Gustav

👁️

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 don't want this to be taken the wrong way (nor do I want to make the point too strongly) because I'm aware that I was one of the names Mubbles mentioned and I'm not trying to say that it should have been me or whatever. But it did seem weird to me that we went from "here are a few people" to "ok here's the nominee" over the course of no posts.
 
Perhaps with a handful of people who joined around the same time, with many probably being similar levels of deserving, next season could warrant a dedicated builder discussion just so we can make sure we have some things said about the group in general? Ideally we would be able to get that done in the normal thread too, but you never know.

Honestly, once we're down to a yes or no on someone, it would be a really bad look for anyone to start pushing hard against it. I've already voted yes and have no issue with that. I think the weirder thing this season was that we just jumped right to that point (rather than no discussion after). 
 
That said, I don't think recent history has followed the practice of inducting people just for the sake of it. It will be interesting to see how things shake out with our "newer generation" or whatever you want to call us.

Here is your roster for the Steel in the upcoming Junior Showcase Tournament!
 
Forwards:
RW - Matteo Stefano @mmrs617
C - Tommy Shelby @Will
LW - Phil Sakic @Phil
C - Nicholas Sunderbruch Jr. @NickSunderbruch
LW - Clapbomb Bardownski III @Eb14
RW - Captain Nugget Jr. @Captain nugget
C - Lightning McSnipe @Langostine
RW - Trevon Rider @bjackson54
LW - Yuki Ishikawa @LilacTwilight
RW - Damo Garland @dmxg444
 
Defence:
Andrew Skilton @ace_five_
Lazlo Holmes @Gustav
Alphonse Dejardins @Anthique
Boris Bone-Breaker @RileyL
 
Goalie:
Jon Webber III @Webberj
 
 
And for your captains this tournament I present you:
 
Captain - Phil Sakic
Alternate Captain - Lazlo Holmes
Alternate Captain - Matteo Stefano
 
 
Good luck to the other teams in the tournament, and let the best Steel Win!
 

I don’t know how I missed this going up initially but out of everything in here I really like this one (as well as the cap of 6 in pay). I don’t like it when people stop posting because they no longer have to post. 
 
That’s part of the reason why I still do media spots—I like them, first of all. But I also feel like if I can’t still pull the weight of earning mostly as normal, I shouldn’t have the job that assumes I can. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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

TALLY HO LADS

Love playing with you all. Hats off to everyone, first few games I was able to pretty much sheep everyone like when I told the jailer I was lookout and the entire mafia was guarding him lolz
 
The skill level of everyone has risen so much since then and that plus always being suspicious of eaglesfan always makes the games a fun challenge 

Good stuff man. You've brought a lot of entertainment and joy to a lot of people thanks to your efforts in ToS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?