Gustav

I have been a member of the VHL since February of 2019. I have played 29 seasons as a player, with three full careers behind me, and spent (I think) 14 or so as a GM. That's 43-ish seasons in total. Before today, I could have said that I have never won a championship on any level of the VHL. Not as a GM, not as a player, not at all in general. I don't even think I've won stuff like the World Cup and WJC. But I can't say that anymore--thanks in large part to the management team of @Dadam30 and @dstevensonjr, Lazlo Holmes and the Saskatoon Wild are your S93 Founders' Cup Champions. It's a bit fitting that my first championship came in the M. I think my VHLM tenure as a GM was much more special than my VHL one, and some of my most exciting Cup chases on both the player and GM end have come in the minors. But I'll still have to point out that I've never won a championship in the VHL. Could Holmes be the one to break the curse, and might GMs be less hesitant to pick him now that he's shaken off said curse on some level so far? We'll have to find out when the draft comes up.

Pictured: my experience trying to talk to @gorlab about graphics as a beginner. Anyone who's joined the VHL over the past couple years knows of my tendency to write some big articles. Heck, I'm putting everything I've got into making Gustav 30 in 30 what I want it to be by the end of next season, and we're heading full speed for my halfway mark. In Gustav history, we're right around S71. I'm trying to do these mostly chronologically, and that's pretty convenient right around this point because my first Town of Salem game started in March of 2020. That's also when I made this: That might not look all that impressive--and it isn't; that was just me swapping out a logo, putting in a blank dark background, and abusing the Color Dodge tool--but I still remember everything about making it even though it was over 4 years ago. It was late at night, everyone else in my house was asleep, I was by myself on the floor of my bedroom in the very same spot I was when I first clicked the link to the VHL, and I had just purchased a subscription to Photoshop after hearing all about how I wouldn't be a real graphics person until I did that. I remember being a little disappointed by how much nicer Photoshop felt, because I'd previously sworn by just using Gimp for free, but considering that this was just a few graphics ago... ...one could say that I was pretty happy with the output. I'd been doing my best to get into the wonderful world of graphics for a while, starting out in Mississauga when I tried to crank some out for my players, and the wonderful month that was March of 2020 also gave me lots of nervous energy that I used on things like...oh, I don't know, being the founder of VHL Town of Salem. As well as a lot more graphics. Before that point, I knew a couple things and could work my way around some basic commands. I could cut out a player's picture from a background (I didn't yet know what remove.bg was), I knew what opacity meant and what a layer mask was, I'd learned how to color swap and jersey swap and all that stuff (which is surprisingly not difficult to get on a basic level). I'd used the graphics channel on Discord as a resource, and at the time, it was a great resource to get extensive advice given mostly by @gorlab. Taking things and applying them and mostly just spending lots of time clicking buttons to see what worked made me feel proud of everything I made, even if it didn't look all that great. I'd made more and more for the VHL and was starting to explore affiliate leagues more closely too. For the most part, I found that I really only wanted to do VHL graphics when I had nothing to say that week. I've always been more of a writer in sim leagues (and a "takes a long time to explain things" type in real life; I'm sure that's no surprise) because I feel that I always have lots to say about things that matter to me. So, especially with the understanding that I could just direct people to better sig-makers, I'd really only make something occasionally and my progress was slow. Something that took off for me, though, was shamelessly doing my weekly (or in some cases, monthly) Player Brand in the EFL for affiliate checks here. In the EFL, it was almost the opposite of the reason why I didn't really catch on with my graphics here. I didn't follow the EFL all that closely and really had nothing at all to say--so weren't graphics the perfect thing to do? I got to work and was pretty happy with some of the output. Here's my favorite out of the ones I made of my own player when I was still a beginner: Which isn't perfect, but it's better than either of those I've shown you so far. It was only a few graphics into my time out there and I started making real improvements just about every time I opened Photoshop. I won't harp on my time in affiliate leagues too much (especially because that's a story for another installment), but most of my best work happened outside the VHL. I made a graphic here and there, and lost a league contest or two... Made for a "make a recruitment graphic" contest. I was really proud of this, posted it on Discord, and was immediately told that everyone looks super yellow--fair point. ...but that's mostly it as far as the VHL is concerned. Digging through my old folder, I'm finding that a really surprising amount of my best work was made for the IHL, a now-defunct GM league created by @enigmatic at some point in the late S60s that I was invited to at some point in the S70s. We were only 8 or so members at any one time, but people really seemed to love it when I made them a graphic and I got more positive feedback than I did on most of my stuff in larger communities. I've got a big lineup of images that I'll dump in a future article, but (in my opinion) the best graphic I ever made was this one for the IHL: Clearly better than the Justin Graves one that probably led to Justin Graves almost immediately going inactive on me. I bring up my history with graphics here because it's a huge example of a real-life skill that the VHL can give someone. I have certainly improved as a writer in my time here, but why bring up a list of my favorite articles? I've also built up lots of spreadsheet skills, but why bring up my favorite spreadsheets? Graphics are convenient. They're visually appealing. I've got all of them in a folder in chronological order. And it's easy to see improvement. I never touched the top tier of sig-making, but what I have in my folder (140 sigs, maybe 40 of which are duplicates before and after lighting adjustments) is about the equivalent of making one thing a week for two years. I'd imagine that more would have been reachable had I not burned myself out of affiliate leagues at one point, but I'm glad what I've done. Because, honestly, you would not believe where basic Photoshop can take you in the real world. I'm Vice President of my student organization off the back of a campaign poster I made myself, I design flyers for that same organization for events, I helped my lab get recognized in a photo contest, and I've developed a reputation for making memes that would not be possible without ever having opened that software. Graphics, somehow, have made me a little bit more popular. Ironically, disappearing into the Internet to escape real life has taught me lots of things about real life. If I'd never joined the VHL, there's absolutely no way that I'd have ever learned how to edit a photo. I'd also never have learned how to organize data until school forced me to. But being a nerd led me to learn nerd things for sim league purposes, which just made me a better nerd. And I'm not sure whether I'll ever consistently make graphics again (and I know for a fact my skill has dropped off a bit), but it's something I put lots and lots of time into that fundamentally affected my perspective on both sim leagues and real life over that time. I think that deserves to be talked about somewhere at least, and I'd encourage you to reflect on the ways what you've done here has carried over into your life as well if you haven't. 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

I promise this image made perfect sense in context. The game of Mafia was invented in 1987 by a student at Moscow State University who has definitely never heard of the VHL. That student probably never envisioned Among Us the lengths to which the world would go to study the game, from profitable spin-offs to home-brew versions to even real mathematical research devoted to its analysis. Playing a game like Mafia requires intuition, wit, and lots of knowledge of game mechanics. And running one takes even more. My first exposure to Mafia came much earlier than I thought it was, when @Nykonax floated the idea of a game way back in May of 2019--this would have been S66. He ended up getting a decent-sized player list and making a game happen. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Not much that was being said in the game thread made much sense to me, and I walked away from the experience considering it largely forgettable. But, I was now aware that this was a thing that could be done on forums. I must have retained that knowledge pretty soon after that, because I remember playing a game in the SBA right around the time of our affiliation fallout. That changed not much of anything about what I knew about the game, but I had retained the basic idea of talking during the day and doing things at night. I'd also joined the EFL (which I will openly admit was fueled by wanting affiliate checks), and in one of those affiliate leagues, I had my first exposure to Town of Salem--a game that you can find on Steam (although I've never played it) that is essentially just a fancy version of Mafia. It turns out that, as a fancy version of Mafia, Town of Salem (or ToS) is readily adapted to a forum game. I still didn't really know what I was talking about in the EFL, but they had a long rule thread and I was more comfortable hanging around there with it being a league that I knew had nothing against me being VHL-first. By this point, it was clear to me that--even though I was clueless--the Mafia concept had managed to stick around for more than just a one-off in our affiliate leagues, and I'd also watched lots of people in those leagues play the games and like them a lot. It was something the VHL was missing, and I was bored--so I figured I should take matters into my own incompetent hands. For those of you who are unfamiliar by this point, Mafia (in general) is a two-sided game consisting of an "informed minority," or an "evil" group of players who plot with each other behind the scenes to kill the others, and an "uninformed majority," or a "good" group who must use their own skills and find out who the bad ones are by talking out in the open (where the bad ones try to blend in and mess with their plans). There are lots of variations on this, many with more unique roles than others. I wasn't confident, so I eventually found myself digging through rule sets on some mafia game forum and settling on a game called Cult in the Jungle Republic where 12 of the 19 people who would end up playing were just residents of the town with no special abilities. We played the game, but most people didn't really like it for that reason--why would you want to play the game where you really couldn't do much aside from following votes? So, it was clear to me that to keep this thing going, we would need to go full Town of Salem--where every single player has a job to do and there are lots of layers to the game beyond just Town and Mafia. Did I establish by this point that I had no clue what I was doing? Whatever. In any case, I relied on two things in equal measure to learn the game, without either of which the game would not be possible. The first was the Town of Salem Wiki, which has every possible role extensively documented with enough information that a game can be run if you read closely enough. The second was @omgitshim, who has every possible role also extensively documented in his head, as well as enough patience that a game can be run even if you're stupid. I spent lots of hours over lots of days dealing with both of those until I felt that I got the point, and then I finally put up the sign-up thread for the VHL's first-ever game of Town of Salem, just over a year after I joined the league and about four months after Cult in the Jungle Republic flopped. Check out the date on that one--is it really a surprise to anyone that we all had the time in our lives to get the game off the ground? ToS #1 was a success, all in all. It took forever--no other game we've played has even started to approach Day 13--but it was a big learning experience for lots of people (myself included) and I had an absolute blast every time I started the night phase and got to see in real time who was taking shots at who. I stuck with asking OMG everything for the most part, but made it through my first game ever without a major crisis. I knew I'd run lots of games at the start, but I had no idea just how frequently I was doing it and I could never pull that type of thing off today. Within a week, I was signing people up for Game 2, and we'd run up 10 games between the end of March and the end of August--that's one game (which itself took just over a week on average between sign-up and last kill) about every two weeks over that time. I'm honestly shocked that we were able to maintain our player base that constantly, but I suppose that's all we had going on over the summer of 2020. In a way, I wouldn't doubt it if COVID was what gave us the amount of interested people to begin with, or if it was the reason why ToS caught on. Regardless, lots of those interested people deserve my mentions. My handy-dandy stat tracking sheets give me all the info I need to tag those who have been involved the most--obviously OMG, but he and @eaglesfan036 have been considered our nastiest, most competent players from the very start. @Doomsday, @Ricer13, @jhatty8, and @Berocka can also all claim to have played just about every single game we've run (with Eagles, Berocka, and @Devise both running their own spin-off versions of ToS at one point or another). Some others who have stuck around consistently for a long time and are still active in our threads today are @Spartan , @Advantage, @N0HBDY, @rory, @Alex, and even @Ptyrell, who has never had a VHL player but has posted over 1,000 times on our forum for ToS and related games (including his own creative project, Town of Pallet). All of these and much, much more have made Town of Salem what it is, which is an awesome way for the community to really feel like a community. I've had so much fun watching everyone go at each other over the past four years (!) and I'm looking forward to a lot more. To bring it back to being a point in the series about my own personal history, this wasn't the first time I decided to just do something fun for the community rather than waiting for it, but it was the most work I'd ever put into that. I think the league would be a much better place if it had more "just doing" in it, and Town of Salem is something I'll always be able to point to as an example of that. Even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the sim hockey part of the league (and therefore is just one of the "intangibles" on my record), I consider it one of my biggest VHL accomplishments and really feel that it deserves a solid place in this 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

Well there's an old name. Welcome back to the league @xsjack! Hope you're doing well.

Who's someone you've never played with but would like to? Do you ever find yourself having to explain hockey to people who know nothing about it? How does it usually go? Have you ever gotten anyone into it? Who are some big names in cricket today that I should know about, and why are they special?

Oh, for sure. I think most of what I've written here so far can be read from the standpoint of "there are real people on the other end of the screen." That can be positive (as in, "you wouldn't believe the difference you can make it some people's lives here") or negative (as in, "stop being assholes to each other"), and I think you caught a lot of the negative. You're not the first person I've seen saying that a lot of what went down in the S60s did not make you want to stick around too closely, and I understand that. I think that isn't something I picked up on as a new player, but I hope I didn't contribute to it too much. Looking back, it was definitely more normal to go after specific teams or people--not even to be mean, but just because that's how it was and that was how you could be seen as funny. I definitely think you had it worse than I did in this regard, but it did hurt to really try to make things work and then open Discord to find people talking about how I sucked as a GM. It's also really hard to lose a negative label as a GM once you get it. I remember lots of people wanting to play for me at first, even wanting to sign with me in FA, and that's something that disappeared as I kept losing. Well, that's fine and people get to do whatever they want--but then isn't that another obstacle when no one wants to sign with you? That's just a practical aspect of it, too. It isn't fun to watch people not even take your moves seriously because "there he goes again" or whatever. I'm not convinced I'll ever want to GM again, and that's a big part of why.

I could have been DC's GM if it weren't for you meddling kids--who knows what would have happened? I also would have had way, way less to say about my time in the VHLM if I ended up being promoted in S68 with the addition of a couple new teams. The BoG toyed with the idea, but eventually they'd decided that they hated me some others were better fits at the time. But I was pretty darn good, after all... ...and my time was going to come eventually. Cue @ShawnGlade fucking up. I mostly joke because I think I would have been moved up sometime not far from S70 anyway. At one point, I was the one @Advantage wanted to take over Malmo eventually, and had the league known that he'd be giving up the team right after S70, they definitely would have waited a little bit on hiring me and done that instead. I almost could have flushed Malmo's hopes and dreams down the toilet too--could you imagine? At least two franchises should be glad I was unlucky. But anyway, back to what I said earlier. When I joined the league, I knew Shawn as the builder of a solid player and a passionate GM in Davos who made a lot of moves that people questioned. Davos got made fun of a lot, even when they were good on paper. So did Shawn, by extension. Even when the team was good on paper, they just couldn't seem to piece it together. Which, by itself, wasn't a negative reflection on his management. With that being said, it certainly meant that when there was an actual shortcoming, the league picked up on it and ran with it. After pinging Shawn, I hope I can keep it clear that I like him a lot while also fairly saying that I don't blame league leadership for considering it a red flag when he missed a couple drafts in a row without notice. Which is essentially all that presented a serious issue to the league. Things happen, and sometimes things matter a little more than this website--so when that runs to enough of an extent that the league has to BPA your picks and your players start leaving in free agency (future HoFer Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen was a big loss), it's enough for the league to also consider that maybe your team could use a bigger loser with more time and energy to devote. I came across the BoG thread on the matter a couple seasons later when they let me in, and it actually started out as a discussion about (deservedly) removing Bushito as Calgary's GM after the Wranglers were functionally run by Dil and/or Blade for a few seasons on end. But S70's draft came and went with that thread up, and with Davos discourse becoming very public afterward, the topic quickly shifted. To be honest, things went into "who should we hire" pretty soon after that, and it was @Rin who pretty soon after that managed to avoid a lot of debate and lists and whatnot by recommending me specifically for the job. Really, the only bump in the road was Advantage bringing up that maybe I could run Malmo at some point--which he walked back later on saying that he wasn't sure what his plans were yet. So it was settled--I'd known myself that I was the heir to the Nighthawks and was a little bit disappointed to find out that it wouldn't be working out that way, but I've also mentioned before that S70 wasn't very happening in Mississauga and I was really excited when Beav contacted me to offer the big-league job. It was also cool to watch my then-both-former-and-future AGM @Berocka, who had just been hired in Halifax and made a questionable trade there, be moved over to run the Hounds because the personal connection we'd both built with the franchise was strong enough to warrant it. With all the hype around me moving up, I was also a bit conflicted because I really didn't want it to happen the way it did. I'd seen Shawn's resignation post (the league asked him to quit instead of announcing it officially, but it was no secret) and subsequent discussion thread, and really did feel a bit bad. I also wasn't really sure how to approach the situation from my end. Here was someone I really had no issue with, whose team I'd inherited and would have to work with, who was a rostered player on that team, and who also probably was not a fan of me in that moment. I did reach out and we talked briefly, but we mostly gave each other some space at the start. Something that was really important to me was the buildup of team culture. Davos was not in any position to win games in S70, and I'd heard a lot about how the team's community needed work. I didn't really want to deal with figuring out what that meant or how true that was, so I almost immediately created a new team server altogether. I followed the same exact strategy I had in building a locker room in Mississauga (which was mostly a carryover from my first season in Houston), which was to try to focus discussion into publicly accessible channels as much as possible and try to create a mutually beneficial environment for the team and the rest of the community. With the Hounds, I'd never had the need to bring in people who weren't affiliated with the team (and there were some cases where people would join the team for this reason!), but with a gutted and mostly demoralized roster, and no alumni network in my newly-created server, I decided to invite a handful of people who had been particularly good to me up to that point. I especially remember people like @Doomsday, @GlowyGoat, @McWolf, and @Esso2264 at the start, some of which would stay active in that server through my entire tenure even if they never made it onto my roster. On the roster itself was...really not much. We had the ever-reliable @Ahma on defense, and right around the time I was hired was when @Brrbisbrr (one of the nicest people I've ever met on this website) decided to make a comeback. Samuel Ross was my first Davos goaler, and he faced the absolute barrage of pucks faithfully in S70. As you might guess, the biggest event of S70 was my hiring. I won't act like we won much of anything (we finished last, of course). My GM tenure had gotten off to a rocky start. I could have just thrown lines together and checked out until I finally got to draft in S71. But I felt that it was worth putting the time and effort into making a team run, at least a little bit, and I felt that our server benefited from that. I was really proud of some of the ways I felt appreciated by my new team, and haven't quite forgotten this article that's over 4 years old at this point. My first year with Davos reinforced a lot of what I already knew--that running your VHL team like a VHLM team and actually trying to see that your players have a positive experience instead of zoning them out and doing your lines when you have to is something that pays off. I'd much rather have the record I did in S70, and know that my team had a good time getting there, than have no connection with them and win a bit more. And while it's unfortunate that I couldn't do both of those things at once, you'll see as I cover the rest of my GM tenure that I don't regret 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

My favorite VHL first name fact is that Jerry Garcia and Jerry Wang were (when they played) the only players ever to be named Jerry and were also briefly teammates.

Can we have more than a handful of hours to fill these out

Currently sitting at work at...Ohio State. So have fun never getting a GM job I have had lots of reasons to think about your team recently. I spent most of my life not caring at all about college football, but getting involved with a big football school has changed that over the past couple years. Now I can't get enough of this shit. I am legitimately curious how the next few seasons will play out for Michigan though. I won't act like I know all your players, but out of the ones I do know I think all of them are going into the draft. I'd imagine that there will be lots more obstacles this season compared to last one. OSU was an interesting case last season. McCord was okay at QB but I felt like he didn't step up as much as some others (painfully, McCarthy is an example) when he had to. Harrison was absolutely incredible to watch and I'd argue he was our MVP despite his position. I felt like we didn't have too many single players who stood out on defense, but the combined effect of having lots of very good players who were all obviously very well-rehearsed turned out very well. I feel like they didn't get enough credit. I'm optimistic overall for this year because we'll have a pretty solid transfer player (Howard) at QB with a couple top recruits (Noland and Sayin) in the room, still a legit #1 receiver (Egbuka) and a new recruit (Smith) who's already impressed--along with last year's top receiver recruit in Tate. Our reputation as WRU should not be at stake. We also got lots of players who left Alabama when Saban retired (and if you want a team who may have more questions to answer than yours, there it is). Offense and defense benefited from this (can't wait to watch Caleb Downs) and I think we look scary. Sincerely best of luck to you guys this year, because I want our matchup to stay exciting.

One of many posts I came across back in the day that featured someone who was really important in one of our affiliate leagues saying negative things about ours in their league's Discord server. Did we deserve it? On some level, yes. Most people know that there are things you just shouldn't say anymore. Maybe not everyone agrees what those things are. Maybe some people aren't quite up on what means what and how those meanings have changed. But you've got to be living under a rock if you aren't aware that much of the Western world has fairly recently come to terms with how our choices of words can affect others, intentionally or otherwise. Whether with any intent to hate or not, lots of words are out there that once were generally accepted in most casual settings and have since been looked at with a bit of hesitation. "If I were a member of this group, would I appreciate this word being used in this way?" is a fair question that's made lots of people reflect. If you're over 20 or so, chances are that you've had both the exposure to such things being common and the life experience to question it. I'm sure you know the sorts of things I'm referring to, so I don't think I need to keep explaining. I won't act like I haven't cringed at a thing or two I've said or found funny in the past. I'm also not going to act like the VHL hasn't, either. Talk to any super-old member, and you'll probably hear a whole lot about how the league used to be the Wild West of the Internet. I've read lots of "if you think this is bad, you haven't seen anything"-type comments, and I believe them. I've seen members attack each other personally and drop comments that really aren't OK in general. But by the time I'd joined the league, it was a good bit tamer than it was. And it's a good bit tamer today than it was then, as well. The single most impactful day in the history of "what is and is not OK to say in the VHL," though, came about after I'd joined. October 31, 2019, should have been a really cool day for the VHL. That morning, @Beaviss, who had revolutionized league recruiting and brought it back from the brink of nonexistence by reeling in the great classes of the S60s, was hired into a very deserved role as league commissioner. The VHLM was in the middle of their Cup finals in S68, with a Game 6 slated for that day that could have given the Houston Bulls their first ever championship. And it was Halloween! What's not to like? There was a lot to like in Houston, that's for sure--that Game 6 I'd mentioned went their way. The season was over and the M had their champion. But the story didn't end there--in fact, this one starts at this point because one comment that responded negatively to the game did so with a choice of words that would not be accepted in the VHL today. Though you can find the thread easily, I'm not going to link it for a couple reasons--mainly, what was said initially came from members who I genuinely believe are good people, who apologized for what they said and took accountability to settle their own business. I consider the start of the situation much more their business than mine, so all I think is absolutely necessary to know is that one of those "ways to describe things that used to be common and now are considered less fine to say" made its way onto our forum. It isn't OK now and wasn't OK then--but it's also a matter that has been settled. Houston, interestingly, was helped quite a bit by deadline signings. The VHL had recently rolled out a strengthened affiliate program (the one still in existence today that gives a free 12 TPE to the super important people in our affiliate leagues), and much of the SBA's leadership had created right at the deadline and signed with the same team. With that being Houston, and with a full weekly cap claimable by all these players, all of SBA leadership saw the thread when they won the Cup--and that also meant that all of SBA leadership saw what was said. At the time, the SBA's guidelines for personal conduct were very different from ours (and much more strict). I had been in their league for a very short time at that time as a very casual affiliate member and never had an issue with anyone there myself, but I was familiar with a few stories that at I thought were ridiculous (I really don't remember most of the stories or most of the details of what I do remember, and it's also been almost 5 years, so I'm not sure if my opinion is any different now). But being a league with stricter guidelines, I can understand where some people may have been shocked to see things posted that they would have dealt with personally on their own website. I'm not going to say that the SBA response was entirely in the right. Our league wasn't given much opportunity to officially respond to a fairly aggressive pushback, and later on that same day, the SBA had removed their affiliation with us entirely. Their justification for this was (legitimate or not is up to you) that the VHL had generally held relaxed standards that the SBA was not interested in promoting, and that recent events had made it clear that the VHL was not interested in changing them. One day in the books for Beav as commissioner, one affiliate partner lost, and one serious dialogue that hadn't even begun to reach a conclusion--what a start to a job (and an admittedly funny one). This was something that made lots of VHL members mad--myself included, and I had nothing at all to do with that game thread. From my perspective at the time, the entire community, just about none of which I felt were actually hateful people and most of which really didn't go around regularly dropping off-color words, had just been punished over something that probably never would have gone down the way it did had the Hounds been able to win a few more playoff games the finals been anything at all other than the team with the SBA's entire BoD up against the team that dropped the first comment. I had a lot to say about this, mostly on Discord, and although I remember being very opinionated and openly saying that I thought the whole thing was pretty stupid, that was about as far as I ever took it. The first few days on the VHL end saw some reactions from our members, though, that certainly didn't help the situation. Some people went to their league to call them the same sorts of words that lit the fire, and not only got banned for it but became shining examples of people the SBA could point to and identify as parts of the problem. I remember disliking some people I'd never talked to personally, and I felt that even though my own disagreements never broke any rules (written or otherwise), I felt that I was disliked by some people as well when I made them known--something I confirmed much later on when I joined BoG and found a screenshot of the list of people the SBA had a problem with, with me on it. Things were pretty quiet after the first few weeks or so, though. We kept observing the affiliation agreement on our end because we didn't want to punish any regular SBA users who had nothing to do with the situation, and while the topic kept coming up (it was huge news!), it didn't ever turn into people going at each other's throats. The only differences were that VHL tasks weren't claimable in the SBA, and lots of us had grown to distrust one another. After five months of sitting around and passively disliking each other, though, the VHL was informed that affiliation was gone forever. The league had been working behind the scenes to try to work out a set of policies that were agreeable to everyone, and it was eventually decided that this was no longer realistic. VHL leadership claimed that this decision was made unilaterally, and you can read the thread I linked there to try to develop your own opinion on the matter. That was one of the more interesting arguments featuring really important people on both sides that I've ever seen, and it relit the fire on our end. Lots of people made it clear how much they still hated the SBA then--I think I did too, but I don't remember. Something that made me think about things a lot, though, was this post made by SBA member @Beowoof a couple days after that announcement. What was detailed in that post didn't fully line up with what I'd seen or my own perception of the situation (I was in BoG at that point and had access to all the primary sources of info), but if I tried to look at it from the SBA's perspective, I found the thoughts laid out there pretty reasonable and could see how someone on their end could have viewed things in that way. I also liked what @okochastar had to say there and thought a bit about how I'd gotten to know a handful of people from the SBA in the past months and really liked them. The sim league world was really a better place once we stopped wondering how we could run around shit-talking each other and got past all the stupid league identity stuff to just have a little bit of fun together in our free time. Plus, I'm sure the VHL wasn't perfect then and isn't now--but the league had taken a harder stance against the sorts of things we were called out for in that time and I really didn't miss seeing them. Why, though, is this in Gustav 30 in 30 instead of just being a recap of the league in general? I'm mostly describing things done by other people, and the most I was ever connected to the situation was that I complained about it a lot. Well...I talked quite a bit in my second installment about how I'd been part of a very tribalistic team-versus-team drama in the VHLM and how that shaped my views on having basic respect for people. I think that did quite a bit in terms of adjusting how I dealt with people I knew I'd have to see again around the site. But I think that sort of tribalism popped up again on the level of the entire league, had real league-altering consequences, and sucked me back into the mindset to some extent. I was important enough as a VHLM GM that the league knew who I was, and so now I had to make sure my league was taken seriously. The SBA, much like any other league, has tons of good people in it that deserve my respect whether I've met them or not. I think this was the last time I jumped on any "my group is better than your group" train in a sim league as blindly as I did, and I think I learned a lot by watching things go down that helped make it so I wouldn't jump on things like that again. Also just like any other league, following incentives for benefit takes priority. Reddit recruitment was pretty much the only source of new members for either of us at the time, and the SECOND our accounts were reported and blocked from a bunch of communities, guess whose affiliation was magically back. I will also clarify that I have NEVER believed the VHL to be a hateful place in general. At the end of the day, now that I'm done caring about it, I think this was an unfortunate situation featuring lots of immaturity both ways that somehow eventually ended up changing the vibe of the league a little bit for the better. For the most part, I think we had good people who had gotten used to a certain environment and evaluated how they did things once that environment was challenged. To some extent, that was eventually me too. I did some growing that I'm almost glad happened as a result of staring alone at a screen instead of saying something wrong in real life and hurting people close to me. That isn't to say I learned to be offended by everything, or that I'm now whatever cartoonish representation of "woke" some people have in their heads over things like this (in fact, I really couldn't care less about that sort of mindset). There's a huge difference between that and just having respect for people and treating them normally--and I think the VHL has largely learned to adapt in those ways. I'm not sure that I'd say I'm glad this was a big chapter in VHL history, but I'm glad that we're past the negative parts. Enough of that--it's time to have fun with what's left of my Wednesday night. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka): #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

Welcome back! I don’t think we’ve had much to do with each other since we were teammates in Malmo but it was great getting to know you then and sad to see you go. Crazy that I’ve been here longer than your kid has been alive now. Every now and then I get handed some VHL perspective that makes me think for a minute.

The Hounds would have benefited from a slightly better TPE distribution in the S69 draft. Ironically, BigHARDCORE32 would go to Saskatoon--but sadly would never earn again. #4 in this series covers the beginnings of my time as a VHLM GM, and I like to think that my last article does a good job of covering some of what happened with some of my more notable first-gens. But the players I had put their time into growing and developing did so in hopes of seeing it pay off on the scoreboard, and seeing as that's work I put in as a GM as well, it's fair to us both to tell that story as completely as I can. I've covered S66, in which I did what I could with what I had with no real plan other than to pull a couple wins out of my hat and put together a respectable season. But all good things must come to an end, and trading away my first-round pick that season led to me a bit light on assets in S67. It was here that I decided to take my management strategy that was "what the VHLM should be" and turn it into "what the VHLM actually was" and tank for as much as I could in future seasons. None of this was to say that I checked out or that I stopped caring about people who played for me. I wasn't in the business of losing games for draft position, just in the business of getting rid of anyone who was worth anything for quantity of picks. Of course, the latter led to the former naturally, but I'd still try to field the best lineup I could make in every sim. Plus--and too many people don't realize this--having good players to trade away in the first place necessarily means that you have to have put in the time to help them get to that point. So, while my notable S67 draftees (Keven Foreskin/Jeff Downey/Jaxon Walker) all finished the season in different places, I'd still push them to be the best they could be while I had them. I still stayed on top of waiver signings, and I like to think that the Hounds stayed a good place for new players even when we weren't winning. Some new names that signed with me despite knowing they wouldn't win a championship included Nate Telker (@Telkster's precursor to HoNB #8 subject Brendan Telker), Balentine Kidd (@TukTukTheGreat), Yeet Dabberson (recreate of my former AGM @Radcow), Block Buster (@Banana2311), and one of my favorite locker room additions in Jacob Perry (@Liberty_Cabbage), who ended up as a lower-end role-filler for a few VHL teams. While none of these players became VHL superstars, all made me glad to have them and I like to think we were a good place for them at the time. But the "not much" that was S67 turned into a competitive season in S68. First off, the draft was awesome. The Hounds headed into the draft with the #1 overall selection--which I traded straight-up for #2 so I could pick @Beaviss, but not at #1 like he wanted (a move that I kind of cringe at today but one I found funny in the moment). We followed that up with a string of picks that would define both that season and the next. First, we brought back S67 signing Balentine Kidd at #9 (because smart places promote from within). The second round saw Jerry Wang (then the second VHL player ever to be named Jerry, after mine a few draft classes earlier) and @ColeMrtz, a returning member who stayed fairly active for a bit and briefly made it as a VHLM GM. In the third, we picked first-gens Guy Sasakamoose (@Cxsquared, an underrated longtime Riga defender) and Patrik Tallinder (another underrated longtime Riga player managed by the recently returned @Patrik Tallinder). Our string of good picks would continue all the way until our selection of @Ricer13's Kris Rice at 43rd. Funnily enough, that last selection only happened because I traded up in the draft intending to select a player who I was surprised was still on the board...and then found out that the player I had my eye on had already been picked. Who could I have had instead of Ricer, you ask? None other than the biggest one-hit wonder I've ever seen--Sven Nyckel, who joined the league, dropped a 2300-word media spot, and disappeared immediately after the draft. Luck works in weird ways. We were pretty good, but after having depleted the entire roster, we were still mostly just a solid core lineup. We had holes on defense and at center, and I did my best to fill them. This was first addressed when I traded for @DizzyWithLogic's Finnegan MacBurn (who would unwittingly benefit us by going inactive right at the cap, at a time when such a player didn't have to be released. I don't want that to be the main point of Dizzy's time with us, though, because he was a great person to have around when active). I'd also never had a huge recreate signing yet, but this would finally change when none other than @Beketov signed with us at the deadline with future Hall-of-Famer and perennial Boulet winner Mikko Lahtinen. It's also worth pointing out that my original Houston roots still ran deep--our hole in net was filled by signing Aleksandr Aleksandrov, managed by my former teammate in @aleks. We had a legitimately good team--maybe not quite on top, but very good and a sneaky threat to make a deep playoff run. And then we lost right away, with an embarrassing series against Yukon featuring practically no scoring. We were shut out twice by my former player Block Buster, including a 1-0 Game 5 to end it all. It would be best not to dwell on that too deeply, though. We had all the draft capital in S69 that we did in S68, and this time I had players returning. Before making a single selection, I had Rice and Tallinder up front and MacBurn on defense. All would spend just about all of S69 fully capped, and we were ready to get down to business. Here's the thing--so was Saskatoon. Where we had #5, #8, and #11 in the first round (our maximum of three first-rounders!), they had #1, #2, and #3. Where we were picking at #20 and #22 in the second, they had #13 and #14. And that meant a lot when there were exactly 19 active players in the draft and we only half-hit on two of our first-rounders. The Wild would go 5 for 5 with their early selections, while our two seconds, two thirds, two fourths, fifth, sixth, and two sevenths translated to zero players who meant anything and our first round essentially just amounted to the solid choice of Jimmy Spyro (@DarkSpyro), who under us would blossom into a capped goaltender and well-known member. That was really disappointing, but the core we had in place already was still enough to make our roster look good. And as it turned out, a good roster in a season with a thin draft class is powerful. Because of all of these circumstances, Rice, Tallinder, and MacBurn absolutely exploded in S69. I reached out to San Diego and traded for Will Clarke (the last player I remember @Will managing before his current one), and we looked pretty good to go. But, again, so was Saskatoon. They went on a run managed by GM @Peace that I've never seen in any league of the VHL since, winning game after game and carrying a crazy undefeated streak deep into the season. Nobody could figure them out, not even in overtime, and they were destined to be the Cup champions. And then we took them down. 50 games into the season, and the Wild had just been figured out. And while this was just once, it was a flicker of hope. Across all my time as a GM, there isn't a single game I remember better than this one. Saskatoon also had a full roster where we didn't, and my solid reputation as a GM combined well enough with our regular-season success that we had a super strong pull on recreates at the deadline. Kyl Oferson (@Nykonax), Ola Vikingstad (@Dil), and Roque Davis (@Josh) all signed with the Hounds and had earned well enough to serve legitimate purposes in the playoffs. We beat Saskatoon again before season's end (and so did Mexico City--the Wild only lost 4 times, and it was twice to each of us). But it wasn't the win-50-games-in-a-row situation that it once was for them. They were still easily favored on paper, but we had a fighting chance and the balance of power had been somewhat adjusted. That wasn't before we got past the Kings, though. We'd finished second overall in the standings, but they weren't too far behind and were the only team that could realistically pose a threat to us before the final (we blew past Ottawa in the first round and I had to look at the index to even remember that). That said, we did have to go through them. We'd done better with recreates, though, and Nyko volunteered to obsessively test-sim for me behind the scenes. This led to a fairly decisive series win in which I got cocky and set all the strategy sliders to zero for the game that closed it out. And then there were two. You get one guess as to the other, and it was the team that hadn't lost a game in the playoffs yet. And we took it to Game 5! That's about all I'm going to say about the S69 finals. You know what happened and you know I didn't win it. But we still handed the Wild their fifth loss of the season and could claim that we were more of a speed bump to them than anyone else. I wasn't even disappointed! Luck wasn't on our side in the draft, but the players I'd hoped would get a second good look in S69 did end up with that chance and it was only because of a weird combination of not having active players to pick that the chance wasn't better. It was my best season as a GM to that point, and it would remain the deepest I've ever taken a team in their playoffs. This was, of course, the VHLM, and what that meant was that after a couple seasons of buying, it was time to burn down the team again. S70 was uneventful, underwhelming, and unmotivating--and that would also be when I moved up to GM Davos not long into the season. That is, obviously, a collection of stories for another time. Functionally speaking, my time as a VHLM GM spanned 4 seasons between S66 and S69. I never won a Cup and I never won the top GM award, but I sincerely believe that I was one of the M's best of the time. Now that Gustav 30 in 30 has closed its book on what I did in Mississauga, I hope you'll agree. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka): #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

Gee, I wonder where I've seen that in the VHL's development system before As much as I'm against relegation for practical reasons, I also like that it would make our last-place teams actually care about winning. I think term limits for GMs are also a good idea on principle but I don't like that it would probably lead to people burning all future assets in their last season and leaving the next one up with nothing to work with (and probably a nice side of relegation if we had both of those things). I do think that (E or not) only getting 8 games as a backup is kind of dumb. As far as I understand it there isn't a way to make fatigue matter between sims in a way that builds up over time, but I wish there were because it would make GMs really think about how to manage starts and incentivize having a decent backup.

I absolutely hate cilantro and get made fun of by lots of people I know from places where it’s very central to cooking. I can’t help what it tastes like to me

I have never said a word beyond "hi" to my next-door neighbor and I don't even remember the last time I did that. I never even saw my other next-door neighbors in person before they moved (though I heard them a lot) and their unit has been empty ever since. I don't know whether I like that or not. I think it would be interesting to go anonymous on the forum for a while, but people would figure it out pretty quickly if everyone kept just writing about their own player. Even things like writing style (I'm aware that mine rambles on in ways that most others don't) would mean something to people who know each other well. But I do think that there's an interesting motivation here and that's the fact that I'm sure username does dictate a lot of how someone's content receives interaction. I like to think that I usually look for things based on first impressions of title and things unrelated to author, but I'm sure some people click on both my stuff and your stuff because we wrote it. I wouldn't mind writing something generic and seeing the kind of feedback I'd get under those circumstances.

Reducing VHL unemployment since S65. It's true that I have an important job. It's true that I have a lot of posts, that people have liked those posts a lot, and that I'm a big fancy old guy who can make targeted attacks against you and your player specifically influence league policy through both my job and my role in the Board of Gustav. But I still find it hard to claim that I'm any more influential than I used to be. Maybe I'm a little more respected as the portion of people here newer than me continues to grow, but influential? I think I was at my peak as a VHLM GM. That influence stayed within our own team for the most part, while others just heard about it--but I've never been able to say that the work I put in to interact with people helped to shape them into active members quite as much since then. I won't tag everyone who played for me and eventually ended up in a management role of some sort, because that would be a few too many tags (). Instead, I'll point out a few who started on my teams and made it really far. I like to think that the work of @Ricer13 and @Berocka speaks for itself, and while I take zero credit for anything that's happened since S68 or so, I still think about their beginnings with the Hounds--Ricer as a then-pass-first forward who initially described himself as a "lurker" in our server after we drafted him late, and Berocka as a waiver signing who didn't even join our server at first and who we had to pressure a bit to talk to us. I think both of these were cases where the VHLM can really change the course of a person's involvement--I described in my first article here how I was very hesitant to say or do much at first, and the teams that go beyond a simple "welcome, tell me if you need anything" can make lots of things happen. VHLM GM is also the one job I've had where I feel no need to self-deprecate. I never won much on the VHL level, I've done some unpopular things and been less visible as a commissioner, there have been times where I've said things I now disagree with in BoG, and my heart was never in updating during the time when I did it. But I was really good in the M and I believe that on some level, the league has seen activity from people other than myself that may not have necessarily happened had my team been run by some other GMs of the day. This led to me writing up a statistical article a few seasons in where I concluded that people on my teams were more likely to get hired than people off of them. Looking back on the first one, this wasn't even true. It's a long story, but my analysis showed a p-value of about 0.2 and most stats people don't care until that goes under 0.05. Some of the comments I got weren't incredibly friendly, either--I managed to make it funny by joking about it on Discord a lot, but it definitely rubbed some people the wrong way. It was still a joke about 6 months later, and I still occasionally caught some snarky comments about it at that point, so I ran the numbers again. This time, it came with a better understanding of calculating statistical significance (along with a better understanding that maybe I shouldn't tag 27 people in passing mentions to get my point across). I had the right p-value in mind and put together an updated list. And lo and behold, after a few more seasons as a VHLM GM, it had become super-ultra statistically significant. In fancy statistical talk, our "null hypothesis" was "Gustav does not positively influence a member's chances of being hired" and the results pointed to strongly rejecting that statement. Like anything in stats, though, this isn't direct proof, and I also think that the multiple layers of interpersonal relationships and luck and whatnot that are separate from the numbers don't make any test like that definite. But I'd done my best to quantify it in a way that I've never seen anyone else do, and I think that in the end it is a real testament to my own effect on the VHLM (however seriously you want to take the results). In the end, 15 people who were either my teammate or a player I had GM'd (mostly the latter) got jobs as GMs or AGMs between S65 and S70--not counting three hires I'd made on my own terms by making my players my own AGMs. At a rate of about three hirings per season, I think that's pretty solid. So I hope you can forgive the ego stroking in this article, because it's kind of what I have to do to make it a readable piece about what I've done for the league's first-gens. What happened to these players on my teams is a different (and less biased) story from the player and team end, and I'll be happy to tell it soon. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka): #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

In which @Advantage accidentally offered me a $1 bonus, which I purposely accepted, which made the portal look like we were in cap trouble. Expansion was the name of the game back in the day. S65 saw the founding of the Moscow Menace franchise, along with two additions to the VHLM in Houston and Philly. I'd played for Houston and was fairly intrigued when I saw that the big league would be expanding again right in time for me to join it. The Malmo logo looked cool, the limited impressions I'd had of inaugural GM Advantage seemed positive, and I just really liked the idea of being a team's history rather than simply adding to it. They were also one of a handful of teams to actually scout me, which is something I don't care about as heavily now but did as a first-gen. In the days leading up to the draft, I had a good time taking in the new member experience. I remember @MubbleFubbles writing a mock draft that said some nice things about me, and I took that idea and made what's still one of my favorite articles ever--my own mock draft, 50 picks deep, that taught me everything I needed to know about every player when I was writing it. I really knew nothing ahead of time about who was going where, but correctly speculated on a bunch of things. Some that I'm proud of were Julius Freeman over Shane Mars to Vancouver at #2 overall, Apollo Hackett to Riga at #16, Edward Vigneault at #33, and Rhys Chism at #39--oh, and my very own Jerry Garcia, 7th overall to Malmo and the first player ever to be drafted to the Nighthawks. My mock was weirdly accurate with Malmo picks in general. I ended up joining Rusty Shackleford (@K1NG LINUS) and Nacho (@Nacci25), picked 17th and 37th overall in both my article and the actual draft. Also of note were goaltender Juan Jaundice (@Jus) and monster goon MORPHEUS DESTRUCTIOUS (@Abaddon), as well as Blake Laughton and @Grape, my VHLM teammate and the only other member of Malmo's inaugural draft class to be active today. I knew some of these people already, and the time that all were active was enough for me to get to know the rest. Our locker room was super active and a really fun place to be in general, removing quite a bit of the doubt that many players have when they leave the M. But of course, we were an expansion team that finished last in S66. Garcia played just-OK and wasn't really anything special despite having lots of empty space on the roster to stand out from. These trends would continue in S67, where the team got marginally better and so did Jerry. Worse, we already had a couple of our S66 picks go inactive. There was some sort of foundation built, at least (we drafted @Phil's Phil Marleau and @fonziGG's Michael Johnson, players that stuck with us at forward and in net for a while)--and we figured it wouldn't be too-too long before things started going the right direction. And go the right direction it did in just the next season--not only did we pick @OrbitingDeath 's Condor Adrienne (the best defenseman of the generation) at #1 after winning the draft lottery, but @Beketov's Matt Thompson (the best player of the S60s) signed with us in free agency for his last season. A few things happened in S68 that were really nice. First, Garcia had his best season on defense. His stats (60 points, 154 hits, and 150 SB) may not mean a whole lot to anyone used to the standards of the S90s, but they were pretty solid for that time and got me nominated for the Jake Wylde Trophy. And though the vote had solid support, it fell one short of winning. I still haven't won an individual award not named Campbell, and this was the closest I ever came. But I digress--S68 had a whole lot more going on as far as the team was concerned. We went from the VHL's basement all the way to the top, finishing first place in the standings and taking home the Victory Cup in just our third season of existence. At some point in our first few seasons--and I think it was here--Advantage became the first VHL member to ever hit 1000 wins as a GM. All of that was cool, and we carried that success into the playoffs, where regular-season MVP Thompson played so well--shooting at somewhere around 20%--that it drew accusations of sim rigging and the strongest demand for live sims up until that point. That's the reason why we have live sims today, actually--it's not a special event as much as it's proof that the simmer isn't cheating. The playoffs went very well, and we made the finals with the chance of becoming the earliest championship winners of any expansion team in the league's history. The finals had been simmed live before S68, so doing them this way was as much common practice as it was the result of peer pressure. So, we did them live--and although I never once believed that the sims were being rigged, the people who thought they were certainly had something to laugh at when we got swept by Seattle (whose core by this point was made up of multiple players who used to be my own first-gen players in the M). It was my first finals, and would remain so for quite a while. After S68, my player success (and my team success) declined steadily. I don't remember a whole lot about S69-71 as a player, to be honest--S69 was my best run as a VHLM GM (as I'll talk about in a future article), and I remember S70 being absolutely dominated by Moscow. Also during this time, Garcia somehow acted as Condor Adrienne's kryptonite. He didn't even steal stats, either, because his totals went down a little bit even as I kept adding to his TPE. But after S71, Advantage stepped down, @FrostBeard took over as GM and started the team's first rebuild, at the start of which he was gracious enough to give me a fair deal to move Garcia out to the Davos team I was then running. That's also a future article, but the long story short is that I made Jerry a winger and enjoyed a couple seasons of being half decent on my own underachieving team before retiring. Jerry Garcia would eventually finish his career with 420 points (an amazing coincidence). He never won a Cup or an award and was never really the top player on any of his teams. He doesn't even come close to making my own Hall of Not Bad series. In fact, I believe that he was the worst player to ever reach 1500 TPE back when 1500 TPE actually meant something. But even though his TPE total was his most impressive number, that's still representative of over a year of work that I put into making him what he was, and I have no regrets about it (not even the part where I built Passing over Scoring). Jerry taught me that I could make it in the VHL as more than just a flashy new kid, that I could earn with the best of them and build a player that most people still respected even when that didn't show up on the leaderboard. And I hope no one who played with him regretted it, either. There were lots of players drafted after 7th overall in S66, but none of them can say that they were Malmo's first choice--and I like to think Malmo wouldn't have had it any other way.

Probably the only time @Beketov has ever agreed with me in BoG, and it was before I was ever part of it. The VHL has seen its share of TPE inflation over the years. The update scale used to max out at 9 TPE until that was changed at some point in the S50s. Things like doubles weeks and predictions and fantasy zone consistently give us more than we're guaranteed to earn every week. Plus, we now have one more season to earn with, a depreciation system that I hate, and new systems like catch-up TPE that do make VHL life more fair but do so by...giving out more TPE. Really, the only change I've ever seen that cut down on TPE inflation was a scale-back of the amount that could be earned through Fantasy Zone every week, when the way it worked more or less made the weekly cap 15 when you bothered to do it and make reasonable guesses. Well, almost. The only other one I can think of was the abolishment of the VHL lottery--and also the first real change I ever advocated for on the forum. If you were around when I joined the league, chances are that you remember the lotto. Chances also are that you haven't thought about it in a while. If you aren't familiar with the system, it's more or less exactly what it sounds like. Back before my time, it was run by @Smarch and featured a poll at the top of a forum thread that people could answer, with each answer constituting an entry to the lottery. Each week, a winner would be chosen from that field of answers at random. Which was fine--except that no one liked it. So, at some point not long before I joined the league, the lottery system was overhauled. This time, instead of purely random based on one entry, VHL leadership decided to try to tackle two things at once and make the lottery a way to make game threads more active. This was in the days before game reviews were a thing, and there wasn't really any reason to comment on game threads unless (gasp) you wanted to use the VHL for its intended purpose of getting to know people and having real human interaction. Which, of course, no one really cares about unless you force them to (a mindset that I've always seen here on some level and never really liked). It seemed like a really good idea to reward those who were doing that and making the forum a more active and readable place. But what was never addressed was the fact that there was really nothing stopping anyone from trying to stuff their own box by just commenting everywhere...and getting tons of chances. As far as I understand it, this really took off in S65 with the emergence of the S66 draft class. You'll know by now that we were historically large, historically new, and historically active. That also made many of us historically competitive--and waving "there's a positive correlation between the number of comments you leave on game threads and your TPE" under our noses wasn't something that took people very long to figure out. Take a scroll through the S65 Games section for the VHLM and tell me what you see--tons of comments on every game thread, all of which were made by the same handful of people. These people were doing nothing wrong, just taking an opportunity they were given. Still, it didn't quite match the intended purpose of promoting discussion--because everyone openly did not care about discussion. I remember talking about the lottery on a few different occasions with @Renomitsu and @rjfryman--two people who took full advantage of the system--and they'd openly admit that the reason why they posted everywhere was that the way things were set up was designed in a way that made that choice one that was in their best interest. This was more than fair enough, and the benefit that it served their players was sizable--eventual Hall-of-Famer Julius Freeman would enter the draft second in the class in TPE as a first-gen. I'd comment on things when I felt like it and a few times ventured into lotto-whoring territory, winning something a couple times but not going as far as some others had. That still didn't stop me from taking issue with how things went--after all, it felt kind of dumb to open up my team's thread and see it already commented on by people who probably didn't care how my team did in the slightest. So, for the first time ever in the VHL, I took matters into my own hands. I considered this suggestion thread my magnum opus at the time, and it was called "FIX THE LOTTERY SYSTEM GODDAMMIT", with the last word specifically added because I was under the impression that there was some study showing that cursing in the title of a book made it more likely to be bought (I can't find that, but there are a lot of online articles about that topic in general). I had done well as a player up to that point, was doing pretty well as a GM, and was ready to start throwing my VHL influence around. People largely seemed to agree with me in the replies, which felt really good, and it felt even better when I suggested in a status update that people start throwing around a "#fixthelottery" or two in their game thread comments. Some people actually did, and I had a cool week or so when I had backup every time a sim went up. I'm not sure exactly when the lottery was fixed, but it happened pretty quickly. The league went back to its old system (one entry in a separate random draw), which was closed entirely before long. The changes to the lottery had created a weird system that I'm sure would have been changed eventually no matter what, but I was the first one to really jump on it. You'll notice a natural progression in these articles, as time goes on and the stories become more recent, where I move a little bit away from my achievements as a player or as a GM and a little bit more into the administrative side of things. That will also come with more "making things happen" than experiencing things on my own. I'm glad I've experienced both, and that there was a time when was heavily involved in both at once. 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

Is this common knowledge? It's the first time I've heard of it. This wasn't even intentional but I don't think I ever said TXC. I would have been fine switching if you asked but I don't think it ever would have occurred to me to do that normally. Wasn't there some day when Devise took control of your account and posted a few stupid things on it, and didn't that happen around the same time as TXC? I remember for some reason thinking that your name was switched by someone other than yourself and you just decided to roll with that for a while. Maybe I'm just making things up. I actually really like the name Hogan and I think it works well in a sim league where a lot of us know each other by more "normal" sounding names than just gamer tags. For context, I got my original username (and therefore my current one) by just rearranging the name of a bass player from a band I don't even really listen to anymore. My name isn't actually Gustav, but I've found that I love that that's how people know me because it works exactly the same as if it were. I'm familiar to people and it doesn't sound fake.

The very first messages in the Hounds server. There's a gap in my message history on the forum between April 3rd and 7th, 2019--that unfortunate period of time I described in my last article where I was busy being nonexistent as a GM in the World Juniors and not having access to my computer. Having things go the way they did might lead many people, myself included, to believe that I wasn't quite cut out for a job as GM. And as justifiable as that may have been, it didn't stop me from applying for a real GM job just four days later on the 11th. Fortunately for myself and others, the league was at the start of a massive period of growth, and jobs were available. In this case, three new teams were being added to the VHLM--the Hounds, Marlins, and Kings. Lots of first-timers had applied for the job, many deserving, but I'd point to a bit of unintentional campaigning as something that made the difference. I'd been into the VHL Discord server a handful of times before, but hadn't gone too deep on a leaguewide basis and didn't have a whole lot of personal interaction that would have made people outside of Houston know me and like me. That would change, though, when I opened up the server to some "getting hired" talk featuring a member named Goonie, one of the other applicants. Goonie was nice. We spent some time talking about our interests in the league, what we intended to do with a team if we got one, and all that. I learned that Goonie was an alias of an older member who wanted a bit of a fresh start, and so it meant something nice to me when we agreed to promote each other in the quest for a job--in the simplest of ways by my posting #hiregoonie and his replies of #hiregustav. We were serious about it, and it's also important to note that when you're active and interacting with others in a positive way, the league will notice. In the end, both Goonie and I got a team. Goonie was hired as inaugural GM of the San Diego Marlins (and just about immediately after ditched the fake name for his old one, @InstantRockstar), and I was brought on as the one who would kick off a legacy in Mississauga. There were a few things I knew I valued from the start. Every GM wants an active server, but I saw how much @Rin had tried with us in Houston and wanted to give that back to my own team. In fact, I loved the Houston server so much that the first version of the Hounds server was almost an exact carbon copy of Houston--the only channel I remember adding on my own terms was #music-sharing, an extremely minor change that just served as my outlet for dumping things I wanted to share on people. I immediately hired @Radcow, a friend of mine from Houston, as my AGM, and we went to work going over the draft lists and getting ready for our first draft in league management. And what. a. draft. that was for us. We took care of goaltending right away by selecting @Rayzor_7 and Rayz Funk 3rd overall, and then turned around and picked @Hogan and his namesake player Hulk Hogan at 22nd. Both eventually spent the bulk of their careers with Seattle and made the Hall of Fame. Our third pick (33rd) featured Cody Smith and @cody73, who would turn out to be a solid VHL-level depth piece as a player and an AGM in a couple different places as a member. Way later on in the draft, too, we were fortunate enough to select Scott Greene, yet another longtime Bear, managed by one of my favorite members of all time in @DoktorFunk. Though I would only invite a few people in from elsewhere, we had way more than enough to keep our server popping, and it positively popped all season long. This didn't even stop at the draft, either--someone you may know as another-future-Seattle-Bear @Berocka joined us through the waiver wire (and I had to send a second DM to get him in our server because he thought I was a bot or something at first). Perhaps the most telling with respect to servers popping was that Seattle GM and VHLM Commissioner @Banackock had access to our server through his role--and you may have noticed a certain VHL team in common among my three most distinguished picks and my most distinguished signing. I won't act like I wasn't lucky to stumble upon such a great group of new members so early on, nor that this wasn't most of the reason our server was as active as it was. But for all Houston was, and for all we heard Philadelphia was, in S65, I like to think that Mississauga was the place to be in S66. Constantly active, overflowing with much of the league's next generation, and even free of the drama that had plagued those other two places a season before and in article #2 of this series. The first Hounds team wouldn't go too far. We were led by VHLM MVP (and S65 Bull) Callum MacElroy, had developed our picks like no one's business, and firmly established ourselves as a competitive playoff team, but just didn't have the resources to spend that teams like (ugh) Philly did and got smacked around in the playoffs. I'd accomplished something big nonetheless by leading a team--this time the right way--and served the actual purpose of the VHLM by showing people a good time and helping them make it big on the next level. And, more importantly for me, I now had people who looked up to me and I felt respected as a more "established" member of the VHL. For all intents and purposes, I'd accomplished what was on my mind for myself. 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?

I'm a nerd for many reasons, but one of those reasons is that I'm a little overly interested in geography. By that, I don't mean anything useful, like understanding how topographic features affect weather patterns or human migration or anything. I mean all the dumb stuff like knowing where to find any country on a map, learning the location of each of Ohio's 88 counties, or digging into the history of abnormal features like what the border used to look like between India and Bangladesh. Along the way, I've come across lots of different places that I find interesting for one dumb reason or another, and I'm going to try to match some VHL teams to those places for the purposes of rebranding. Gaffney, South Carolina - the "Peach Capital of South Carolina," Gaffney is known pretty much entirely as the site of the iconic Peachoid water tower. Because of this, the Gaffney Peaches would be a super gimmicky team name. As it's very close to Spartanburg, I think @Spartan and Moscow would be a nice target for relocation here. Kanorado, Kansas - named the way it is because of its location near the state line with Colorado, Kanorado is near Mount Sunflower, the highest point in the entire state. Although Mount Sunflower isn't at all distinguishable from the land that surrounds it, I think that's part of what makes it cool and I think the 153 people living in Kanorado could use a hockey team to make them a bit more distinguishable from the rest. The Kanorado Sunflowers make natural sense to me, and I'd move Saskatoon here because they're already in very flat territory and could get used to it pretty quickly. Greensburg, Kansas - I swear I'll move out of small towns in Kansas after this one, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a place with a more compelling history. Greensburg was completely wiped out by a tornado in 2007, and since completely rebuilt. For that reason, I'd move Chicago here and keep the Phoenix nickname--it's arguably much more fitting here than there. Oh, and it's also the site of the world's largest hand-dug well! Seville, Ohio - proclaiming itself as "a giant of a village" on multiple signs throughout town, I've actually visited this one and was surprised by how much they lean into their most distinguishing feature--that being the home and burial site of the world's tallest married couple. I suppose it's better to focus on that than to draw attention to being the retirement home of Jeffrey Dahmer's father, and it's for that reason that I'll suggest that they go full tacky and welcome the Seville Giants to town--relocated from New York, because New York already has a team called the Giants and I think it would be funny to get rid of a different team in favor of the name. Kennebunkport, Maine - the most well-off place I've ever been to, Kennebunkport is about an hour away from Portland and is the vacation home of the Bush family (as in, both American presidents). I think this would be an interesting social experiment in that a team here could conceivably charge a whole boatload of money to people who have whole boatloads to throw around. Could they balance the budget of a team on a town with somewhat limited population? Quite possibly--and though I'm not 100% sure I love the name, perhaps the Kennebunkport Executives would have to do. I'd move (gasp) Davos here as it's a small-population, rich-people place who probably knows a thing or two. Boonville, California - not in a part of the state that's commonly visited, Boonville is isolated from lots of other places out on the West Coast--which could certainly have been a factor in the development of a language entirely specific to Boonville. The name could come from any word at all in Boontling, but I like the Boonville Bootjacks a lot because the words sound similar and "Bootjacks" just means "Coyotes"--something that's already a thing in the hockey world. Out of all the teams the league has to offer, I think Ottawa, being very wildcat-ish itself and having (in my opinion) a relatively boring logo and a name that's just ripped from their defunct minor league baseball team, could benefit from placement here. Amboy, California - with a population of 4, Amboy isn't the first place one would expect to have an iconic site that's come up in lots of familiar media, but Roy's Motel and Cafe is just that. The reason why both of these things are true is that the town was once a big stop on America's famed Route 66, and is one of many that serve as a memory of what once was. The Amboy Jets would be a nice fit with some of the architecture that defined the town's heyday, and it's for that reason that I'd also move New York here on the same basis as I did for the Giants above. I hope you enjoyed my list of places and that you found them entertaining (and that you learned a thing or two about some of the more unique places the US has to offer!). Come and visit sometime.

In perhaps the most meta image the VHL has ever seen, here's my computer with this article in progress. I've had the same laptop the whole time I've been in the VHL--so imagine how many times I've pressed the space bar you see here for your enjoyment. There have been thirteen World Junior Championships in the VHL since I took part in my first one back in S65. And before you ask, that one was a nightmare. The WJC is a big opportunity for anyone new looking to make a difference. It's true that not many people care about the tournament if they're not in it. It's also true that not many people in our tournaments care about them. But for many, it's a big deal. That's especially true when those people are very new and are finally getting a chance to get their hands on STHS. And it was true for me as well when I applied to run Team USA in hopes of GMing my player to success. I'd never touched the STHS client before and I was ready to do what I'd seen in my own locker room in terms of helping players have a good time. I didn't get exactly what I asked for, but it still felt great to be picked as GM of Team Asia. That feeling didn't even change when I found that there weren't enough players eligible for my team, or that the ones I had were mostly inactive. Lots of people wanted a WJC job, and it felt really good to be important. I picked my roster, made the right complaints, and soon received notice that I could fill in those inactive spots with players that had been left off of other teams. And that helped to some extent--we still had a worse roster than most other teams, but I at least brought in a few people that helped us out. @Kuch9's Viktor Kozlov and @xsjack's Jack Lynch were wrecking the M at the time, while I always appreciated seeing "Srraxxarrakex II" (I wonder how many others can spell that!) on the play-by-play. I announced the roster and sent out the proper invites, and then I got in the business of figuring out how to run STHS. And then I broke my computer. Running STHS on Mac is something that's been figured out by different people, in one way or another, over the years, but no one I knew had done it and neither did anyone they knew. The STHS client is Windows software, meaning that you'll need to find a workaround if you want to get your hockey jollies with any other OS. These workarounds exist for Mac, but they're janky to say the least--I eventually came across one fully functioning, but that was after I spent $100 on Parallels (a program that drained both my battery and my storage). Before "eventually," I found out how to make it work on a very janky level with Wine. Do you enjoy not being able to see where you just put your players in your lineup and just having to remember? I've got quite the program for you if you do. Many of you know that I'm not great with computer stuff, so I'm also assuming that you know how much of an accomplishment it was that I got it to work to begin with. The STHS website has two "versions" of the client, one for Windows and one that's allegedly for Mac. The thing is, the Mac "version" is the same exact .exe file as the Windows one, and the only difference is that it downloads itself in a folder with a text file that basically tells you you're shit out of luck. I don't remember this file being particularly helpful to me, and that's what led to me eventually finding my way to Wikihow trying to figure out how I could open this thing with my computer. "Download Wine" seemed easy enough, so I followed the link that was on Wikihow and clicked the button to download the software. That popped up a window that wasn't clear at all as to its purpose, but had a button that said "continue" or something similar. So, I clicked that...and watched as my computer installed some random antivirus software. Shit. I found the actual button that got me past that window quickly enough and downloaded Wine for real. From there, it was about three straight hours of trial and error as I clicked things, first trying to get the software to open, then trying to open the client file from the index, then trying to figure out how to put players in my lines, then finally generating a lines file and emailing it to Devise. All was well and good and the world had no worries in it. That was, of course, until my computer slowed to a crawl and refused to do anything I wanted it to. I really hadn't paid attention to this random thing that was sitting in my downloads folder because I didn't see anything happening with it right away, but here I was a couple days later with a nonfunctioning computer and a few searches on my phone warning me that this program (I forget what it was called) was straight-up malware that I was dumb enough to install. Deleting it didn't fix anything, so I ended up having to take it to the Apple store and hearing that they'd be happy to reset it for me, and by the way, that will be $800 (seriously), and, oh right, you have AppleCare (a 1-year policy that came with this thing and that I'm very happy I was still under the terms of at the time), so you'd better thank your lucky stars you won't have to pay that much. I didn't have a functioning computer, so it wasn't a big deal for me to just not have a computer altogether in the week or so they took to reset it (I'm also not sure why that took as long as it did either). During this time, I didn't have any real-life setbacks beyond having to convince a professor that I couldn't do the homework because my computer was broken--something that I'm sure he heard as a fake excuse all the time, because he definitely never believed me. That also led to me dropping off the face of the VHL Earth for close to a week. Regardless, I'd sent in my lines and I hoped my team had done well despite me not being around Discord much (don't ask me why I never checked in on my phone, because I have no idea). I was not altogether surprised, but still disappointed, to find out that a.) Team Asia had gotten absolutely bodied in the first round of the tournament and wouldn't be progressing to the next ones, and b.) I had managed to screw up the lines (because I didn't know I had to hit "copy all") and everything past our first game was simmed with auto-generated lines. Asia did manage to pull off a win--despite the index no longer existing, comments on this thread tell us that we managed to beat Europe--but that was it. Team Asia was Team Disappointment for the rest of the games we played and had the GM to match. But after the tournament, I'd learned a lot. I'd put together a team and thought about how I would hypothetically manage them had I had the means to do so, I learned that the community saw me as good enough to do something cool in an official capacity, and I learned that I really cared about those things after I had them taken away for a bit. And, for better or for worse, in my own janky way, I made STHS work on a MacBook. That's something that would set the stage for...quite a bit. And there's quite a bit more personal history, and some marginally better GM accomplishments, on the way. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along?

Maybe that's why you turned out OK I think my perspective of being mostly on the outside of things looking in contributed to the fact that I'm still usually in popcorn mode when one drama or another fires up here. Granted, I'll still do the right things as my job calls for them. But if it's got nothing to do with that, I don't mind that sometimes there's a thread that makes me feel like I'm back in the good old days. I'll never try to start things with anyone for no reason but there was something intoxicating about being around that when it was happening. Almost like there was something new for me whenever I opened my computer after work.

Imagine being from Boston. Your city is big, important, and historically relevant. You're in a crowd of some of the most passionate sports fans around. You love a good bowl of clam chowder and you find it a little bit charming that you can sometimes tell who's your neighbor by listening to the way that they talk. It's a much better existence than that dump over in New York, where the people sound funny, the Giants fans won't stop reminding you of what Eli Manning did to the Pats, and don't even get you started on their idea of pizza! But what's to stop them from feeling the same sort of pride in themselves and the same sort of derision towards you? After all, you sound funny to them, the helmet catch was pretty sweet, and maybe living in a heavily Italian area has given some people a pretty good idea of how to make a pie. It's obvious to most on either side who take the time to think about it that all these things are silly, but that doesn't even stop lots of people who think it's silly to think that way from doing so regardless. I've seen this come up in the VHL time and time again over the years, which will make this a perfect intro to at least one other article I have lined up, but here it shall fit as I'm doing my best to put things in chronological order. My first experience with VHL tribalism came not long after I signed up. I distinctly remember one of my very first questions in the Bulls server being related to team rivalries and who I should write articles about--which led to me writing some of the anti-Halifax pieces I alluded to in my last article--but something a little more serious than friendly rivalry between @Rin and @McWolf was more serious conflict that arose between the VHLM's two expansion franchises that season, boiled over into personal issues between members, and had effects that persisted for seasons longer than they should have. Anyone who was around at the time is probably aware that I'm talking about Houston and Philadelphia and the conflict between Sonnet and inaugural Reapers GM @BladeMaiden. I'm going to stay out of anything personal related to this because I feel that isn't quite my story to tell, but I think there was a lot to sort out from the perspective of the players themselves. The expansion teams in S65 had quite a bit in common that would naturally lead to competition. They were led by very active first-time GMs with one or two seasons of VHL experience, they started with similar assets, and they both featured team servers that were among the most active the league has ever had to offer. VHLM expansion then was symbolic of a whole lot more than just having more teams--the league had just started to boom, its then-largest-ever draft class had just opened the floodgates, and everyone was out to prove that they were important in this whole sea of newness. And where most teams were active and built their identities on positively representing themselves to the wider community, Houston and Philly were really active and got there by hating each other. In my almost-30 seasons in the VHL, I've never seen anything like it and I've really never seen anything close. Both teams were full of first-gens (hello to fellow S65 Bull @Grape!) and the bad thing about that, if someone chooses to manipulate it, is that first-gens are super impressionable. I'm unfamiliar with how things got started in the way they did. All I know is that not long after I'd joined the team, I'd read through some really nasty exchanges on the forums, been snapped at a few times myself with not much reason, and heard a lot secondhand. Beyond just whatever GM conflict there may have been, the players were heavily involved. In Houston, we were never mobilized to join in arguments, nor were we ever told what to think (something that I don't think could have been said the same both ways. @FrostBeard has a great thread covering the Reapers' side of things that also happens to explain a lot about some of the interactions I remember having with people I'd have no reason to dislike normally). That said, we certainly had enough exposure to the situation that we knew what to think anyway and were often fueled by the need to do what we thought was necessary to defend our team. I remember being part of some Discord arguments. I remember being angry at some forum topics that should have had nothing to do with me. And you know what? It probably helped keep me active. I had people in Houston that I considered my friends and I wanted to see them treated right. I wasn't about to walk away from that situation. People who played for the Reapers probably felt the same way, and though my perspective is probably biased, it seemed absolutely insane how deep that ran. I remember multiple occasions when I saw one person fighting with someone else--and within a few minutes, that amped itself up into three or four. I don't believe any of the worst offenders there are still in the league, and I also can't say I'm disappointed by that. What I am disappointed by is some of the negative fallout that caused for some. I talked to a handful of people at the time who felt that they were treated very unfairly, and I remember a particularly unpleasant experience had by one of our active first-gens that he later cited as a major reason why he left the league altogether. Were this only a GM problem, it would be one thing. But players came to believe that being part of the problem equated to being part of things in general, and some who wanted to be important got sucked too far into that. It was also a shame that it led me to think negatively of some people who played for the Reapers (Frost is one example, but I can think of others) who weren't even part of the problem. I'm sure that some people also associated me negatively with the Bulls. And there was no reason why that should have been the case--former S65 Reapers like @McLovin and fellow Buffalo expat @DMaximus are people I genuinely like and people who I've never seen trying to fight anyone. But that sort of thing was hard to see in the moment when I saw others who I won't name coming after my GM and teammates simply for existing. It's something that I never hope to see again in the VHL and it's a problem that I'm glad to say our current group of GMs never has. It also happened to be something that was on my mind quite a bit in my first VHL season, enough so that there has to be some way that it shaped my course as a member. I think it made me realize early on that GMs are only human and that not every person I met online is worth my time and effort in stressing about. But do you know what else I learned? I had enough fun anyway that I learned that that's OK. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name