Spartan

Ngl if I had picked someone else I would have hit 1k words, I thought I would hit it without detailing another forward. I overestimated myself, sadge

Funnily enough, this was the theme week prompt back in October 2020, which I'm guessing was either S73 or S74. Check out that old ass podcast with Fishy and Moose here. Back then, I selected a team based on who I'd want to play with, and I'll do the same here with the caveat that I won't repeat the players/users selected the first go around. S73 Dream Team: Kevin King (Moose) - SS Hornet (McWolf) - Onde Sandstrom (Fonzi) Matty Socks (Fishy) - Oscar Lagesson (Fever) Raymond Bernard (Hatter) Forwards: LW - Aloe Dear - @Renomitsu My most difficult omission on my original team was of course Reno, who I believe had just created Aloe Dear. About eight seasons later, I finally get to say that I would have loved to have played with Aloe without it being considered tampering. Aloe was one of the most productive wingers in the latest expansion era, finishing her career with 329 goals and 455 assists for a whopping 784 points in 576 games. An absolute force of nature in S78 winning the Slobo, Beketov, Campbell and Szatkowski while leading Warsaw to their first Continental Cup, Dear is probably the easiest decision for me to bring onto this dream team. C - Taro Tsujimoto - @Gustav I don't think I knew Gus extremely well back in S74, if we even spoke at all outside the Town of Salem games. However he's someone that I enjoy chatting with and having arguments discussions with since I can rely on him being fairly rational. Taro arguably could have been one of the best centers of the last decade, but he seemed to suffer from the Davos curse and seemingly flew under the radar for most of his career until S80 when he won the Campbell for nearly single-handedly driving Davos into the playoffs. Underrated user and player, but not one I'll pass over for my dream team! RW/LW - Nico Pearce - Myself I passed over myself last time, so I get to actually be in the company of the users and players that I want to play with this time. Nico has yet to really prove himself in the VHL, but he's a 630+ TPE sophomore winger that has another 7 seasons left in the league. Am I banking on a high ceiling and sentimentality here? Yes. Defensemen: D - Battre Sandstrom - @Acydburn Battre's another player that flew under the radar, taking a few seasons to really get going before enjoying a mid-season explosion into a top-tier defenseman. Acyd as a user is probably one of the people I willingly DM the most, either to complain about shit or problem solve when issues pop up. Even before I joined the BoG, Acyd was always willing to listen to ideas and then pass them on to the best people's club with his stamp of approval, or at the least, agreement that my idea had some merit. We as a league don't appreciate him or Sandstrom as much, but I'll show him some love here D - Max Torq - @Steve Frankly when I traded Letang to LA in exchange for 1st overall, I was resigned to a shitty season and figured I wouldn't be very active in the LR. Letang was just going to gasp through the season and then retire, but LA wanted to move 1oa and Moscow needed to stop Riga from selecting Bek. To my surprise, one of the best parts of LA wasn't the massive personal success I had there, but actually meeting Steve. His exit from Toronto a few seasons sooner on Merrick was messy and everyone heard of it, but to my pleasant surprise, Steve was one of the nicest people I've met in the league. We used to chat weekly, although now it's dropped down in frequency a bit to monthly. But he's always pleasant to chat with, and I'm glad he even enjoyed some Calvin and Hobbes comics with me as well. I wished we could have selected Torq in the draft, but his earning simply made him a top prospect and one who most definitely wouldn't drop down to Moscow. Since the chances are very low that we get to team up again with these players, I'll have to settle with having him on my dream team. Goalie: G - Papa Emeritus - @Beketov/ Leroy Johnson - @Vkobe-v Is there any other choice I can go with here? Our current goalie tandem in Moscow is arguably the best in the league, even when Papa has some terrible sims here and there. I'll continue to have faith in our two goalies who have been fantastic locker presences and just good folks to be around. Papa is the present and future for Moscow, and even Leroy has been stealing wins for us with a 15-4 record across two seasons. But even in a dream, I can hope that Papa plays like he does in the playoffs and continues to get more shutouts. I'm sure Bek will be dreaming of the same.

wrong

I don't think the issue with the meta is that "passing doesn't matter" and everyone is ignoring that other attributes like Discipline, Penalty Shot, Leadership aren't significant. It's been proven with tests that even an individual 99 SC/40 PA build is actually the optimal build for stats, and a full team of min/maxing SC/PA players is statistically going to outperform. Compound it with the fact that a "meta" build can be very TPE efficient that then results in a lower cap hit, making the optimal roster quite cheap, and that's where you have the "meta" issue. We'd have the same issue if PA was useful and say 60 SC and 80 PA became proven to be the best build. When an optimal build is figured out, and it becomes cap efficient to roster a full team of those builds, we end up with the problem we face now. It's not that people are annoyed with simply prioritizing SC, the majority of the league does that. But now the blueprint is basically set in stone that teams should be aiming for 99/40 builds since they're proven to be the most effective both individually and as a team composition, and the most cap efficient as well. That's why the BoG is working to eliminate the current meta and attempting to create some build diversity at the same time.

He's been making it up really quickly alongside Chara, he should be in the positives pretty soon! Rumors have it that The Seabasstard has consumed all the beer in the Menace's stadium and forces his teammates to drink as well. They're really only sober-ish on the road I have faith, Power had some nice sims recently and has been playing a lot better with Markinson as his partner instead of Moreau. I see good times ahead!

10000% correct, 15 goals and 17 assists and showing up a lot more recently after the lines changes. I'll always be super appreciative that we were able to trade our S82 1st instead of our S81 1st when we wanted to move up. Sergey has been a super underrated yet crucial contributor!

I think we settle this with a @Beketov and @Vkobe-v deathmatch

VHL Wordle https://vhl-wordle.herokuapp.com 14 3/6

@Berocka LOL, I had an unpublished podcast that was #13 so I just breezed over to #14. I deleted 13 and updated 14 back to 13, that's pretty funny though. Thanks for the catch. Also I wasn't recording on Anchor for #10-#11 so I had to just guesstimate what episode I was on, that's probably why I doubled it up in my intros lol. By the time I got home to publish it, I forgot what I said in the intro. I don't think there's a great chance of new career tasks by TDL unfortunately. We did chat about linking stuff to player pages as an incentive to complete, but we're still discussing potential changes to the tasks themselves rather than incentives to complete them. Plus with a bunch of test sims and data gathered to try and get a meta-solution rolled out ASAP, I don't think much effort is going to go into career task changes until this offseason or next season.

Also, you sleazebag with like 2 minutes of outro music to hit the 30 minute mark.

If I quit financier, how would I maintain the reputation of the most financially corrupt staff member??? Who would the community blame for everything??? How do I flame mods in the staff chat??? I think it's crucial that I remain financier to keep all of these points ongoing.

You're right, it's no fun to not know when a fix is coming. As a GM/general member, I wanted a fix yesterday. Do you really think I'm content with doing nothing after losing in the finals twice to Vancouver? I can say that we want to implement something this offseason but we're not rushing into a fix. If people have ideas for a stopgap measure that doesn't involve rerolls, feel free to lay them out. We'll listen and see if it makes sense, we've done it with other community proposals. I can also see from a financier standpoint, if there's a way to tweak salary brackets to target meta builds to make them more expensive as a stopgap measure. It'd also have to go through commissioners at the least, but I hope that's enough of an effort for you. I can't speak for the BoG or the league, but I hope that you don't worry anymore about how seriously at least I and others taking the issue. The last two finals are still fresh in my mind.

DoubleTroubles really busted out the EFL presentation style to bury the meta discussion thread. What a guy

I mean, outside of a few people who seem to have more radical views regarding the meta, I don't think anyone is coming after you, or Thad, or Cow, or anyone else on the team individually for the issue. Obviously the organization was built in a certain way, so the entire organization is going to get the heat for it. Clearly some of the accomplishments of the team aren't regarded favorably around the community. You or Thad didn't make the decision to build the team it was it has, but you guys get lumped in with the community's dislike of the team because you're reaping the benefits. I see Jerome Reinhart's record breaking playoff success and think less of it, knowing that in the back of my mind, there was an exploit that played a role in it. I don't hate Cow for that, so I'm not going to bash him. I just don't respect the accomplishment much because of how I perceive the team's composition impacted it.

Yeah, this sums up the anger pretty well. I don't get why people brush over the fact that there are other GM's in the BoG as well, who can see the data. We have the source files, it's uploaded to an index for our viewing. We see every players ratings, the stats, and it's simmed by Bek himself. There's literally no way for the data to be biased without someone noticing.

I mean, we're also not rushing into a change like the SHL did when they faced this issue. Has FHM really been any better for the league? It's arguably a lot more difficult to fix the issue with the limitations of STHS than to just switch sim engines and how the league operates in terms of updating and simming. As for the three season point, the first season could be shrugged off because it was one season. Clearly you don't make knee jerk reactions off of one season. The second season was like "ok, this isn't great, let's figure something out." Now we're like two weeks into the third season. How much faster of a timeline do we expect here?

We'd rather not require the entire league to reroll multiple times, which is what a stopgap and final measure would require. We can't just bump up anyone with less than the gap for free, it'd mess with TPA brackets for the salary and also give people TPE they haven't earned. I've seen in the SHL how annoying it is to get every team to submit regression in a timely manner each offseason. Imagine if we have to reroll everyone in the league not once, but twice. It'd be time consuming and for what? Just to need another reroll hopefully within a season when the final solution is implemented. I agree, it sucks that we can't just implement something easily and quickly. However I think the league is having a fun time bashing Vancouver. Good way to bring us all together lol.

No sorry, we're targeting you specifically!

hurry up

Can't really compare literal irl skills to numbers tho, and his usage was correct in this instance. There is a known meta build, that leads to more wins if executed in a certain way. It was executed in that way, and we're in the position we're in now. Yes, any build that wins cups on a regular basis is meta, and that's Vancouver's composition. Support+Smite top isn't illegal but it damn sure isn't good for the game, so it gets nerfed so it either A. isn't possible or B. becomes too weak to be pursuing.

As NSG said, it's not "fair" but it also wasn't "illegal." We can't punish people for a rule that never existed. For years, the "meta" was known but it was never used to the extent it was. It's like the unwritten rules in baseball or hockey, but you can't really punish someone on behalf of the league for breaking them. It sucks, but it is what it is. As much as we get clowned for it, the BoG is trying to fix it, and we've got a tentative solution that shows promise. Nyko was mainly involved in gathering data so that the BoG collectively can work on a solution, he's not driving what the solution would look like. It'd be bizarre if I, as the GM that lost to Vancouver twice in the finals, just allowed him to finagle some shady solution in the BoG. Feel like there are enough VHL GM's in there who obviously have not benefited from Vancouver and would want to completely reduce the possibility of a similar occurrence in the future. (Seriousness aside, I love these posts and threads, keep it going )

Give topics pls and ty

You should have 90 TPE now with 2 banked. I think you got missed when other folks' fixes were getting rolled out last week. If it happens again, send me a message.

VHL Wordle https://vhl-wordle.herokuapp.com 12 2/6 lol

We've been running a decent amount of test sims, but we're also limited by who owns STHS, and has the time to test sim for us. We've been test simming some other areas for what we're hoping can be a permanent solution and would allow more build flexibility than the limitations archetypes would provide.