not sure this specific one is one of them. I'd love to do an analysis at some point on whether it's really true that players "always choose either Houston or Miami" or any others--I've seen people saying "everyone goes to Team X" before, and at exactly the same times as people from Team X saying everyone ends up on Team Y. Whether there are even players available to sign depends on a few things--after the draft, during recruitment drives, and at trade deadlines, yeah, you can expect more players to create and you should be on the lookout for new signings more so than other times. I think with more experience you'll gain more of an understanding of what's normal. One legitimate complaint about the current state of waivers is that GMs have certainly lost an element of control over signings. I do prefer the current system over the old one for multiple reasons, but it's not like I'll never admit that's a negative. I think because of this, some (particularly on the more active end) believe that they could draw in more signings by doing everything themselves and tend to blame the system for it not working out that way. So, I'd encourage you and others to take advantage of the parts of the process you do have control over. I don't police what's in waiver pitches, but I've seen some good ones and some pretty low-effort ones. Make sure yours is written in a way that would make you want to pick your team above all others, and if it's not, changing it so that it is will probably make some level of difference. Also--in much the same way that old waivers could be signed by active GMs who could immediately make offers, I'll note the importance of being on to immediately connect with the signings that you do get. I'd bet that there's more of a success rate associated with this, even if it offers no advantage in numbers.

@Spartan we done

G - ART VANDELAY @eagle_3450 to end it when possible!

@eagle_3450 skipped; @kirbithan up