Gustav

With the conclusion of this series, I once again give the people of the VHL what they want. After a season or so longer than I'd originally hoped, which shouldn't surprise you, and a lot more words than I thought, which shouldn't surprise either of us, it's time to close out Gustav 30 in 30. This series at times saw multiple articles per week, and at other times saw multiple weeks per article, but what's most important to me is that it's super comprehensive and a successful completion of my most ambitious individual project ever. I'm not entirely sure there's even any more to talk about than what I've given you--checking out my other articles really should give you the full Gustav experience. Spending lots of time wondering if I've forgotten anything, from the time I first made my list of article ideas up until now months later, has given me nothing of any importance. So, here you have it: the very last bits of thought about my time in the VHL that I've left unwritten. I'd like to delay the weird personal recap a bit by first talking about my current player, Lazlo Holmes. In keeping with my run of naming players after something I find fun, Lazlo is named after the reporter in this SNL sketch. I pay practically no attention to SNL in general, but it was a video I'd seen years ago and liked. Plus, I can identify a little bit with Lazlo Holmes--I really like hockey and I do my best to watch my teams play when they're on, but it just isn't my favorite sport and sometimes I feel a little out of place talking about the NHL with people here who know how to evaluate a player beyond "does he score" and can tell me more about my team than I know myself. So, perhaps because I hadn't played the position for the longest time, and perhaps because I wanted to make up for the abject failure of my first player to do it, I created Lazlo as a defenseman. I came into this career with a lot of publicity, retiring Art Vandelay in an "Art Vandelay"-filled thread and bringing in Lazlo by offering VHLM GMs the opportunity to offer to my player old-style. I ended up going with Halifax, who wasn't going to make the playoffs but gave me lots of opportunity to see what was possible. It turned out this was a lot, as I went point-per-game with very respectable defensive numbers in the rest of S92. S93 was very interesting and very fun. I was drafted 3rd overall to Saskatoon by GM @Dadam30, who ran a fun locker room with lots of active players. It was my first time ever playing for the Wild, and we were really good. Lazlo wasn't top of the top on the board from an individual standpoint, but I was still excited for his future and I was having a fun time. That fun only increased when I did something I've never done on any level of the VHL and won a championship--some might say it's "only" the VHLM, but that doesn't stop it from being something I'm proud of. My draft season came up next, and I was ready to make a difference. The two players I'd managed who I'd seen drafted by someone other than myself went 1st and 7th overall, and I'd earned well enough with everyone I've managed to back up that draft position, so I thought I had a shot at cracking the top 5 in a stacked class. As it turned out, I went 10th in a stacked class and came after a few people who played the same position and were a bit better at earning that extra uncapped TPE than I was. Prague and @Tetricide had themselves a pretty good deal. I played S94 in the E because there was really no point in wasting a season of depreciation to join Prague's roster that season (as much as I have to say about that). My GM was @Doomsday, who did a genuinely great job of managing the team and shifted my perception of the E a tiny little bit. It's not that I ever stopped hating the E or that my opinion ever changed about it being something the league should get rid of at its earliest convenience, but it is that I was glad to have a positive experience there and wasn't as worried for the sake of anyone who found themselves playing for Stockholm. Lazlo responded to his promotion to the E by putting up just about identical numbers to his last season in the M (including exactly equal goals and assists and hits/SB both within 10 of the season prior). After this, Lazlo graduated the E and moved up to the bottom-feeding Phantoms. It was here that I led the league in a category (SB) for the first time ever, blocking even more shots than I took myself in an effort to make Prague look semi-respectable. Granted, this failed most of the time, but it really wasn't anyone's fault given the state of the team's rebuild. That rebuild, unfortunately, proved to be a little bit of a roadblock. Going into the draft, and in all of my discussions with every team, I promised that I'd be pretty easy to convince to stick around if I had a clear picture of why the team could remain competitive enough to support that. And this was true going into this offseason, but still--and I will repeat, this is no one's fault--Prague had a plan but not too many pieces in place to be a competitive team. So, I chose to do something that I've very rarely ever done, which was to ask a GM to wait on the question of me re-signing and get back to me later once things had worked out. Now, it's in all likelihood that I would have re-signed eventually. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that building a team up and getting players to buy into something unproven is very difficult, and I was sure that there was a real honest effort to get better, which is usually really all I ask for. But it wasn't too long after I had that talk that I was informed I was on the block and could be moved depending on interest. Not too long after that, I was traded to Seattle after spending just one season up in the VHL. I left Prague on what I like to think are pretty good terms, and things all worked out anyway--they essentially turned a mid-1st into a probably-earlier 1st, plus a 2nd and 3rd, plus future-1D-and-someone-who-will-definitely-outearn-me Pan Daffleck was their #1 pick this season. The rest of Lazlo's story remains to be seen. He's a bit underwhelming this season, but with me finally adding to Scoring with a defenseman, is a Valiq in my future? I've been recently adding to Checking--could I win the Wylde after missing it by one vote in S68? Could I even win a Labatte? Or a Kanou, or even my first-ever Continental Cup? I have no idea and maybe at some point down the road, I'll be able to read through this and smile as I read this and remember when I thought about it. That's something that I really think will be important to do at some point in time. When I came into the VHL, I was a quiet first-year college student with decent grades and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I'd never lived anywhere outside of the house where I grew up, and the VHL was really one of my first-ever forays into meeting people on purpose. Now, I earn my own living in my third year of grad school in a different state, I'm president of my department's student organization, I have ideas of what I like but still not much idea of what I want to do with the rest of my life, and I'm up to lots of things that would have surprised me five years ago. Gustav 30 in 30 is actually wrapping up tonight because I have a flight at a weird time for a conference across the country tomorrow, and I decided I'd rather just suck it up and try to sleep on the way. I've learned so much about my field, my hobbies, and even just the world in general over the time I've been here, and I think I'm a very different person than I was back in the day. That being said, I love that I still love the VHL. I could have very easily lost interest, like I've done with some things. I think it's helped that lots of hobbies I have come with the idea of working up to a reward. For example, I like to write music in my free time and recently finished something I've been working at for a long time, which is nowhere near as good as a pro would put out but is something I'm proud of. Luckily, doing things like long media spots combine something I'm good at with something that I can work at for a long time if I want to, that is rewarding when I do it simply because I have just decided it to be that way. Just as much as for the sake of getting you to talk to me about things that I wrote that I find interesting, which is something that in and of itself is fairly satisfying, I put hours of my time into trying to make high-quality media on the forum for the enjoyment that I get out of simply doing it. Often, this is a piece of work that I don't really have to do, and I think that freedom and the fact that I do it when I decide I want to makes it what it is. I think that goes for lots of things in the VHL, and it goes for lots of things I've done that aren't specific to PTs. From the start, I broke my computer trying to figure out STHS, and then eventually got into GMing, and then got really good at building team servers, because I wanted to do all of those things. I started things like Town of Salem because I like being a part of them. I advocated for things like the end of the lottery, portal waivers, and the end of the E, and became M commissioner and helped overhaul the way it works, because I saw those things as things that would work differently if I had anything to say about them--and I did have something to say about them, and now they are different. I even started Discord gags like those related to Kranch and the Horny Police because they were things I wanted to see people having fun with, and I spent some time over COVID putting up those introspective reflection threads partly because I needed an outlet but also partly because I wanted the people around me to get what I had gotten out of thinking about those things. What I'm saying is that I've logged on to the forum with intention for years on end now, and I think the spirit of the league itself is just a little bit more "like me" than it would have been otherwise, because I willed it so. It's not that no one else has ever done this, and obviously lots of people have done that quite a bit more than myself, but I think I can say pretty confidently that I'm one of the people who has. But anyway, I don't think I need to hang about that point for too long, especially since @Victor referred to this series months ago as "an act of ego-stroking" and that's stuck with me enough that I've tried to make sure that most of what I put into it doesn't go too far that way. Up until this sentence, Gustav 30 in 30 contains 51,544 words over exactly 1,900 sentences (yes, I checked), with an estimated reading time of 3 hours and 7 minutes. It also contains 169 instances of the word "VHL," and somehow 308 of "time," which I guess is fitting for the amount of time that it took. I have to say that I think that time was worth it. I've written about lots of things I completely forgot until I went back to write about them, and I think I've learned a lot about what my work here has meant in the broader context of what eventually evolved from it. I'm not going to tag everyone who's ever meant anything to me here, because I'm not sure we have space on this forum for another 51,544 words. But if I matter to you in some way, then chances are that you matter to me just as much. The VHL has been a huge part of my life, and I'm glad if I could have given you any amount of enjoyment along the way. You may have noticed that most of this series was written about things I did a long time ago, but I'm not at all done yet--and I think there's lots of room left for me to discover quite a bit that I never thought I'd come across on this site. As for Gustav 30 in 30--it's over! Go home! And finally, for the first time in months, I can write other media spots. Read my other articles for the FULL Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE #26: Mint Jams #27: It Ain't Easy Being Green #28: Art Vandelay #29: Oh My God! They Killed Kenn-E!

FWIW I do agree with this. One thing that annoyed me about the "kill the E" argument was that it often came without much to back it up and it was mostly just something that people said because they wanted it. I like to think I did try to actually back it up when I could, but I would understand not taking it entirely seriously for that reason.

Is it that surprising? I held the opinion from the start that it was necessary but when it wasn’t I would be open to changing things. Up until that point I didn’t see it as a necessary discussion. Kinda yeah. I knew this was your opinion on it but I figured that the ball would have started rolling from someone who actively hated it more. I really didn’t mind it at first but the more I thought about all the ways that lower level would have been gutted for the sake of the upper team the less I wanted to deal with it. Not that we couldn’t have worked with that, of course, but I feel like at that point it became a matter of that versus the other option that I liked better anyway and didn’t feature those issues. I am super glad we test simmed regardless of outcome. I feel like prior to that point, we had a lot of assumptions going both ways about how it would work, and they were ALL unfair with nothing to back them up at the time.

Yeah, ultimately no one cares about the most popular post in my original thread. This wasn't even about killing the E at first, but I was more than happy to oblige when the discussion took a turn in that direction. Gustav 30 in 30 #25 was going to be my only article about the VHLE. I've only played in the E for one season, which I really didn't hate, and it was at the point when I started this series a foregone conclusion for me and BoG that the E was going nowhere. It really wasn't for lack of trying, mind you. From the day the E was conceived, I hated it, but I knew that the number of players we had in the league didn't justify its removal. So, I chose to sit back and make it very clear that my ideal future for the league was one where we hypothetically could delete the E and chose to do so. The first time that perception flipped for me was S89's theme week. Then, the wonderful people up at the blue team decided to ask the wonderful people of the VHL what they would do if they ran it for a day. Of course, in my case, asking what I'd do if you made me commissioner wouldn't have been nearly as smart as just knowing what my answer would be and giving me the TPE to shut up. My response to that question was one of my best media spots ever, one that aggregated roster size data and compared multiple different E-less scenarios to analyze whether we could get rid of the thing. For my model, I purposely made generalizations in ways that would approximate larger VHL roster sizes so any conclusion that the E could be deleted couldn't be claimed to be the result of personal bias. And guess what--I found that it would be just fine. Everyone knew that the size of the VHL's prospect pool had declined since the late S70s, but this did absolutely nothing to stop large parts of the league from maintaining that the VHLE was still necessary. It also did nothing to stop me from agreeing with them if we weren't able to accommodate any overflow from getting rid of it. I really hadn't known the answer to that question for sure up to that point, but I had my answer there and I was ready to take the next step. So, in S91, I followed up with exactly the same analysis and reached exactly the same conclusion. This wasn't unprompted and was even the result of a different theme week. This time, it was about recruitment, and the reason for that was hardly a secret. Right at the start of the S90s, recruitment had been just about entirely nonexistent for a few seasons on end. Draft classes were super thin, and so was the VHLM as it depended almost entirely on recreates. And even though my updated media spot showed practically no difference in VHL numbers from S89 to S91, something it didn't focus on as strongly was a dramatic reduction in VHLM numbers. Recruitment was a controversial topic, some of the reactions weren't so friendly, and it doesn't take too much intellect to realize that a declining VHLM also means a declining VHL eventually. The Board of Gustav went to work on discussing VHLE Society and Its Future the next season in a thread (surprisingly) started by @Beketov. By then, decreasing M numbers had started to hit the VHL more evidently, and the idea of nuking the E had become appealing to much of BoG. There were relatively few disagreements on that topic from a group that had previously instituted the system (I wanted to roll it ALL the way back to a cap of 250 and the old depreciation system with 8-season careers), and the thread wrapped up with a conclusion to kill the E. Until: Until, that is, recruitment decided to do something. The S93 class had 64 picks to S92's 31, with lots more active players as well. The decision to shut down the E was as made as anything has ever been in the BoG, and it fell apart pretty much immediately after it was made with a successful recruitment drive that filled the M back up and re-justified any "the M has enough players so we don't have to do anything" arguments that had been made in the past. I still hated the E, and the number of players we had in the league had nothing to do with my feelings about it. I was a bit disheartened by the last failure to make things work the way I wanted, and it was still a bit too soon to suggest that we do the apparently unthinkable and get rid of the E, so I decided to propose an alternative. My alternative was very clearly labeled as pure speculation, but I suggested that perhaps VHLM teams could be directly affiliated with VHLE teams. There were lots of intricacies to how this might have worked, but in short, I wanted to pair two M teams to each E team, therefore getting rid of lots of awkward transitions between the M and the E. I reasoned that, under a system like this, first-gen players would be far less confused with one of their drafts eliminated and far less displaced with an organization that could be run all as one community right up until that player went up to the VHL. Interestingly, this took off far more than I thought it would. The thing was, I wasn't super crazy about my idea in the first place and just wanted to test the waters on alternatives to the current system. To me, there were downsides of my way that were very evident as well in that GMs in both the M and the E would find their abilities handcuffed by the other teams involved in the matter. Plus, I still definitely didn't like it as much as just getting rid of the E, but who cares about that when the idea that you might just went out the window? I watched as the thread took off and built up steam and eventually snowballed into something entirely different, which was Bek's idea of having the development league be just one all-encompassing level managed by the same GM, where the upper level could be managed as the GM chose and the lower level would be meant more for newer, lower-TPE players. This was quite a bit simpler than my original idea in the sense that it got rid of having three cooks in the kitchen of one organization, and I didn't hate it at first. A couple things got in the way of the idea that I might support it: one being that I thought inconsistent roster sizes would lead to a more stable upper division at the expense of a bot-filled lower one that wouldn't be friendly to lower-TPE players, and the other being that it was also being floated out there by this point that we could just make things simple by deleting the E and calling it a day. Well, that was interesting. I'd (quite accidentally) relit the flame and gotten the ball rolling again on my single favorite topic. BoG was very interested in the latter affiliation system, in my opinion because (as stated in #22 of this series): This led to my thread eventually becoming a poll between the three options that had been covered up until that point, and the results indicated that we may be headed toward a whole new thing that I didn't really like: Even though deleting the E was simpler and accomplished everything I meant to accomplish from the start in suggesting that we overhaul the system, a couple things about the affiliation system were more appealing to a lot of people. It was touted as promoting league stability, as the natural stopgap between the lower and upper levels would allow the size of the league to ebb and flow without requiring that we adjust the number of teams (despite other concerns of how this would affect the lower level). Plus, having 30-TPE players right up against 400-TPE players was seen as just too much for those 30-TPE players (eventually, test simming would refute this point. Keep in mind that 30 versus 250 under pre-hybrid attributes was quite the difference and it worked fine). Discussion took off on the affiliation system, and the more ideas people had for it, the more complicated it seemed, until we were at the point where we had something that was going to operate on a huge string of technicalities. I was actually very much checked out by this point, because I'd accepted that it was going to go some way I was going to like less than the E. Later on, though, I clicked back into the thread and saw posts by people like @Berocka and @v.2 (and others I don't remember) opining that the proposed system had become too complicated, it really was less desirable than the E, and we should either just take the simple way out in nuking the E or do nothing at all. Which, it just so happened, I agreed with. I rejoined at this point, but it was mostly just a matter of jumping on board what had become the third entirely different end goal of the discussion. A separate thread was put up where the voting results were now heavily in favor of simple E deletion, and we set that in order very soon after. It really wasn't my doing, but the thread I started was ultimately what ended up getting rid of the E. After the lottery, it was the second time I'd brought up an issue with a league institution, watched BoG fight over it, and eventually saw it disappear entirely once everyone decided they were done fighting. Perhaps that's just the best way to go about things. On a personal note, I'm very glad that I was slow enough with my articles that this happened while I was still writing them. Gustav 30 in 30 was originally going to be mostly a 29 in 30 with a stupid filler article shoved into place of this one, because I could only think of that many ideas, but one more thing just had to happen that was memorable, and here it is. Plus, I haven't seen the behind-the-scenes perspective of this anywhere out in public yet, so it's quite possible that it's the first time lots of you are finding out how it all went down. By itself, I think that's a story worth telling, but it's also a perfect addition to my series. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE #26: Mint Jams #27: It Ain't Easy Being Green #28: Art Vandelay

Yes hi hello I still haven't forgotten about Hall of Not Bad and I'll definitely keep it going (I have numbers ready to go for a couple different players). Milo may be the best one left though. I think that if we can get Jannula in, Milo has a decent shot as well. The line between Milo and Felix Peters is practically nonexistent.

I knew it was someone who had been here longer than me but my guess didn't feel right. Congrats on making the best Vandelay meme though!

I don't remember who made this image--somehow I think I remember @CowboyinAmerica, although I could be wrong--but Art Vandelay made a name for himself early on in his career by absolutely wrecking both Chicago and DC for some weird reason. When I started in the VHL, I set out to create a defensive defenseman. After that, I switched positions to a goal-scoring forward and then experienced a full career as one. So, unless you consider offensive defenseman a separate position, I'd gone over all the viable options by the end of my second career. That is, all the options except goaltender. With my career ending and the first season of my recreate also being the first season of hybrid attributes, I wanted to play the one position I never had before, and I was pushed farther in that direction by a desire to hold on to the past. So, Art Vandelay came into the VHL world, and in a more awkward fashion than I may have wanted. I created right at midnight on trade deadline day, the first player in the S84 class--except the portal hadn't flipped yet and I actually ended up as the last player in the S83 class. I got made fun of for this, of course, and I remember someone saying something way more mean than the situation warranted to me on Discord, but all was well as I caught that and got it sorted out right away. Perhaps somewhat ironically given their sudden exit from the M later that year, my first GM with Vandelay was @diacope, and my first team Ottawa. This was the only team that offered me any playing time at all, and I delivered on it with four wins in as many games. The next season, I had enough TPE to go up to the E, but I think you can take a good guess as to how I felt about doing that. As it turned out, the M would be Vandelay's stomping grounds for an amazing S83 campaign in Miami under GM @Ledge. Running away with VHLM goaler stats, Vandelay took the team to a 48-17-7 record with a .924 SV%, a 1.88 GAA, and 11 shutouts. I'd never won any VHLM awards, not even after Taro had an amazing campaign in his time, but Vandelay took it to the next level. Not only did I win the Devereux for being the M's top goaler, I was the VHLM MVP. Miami faltered a bit in the playoffs, but it was still a successful campaign that culminated in me being drafted #1 overall to the Stars in S84. I'd been familiar with @InstantRockstar for quite some time by that point, because he's continuously been a GM since we were both hired into M roles at the same time in S66. I'd never played for him, and after a decent talk over DMs, that changed a bit. LA had the first and third picks in the S84 draft and chose to honor me with #1, something that I was very proud of. I was also very proud that I said long in advance that I never wanted to touch the VHLE, and LA let that happen by calling me up right away. Art Vandelay was officially a 9-season player. Something I'd be a little less proud of was the state of LA that season. Logically, I never needed to come up right away, and it hurt my TPA trajectory to do so. Still, I'd made the VHL and I was a starter right away. Vandelay almost won 20 games in his rookie season on a roster that had started a rebuild, with a surprisingly high .927 SV% putting him in the running for Top Rookie. This was something that I'd lose to the legitimately better choice in IR's Augustus Kennedy (who consistently beat Vandelay in head-to-head matchups throughout his career), but with one season that was about as good as I could have hoped given my and my team's low TPE level, I was looking forward to the rest. Vandelay had already gained a reputation as an up-and-comer, had been a thorn in the sides of a couple better teams (hence the meme up top), and had a personal brand built up. In every game thread where Vandelay either went 2-0 or recorded a shutout, I'd simply comment "Art Vandelay" and others (mainly @jacobcarson877 but others too) were happy to follow. S85 went surprisingly well from a team perspective, and Vandelay came close to putting up his first winning record. I do remember being a bit frustrated around this time by the team's performance in overtime and particularly the shootout, and my 8 OT losses seem to reflect that. Despite starting Vandelay twice more than was legal, LA didn't make the playoffs, but that was OK. We were on track to do nicely in the future. Maybe, though, "the future" would have to wait a little bit longer. Vandelay's third season was his worst up to that point, with only 16 wins and a career-low SV%. Ironically enough, Vandelay was started four fewer times than he could have been in S86, sparking BoG speculation that LA was tanking the season after they supposedly tried to sneak out a few more wins. I do suppose that it could be fair to want to watch Art Vandelay as closely as league administration did, but this was never true. LA didn't even own their first-round pick in S87, so we couldn't have logically tanked on purpose anyway. On top of this, the first-round pick that we did have was used on a player who went to free agency before ever making it up to the VHL, making the S87 offseason a big waste of time. More or less, LA needed to worry about developing their core first and foremost. Vandelay re-signed prior to S87, despite no team success to that point (not that I've ever been used to that on a rookie contract anyway). Luckily, this worked out great. With a 41-win season and a career-high SV%, the Stars were back in the spotlight and back in the playoffs. Plus, Vandelay was right at the center of it. I got my first-ever nomination for Top Goalie and my third for MVP. This was an MVP race I'd lose (for the first time ever), thanks in some part to @FrostBeard's Sirdsvaldis Miglaskems being LA's top scorer and the eventual MVP winner that season. Miglaskems' 54 goals in the midst of an insane era for goalers propelled the Stars into postseason standing, where Vandelay reversed the usual course of my players in the playoffs and did horribly. I only had to wait until S87 to make the playoffs, but it turned out that it would be a little bit longer before I got my first playoff win. That first win came just the next season, when LA made it to the playoffs yet again off the back of 35 wins and a .928 SV% from Vandelay. I'd yet again be nominated for the two big awards, and I'd yet again lose pretty easily. It was another baby step forward for the Stars, though, with two playoff wins in a close wild-card series. Finally, it seemed like LA was consistently at least decent, and Vandelay was a big part of it. S89 was a little step back, and it was Vandelay's first in a while. Don't get me wrong, the team was still decent, but the numbers dipped quite a bit to levels that really weren't very good for the era. LA took the slightest dip possible afterward, with just one playoff win instead of two, and you can tell that what that means is that we were once again (predictably) out of the playoffs early on. In S90, though, the team turned a corner. We had a new superstar (and a new MVP winner!) with @KRZY's Todd Cooke, right on top of a lineup that held the bare minimum number of players but pressed its finances right up against the cap. In other words, we were stacked in exactly the ways STHS favors a team, all with Vandelay running the show in net. S90 was the best Vandelay had ever done up to that point, with a whole 45 wins more than making up for his early career failures. The playoffs rolled around, and Vandelay did what he never could before: win a series. More specifically, LA swept DC in the first round. We had officially gone from competitive to really good, and we were one series away from the finals. The NA championship against Toronto, who were built in much the same way we were and were arguably better on paper. Any lineup where one of Ronan Lavelle, Mac Atlas, Tomas Sogaard, or Jimi Jaks wouldn't be able to crack the top line was stacked, and that was the exact lineup that Vandelay needed to make his way through to make it to Cup contention. The Legion went up 2-0 early on in the series, before LA rebounded and tied it up at home. The series went back to Toronto, where they won, and then came back to LA, where the Stars saved their chances with a win of their own. Game 7 was in Toronto, in a series where neither team had lost at home, but LA finally reversed the trend. Rookie Gregger McKeggegger scored the go-ahead goal in the second period, and Vandelay held on for the rest of a game where the Stars were outshot. We were in the finals--only my second trip there ever, my first since my Nighthawks got swept by Seattle way back in S68, and my first time ever winning a NA conference championship. Where, as it turned out, we would get swept by Prague. I have now been in the VHL for five and a half real-life years and have still never even won a single game in the Cup finals. Pain. Anyway, you can tell by that that Vandelay would never achieve that ultimate goal. LA remained as good as ever in the next two seasons, but S90 was as far as I would ever get. They're practically not worth mentioning because they're basically the same minus the playoff success--super good regular season, 43 wins followed by 45 again, don't get any consideration for awards because the era was absolutely insane to goaler numbers and other people were still better. Rockstar gave everything he had to give us one last chance at winning it all in S92, but Vandelay was done after then and so was everyone else. Much of the team retired, putting LA in the hole it's still in today, but I like to think that all the memories we made in that time justified that to some extent. I never required that someone keep me around for a full career, but I'm glad that it happened to me once. VandeLAy was one of the greatest Stars of all time. Art Vandelay is currently the winningest goaler of all time to not make the Hall of Fame, and as he was never even on the ballot, it's very likely that we're talking about something that will never happen. But, I managed to make a pretty darn good player for the second time in a row, and the impact he had on the league in his time cannot be understated. Art Vandelay Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE #26: Mint Jams #27: It Ain't Easy Being Green

G - Red Panda @leandrofg

F - Toby Kadachi F - Diego Machado @hylands

Additionally (and not that this is the point here either), our GMs don’t need to live under a microscope. If we become aware of a systemic lack of effort that’s being spent on first-gens, then that certainly warrants some action, but that’s really not the case at the moment. It’s largely working out completely fine to trust GMs to do their jobs and we feel that having the system built on that trust is much healthier than pushing people to work in a way that meets some specific metric. Besides, in the cases where we’ve had an issue with anyone specific, that’s usually been very clear from the outside. I don’t think we need to closely monitor. If it did become clear that we had a problem, though, I would agree that having an incentive to do better would be helpful. It’s definitely the better choice to make it naturally in people’s best interest to do something rather than just deciding that there will be consequences if they don’t.

Awards like Top GM often end up with strong consideration of the community a GM has built up. Additionally, one could argue that those Cup wins themselves are directly tied to retention/graduation rate since they now have to be won by active players (which is even more true now that the M cap is larger). I think being good at retention is something that rewards itself with wins at this point, and that’s the way it should be rather than everyone thinking about those things as completely separate.

Boredom and stream of consciousness. It's really not difficult to fill up tons and tons of words if you write down everything on your mind; you just have to be able to organize it into a story.

Not everyone was a fan of me becoming commissioner. But I said what I wanted to do, I was hired, and then it happened. That's nothing if not effective management--and a better track record than any politician. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and Gustav right back to the VHLM when I assumed my current role as VHLM Commissioner. Real administrative job openings are few and far between, and I got one the first time I applied for it. It wasn't my first time thinking about it by any means. The first time I ever saw the job open was when I had been in the league for about a year and a half, which was enough time spent being super active that I'd be given a fair shot, and when I was just starting my third year of undergrad, which was definitely at odds with me taking on more league responsibility even though I was fine with staying super active. This was my first year being put in all the difficult core courses for my major, plus I had to work most days I wasn't at school, which would make job-specific commitments like being around to run drafts pretty difficult. All that notwithstanding, I had lots and lots to say as I assumed the job would remain filled for a pretty long time after it opened. At that point in time, the M had a few things I hated about it. Long story short, there really wasn't anything stopping a GM from placing wins over development, and despite every GM claiming they didn't, that certainly wasn't always true. A few teams were notorious for hanging onto high-TPE inactive players and making no effort to replace them or play actives first, and I'd go as far as to say that every team was guilty of this on some level. Considering that, it really wasn't the GMs' fault that the league was like this, because it was the culture that everyone was introduced to and the path to success led right through that. There weren't many things that didn't eventually lead back to this general point, but there were a few things that contributed to it most specifically. So, I wrote this article that outlined my issues with the M and proposed solutions, in the hope that whoever was hired next would consider it. If you don't want to click the link (although I recommend that you do, because the whole discussion gives a good snapshot of where the league was then), I proposed to: Trim high-TPE inactives from rosters at the start of each season Establish a 4-season limit on VHLM play Reduce the maximum amount of picks held by a team to two 1sts and two 2nds (down from three of each) Expand or eliminate waiver limits and assign players without signing offers to teams automatically Some of these sound familiar because something like them eventually went into the rules. In fact, the waiver idea was probably my first stab at modifying the waiver system, which at the time involved a few teams reaching the waiver cap while lots of others sat around with their inactive players and never offered to players. Expanding the limit would reward teams who used the waiver system to fill up, while auto-assignment would ensure that all players ended up with a home and incentivize teams that didn't want to offer waivers to do so anyway to maintain control over their rosters. Some things I didn't like in the replies were mentions of banning draft pick trading entirely (which would, in my opinion, make GMing a job not worth doing) and forcing teams to fill their rosters by also forcing them to put bots in their lineup if the roster were below a certain population. The commissioner hired then was @Acydburn, who messaged me soon after to let me know that what I'd written was being considered. In time for S75, the VHLM: Banned all inactive players Removed the waiver limit Cracked down on past overuse of inactive players It wasn't exactly what I'd proposed (and, in fact, I thought banning ALL inactives was a bit too harsh), but it was a huge step forward at a time when a supersaturated VHLM required it. Inactive players have not been allowed in the VHLM since that point, and we're glad today that it played out like this. In retrospect, I think the effectiveness of the rule change was (unintentionally) demonstrated by the huge crowd of low earners in the M staying active enough to become a huge problem for the VHL. Perhaps the whole E issue could have been eased by continuing to allow M GMs to be awful--but I guess that's just a random musing. Plus, it's straying a bit from the topic. After a little under a year, Acyd moved up to the VHLE and the M job opened up again. I had fewer issues with the M at that point, and probably wasn't as interested, but I was still just a bit too busy to justify doing more VHL stuff overall and didn't apply. This time, the new commissioner was @McWolf, who was genuinely good in his job but was also part of one of the worst rules I've ever seen in a sim league (sorry). In much the same rule that was proposed in the replies to my article from a year before, GMs were now required to set their lines in ways that were friendly to larger rosters, and to play bots in places where they weren't allowed to overuse players. It's important to understand a bit of context if you're on the newer end, because the reasons for this aren't completely obvious today. Then, waiver offers were done manually and at the discretion of GMs, so teams could simply choose not to make them if they didn't want to deal with new players who would take ice time away from the high-TPE players who helped the team most. It was clear by this point that banning inactive players really didn't solve this problem, so then why not make it so GMs couldn't max out ice time for their top players in the first place and light a fire under them to put players in those extra spots who wouldn't be a liability? From that perspective, it made lots of sense, and it really was an effective way of achieving that goal. From the perspective of getting GMs to do what the league wanted, it was great. There was a different side of this that immediately became clear, though, and that was that the league had failed to consider the player perspective. Especially in the seasons that followed as M numbers adjusted back down to normal, the M saw lots and lots of players who were losing ice time to bots, which was really weird coming from a league that was proud of its players not losing ice time to inactives. Lots of people weren't a fan of the rule from the start (in fact, the first reply to the announcement thread is my own objection to it), and the M had something I didn't like about it at all again. To the green team's credit, this was rolled back almost immediately. The next offseason saw a rule modification that restricted the double-shifting rule to only being in place during playoffs--which I still wasn't a fan of, but it was much better than restricting the regular season. Plus, it still kept teams interested in making waiver offers during the regular season, because they didn't want to be underprepared for playoffs. It's worth mentioning that the double-shifting rule had gotten me excited again. In the two months that the rule was on the books, I'd come up with a whole new manifesto that outlined what I didn't like about the M. Getting rid of the double-shifting rule was a big part of it, but some other ideas I had to make that work included: Finding a controlled way to reintroduce inactive players in a way that didn't get in the way of actives Tightening draft pick limits (again) and introducing a floor to pick holding so teams couldn't go completely without resources Closing a loophole in the draft pick rule that had been recently abused Put waiver offers on the portal (!) If you'll click that link, you'll notice that this article had put a different spin on things than had been floated out there before. It comes from the perspective that the M had at once continued to tolerate too relaxed standards that made things worse for players (like with its rules related to the draft) and tried to deal with those issues with rules that made things a lot less fun for GMs and stripped away many layers of trust (like with the double-shifting rule and the blanket ban on inactives). Importantly, I saw the portal waiver system as a massive solution to a lot of the VHLM's problems, and it would be something I'd advocate for behind the scenes for a while thereafter. The M now had a long list of things I wanted to do with it, and I was now very interested. The M also went mostly without rule changes for most of the next year. All of this ended up with the Commissioner job opening up at that point with me still wanting to do things. I was spending less time deeply involved in school at that point, because funnily enough, grad classes are easier, and I was no longer a GM, so I didn't really need to turn over in my head whether I could make it work. I applied for the job and got it. In a surprise unannounced move, longtime VHLM Commissioner @diamond_ace stepped down at the same time, which is what led to @Spartan and I being hired on the same day. Thankfully, we've usually been on the same page as it comes to most VHLM issues, with only minor disagreements coming up over little details of big pictures. That worked great when we took over, with our first change--raising GM job pay--coming just two days after we were hired. Something else we did within a season of being hired was to (finally!) tighten draft pick limits. Having earned GMs' trust with some extra TPE, we could make a move to cut down on the boom-bust cycle, and the effects were felt almost immediately. The days of the Hounds having zero players on the roster (as happened once) were over, as were the days of having one team who everyone knew was winning from the start of the season. Still my largest-impact idea ever came about pretty soon after I was hired, too, with waivers moving to the portal in advance of S86. With this going down, we were finally able to get rid of the last remnant of the rule I hated. We abolished the double-shifting rule five days later, and GMs were once again free to orient their lines however they chose. That same offseason, we actually did do something to reintroduce inactive players, at least as far as Spartan was willing to let me take it, in that we allowed for teams without a goaler to go and get one. Since that point, the VHLM has been in a place we're very happy with, and it's hard to believe that it's existed without any major rule changes for about two years now given how much things shifted around across the S70s. But until I hear that we have major issues on our hands--which I have no reason to believe that we do--I'm happy holding the league steady in a place where we like it. None of it would be possible without all the players that give the VHLM its character or the GMs that support them in doing so. Plus, now that the league is restructured and most people will be spending a couple seasons in the M, you've got no choice but to follow my rules for a little bit! Stop by and enjoy the experience. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE #26: Mint Jams

F - George Richmond D - Mark Calaway @hylands

Well this is the first time I've ever been traded that didn't very directly have to do with me GMing one of the teams involved. There's a first time for everything I guess. Thanks @Tetricide for making Prague a great place to play through a bad season and letting me lead the league in blocked shots for once! I wouldn't have regretted staying with you either, but I get that sometimes deals go in certain directions that are independent of how vibes match. Anyone who finds themselves on your team in the future won't be disappointed. Looking forward to a great time in Seattle! Maybe this is what I need to finally win my first Cup.

Let's get unconventional. D - Obuz Schneider Canet du Bocage @hylands

My best advice is to recognize just how stupid it would be to get upset by the numbers on some spreadsheet on the portal. Player success is great and it should always be something you work for, but I also remember how I’d watch Garcia struggle to put up 40 points as a vet and I’d still hear about how other teams were trying to trade for me—and that my GM wasn’t going for it. You can still make your player notable by building the legacy of the name next to the player name, and that’s something that has nothing to do with TPE or points or awards. Honestly, when I say that Taro was my favorite player to build, a lot of what I mean is that the time I was building him was also the time I was doing all that other stuff I’ve talked about recently. It’s definitely up to you what success means, but I don’t think it’s worth wondering whether you have it if you still enjoy what you’re doing.

Honestly Vandelay was the first player where that didn't at least kind of happen. At least the other time was me bringing Garcia to Davos--I was sort of unofficial AGM in Malmo for a bit and ADV left that offseason--so I guess it's even. It's really appreciated! I think the league needs good content and I like making it. Hearing nice things about it is just a bonus but I'll always take that too.

What? Taro again? This is article #26--haven't the past seasons been exciting for you? It's not that they haven't at all. It's just that giving things time has shown me which memories deserved to last. Also, I guess I may have done the VHL equivalent of peaking in high school. But we don't talk about that. Imagine, if you will, an article where I talk about myself succeeding with STHS. Everything up to this point has indicated that I'm either unlucky, unskilled, or that Simon has a particular hatred for half-Italians living in the rust belt. You've already read my multiple articles dealing with my time as a GM, where I tell you all about how I created locker rooms I'm proud of and led them to consistently disappointing results. You've hopefully also read what I had to say about how truly awful my first player was for most of his career. The last we heard of Taro Tsujimoto, it was the end of S78 and he had finally established himself as the top forward in Davos. Also at the end of S78, Davos found themselves in a bit of a crummy juncture. I talked about this in my third Davos management article and go over the situation independently of Davos in my last one about the E, but as a GM at the time, I had the same issue everyone else had: clickers. My farm team was full of players who, if they made the big league roster, would not only not get to play much themselves but would strip time away from all my top players who wanted all the ice time in the world. So, I paid through the nose to do what no other GM in that offseason was able to accomplish in finding a trade partner for all of my low-earning prospects. Suddenly, the situation in Davos had resolved itself, and the makeup of our pro and farm leagues looked much like it did pre-S75. Although we didn't have as many resources, we were one of the few truly old school-style systems in the league at the time, and my player was at the forefront of it going into his fifth season. Taro responded by having a really weird year. Maybe it was because we were suddenly (literally) built different, but what should have been a defining moment turned into a career low in goals. He was still pretty good--a then-career high in assists gave him only a one-point drop-off in points from the previous season--but he wasn't the goal-scorer he was. With the first net positive rating of his career, though, he was finding his place on a team and learning to fit in as a leader. S79 was also Taro's first trip to the playoffs after just missing Davos' first competitive window. It had taken half a career to get to that point, but he put the team on his back the second he got the chance. Seattle and Malmo took 18 and 19 games to play through every round, but Taro managed to be third in goals among all players, scoring over a goal per game and clocking in at the highest point rate out of anyone by far. Until Lazlo Holmes led in blocked shots last season by virtue of simply *existing* on Prague, I didn't think I'd ever led a league in any category. Turns out I was wrong--Taro had 21 points in 10 games, which would have been on pace for 152 points over a regular season. S79 playoff Taro would have been a very sensible Kanou pick had things worked out. Unfortunately, seeing 10 games played should tell you that the playoffs didn't go exactly the way we'd hoped. It does tell you that we won a playoff series, which was a rare occurrence in my GM tenure. Something else that the list should also hint to you, in that the same handful of teams appeared multiple times on the leaderboard but there was no one else from Davos, was that Taro would learn to work extremely well on his own. It turned out that S79 would be the last time the league could ever consider itself normal. We were still on our old update scale, and as I talk about in my article about the meta, S80 was when things got truly insane. It was the first season of Vancouver's threepeat, and anything I thought was previously established about Taro settling into a primarily-assists role went out the window. Taro put up career highs in goals, assists, and, of course, points, while following one plus rating with another. The only number that dipped (by over 100) was hits for some reason, but who cares when you do so much better with everything else? The thing was, so did everyone else with it being the meta season. I finished up nowhere near the top of the points list and didn't think that S80 would mean much in the grand scheme of things. After all, the big news was in Vancouver and the even bigger news was the controversy that was stirring up. Taro put up a goal per game in the playoffs again, but this was only in one five-game series loss. Oh well. So, imagine my surprise when I did my usual award voting and saw myself in the running for MVP, and imagine a little more how it may have felt to see the top post in that thread made by @fromtheinside and reading as follows: That was unexpected, to say the least. It was a really weird ballot, to be fair. S80 saw eight whole nominations, with two nominees from each of three teams making up six of those. From experience, I can say that the BoG doesn't tend to like voting for players that aren't unquestionably the MVP of their team, so having two on one team was already a disadvantage for most. In terms of most outstanding, the other player on the ballot who was getting attention was @OrbitingDeath 's Duncan Idaho, who had me beat by a mile. He'd recorded four fewer points, but had scored eight more goals and more than doubled up on my hit total. By the same argument that was put forward for me to win, though, he trailed--Moscow was a better team than Davos, and Idaho's share of his team's points was lower. I don't like to influence awards when I'm in the running for them (which is a lesson that I think BoG could do well to learn sometimes). I decided that my best course of action would be to say nothing in that thread and vote for Idaho when the form opened. That way, I'd have nothing to do with the discussion and could feel like I really earned it if I ended up winning. So, that's what I did. As it turns out, I could have voted for myself and been the only winner of the award in S80, but instead, it ended in a tie. That's not something I'll complain about at all--I think the outcome was actually pretty fair, all things considered, and I'd probably also have felt weird if I made a point to bias voting away from myself and lost by one. I wrote this article after the fact, still, because the use of point shares as the main argument was very new and I didn't know how to feel about it. Anyway, I'd just won my first individual award ever, and it was the biggest one the VHL has to offer! It was time to turn to S81. I'd be lying if I said that S81 was one I approached with optimism. I'd considered stepping down as a GM both that offseason and the one before, and took the team through the offseason without doing anything at all for the first time in quite a long time. Davos did have a few good players at that point, and some were from pretty recent draft classes, making us playoff contenders. That said, the meta was in full swing at this point, and we were not a meta team. Taro had arguably his third weird season in a row, again putting up a career high in goals (and hitting 50 for the first time) while taking a dip in points. The physical game that had dipped a bit in S80 surged back strongly in S81, though, and I broke 300 hits. Finishing below 100 points in a meta season, though, was never something that would be noticed by anyone, and my 98 points then meant essentially nothing despite respectable placement on the goals leaderboard. Davos squeaked into the playoffs again and lost in 4 games, with Taro again turning up the scoring a little bit but just not impressing enough. After S81, I'd had enough. The E was on its way, as was the need for a rebuild thanks to my predisposition to trade all my future resources for aging players. I didn't feel motivated to deal with these things on my own and just felt that the GM would be in a better place with someone who cared about them. So, I was out as a GM and handed over the team to @Alex, who's been GM ever since. If I remember correctly, he did give me the option to stick around for my last season, but I let him do whatever he wanted to get value out of Taro with a rebuild on its way. I don't remember if I had anywhere I didn't want to play for at the time, but I do remember I was fine with playing for Seattle. The deal went through, and I became completely disassociated with the Davos franchise for the first time in a couple years. S82 saw Taro in a different uniform for the first time ever, and I'm sure that seeing his name associated with anyone other than Davos was a shock to a few casual members here and there throughout that season. This was the last season of the meta before hybrid attributes rolled in, and it was also Taro's last shot at anything meaningful. Aside from the award win in S80, it was looking like he'd end up as an installment of my not-yet-conceived Hall of Not Bad series. As it turned out, S82 would be nothing short of magical for Taro's legacy. I've noticed over time that Seattle has always been a little bit weird when it comes to individual player stats--sometimes, we'll go looking for an MVP or even just a team scoring leader and we'll have trouble coming up with players from the Bears, even when they're good. That's not true all the time, of course, but it was true for most Bears players in S82. Except for none other than Taro, who recorded new career highs in goals (53) and points (139) and put up numbers that were even impressive for the meta era. Seattle made the playoffs, as usual, with Taro as the unquestioned face of the team that season. Just how unquestioned was a thing of history, by the way. Taro would finish S82 with 52 more points than the next-highest total on the Bears, a mark that was still by far the record as of @DMaximus ' last installment of the Unofficial VHL Regular Season Awards. That, and the same offensive share argument as before, popped up in BoG in award voting, and even though I handled it on my end the same way as I did in S80, I didn't write any article disputing the award win this time because I agreed with it. The playoffs were Taro's last chance ast success, but with the meta still in effect and Taro now playing in the NA conference, the conference champion was all but decided. Seattle did manage to make it to the conference championship series, but got knocked out by Vancouver on their way to another championship. Taro again put together a top-tier playoff performance, but one player can't do it all and his career faded off into nothing. The next season, Taro was voted in to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. Looking back on it, he was pretty clearly the best player of S75, a draft class that will forever define league history. With two MVP wins, too, he certainly had the award cabinet to match the vote, as confusing as those wins may be given a complete lack of other awards. The response to my induction was pretty well deserved. I don't know if I'll ever have as much fun with a player as I did with Taro, and I find it hard to believe that I'll come up with any other player who I get to make as much the face of a franchise or as well-known leaguewide. I was Davos for a time. I was one of the players who succeeded without a full meta build, and I was one of the players who got attention consistently in league media without needing to be on a meta team first. I heard lots of good things about Taro when I was building him, and I like to think that he made an impact on the league outside of the sims. Maybe the day will come when I match the Taro Tsujimoto experience, and if it ever does, I'm sure I'll love it. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE

I can’t believe you drop this when I’m building Holmes after you wrote the one about how goalie numbers were inflated when I still had Vandelay. I think you’re just jealous of my ability to build pretty good players who still kind of suck.

To be fair, it’s deserving of inclusion in the series for that same reason. I can’t just decide NOT to talk about it, especially since I’m also spending this part talking about things I had issues with. But 5 more to go, and I think they’ll be worth your time.

Well sure, a dead locker room is a concern. I'll defend VHL locker rooms a little bit because they suffer from lower player turnover than the other league(s), plus everyone is less new so there's not only less pressure to go out and make oneself known and draw connections, but there aren't as many people who need help and all the conversations started by questions about the league just don't happen in the first place. My line is whether that inactivity is the GM's fault. Personally, I've been in some "dead" locker rooms that are dead in the sense that there isn't much conversation, but I personally have never been in one where I felt that the GM was making no effort to create it. Both of these things would never be true in a typical M server, for example, but they can be true in the VHL and that's where the distinction between lack of activity and lack of GM activity needs to be drawn. I'm not saying that a lack of GM effort doesn't exist in the VHL, and I definitely know of cases over the years that I'd identify as such (which you can, in fact, see me talking about in BoG if you know where to look). I have also never identified all VHLE GMs as being part of this problem (I've only ever had one GM in the E, who was @Doomsday and he was great). But what I will say is that I consistently came across far more complaints of this nature that were related to the VHLE than the VHL. Not all of it was the GMs' fault, but I don't think that anyone would agree that "my GM doesn't respond to my Discord messages and hasn't said a word in our server in months and never scouted me or told me I was being traded" (as a real example I've come across) is an ideal situation. TBF your screenshot deals with a different issue, which is the longer pathway up to the VHL and my personal disagreement with how depreciation works in relation to it. It's a good representation of how we feel about that but doesn't really have anything to do with the statement it quoted. If we're talking about the issue of "placating to clickers" and whether that was the goal, I think that's a topic that can mostly be talked about independently of my E hate. I do think that thread was full of a lot of acting like we were doing something really nice to clickers, and there was a lot of mention of "giving" them a "competitive environment" that they can enjoy and whatnot. Honestly, I'm not sure that was ever anyone's intent but it was certainly something that was brought up as a selling point for the idea whose ultimate purpose was really to clear up VHL rosters and make clickers none of a GM's concern. This was exactly what my "do nothing" approach was and I'll still defend it that way. Let's say there's a season where we have an ad REALLY blow up, like far more than in S75. Are we then obligated to change the entire league structure to accommodate this if we see that ad as a one-off? Or would it be better to accept that the league as it is can't satisfy all those sudden and unexpected needs? Besides, with most people that join big drives going IA soon after, one would expect that the league could naturally ride the wave. Players that are resilient enough to earn well through that should have no issue staying on rosters and would likely be the ones who we would have gotten to stick around anyway. I guess that's an extremely capitalist/survival of the fittest sort of thought process, but I feel like there would be very limited harm done to people who are currently members and I'd rather protect their interests before catering to those who haven't done anything yet.

The biased source is happy to be taken seriously in any case. I won’t act like I closely read through ALL of the thread but you were the first to mention a third league and there was some question as to its format at first with junior/affiliate terminology being thrown around. I also won’t act like I understand all the nuances of how those systems work IRL either so I’m probably not the best source on what to call any given proposal.

Let's be real, you knew this one was coming. This has been me for years on end about this topic. Something that really ground my gears over the later half of the S70s was the addition of tons and tons of new players to the VHL player base. This was something that was great when we first saw it in the S60s, but as with all beneficiaries of VHL systems, I prefer to take my help and slam the door in the face of anyone who comes looking for it afterward. I'm kidding about that last bit, of course. But if multiple expansions in the S60s, followed up by four teams being added to the league in S72, wasn't enough of an indication that times had changed, some other things should have been. For one thing, the league's efforts to tap into different sources had taught us that those different sources will yield different responses from one group or another. For example, we learned that paid Reddit ads (as opposed to making posts in one community or another) did literally nothing and gave us literally no one. @Matt_O learned that attempting to recruit even through comments on PornHub was more effective than that, but only in that we got someone who didn't stick around to create an account. Most importantly, though, we learned just how much of a different beast that YouTube could be. We've had YouTube drives that worked well, for sure, but we've also had some that didn't. The difference in that, though, is that sometimes YouTube drives don't work and really mess with league numbers. An example of this was in one of our first YouTube drives in S69, where we advertised with @TheFinnFTW and got basically no one who stuck around, despite way more players than we wanted being created and way too many of those being goalies (curiously, the second time we went to that channel, it worked pretty well). We've had some others work the same way. Most recently, the S93 class was filled up pretty nicely by a drive that led lots of us to believe that we'd just ended a period of stagnant recruiting, but the vast majority of those who flooded in never ended up being substantially active. But, the emergence of YouTube recruiting and the fact that it DID work okay enough sometimes was enough for @Beaviss and the rest of recruitment crew to consistently try to prove the point that the never-before-thought-sustainable levels of recruitment that we'd seen for a bit could in fact be kept up. And most of the time, this actually worked as intended. Those too new to see it would be super impressed to see it today, and it's my opinion that some of what happened then is still an influence on the memories of some who complain about the state of recruitment today. The thing was, that just kept on growing the size of the league. This would go from a great feature of the times to a huge issue practically overnight when things went off the rails and a last-second drive was shoehorned into S74, right before to the trade deadline. The player turnout was the player turnout to end all player turnouts. The S75 class was (and is) the largest of all time thanks to an effort to prove a point that we had nothing to worry about. Very quickly, VHLM rosters filled to the point where the league had completely filled up, sparking the decision to develop a never-extensively-used framework by which teams could place players in their junior lineups in STHS. We hadn't seen a recruitment drive, nor a draft class, of that magnitude ever, and it bring sprung upon an already full league was nuts. But oh well, we'd just added a whole bunch of teams to the VHL, and most YouTube recruits drop off quickly anyway. Give it a couple seasons and we're probably fine. The sheer size of the S75 class somehow also unfortunately coincided with a large amount of a particular VHL demographic. I'm sure you've come across players in your life who may as well not exist on Discord or the forum, who don't earn TPE outside of a weekly check in on the portal. It wasn't just some new players around this time; it was lots of them. I had warned about this much earlier on when we first moved Practice Facility to the portal and noticed a worrying trend of players who only clicked the Practice Facility button every week and nothing else. In just about all of these cases, the player was completely uncontactable on the forum and sometimes hadn't even visited the forum since creating. It was almost as if (and I didn't entirely doubt that) these were people who had no idea the forum even existed and were just checking the portal every week until they eventually disappeared. Well, by the later half of the S70s, Welfare was also on the portal, and the earning potential of players who never left the portal had tripled. The term "clicker" arose behind the scenes for players like these, in reference to all of their activity coming from clicking buttons, and we suddenly had an army of clickers on our hands who also suddenly had the capacity to break out of the M. It wasn't just pure clickers, to be clear--high earners never had anything to worry about, but we had an army of low- and middle-earners on top of this that VHL GMs wanted nothing to do with. A few seasons later, we had players with multiple seasons of VHL experience going completely unsigned, GMs letting rookie contracts expire rather than giving roster spots to their players, and VHL-ready prospects having no place at all on their rosters. The roster spots that were available, as a consequence, were practically nonexistent, and I can speak to the trade market being very deadlocked at the time with most rosters right up against the cap. Clearly, something needed to be done. This time, it was once again Beaviss asking the league to do something about it, but this time it was something other than just asking for expansion. Something that Beav had always argued for aside from expansion, and something that he deserves more credit for than he gets, was larger team rosters. I don't disagree with this myself--more people on your team means a more active server and a stronger team community. His post had mostly to do with this at first, but there are also obvious challenges to trying to create larger rosters. There is no world in which GMs will not just want to run with their highest TPE players on the ice as much as possible, and expanding the cap will just make it so top teams can keep more top players (rather than encouraging rosters themselves to fill). Plus, a system that attempts to enforce larger rosters sort of loses steam if those larger rosters can't be maintained by the size of the league. For better or for worse, the BoG decided against it, but the problem still existed. It was originally @Victor who put forward the idea of a third league, but it was more of a junior league/farm league system than what the VHLE eventually ended up being. It's a very long thread, and I'll really only cover the highlights, but you already know that the long story short is that the E ended up morphing into its eventual state by the end of it. From the start, I wasn't crazy about the E league, and I remember @Fire Tortorella probably being the BoG member who was most on the same page as me. For my part, my initial objection wasn't necessarily to the third league itself--because I did see how it created a space for the people who were past the VHLM but couldn't make it in the VHL--but I hated that it made the path up to the VHL longer and more difficult for everyone. To me, it was unacceptable that players would take longer (in some cases far longer) to make it to the VHL, in a league structure that supposedly prided itself upon player development. In fact, there was a point back in the day when the VHLM cap went from 200 to 250 and I hated it. I proposed lots of alternatives, from trying to adapt Beav's original proposal to even just doing nothing and letting people disappear until we were back to OK--objectively a bit of an asshole move, but also objectively low-stress and still in keeping with the idea that the VHL should be full (though not overfilled) with active players. Additionally, there was a debate over the intended purpose of the E and I didn't really like either end of it. On one hand, we had people who promoted the E as a system for everyone and wanted no situation that didn't involve the E for any player (a point where I clashed really strongly a few times with @bigAL). On the other, the E was being internally promoted as some sort of dumping ground for clickers, which I really objected to on philosophical grounds. From my perspective, this would be degrading the E as undesirable and creating a rift between the league's high and low earners. If a low earner were put in the E and then just forgotten about--because the system then circled back to that first point, where we decided it had to be that way--then VHL teams could wait and never see that player develop before the end of their rookie contract, at which point they could just let that contract expire and continue cruising along with their friends who earned more. Which I guess wasn't too dissimilar to my idea of doing nothing, but I still defend the difference as this way being the fake-nice way of achieving that goal that also unnecessarily lengthened everyone's player development. And to the end, I fought the decision to implement the E league, for reasons that lots of you have seen in lots of posts. I did a lot over time to get that word out there and became one of the league's prominent E haters--something that was backed up by complaints from across the league that someone's locker room was dead or that their teammates were all inactive or that (in some cases) their GM didn't even try to talk to the players. I kept that up for about as long as it was needed, and until the fall of the E, which is a story of its own. Although I do recognize the part that the VHLE played in keeping things running, that's about as far as my opinion ever shifted on the matter. Even when it was clear that it was going nowhere and it seemed like it never would go anywhere, I still wasn't afraid to speak up about it and highlight what the league could be without it. And for those who believed in the same, I'm glad I could represent that feeling. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy

Damn I meant to bring back Hall of Not Bad at some point. Maybe the two can coexist Seems like a great article in the making!