Spartan

What team is Bo on? And also it sort of makes sense that you went from no TPE to some TPE and therefore put up points. I also think PA may give you a false sense of optimism in the VHLM where folks are such low TPE. My old player, Alex Letang, was 80 PA when he was capped in the M and led the league in assists. He also had 70 SC, and played on a team that was pretty top heavy and those top forwards scored a lot of goals. I really think that it was mostly just relative to the talent on the team, and a byproduct of being the best defenseman on the team as well from a TPA perspective. Lastly as much as I'd love to believe that giveaways and takeaways matter in this sim engine, the overall "meta" right now implies that it doesn't. Feel free to look at the VHL teams that have won the cup in the past few seasons and let me know what data you can pull from it, because I wouldn't think Vancouver with their nonexistent passing would be generating more takeaways than giveaways. At the end of the day, they just shoot the puck at the net whenever they can instead of deferring to teammates. More volume = more goals. That seems to be all that our engine really cares about.

Idk if anyone has told you this but PA doesn't correlate with assists. SC drives scoring of both goals and assists, but the largest factor for assists comes simply from the situation a player is in. Take Phil Stein on Moscow last season, a pass first player. He played on the first line alongside Paul Atreides and Duncan Idaho, the latter became co-MVP. Aurelian Moreau was also a solid point better as a first pairing defenseman. When you put a player with exceptionally good players, their stats will essentially get padded and they will get more assists. My 40 PA player has 18 assists as a rookie just from touching the puck before someone else scored. I also wouldnt put the most stock into the STHS generated play by play. I think it's just a lot of turnovers to fill the time and generally all made up and not really accurate. I think Dil tried to track it a season or two ago and noted that the amounts were absurdly high, for both giveaways and takeaways. Also don't put much stock into the user manual either regarding how the engine works. When you have four defense pairings, you can't really trust that the developer actually knows how hockey works lol.

wheres theme week???

Claim 4/4

Linking to player pages . Underrated level of effort, love it!

MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW

nice

good morning

donation made here, $20 coming to the raffle for 10 entries slots: 6, 12, 21, 23, 35, 40, 50, 59, 71, 66 @Baozi

don't kill strays Edit: Covering for @Agito! Happy holidays

For what it's worth I did say that overly successful recruitment is harmful on my podcast, specifically over-recruiting when we already have teams mildly filled up. I don't know if that's along the same lines of what you're inferring to though. That we need to have more coordination and intentional targeting when recruiting with an eye on current league state to avoid expanding our user base before we have the potential to keep up with all of them.

This proposal isn't even how "relegation/promotion" really works. That system says that teams that play well move up, while teams that play poorly get bumped down. An even number of teams would move in both directions which wouldn't help the situation here. I think your idea is just saying to flex teams up/down on an ad hoc basis, which seems to be how we're already treating the situation with the recent move of Minny/Yukon. However, it does need to line up well as Bek said, since moving teams who have traded assets are a nightmare to work with, especially with draft picks and rostered players. I don't think that's as flexible as we'd need it to be.

MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW

Was the E not created to be permanent? I don't really know what the BOG had in mind when it was created, but maybe there needs to be more clarification as to what this league was supposed to be outside of a method to prevent VHL rosters from getting overloaded with 250-400 TPE players. If we continue to recruit the way we have, I feel like it would be permanent no? I also don't want to double its size, just to provide methods for people who don't need more catered development to move on to leagues where they're not taking away from new member development. So many recreates missed out on the VHLE because we fell just short of the 201 cutoff, and even if we had, the PF payout is a bit of a deterrent as well. Those are roster spots that as @bigAL said, get taken away from first gens who could be making the team their own. We obviously don't want to leave first gens alone, but I'd rather move the people who don't need to be coddled in the M to the next level. It'd also help out a bit with the roster size issues in the M, especially if recruitment continues to succeed in the way they have.

I'm on my phone rn so this'll be short. I'd rather drop M cap even further to cycle folks out of it sooner than to start treating recreates and first gens differently. Maybe a 150 cap for the M and leave the hard cap for the E, 300 soft cap though so VHL teams can call up folks sooner if they have the roster spots. Cycles players out of the M sooner, which would make sense with the recent league realignments. No recreate would spend more than a season, and TDL recreates will hit 150 by the E draft in most cases. That way first gens would continue to be the primary focus and recreates would just supplement the team. Also allows for more call up flexibility from E to VHL, kills a few birds with one stone.

the oopsie worked out. nice! @Vkobe-v legend

No sorry, we just became the Mumbai Menace. Too soon for another rebranding. Right @Dil?

Hm, I think you'd be fine if we let you in. I could use another person to help me bully @N0HBDY though. The intention with this structure is not to fully get rid of the draft, simply to reduce the over-reliance some teams place on it. I've never found it pleasant as an M GM to develop a player for the better part of a season, build a good relationship with that player, and integrate them to my team's community - only to see them get drafted to some other team who rostered 3 players the season before in order to stockpile a bunch of draft picks and then circumvent draft pick limits on/after draft day. We already have had a bunch of imbalanced rosters recently because of rampant tanking or GM's going all in and losing all their assets. At least a partially permanent waiver system would encourage GM's to really develop and retain the players they sign with the knowledge they can't just ditch them in the next draft and replace them with 4 first-gens who exploded out of the gate and built a good reputation for themselves, or were guided by other GM's who spent a lot of time helping them out. Any person who earns well would graduate out of the M pretty quickly anyways. Most recreates who create right after the draft will not play a second VHLM season. Recreates at or after TDL would go into the draft, which is meant to balance out rosters a bit. With a 200 cap, you're not going to see anyone sticking around long enough for there to be a "competitive" issue. I also understand that it would put more GM's under pressure to be on forums, so I had some other ideas around that. Some leagues have mandatory hold periods before a player can sign with a team, so that players have time to understand what they're walking into (usually guided by a rookie mentor or others in the community), and so that GM's have more time to send players offers without the fear they're going to immediately accept the first offer they see. Overall though, I think we need to overhaul what new members see when they first join this community and how they're assisted, and not let them just get ass blasted by M GM's copying/pasting pitches to try and be the first ones to offer on a player. When I was an M GM there were discussions about each team posting blurbs on the portal and the new create selecting the team they wanted to join. I didn't really like that idea back then since it felt very inorganic and had absolutely no personal interaction. I still don't like it, and don't really support it since it continues to push the mistaken first-gen narrative of "portal is love portal is life." I think adding a hold period before a first gen can sign, but having people in contact with them from the time they create would be better for retention, and also for the poor M GM's who need to get players to join them. I don't trust a first-gen who puts TPE into leadership to be taking the time and effort to learn about VHLM teams and requesting to join one. heh I love seeing successful recruitment drives. Aka, I like seeing high retention rates, not just high volume. Maybe it's just a difference of opinion, but I just think that the situation changes every other season. We had too many empty teams last season, now we have too many full teams this season. Instead, if we had advertised on a slightly smaller community since we already had a pretty solid M community from the large S81 class, maybe we still would have had a successful recruitment drive with decent retention, without the overloading volume that's handicapped the M this season. We can't keep adding and cutting teams for the VHLM based on what happened the previous season, there really needs to be some more planning and coordination as you said. Probably lol, I just like giving folks shit when there's a window to do it I'm taking the small step to join E LR's to try and facilitate more interactions and hopefully others will want to do so as well. I may try to shift my content over to the VHLE in due time to try and emphasize the good the league provides. I'll have to see how I want to do that. Thanks for listening and commenting

FRANK FRANK FRANK

ay if we're campaigning, 2 is sexy

It was yet another pseudo-SHL idea where they ran 3 lines, and sort of relied on the community aspect to retain folks instead of the actual performance on the ice. I recognize that people in the VHL are more motivated by ice time and performance as you touched on, but just spitballed for shits and gigs about what could have been implemented. But if the people playing on those lines are clickers who have very little forum or discord presence, I can't imagine that they'd really be that vocal about their playing time like a commissioner would be lol. But yeah, too much of a logistical nightmare and all that, just interesting to think about. Ok listen I know I fucked up lines, but you wouldn't have been eligible this season anyways because you would have played 8 backup games in S80 behind Rara, taking you to 16 if you only played 8 in each season. You really had no realistic shot in my plan, sorry bud. At least now you've got a bunch of seasons to win more meaningful awards! I'll happily claim that I was one of the new folks back in S71 who loved the M and decided to stick around it and love it some more. More E passionate people will come soon enough, just gotta start questioning folks when they criticize the E baselessly. Try to make them rationalize why they don't like the E instead of allowing them to blindly follow E hate. It is what it is, I just didn't expect that from you guys since you're usually very intentional and aware of what needs to happen in an offseason. Speedrunning the one critical offseason for the implementation of a new league that has commissioners in two wildly different timezones just baffled me, and felt like the E was tossed behind the 8 ball from the start. But it'll get back on track soon enough.

1. I think we should have always expected stiff competition from Malmo. They've been our biggest conference rival for a few seasons now, and we'll have to elevate our play to reclaim the top of the EU. We can't drop games like we have, especially when they've put up some solid win streaks that we haven't matched. 2. I credit a lot of the success I'm having to my move from the first line to the second line. I really like playing alongside @Seabass and @AW13, our line has gotten pretty hot recently. I've had some chats with the coach about going back to the first line since we dropped a few games after the change, and I think I'm ready to perform on the first line this time. 3. From a personal perspective my first VHL hat trick was probably my highlight of the season so far. From a GM perspective, probably the fact that we surged to the top of the league very quickly, showing our team was ready to be one of the best in the league for a second season in a row. 4. Imagine an arena full of hostile russians cursing your entire family, all drunk out of their minds on Moscow. They're the most passionate fans, we have to win for them otherwise the mafia will hurt our loved ones. 5. I think Nico would like to go into the front office side of hockey one day, he's got a knack for management and hockey operations. 6. I have not, what's it streaming on? I'll check it out!

@Girts I rarely comment on graphics posts, but considering I denied your first one for not meeting graphics standards and you responded with this, I'll say you did very well! Added some effects to it, cropped it well, text is also pretty cool though I'm not sure if the light blue fits the rest of the sig going on here. The little spiral effects going on are interesting, but it suitably blurs out the background to get all the focus on the player. Soon you'll be cutting renders, doing logo swaps and so much more like a pro. Great response after getting your other graphic denied! V proud .

Yeah I fully agree that right now, skipping the E is locked away behind a paywall. However, I don't think the solution is to just lower the hard cap, but rather to allow for more flexibility in call-ups. Some teams ran out of bodies to sign in FA because there weren't enough players at or above 350 TPA, while there were prospects slightly under 350 that could have been called up. If GM's continued to have the option to call up prospects as they choose, every team in theory would have full rosters. Prospects who don't want to simmer in the E, while also being at a TPE/TPA level that their VHL GM's are comfortable with to roster, could then get called up without the paywall barrier. It'd add another layer to draft scouting and roster planning for VHL GM's to handle, to understand the desires of their prospects and to agree on a direction before drafting them. More of these career options should be mutually agreed on between VHL GM's and their prospects instead of set by the league as a hard cap.

My comments were mostly geared towards the community outside the VHLE's response to the league, but I always appreciate some self-introspection. You weren't one of the GM's I had an issue with for the initial hiring, since you were somewhat fresh enough to be considered a newer GM. However, if you recognize that your activity in the E as a GM and leader has waned, I applaud it. If you want an active member in your locker room, feel free to reach out. I'd be happy to join and pop in from time to time. On a different note, I will always consider the E as the optimal place for new GM's to start off, so it bothered me a bit that veteran users with lots of league experience were getting those jobs when they really didn't need it. It wasn't a promotion in my eyes at least but I know the E was viewed as one back then. I didn't even think it would become a stepping stone to the VHL and it really hasn't been, so hopefully the purpose changes a bit when it comes to GM hires. Maybe it's just scratched the competitive itch for a few folks, which I can respect, but I'd really like to see it become the entry level position where people figure out if they're good at teaching, or if they're good at competing. The fresh perspectives and energy new people bring in would really energize the league, which it sorely needs. For now though, it's on the current GM's and anyone that supports the E's purpose and cause to make it a desirable place for players to be.