Spartan

Omg are you Sonnet But yes, pitches/team joining is on the portal. You can find it in your manage player tab!

Trade will remain approved as long as you agree to the following, but just letting you know that the condition on the S91 1st is illegal due to current conditional pick rules about when conditions need to trigger by. There is no enforceable condition on that pick in this trade. You're free to make a new trade after rollover into S90 with those conditions. Like swap 4ths or something and add the condition regarding the 1sts there. Stupid, I know, but just gotta follow the rules are written and intended. If you don't agree to resolving this situation in this manner, then we'll be reverting the trade. TL;DR - league won't enforce the condition on the S91 1st, make a new trade in the offseason to add the condition in.

New set of press conference questions!! 1. Moscow had a very active trade deadline (we laughed at trades others made). How happy are you that I didn't trade you to some random team? 2. Left Alone @okochastar and Jason @Jason kranz lead the team with 6 and 7 Game Winning Goals, respectively. How important is it that our second line can provide such clutch scoring? 3. Our pass-first defenseman Deron Nesbitt @AW13 somehow leads our defensemen in goals, and leads the league in PP goals with 11. How in the world is this happening?? 4. For the first time in as long as I can remember, Moscow has 0 players in the top 10 Penalty Minutes leaders. What has the coaching staff been doing to make sure everyone keeps their penalties down? 5. In what seems to be a repeat of last season, Ronan Lavelle and Hammar Voss are each leading forwards and defensemen in scoring. Do you think they'll be able to fend off challengers for more awards at the end of this season? 6. Wrong answers ONLY: Who is the best player in VHL history and why?

Wow....unexpected one

Why did you write this after retirement when you can't get the TPE.....?

Not completely sure where this is coming from. To clarify the role of the BoG beyond award and HoF voting, we're just a sounding board for the Blues to suggest process improvements or address issues within the VHL. Ultimately the entire BoG can come to a decision, but the Blues have final say on whether something will get implemented, when it gets implemented, and what it'll actually look like. For the most part, I think the non-commish BoG members do fine in terms of bringing up posts and following them up - that's really all their role is. Usually people who are fairly rational, are visible in the community, offer insightful perspectives and aren't noted trolls/baiters. Usually people just get brought up in discussions to be added if we feel more voices are needed and there may be a vote to add 3/4 out of like 9 candidates. On the flip side, VHL GM's are probably least likely to be added since there's already a plethora of people in that role in the BoG (usually from being added as a M/E GM and then getting "promoted" to the VHL). M/E GM's who routinely contribute in GM subforums and with commissioners to suggest improvements will be considered and added - ex. Arce, Jacob, Mubbles. Yep!

Yeah I don't think your name has ever come up for discussion to be added, nor do I think it ever will be lol. No stress there!

Any sort of public vote ends up leaning towards brigading or favoritism. We've seen it with all-star votes and cup banner votes, even Slobo ends up with groups forming to advocate for specific candidates. However, we try to get pretty diverse representation in BoG like your next point: So I think we do have a fairly wide range of folks in there. We try to get voices from each league in there, I think the only slacking league right now would be the E since they turned over a lot recently and hired mostly newer/unproven GMs. But we still have Thad and Eno in there anyways. But I think voting has been generally fine there, and with the BoG, we're usually cleaning up and bringing in new folks when we feel like our active voices are quieting down a bit. No. #Gaiko4GM.

What was your favorite team to play for and why was it Moscow (on both stints)? Who is your least favorite commissioner to work with (between the VHL, E and M)? What is your sim league pet peeve? (For example, mine is when someone DM's me "hello" and doesn't just ask their question, to which I have to prod them to ask it @Moon) How do you REALLY feel about users who only want to play for 1 VHL team? If you could delete 1 VHL team right now, which team would it be?

Also back to this, I'd rather work with the GMs to make sure they cover everything they should be instead of outsourcing their job. We can chat about this privately or in the M GM chat with the other GMs if you'd like. Probably more productive than out here.

I think that's fine, moreso meant that it'd be good to maybe get someone to learn from you on what all you maintain and how you do it. Just because everyone's time in the league is finite, can't expect people to be around forever.

Yeah tbh it just comes down to this. We will work with every M GM and their AGM to make their life easier. I don't have any plans to add more jobs outside those two for development. Gus and I are happy to assist when needed, I know updaters are also fairly decent with fixing updates and answering questions in those edit/denial messages too. Just see no reason to add mentors on top of M GM's. I still think the recruitment team getting paid 6 TPE a week should be able to serve as additional communal resources if you want more M help.

I still don't get why we need a team of VHL experts between forum account creation and player creation though. There are maybe like, 5-10 minutes between those two events in most cases. I don't think player creation is nearly as complex as this is making it out to be. After creation, I can see your point. But we've had this mentors conversation with the M GM's and in BoG before, and the BoG agreed that we're not going to create a league mentor program for players when they have M GM's who are responsible for the exact same things, and M AGM's who assist in these areas. This was before Gus and I became commish, and also before the new waiver system. When we came on board, we made/introduced those changes and also increased job pay for you guys since we know you have to work with 5-15 players every season to get them all the information they need. We intentionally made your lives easier in one area to give you more time in other areas - specifically the hands on portion. However, we told M GM's that they're free to add people within their servers as unpaid mentors with roles as such. I can go back through the BoG thread and give you names of people who were willing to serve in that role, veterans who just exist in your LR and assist if you and your AGM aren't present. I'm sure you can find more around the community if you just ask, people just don't want to be press conference bots or do lines/roster management things. I don't think any teams actually tried to do that back then though, or up through today. Nowhere near full: What specifically are the development methods proposed here beyond someone else who does what we expect M GM's to do? And the TPE checklist which I'm fine with existing if Josh is willing to develop it (though I think it's tougher or impossible to do with this forum vs the SHL's since theirs is more customizable - perks of their forum ig), but absolutely does not change the responsibilities of our M GMs.

My response was mainly VHLM GM's serving as mentors as well, leading to conflict of interest. But with your response here, I guess my concern then is what area will the mentors cover that isn't already covered? Do we really need someone to point new players to the "join team" button in their manage player page? I don't think we've had many issues with that, if any. I just don't see where mentors will exist within the current creation process which is fairly streamlined already to lead directly onto a team after creation. That leaves the brief period between forum account creation and player creation - during which I don't think many users pause in.

I'm probably getting annoying about this, but I never got a response as to why this *can't* be the recruitment team themselves. You said you and Subject are grinding Instagram daily, and maybe this is the disconnect, but does Instagram/Twitter really take so much time in a day/week that it 1. merits 6 TPE weekly pay and 2. prevents you from doing the requirements of the mentor job you state here? The only real concern if implemented would be the overlap of M jobs with mentor jobs, we wouldn't want that to occur. Beyond that, I still don't see why the Recruitment team can't be the ones responsible for this within their 6 TPE pay.

And you get more as a bonus! So Mubbles' stuff I get since I think it's manual. I could probably work with him to not make it manual if he's interested. RJ had portal API access which made it a script he just ran weekly, afaik Mubbles was doing his draft class stuff manually which I don't think is optimal, even without API access. The rest of y'all though, just echoing the sentiment of I don't think Insta/Twitter have as much of a reach as we expect for replenishing draft classes on a seasonal basis. Do you guys have set internal metrics that you aim to reach, or grow over time? Twitter/Insta give you guys metrics like views, engagements, profile visits, I'd probably set goals for those and re-evaluate over time if those are being met and improved upon - otherwise it's just doing something to be busy without really focusing on the results coming out of it. Which I know you guys aren't doing, just wanted to highlight the metrics/improvement portion as something to guide your work. I don't think anyone wants to babysit players all season to earn. I sure don't, but I still send out weekly check-ins to my players who haven't updated (or try to bc sometimes I burn out and forget) because it's just the nature of a GM role. Especially at the M level where the job is explicitly to mentor, engage and retain newbies. If handholding for a season or two is what's needed to make people really understand how the league works, I would expect that to be done. We made changes to waivers and increased pay specifically to incentivize that type of commitment and effort. Yeah DM me about this since I'm curious how many non-job holders right now are actively looking for jobs beyond GM'ing. I can already see AGM/GM applicant pools first-hand, the other stuff I don't pay as much attention to. AFAIK this is a pretty open thing. Just ask Alex to be part of VSN and then meet the requirements, don't think it's anything too formal. Maybe @Alex could bump VSN openings to the site to let everyone know they are always happy to have more writers. Personally though, I think VSN is better as a one-off or once a season job since on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, it ends up being one of the most burnout inducing jobs on the site. I've seen too many people fall victim to VSN. Someone should eventually start getting trained to replace @Victor in the HoF department since I doubt he will do the sheer amount of seasonal background legwork with updating the HoF subforum forever. I'd support that being a job or two.

That's fantastic! Glad things are starting to get going, and I'd love if all those avenues become more consistent and get a wider reach over time. But that still means we need the stuff that works, aka Reddit/YouTube, to continue on a seasonal basis. Just not ready to put all the eggs into those other, unproven baskets yet. But I give you guys a pass for this season since the recruitment team basically completely turned over.

Yeah Gus and I have been pretty decent with making sure rules are useful, clear, and also easy to regulate. Part of the VHLM activity definition change was reliant on that, we can't do weekly IA checks (which I should do this week) looking through every VHLM player's update history, and also go through their forum history. It's just not sustainable.

I'm replying to this one because there's a lot of suggestions in here and I have some strong opinions on a few of these. Buckle up. I'll preface my thoughts by saying I think the recruitment team has generally been fine over the past few seasons. There's been a push to be a bit more organized and delegate tasks fairly across members. However, from my personal understanding and semi-outsider perspective, I have no idea what the recruitment team does on a weekly basis to be earning more TPE than our VHLM GM's. In theory, the recruitment team is constantly working to engage people outside the VHL to convince folks to join. Maintaining Twitter is great, but I don't think we've had a single new person join from social media in the time I've been in the VHL - so like 3 years now. No other social media platform comes to mind as being successful (outside of the old Reddit posts). A recruitment drive on someone's YouTube channel might be the most in depth I think recruitment gets, but that didn't happen for this season and I reaaaalllly doubt is such an intensive task to plan that the entire team is spending their full weekly "recruitment team work time" on coordinating those ads. If Recruitment is getting paid more than VHLM GM's, then I'd fully expect them to be the welcome committee and the pseudo-mentors that you're referring to. You guys already have the unique Discord role to identify yourselves, why have it if not to be a resource? So I'd put this responsibility fully on the recruitment team, not expect a new group to pop up beyond Recruitment and our VHLM team to work with new members. There's only so many people interested in teaching new players (VHLM GM's and AGM's), our pool to hire from is limited already. Cool idea that I enjoy in the SHL. However, I like it there because I'm not that active in their LR's since I'm on my second player already and am fairly hands off. For a new player, I think that being hands off is not optimal. We automated waivers to shift the VHLM GM role to be able to invest more time into following up with their players and babying them when needed, push more personal touch into the day to day life. Everyone is capable of reading a screen sure, but I don't know how many new players are going to spend the time to research and self-teach themselves the site. If we can get a checklist it's great, but the onus to me is still on our M staff to not only teach new users, but push them to improve over time as well. That will require handholding. This is going to be more GM oriented, but the pool to hire from has substantially shrunk from pre-VHLE days. We basically removed 16 people on average from the VHL and VHLM pools since they're running the 8 E teams. People want jobs sure, but the league wants to hire quality and capable people for those jobs otherwise we just create more of a mess to clean up if/when things go wrong. Bek seems to be covering it as I write this ffs. VSN already has literally no bar to be above to join. All you have to do is follow the slightly higher requirements for their product, and actually do something weekly/bi-weekly in order to claim pay. So if people already aren't doing weekly VSN content, then hiring more people doesn't change anything. And no, I wouldn't raise VSN job pay at all. It's just writing an extra vhl.com within a Media Spot for the extra 2 TPE. What stats/data does STHS offer that isn't already tracked in its output? The only thing that comes to mind is GA/TA but people have scraped the PBP's in the past and the numbers are nonsensical, or at least absurd to analyze. Probably the #1 job in my priority list if I could control job applications and hirings. We should have at least 2 more folks in this role yesterday. While this is a neat concept, there's 2 issues. One, it is only for one subgroup of VHL PT creators - excluding anyone who writes or podcasts. Big no no. Two, even with the banner contests for cup winners, it usually ended up becoming a bit of a popularity contest since folks would just plug their teammates' and friends'. If we decided to start denying bonus TPE to any winner found to solicit votes or have friends assist in soliciting votes, then I'd be ok with cup banner contests only. Nope nonope nope noipe enope nopenopenopeope. Hard pass on undoing seasons of work on making the M more balanced and less of a competitive hellhole while also curbstomping the new player experience. Sure, they can get stomped when they get to the VHL at 450 TPE right now, but they will at least experience being a solid player in the M, then struggling a bit with their role in the E, before learning they aren't the best and to grow into a larger role in the VHL. Or just be quality depth, whatever it is. I think it's a fairly accurate path right now in comparison to the typical NHL draft prospect's tbh. I would consider a smaller M cap increase to 250 or 300 if we genuinely abolished the E, but definitely not to 400. The current M system works as well as it does because under hybrid attributes, the 50-200 TPE range can perform very similarly under the right conditions. --- Overall though I like the creativity and thought provoking content. Good avenues to pursue for sure, I just don't agree with some of the ways you've proposed. 6.9/10

@JCarson I saw this a few days ago and briefly skimmed a bit at the top before moving on, not wanting to read much about the pain of loss. Didn't even read down to see your core topic was about Alzheimer's. Your article popped back into my mind this morning, this time a bit more heavy hitting after I found out my grandfather with Alzheimer's passed this morning. You're absolutely right with the general sentiment here. I've seen two great grandmothers suffer for 10+ years each with the same disease. It doesn't get much easier seeing those you love and the ones closest to them deal with this horrible burden 24 hours a day. Obviously you wish you had the ones you love but to go as quickly as possible at that point is just the most you can hope for. Our family has walked on pins and needles for the past year as my grandfather's condition worsened, never knowing when an emergency trip would be needed. Just a few months ago, my father had to travel overseas on a couple day's notice to support my grandparents who were just overwhelmed with the care needed. We canceled vacations, family time, missed special events just because we were scared and just in the dark for what could happen the next day. It's still a lot to process but I'm just glad he's not going to suffer like others I know. Thank you for this piece, truly. The timing of your post was right when I needed it.

I broke the record and I'm retiring, you have no leverage over me!

Alright, so I'm gonna use this text to speech thing and then edit it later. Or maybe not. Maybe I just won't edit it. But either way, I'm already a commissioner, though I guess it's just at the VH LM level. I guess I can look at this from as if I was a VHL Commissioner and everything that I would do from that regard. First, I would probably delete the VHDE. I think that's a pretty common thing that everyone's going to be saying at this theme week. And it's definitely an extreme one, but something that I could get behind just for the sake of putting Thad and Eno out of a job. I think both of them should really focus on the VHL GM in life, especially Eno, who just quit being a GM. I think he should go back to being a GM, so if he's not being a commissioner anymore, then he would have plenty of time to GM again. And then Thad, of course, could just focus on New York. NY needs the help. So yeah, so goodbye VHLE. And it's all their fault because we want them to be GM'S first and foremost. Secondly, I would raise Commissioner pay to 12. While we already do plenty of real life money siphoning, we don't do enough when it comes to TPE. So effectively immediately all commissioners will be paid 12 and every other job except for M GM's will be paid 2. I guess developers could have four as well. Oh, we should probably also hire some developers to someone to replace Dil and maybe do just as bad a job. But hey, you'll become a builder within a few seasons once you decide to quit. And also maybe VHL GM's can get six TPE just because it's a hard job to talk to player. Third, I would just give Moscow all of the continental cups from the season 80 through 83. I think it's clear, given we restructured the way the league works and attributes work, that they were robbed out of cups during that time. So it's really only right to just give Moscow all of the Continental Cups and make it all fair. I guess that's the VHL reparations. And that means that we also take all of the Vancouver players who made the Hall of Fame from that time and remove them from the hall. We should probably also scratch them all out of the record books. And as long as I'm here being selfish, I might as well say to just remove depreciation from the league. Let people be 2000 TPA if they'd like. Lastly, I'd delete the moderation team. You know, it's 2023. Society has evolved to the point where we no longer need moderators. Clearly, they're just here to push their own agenda. Everyone in the VHL community is a pristine person, so we don't need those mods and really we can just fire them all. Everyone can have whatever name they want without any issues. We can delete all the weird auto mod stuff on Discord that doesn't let you say some bodily functions. And we can just let everyone have multiple accounts and then we're gonna have a much larger player base. I think it's just a win, win.

Visney Hockey League could be a cool rebrand

No we just all like dog piling on ScottyP