Gustav

Any draft class is going to shrink with time. People retiring or going inactive before they make it up is nothing new--even among first round picks (look at NY in the early-mid 70s for an insane streak of bad luck). I initially put together the sheet about a month ago, so of course things have changed. I doubt anything between then and now threw things off much, because I did take into account the probability that players wouldn't make it up (i.e. a player at a certain TPE level who has a 70% chance is only counted as 0.7 players). I vaguely remember someone saying this a couple years ago. I managed to keep it hidden for a while, but we'll see what happens with all the recent punishments...

Behind the scenes, it was more or less agreed upon that we didn't want to expand, or at least that we didn't want to keep expanding in the future. The VHLE was initially brought up as an alternative to that. So, if we want to talk about making the league bigger, and advocate for that, it works pretty much in opposition to why the VHLE exists in the first place. but so do a lot of other things we're trying to do with it so I guess that doesn't really matter

Reddit always WAS the best way to recruit--we'd get permission from some sub's mods, make a post, and wait. Then there was one day where a member of one sub who may or may not be a member of other leagues took exception to one of our posts and mass-reported everything we'd put up. Technically the way we were doing it (specifically, offering a reward to members for upvoting) violated Reddit rules so there wasn't really anything we could do about that. Moving forward, I believe we tried to put up posts without offering any reward, but we'd basically been blacklisted from hockey subs at that point.

Some of you may remember a couple status updates I posted within the last month: one promising the release of "the most quantitative" article I've ever written, and another saying that I'd hold off until exams were over. I meant both sincerely at the time I posted them. And now I'm just not going to write the article. That doesn't mean I'm not going to talk about it--I did most of the number work, and I learned some things that I think are important to share. It's just more of a collection of general takeaways than any big main point that I can argue, and that makes it much less fun. Takeaway #1: we can't realistically nuke the VHLE anytime soon (as much as I want to). Originally, I opened up a spreadsheet to try to show that with the retirement of the S75 class, we'd have the ability to get rid of the VHLE and operate under what I still consider "normal" conditions, with the 250-TPE cap back in effect in the minors. If we had more normal-sized draft classes in S80 and S81, this might indeed be realistic. But the problem is...we didn't. Both of those were huge, and per my own projections they're going to make average roster size increase over the next two seasons. Takeaway #2: BE CAREFUL WITH RECRUITMENT. What are we trying to do here? We established the VHLE with the understanding that we didn't want to make the big league bigger, and that this would be our way to keep things sustainable rather than trying to expand. We shouldn't have responded to that by flooding two draft classes in a row--that's how you create exactly the same roster issues that made the VHLE happen in the first place! I have spent some time talking to @Beaviss and I understand that it's really hard to control how many people join as a result of which recruitment campaigns (especially after we got yeeted from Reddit), but keeping the size of the league CONSTANT rather than trying to grow it is the goal we need to have in mind at this point. It's my opinion that we could do nothing at all for the S84 class (also known as the S75 recreate class) and that would be a good thing. Takeaway #3: I made a cool equation and I'm proud of it. Projected Earn Rate = (TPE-(TPE/([Current Season]-[Draft Season-1])))/([Current Season]-[Draft Season-1]) Until banking starts and depreciation hits, at which point I just assume that TPA is constant, I have in the past just calculated projected TPE numbers by guessing based on my own experiences with players and their earn rates. Instead, I decided to make an equation to guess for me. This is more complex than just TPE divided by seasons played, because things like carryover and creation time can mess with things and give numbers that are way too high. This thing gives me some pretty nice, realistic-looking career arcs for players of varying levels of activity, though it's worth it to note that it doesn't work on S81 players (because current season and draft season are the same thing). Here is a big spreadsheet I made to track roster projections across the league. Assumptions I made to do that are as follows: I don't think what I have proves much of anything, and that's why I'm not going to write 5,000 words about it. But there it is, and you can do what you want with it.

Happy Festivus! It's over, because I'm slow, but I started writing this on everyone's favorite holiday, so that's what counts. As anyone knows, the tradition begins with the AIRING OF GRIEVANCES, and since I don't have the energy to write about how much I hate the VHLE or something similar, I'm going to do something a bit simpler and roast every team's logo. Yes, this is me trying to be funny. We'll see if that works. CALGARY WRANGLERS Honestly, I think the greatest disrespect here is that the new logo was never made into a forum emote and I still have to use derphorse. How successful was the rebranding, really, if we weren't excited enough to make our forum logo up-to-date? Anyway, it's a little bit sad that everything we hated about derphorse is still present in the current logo: the grimace, the weird eye shadow thing, the mane that looks more like an emo haircut, and the horseshoe that doesn't even really look like a horseshoe. I'm not convinced that we didn't just draw derphorse again and try to pass it off as a new product. We're like Apple! The only thing that's changed is that derphorse is now wearing reins, which could be nothing but the league expressing its shift towards authoritarianism and total mod control. I see how it is. CHICAGO PHOENIX There's only one phoenix in mythology, which leads one to wonder: which player is the phoenix? It's probably one of the 15 S73s that just retired last season, because I find it hard to imagine current Chicago having an all-powerful mythical being and losing as much as they do. But if that player is gone, then the name is meaningless. Or are all the players collectively the phoenix? That name is meaningless as well, because Chicago has no players. As for the logo: imagine you take Toronto's logo, stretch it vertically, invert its color, draw an absolute shit ton of lines on it, and then add the worst, most what-in-the-name-of-Fred-Flintstone-is-this possible text over it unnecessarily. You've got Chicago! D.C. DRAGONS D.C. is the only VHL team with punctuation in their name, and they're the only team whose location has been reduced to two letters. They had the chance to go full Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and call themselves the Washington, District of Columbia, Dragons of Arlington or something way cooler, but instead "D.C. Dragon" sounds like a rapper who never got famous. The logo also just looks like someone took something they shouldn't have taken, traced over the Seattle Kraken logo, reflected it, and did whatever they did to Chicago where they drew a ton of lines over it and stuck a big block of text in the middle unnecessarily--so the dragon can hide itself behind something far less important and act like that one thing has enough to make the whole design great (much like the team did with Groovy Dood for 8 seasons). If you look really hard and up really close, too, you'll see that some of the teeth are a bit off, including one that's practically on the dragon's nose. HC DAVOS DYNAMO Davos has the league's only logo that's an actual shape. And it's one of just a few that actually works as a hockey logo. Imagine trying to stitch the absolute monstrosity that is the DC logo onto a sweater. There's also only one color, not counting black and white--none of that silly gradient stuff or that wildly unnecessary "we need 50 shades of red in this one part of the logo" stuff. And yes, there's text on the logo, but it works--you see the picture and notice that the team name happens to be there. You don't read that the team name is the HC DAVOS DYNAMO and then just happen to notice that maybe there's some mountain picture with half a box of crayons melted onto it somewhere in the background. The worst part of this logo is simply that it's too perfect to be messed with, and the VHL should be ashamed of itself for letting such perfection exist unchecked. HELSINKI TITANS I find it funny that the forum emoji abbreviation for this logo isn't "HSK" like we see in trade threads. Instead, it's "HEL", something that aptly describes what playing for the Titans is like recently. I also find it funny that Helsinki's current GM is the former GM of Oslo Minnesota Oslo, and both of the logos are just...some dude with no real connection to the team name. It's not even an accurate depiction, either. Look up any portrayal of a titan, so long as you're prepared to see a lot of pictures of naked people, and you'll see said naked people fighting each other without a helmet, in the style of good old-fashioned hockey. So it's just some dude on the jersey, who probably isn't a titan at all. But let's say he is--are you also aware that the Greek gods we think of, the ones who had all sorts of terrible relationships with anything that could walk, defeated the titans in battle? That's right, a big part of the story of the original titans was that they lost. Some team! LONDON UNITED United? United for what? London came into the league less than six months after Brexit, and I'm sure being thrown into the European Conference made a lot of British people mad that they were being thrown into the European Conference. Imagine if the New York Americans tried to change their logo by keeping the current logo but throwing Mount Rushmore over it and two giant bald eagles behind it (and maybe sneaking in Guy Fieri somewhere). You'd have a super stereotypically American thing that most Americans would just find funny--which is exactly what the VHL thought would be a nice little official logo as a British equivalent. That's not even to mention that the UK flag on the logo is distorted and misshapen, just like the London roster this season. LOS ANGELES STARS This logo goes beyond "the text is too big" and goes right into "the logo is the text", something I wish I would never see outside of baseball. Speaking of baseball, this is just what happens if you take the Dodgers logo, bend the L a bit, change the colors, and put a star in the middle. Enough about the text, though, since that's boring. We'll talk about the star instead. The star in question is gray. No stars are gray. At first, I thought I could say that it's a neutron star and make fun of the fact that it's got no energy source and it's starting to lose its power, but then I realized that it's more of a white dwarf, which isn't even powerful enough to become a neutron star, also loses its energy over time, is also quite dense, and isn't very bright. Why a team would choose to advertise those things about themselves is beyond me. MALMO NIGHTHAWKS Oh look, the forum emoji doesn't have text on it. It's almost as though having a giant block of text on your logo is not a good thing! I wonder if the league realized that officially--oh wait, no they didn't. The bird has to sit behind some letters that explain what the bird is, because we're too stupid to know otherwise. It's also one of the logos that follows the "generic blob with a ton of different colors scribbled on it" trend--I thought I'd seen enough shades of green highlighter in my overly organized friend's pencil case, but I hadn't seen anything until I saw this thing. If they're "night"hawks, too, shouldn't they be stealthy and mysterious? Imagine getting mugged at 3 in the morning by the Nickelodeon slime bird. MOSCOW MENACE Anyone remember the Duck Dynasty guys? They aren't very menacing, they're rednecks. Same with ZZ Top. The only difference between that and this is that this guy is wearing a crown and he seems to have a case of yellow fever. Again, much like Helsinki, the logo is just some dude. He's not menacing at all. Imagine what he'd look like if he shaved! You can tell by looking at him that he's got no chin and he's trying to cover it up...which he does by completely obscuring his mouth. Maybe if the logo looked like this: ...I'd look at it and not wonder how much food is stuck in his beard. NEW YORK AMERICANS Wow, so American! So much more than LA or Chicago or D.C., THE NATION'S CAPITAL! This logo takes the flag and destroys it in such a way that from a distance I thought I was looking at the cow-catcher on the Cologne logo. Way to be respectful! It also has the exact same sticks-and-puck clipart that graces the top of the Davos logo, something I'm sure is representative of the baseless hope to even begin to approach the greatness of the Dynamo. This logo is also one of many in a disturbing trend of "logos that look like shields", which expresses not only a severe lack of creativity among VHL leadership but also an unsettling subconscious message in the same spirit as the Calgary reins. Just like it was in medieval times, when shields of this sort were used, league leaders see themselves as monarchs and us as serfs, and DELIBERATELY mock us in this manner through logo design. PRAGUE PHANTOMS The abbreviation for Prague is "PRG", which is, coincidentally, the noise I would make if I were ever drafted by Prague. It's also a nice abbreviation of "purge", which, on top of being what I would do to my stomach upon being drafted by Prague, is a nice thinly veiled threat that the common member will be IMMEDIATELY PURGED from the community if they dare to speak out of line. But I digress. Apart from being yet another "unnecessary text with a side of highlighter" logo, I think it just looks like Zubat. 40 HP with not much attack? That would at least explain a lot. RIGA REIGN I was a little bit surprised to see that Riga's rebrand has been added as an emote--the disrespect to Calgary!--but looking at said emote makes me realize how terrible it really is. It somehow participates in two previously-mentioned trends without fully committing to them, those being the shaped-like-a-shield overused thing and the way-too-much-detail overused thing. Surprisingly, it's not a highlighter logo, but that somehow didn't stop us from using 50 different colors and enough lines to make a printer run out of black ink anyway. I do appreciate that the mouth is visible, unlike Moscow, and that the teeth are reasonably placed, unlike DC, but I can't get past the fact that we sacrificed a bright orange blob for a dark orange blob. Also, what's with the red hair? I hope we're at least recycling our supplies a bit after we killed derphorse. SEATTLE BEARS Unnecessary text. Looks like a shield again. We're already off to a bad start. But honestly, how different is it really from the Riga logo? Weird red hair for no reason, fully white eyes, and the same facial expression. The thing that gets to me more than anything else, though, is that the teeth are bad. And I mean BAD. Those are some human teeth right there. Bears eat meat, and I don't see a single fang in there. Aside from just not looking too vicious, it just looks unsettling. In fact, here's a real-life example of what the Seattle logo looks like. Intimidating? I think not. TORONTO LEGION Fun fact: I had no idea what this logo even was until I was in the league for a few seasons. I'd only ever seen it from a distance, and the ridiculously small head didn't make it very clear from such a distance that I was supposed to be looking at a bird. I did, however, notice the obnoxiously large text directly over the logo, telling all of us idiots that we are in fact looking at the TORONTO LEGION logo, because we wouldn't ever be able to tell otherwise. This is the complete anti-Chicago, really. You don't like the bird squashed horizontally? Cool, let's stretch the shit out of it. You don't like the million different shades of orange with the lines everywhere? Cool, you get one block of blue with no detail whatsoever. You don't like the bird looking right at you? Cool, you get to spend a couple months figuring out that the bird even has a head in the first place. Is it any better? No. VANCOUVER WOLVES Oh, look, another one that looks like a shield. And it comes after the Legion, one of the few teams I'd actually excuse that for and one that doesn't go down that road. There's something else I have an issue with, though, as usual. The implication here is that the wolf happens to be howling, and the implication with that is that there happens to be a moon present. But the way this logo would be set on a player's jersey, the wolf is going to be howling at that player's heart. What does that mean? Of course, it means that the player's heart is round, cold, cratered, and devoid of human life, just like the moon. It's also what a player's heart needs to be to fully embrace the latest meta. Do the math. WARSAW PREDATORS I will forever not understand why this logo is liked by anyone, and that's something I'd say outside of this thread as well. What kind of predator is this even supposed to be? A fox? A dog? A jackal? It doesn't look like a large animal, more like a smaller pack hunter type. It's also got some horrendously clashing colors, with blue and orange being direct opposites combined with pure black and white. This is the kind of thing you'd see spray-painted on the side of a bridge somewhere, not carefully stitched onto a hockey jersey. And if you look at it long enough, maybe squint your eyes a bit, the white patch that's supposed to be this thing's ear kind of starts to look like a second eye, making the logo look like this more than anything facing to the side. I'm not a fan. /thread 2,396 words, somehow. See you in a month.

>Writes "some of the problems I have with mods" article >Gets TPE banned for something "unrelated" I wonder how many times I've been "randomly selected" for a multi check.

Literally 1984

Are the Houston Bulls aware now?

I've been surprised to see some punishments happen, but this is the only one that made me stare in absolute disbelief for a minute or two. Still trying to wrap my head around what on Earth just went down. In retrospect I can point to a few things that seemed a bit "off", but I never thought the reason was what it was. Had the guy not joined as himself eventually I don't know if we'd ever get the full picture (or even any of it). I do hope he's doing ok, because I don't know what motivates someone to pull some of that stuff.

Sabres, and I hate it.

Prepares guillotine

I guess I get you. Had I known that, I would have tried to win the auction for @JardyB10's underwear and paid for international shipping. A hug from someone who means it. Doesn't even have to be in a romantic context. I have a job and I have my own money, so what I want is more in "things I can't buy" territory. Well, there are a lot of white people in my town, I guess. Some years yes, but this year no--it's going to be above freezing and rainy, which is much less fun. I didn't, because I dropped a ton of money on applications and I'm trying to earn it back. If I got $100...well, see the first question for my answer. I listened to Jardy's and concluded that nobody else was going to put that much effort into theirs. Done deal. I kind of forgot to vote though. I hate Christmas music. It plays all the time at my work, it all blends into one thing, and an image that keeps coming to mind is some singer in a studio over the moon about how they're going to make way too much money from a song that they didn't even write because people are going to pay to hear said song for the millionth time. I could go on.

At least I'm aware of the first part I guess. Boomer

I knew this more as the Robbie Special or whatever he called it. I think you'd be the first member since Robbie to do this if you did, actually.

It has to be this one. Please.

lmao I wish Fun fact: Harvard doesn't even have the (fairly common) program I'm applying to. I didn't necessarily mean that as a flex; I got into a decent school that's probably more well-known to most for sports. It's ranked higher than where I am now, but not by a huge margin.

Yes, Gustav Life Update--because I'm just now realizing I don't have a media spot for this week and I should be in bed already. Some of us who were here some months ago might remember a few threads I put up that were deep and meaningful to some and probably cringy to others. While I'll do my best to be emotionally honest in this article, I promise this is not me complaining about my life or feeling sad about myself again. Rather, it's just me talking about what I'm up to! I had my last exam Thursday, which means I'm done for the semester! I also think it was the last final I'll ever have to take as an undergrad. I'm pretty sure I did OK, though the night before kind of threw a monkey wrench into things--I got ZERO sleep, not because I wouldn't but because I couldn't for some reason. I wasn't nervous; it just didn't happen. Thankfully, I'm fine, and though I haven't seen for sure yet, I did fine! Speaking of the end of the semester, I'm actually a little bit sad that it's over. This was the first back-to-normal (with masks) semester I've ever had that involved more than one class in my major. I did some cool things, learned a lot, and for the first time ever, made a few real-life friends in college. Break is going to be a bit lonely, but I suppose that's for all the best reasons. And speaking of the end of school, I'll have my degree in the spring! It's a little scary, because I don't know what my life will look like in a year... ...though I do know I'll be in a grad program! I got into one school you may have heard of, and I'm waiting to hear back from the rest. I don't expect other decisions until January, though the fact that one got back to me so quickly (2 business days after I applied, for someone with zero research experience, no less) is a bit encouraging--I'd heard that applications are going to be fewer and credentials are going to be lower in general this year, especially for domestic applicants, so this could go really well! Even if it doesn't, I've got a guaranteed spot somewhere. I'm working more at my usual terrible job, and hating it as always. I said (informally) that I should be paid a bit more, as I've been there over 4 years and practically led the department for short periods of time during that, and was told that minimum wage is going up in a couple weeks. That's cool, and at least New York has a decent minimum, but I still get paid less than high school kids at McDonald's. I've been a bit quieter on Discord lately, and I think that's okay. I don't miss the days when I'd spend 4 hours at a time in genchat. I know I've said this before, but it's a bit more so most recently and it's worth reiterating.

Somehow I missed this--thank you for posting it. This season, probably you. Taro is just short of being considered for MVP again with the whole "nobody else on the team helped" argument (not that that's true anyway) and I'm leading Davos in points. So it's goaler time. This is weird, but...I've had lentil soup both of the last two days. Maybe it's bad luck. I think you know who I'd rather blame for it. Moscow. They're considered the most "meta" out of anyone in the EU so it would be nice to beat that. Vancouver, for the same reason as above. Alternatively, Seattle, so Bana loses to himself. Your house.

Ye

And I hope you don't take this as me not appreciating your perspective--I do. It's 100% possible to disagree with something without having a problem with the other person involved.

Hi

Davos was 18-1-0 in their last 19 games at the time of this message. This season started, well, predictably for us here in Davos. Simon isn't a big fan of us in general, and that showed. But, as happened to me exactly once before in my GM career, way back in S74 when a late-season push took us from hopelessly out of the playoffs to missing it by a tiebreaker, change the lines once, and magic can happen. I write this article today because today was our second loss since said line change (yes, we're now 19-2-0 in the last 21, bummer), and I know it's something I have to write about before the sim inevitably decides to give us a good equalizer. But who even noticed? A search of "Davos" in genchat gives me a few mentions of recent success, but that's about it. It's largely irrelevant, because who knows what the sim engine will throw at us on any given day (meaning that, yes, I get that it's more the result of luck than skill), but it's not often I get to write an article about how great my team is doing and I might as well do it while I get the chance. The main takeaway from this is just that the sim engine is confusing as hell. With no changes to the roster, we go from typical underachieving to (probably just briefly) best team in the league? Please. Ironically, the ups end up being frustrating to deal with as well. But for now, I've certainly enjoyed it, and if it keeps up in any way, I'll certainly continue to enjoy it.

Hell yeah

According to what? The only real way to confirm this would be through a controlled experiment. I feel like definitively stating that this wouldn't work isn't correct, unless you or someone else has numbers to back it up. I was away all day yesterday and I'm currently a bit short on time, so I haven't looked at the thread yet, but from this comment I'm assuming that you raised the idea and someone told you that it would absolutely NOT work for this reason. Unless they have actual numerical evidence, that's bad science. Before last season, before the full 40/99 thing took full effect, there were some teams that were kind of meta in that their players tended to hover around the 70/99 range rather than the 80/99 or whatever people liked in other places. While a lot of people there probably tried to go with a bigger gap, we didn't have entire teams (and yes, I'm saying teams in the plural sense; it's more than just the one most have in mind) actively planning that out. S70 Moscow may have been the first, then Warsaw for pretty much their entire existence, Malmo for a while recently, Chicago for a while until recently. And a lot of these were good teams who put up good numbers and won cups. But we didn't see differences like we're seeing today. Of course there's a meta--people will always try to find the best build and now that we've successfully turned the VHL into nothing more than a spreadsheet war we'll ALWAYS have teams trying to figure out how to game the system. No system will solve that. But the pre-meta 70/99-ish thing wasn't nearly as bad for the league as going full 40/99. Long story short, that happened already, and it wasn't unbeatable. S77 VHL or so had maybe 4-5 of these teams who followed the general "bigger gap" correlation and it was a good deal less problematic than S80/81 VHL.

Hi hello it's me here to be a boomer. I think that this is better than doing nothing in terms of addressing the meta issue, but I voted "no" for one reason--I feel like this would benefit top earners the most. If you're earning your 12 a week, you're now going to be able to upgrade DF and SC higher than someone who isn't. Currently, someone building in the 400-500 range can max out an attribute or two without completely wrecking their build. That's good because the league needs to be accessible to everyone. Sure, if your build caps out at 500, you'll never be an all-star...but I think you'd agree with me when I say that this type of person should still be wanted and accepted on big league rosters, right? If I'm at 500 TPE and the most I've got is 80 for SC and DF, there aren't many build-focused GMs who are going to want that. And let's not even get into the fact that performance would end up super polarized and VHLM-like...imagine how the stat leaders would compare to average players if that happens. The rich get way richer than they have any right to be. To bring up a couple things that have been mentioned before in other public threads, probably before you joined...how would you feel about the gap between PA and SC just being limited? For example, either: There is a set maximum difference (i.e. PA and SC must be within 20 of each other at all times); or, We introduce a "GAP" attribute that lets people spend TPE on the ability to separate PA and SC, up to a certain point? For example, your player starts with a maximum GAP of 5, which can be increased to 30 or something at a higher update scale than other attributes?