bigAL

What a Christmas season. I'm always amazed by the generosity of our community. Nicely done to everyone who donated, and thanks for the participation and attention from those that were unable to. The results from the charity drive are amazing.
 
The last loose end to tie up is the 12 Days of Christmas Raffle. Every day, you dutifully logged in, said hello, and got entered into the grand raffle.
 
As explained in the rules, we've got a lot of winners:
I used Google's Random Number Generator to pull a number of Josh's crazy spreadsheet that organized all the entries. You can view the streams here, here, and here if you don't believe me, but don't waste 15 mins of your life watching and listening to me fumbling around a spreadsheet.
 
So, here are the winners!
 
Tier 1:
You win:
 
Tier 2:
You win:
 
Tier 3:
You win:
 
Tier 4: THE GRAND CHAMPION
You win:
 
Thanks to everyone who participated. The 12 Days raffle is always my favourite because it's an "activity" check of sorts. We had 186 unique users participate in this bonanza. That's fantastic, what a big number. I'm proud of you, proud of us, and happy for all the winners.
 
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Good Riddance 2021, let's all have a great 2022 ✌️ 

Happy Tuesday everyone,
 
As the last few payments are trickling in and we prepare to make our donations to the The Red Cross (both Canada and US), I wanted to give everyone an update on how well we did this holiday drive! This year the community donation we managed to raise was $3150, with $1820 coming from donations to the league PayPal and a staggering $1330 coming from direct donations. (As many direct donations were made in USD I kept track and converted it all to CAD to calculate our total).
 
With the $500 contribution from the league, our total contribution comes to $3650 CAD! The balance of $2320 will be split evenly and donated to The Red Cross later this week.
 
Now rewards! Please refer to the original Holiday Bonanza announcement: https://vhlforum.com/topic/113186-2021-vhl-holiday-bonanza/
 
 
 
@Members may ALL claim 8 14 Uncapped and a PT Doubles!
 
 
 
If you donated, don't forget to claim that first line of rewards! Lastly, the Blue team would love to thank everyone that was involved in this. I am incredibly hopeful that these drives can truly make a difference in peoples lives and am grateful for the opportunity to be part of a community of which we can all be tremendously proud. 
 
Thank you!
@Commissioner

Post city

With Ariane Lablanc’s recent retirement (after the winning bid was paid out by @FonziGG), we need a creative solution to an unexpected problem. 
 
The initial amount offered was 48 TPE. A number of people have offered to step up and let Fonzi spend your TPE instead of Horcrux’s. 
 
Instead of choosing one person to get slapped with 48 spent TPE, we’ll add everyone who offers to a list of potential donors. Fonzi can choose anyone or multiple people from that list and spend 48 TPE total on their players. Maybe he sinks Reylynn Reinhardt with 48 TPE in leadership? Maybe Nico Pearce becomes a penalty shot expert? Who knows!
 
If you want to offer your banked TPE, feel free to sign up here.  

With Ariane Lablanc’s recent retirement (after the winning bid was paid out by @FonziGG), we need a creative solution to an unexpected problem. 
 
The initial amount offered was 48 TPE. A number of people have offered to step up and let Fonzi spend your TPE instead of Horcrux’s. 
 
Instead of choosing one person to get slapped with 48 spent TPE, we’ll add everyone who offers to a list of potential donors. Fonzi can choose anyone or multiple people from that list and spend 48 TPE total on their players. Maybe he sinks Reylynn Reinhardt with 48 TPE in leadership? Maybe Nico Pearce becomes a penalty shot expert? Who knows!
 
If you want to offer your banked TPE, feel free to sign up here.  

With Ariane Lablanc’s recent retirement (after the winning bid was paid out by @FonziGG), we need a creative solution to an unexpected problem. 
 
The initial amount offered was 48 TPE. A number of people have offered to step up and let Fonzi spend your TPE instead of Horcrux’s. 
 
Instead of choosing one person to get slapped with 48 spent TPE, we’ll add everyone who offers to a list of potential donors. Fonzi can choose anyone or multiple people from that list and spend 48 TPE total on their players. Maybe he sinks Reylynn Reinhardt with 48 TPE in leadership? Maybe Nico Pearce becomes a penalty shot expert? Who knows!
 
If you want to offer your banked TPE, feel free to sign up here.  

With Ariane Lablanc’s recent retirement (after the winning bid was paid out by @FonziGG), we need a creative solution to an unexpected problem. 
 
The initial amount offered was 48 TPE. A number of people have offered to step up and let Fonzi spend your TPE instead of Horcrux’s. 
 
Instead of choosing one person to get slapped with 48 spent TPE, we’ll add everyone who offers to a list of potential donors. Fonzi can choose anyone or multiple people from that list and spend 48 TPE total on their players. Maybe he sinks Reylynn Reinhardt with 48 TPE in leadership? Maybe Nico Pearce becomes a penalty shot expert? Who knows!
 
If you want to offer your banked TPE, feel free to sign up here.  

With Ariane Lablanc’s recent retirement (after the winning bid was paid out by @FonziGG), we need a creative solution to an unexpected problem. 
 
The initial amount offered was 48 TPE. A number of people have offered to step up and let Fonzi spend your TPE instead of Horcrux’s. 
 
Instead of choosing one person to get slapped with 48 spent TPE, we’ll add everyone who offers to a list of potential donors. Fonzi can choose anyone or multiple people from that list and spend 48 TPE total on their players. Maybe he sinks Reylynn Reinhardt with 48 TPE in leadership? Maybe Nico Pearce becomes a penalty shot expert? Who knows!
 
If you want to offer your banked TPE, feel free to sign up here.  

Boy I can hear the negative reactions already....
 
I just wanted to throw a quick announcement out there in advance so that everyone doesn't get surprised by it. Our @Simmer team obviously works very hard all year to give the league nearly daily sims between the regular season, playoffs, and off season tournaments. There is a bit of time off here and there but for the most part it's a daily thing. We were hoping that playoffs would line up well with Christmas again like they did last year and provide us with an easy excuse to have a couple of days off for the holidays but sadly no dice this time around. For that reason we have decided that sims will be halted from tomorrow, December 24th, to resume on Monday, December 27th.
 
I know it is inconvenient to have 3 days without sims but as we frequently remind our members the simmers are not robots and need time as well so a holiday break is the least we can do. So enjoy the sims today, embrace a few days with family and friends (if possible, stupid covid) and we'll see you all on the 27th for more Regular Season action in the 3 leagues.
 
Thank You and Happy Holidays,
@Commissioner

@Membersdue to the amazing support from members wanting to push us over the $3000 community milestone, I've decided to donate to a local drop-in center that focuses on harm reduction and social inclusion. As a result, you are all able to claim an additional 8 uncapped and @Beketov will be hosting a Zoo Tycoon 2 stream (I'll leave it up to him to schedule that).
 
If you've already claimed the 6 from the first post: use this post to claim the remaining 8.
If you haven't, claim all 14 on your first claim.

What about when the player joins the team server? Even if the GM isn't online right when the offer is made, it's a good bet that someone will be there to welcome the player. 
 
There's also the message itself, which, even if it's automatic, is communication. I agree that it's still better to have someone online and talking to the player, but that typically doesn't happen within the first 30 minutes of a player's existence if you don't count copy-paste waiver thread offers (and if it does, other GMs scream that they're not getting a fair shot because the player signed too fast). Keep in mind that the speed is a big positive to this--there's no faster engagement than getting on a team of your choice immediately.
 
I do understand your point, but I can think of enough reasons why it's somewhat offset that I don't see it as a reason to not go through with it.

I originally wrote this in response to @Josh in another thread, but it's a big sidetrack from that thread's topic so I'll divert it to its own. He makes a good point that we never actually established what this would look like, which I thought was incorrect at first but eventually I realized that I never explained that part.
 
If you're unfamiliar with my idea of putting waiver offers on the portal, it's first summarized (along with a good list of benefits) in this article. Basically, get rid of the whole waiver thread thing and let eligible players choose their team immediately upon creation.
 
Here are my initial thoughts for a procedure:
 
Teams are laid out in some sort of order. Whether it's standings or name or whatever, it doesn't matter to me. Important info to display for each team would include rank, projected line placement (i.e. the portal will say "3rd line" or "2nd pairing" based on the number of active players at that position on that team), current playoff/non-playoff status, and a button to click which brings up a short message from the GM, editable from that team's "manage team" page, about the team and its plans (give this a character limit). Once a team is selected to be joined, @VHL Bot or something creates a forum message between the player and the GM, and drops in a link to that team's Discord server (the GM can also provide one with the general message in Manage Team).  There should be certain restrictions on ability to select a team. If Team A has 10 forwards and Team B has 3, new forwards shouldn't be able to sign with Team A.  
Thoughts? @BOG

It's not a technical issue, the entire thing just needs to be laid out with rules so that we can then design how to implement it. It's definitely not just "waivers on the portal".

We have this everlasting debate at work: Queen or The Beatles. It’s not even close in my books. Freddie Mercury >>>>>
 
I can appreciate some Submarines but not to the point of loving them over Queen.  
 
Why not both? Because jerks in the staff room decided so. 

Tina and AL defeating together Ricer will be a sweet, sweet victory

Sure, I'll claim this instead of Aussies this week

So this week is ending up being Christmas and I thought what better time to do a year in review.
 
So, let us start with this time last year. I had my work Xmas party this day last year pretty much and it was good. My Fiancée was meant to meet me there after she had a doctors appointment. However she never showed up and wouldn't answer my call. So when I got home I found out there was a reason, she had stage 2 skin cancer. This threw the whole holiday plans for a spin. I had to message @dasboot as I was meant to podcast that night with him and @bigAL. I think that this is still one of the best podcasts recorded so I am part glad I wasn't there to ruin it haha. January meant that she had to have surgery to remove the cancer this was an interesting process and I was in there while she had it removed. Watching that really hurt me seeing her in pain and not being able to do anything. This was the start of a year I don't think either of us will forget. I would like to thank @Banackock for his help through this.
 
Not only did this hurt her but it hurt me as well. I dedicated all my time to making sure she was okay and that we would get through this. Unfortunately this time and effort saw the demise of my cricket sim. Something that brought me a lot of joy had to slowly die and I still miss it most weeks. I am thinking I might bring back a reduced form of this in the future if we see some interest.
 
Then we had lockdowns lots and lots of lockdowns my Fiancée is from the state of NSW and we live in QLD. Both states were always constantly in lockdowns and there was no way to cross the border this made her recovery a lot harder as we couldn't see her family. Eventually when it got to Easter there was a break in lockdowns and we could cross the border so we packed the car and drove the 10 hours to spend 4 days seeing her family.
 
The next issue was with Covid and international travel. As I said before I have a fiancée meaning that we were meant to get married, we planned to get married in Fiji the place we met 10 years ago on 23rd November. This had to get cancelled as we were unable to travel. I remember the day we had to call all of our guests and explain to them that we were no longer getting married. This has lead to every time we see family or friends we get the question on when we plan on getting married. The issue is we lost thousands of dollars in cancelling the wedding so we have to save up again.
 
Another reason we think the universe doesn't want us to get married is we had someone break into our house whilst we were sleeping, the person stole our wallets and my Fiancées engagement and wedding ring. Not only did we lose our possessions, but we did not have any insurance at that time, so we needed to pay for the ring again. 
 
Due to Covid last year I had to take a job I wasn't extremely happy about taking but I needed the money and the work. I was never really enjoying the job and planned to leave once Covid finished and companies were hiring again. In April my manager suffered a Stroke. This shook the whole company as we are a small accounting firm having one person unable to work made it that everyone else had to pick up the slack to cover. This has made this whole year extremely stressful as we are still short staffed and have been all year.
 
Not only did my manager have a health scare so did I. I went out one day, and that night was very tired, I slept all the next day, this lasted two weeks as well as my whole body swelling up I was not in a good spot. Below is a list of some of the diagnoses:
·         Glandular Fever
·         Esophagitis
·         Gastritis
·         Tonsillitis
·         Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
This led to me not being able to eat anything for two weeks and in that time period I lost 15 kgs (33 pounds) as I am quite a fat person this was the one small positive from my sickness. However the inflammation around my body worked its way to my heart and it was not where it should be for someone my age. So after speaking to a cardiologist I was told not to exercise for a month. This then meant the kilos all came back and as I sit here writing this I am probably at an all time high for my weight. (Hopefully with my plans this should reduce next year)
 
So, this has been my year, it has been a tough one to get through, but my Fiancée and I finally received some good news, we are expecting our first child in June 2022. this has brought so much joy and excitement and I can not wait to be a father.
 
So here is to a better year in 2022. I will hopefully become a father, lose some weight, become a certified accountant and move up with my career.
 
Best of luck to everyone reading this, I hope next year is a kick ass one for you. Also please remember if you ever want a person to talk to or lean on, hit me up I am here to help.
 
Finally to say thank you to some people.
 
@BOOM & @dasboot you are both great blokes and I appreciate your support whether or not you know you are giving it.
 
@GustavMattias and the Davos crew, thank you for the fun locker room chats.
 
To all the people who listen to my podcast, I appreciate everyone of you and you make this place a bit more fun for me.
 
Anyway this is a lot of words for a .com but thank you. And sorry to those who I tagged.
 

I just realized both @bigAL and I get 4 weeks from this  
 
Anyway, 2/4 (Week ending December 19, 2021)

I don't mean to sound defensive/confrontational, but I believe in being direct here: if all you're getting from my post is "I hate change", perhaps you should try to attempt your own logic of trying to understand. I've put my honest thoughts out there and can't say I appreciate them being boiled down into some three-word phrase meant to belittle my point without actually addressing it.
 
 
As to some other things, because I hope we can both move on from the above...
 
 
I think this came up in some public thread recently, and I just used it as an example. I'm also against a flat cap of 175, but that's because I think I have a better idea than that...
 
 
Recruitment pushed through the largest campaign ever, immediately before the S74 deadline, (allegedly) to prove some point that rosters could be filled (at least from what I remember). Rosters leaguewide being absolutely destroyed as a consequence and us having to spend months coming up with a giant sweeping solution was not a good thing. Taking the E league and my opinions of it completely out of the equation, if the league today looked exactly like it did roster-wise in S72, I'd much rather have that slow, gradual climb up to "full and healthy" than have a bomb dropped on my head and scramble for answers.
 
If the (alleged) motive for said recruitment drive was what it was, that's NOT a good thing and it shows a serious need to switch our focus to sustainability over growth. If it wasn't, of course, we just got unlucky with it. But in no way do I consider the S75-79 roster hell a good thing.
 
 
Ironically, I use the same logic of "did everyone forget the initial conversation" when I'm making my posts. The E was created as a solution to roster hell. And that's it. The whole "I want to skip this league or that league" thing came along later. Regardless of which league anyone thinks they should skip, and regardless of anyone's opinions on the matter, the first stages of VHLE discussion, and the sole reason creating the VHLE was even considered, had to do with roster issues.
 
One problem I have with the skip-the-M argument is that it operates under the assumption that recreates even existing in the M is bad--for retention, for roster space, for getting slimy recreate germs on the precious new member equipment, you name it. I make my opinions known quite a bit here (and in that thread in general). In short--these issues don't exist nearly as much if we put 👏 waiver 👏 offers 👏 on 👏 the 👏 portal 👏
 
 
Something I will propose, though:
 
THE ALSO-ON-THE-PORTAL COMPROMISE...also the point that actually relates to the topic.
 
Upon creation, recreates will have the opportunity to select their preferred league for the next season. This is not an available option to first-gens. Those who choose to stay in the VHLM may do so, and those who choose to go up to the VHLE may also do so--both without judgment. By the time of the draft, those who chose the VHLE must be at or above a specified (lower) cutoff--say, 125. This is meant to keep the VHLE competitive and keep lower earners in an environment where earning and learning is more heavily emphasized. Note that this says nothing about opinions of which league should be skipped--and I don't think it needs to. If you have an opinion, express it by clicking one button or another.

For Podcast Intro by @bigAL
and
Graphic by @Ricer13
 

 
 

Igen, we’ll get that all together early this week. If you’ve won an auction, you can go ahead and make your donation to the league or to your local charity of choice. Post the proof in the donations thread and link to the auction you won. 

Igen, we’ll get that all together early this week. If you’ve won an auction, you can go ahead and make your donation to the league or to your local charity of choice. Post the proof in the donations thread and link to the auction you won. 

Whether you want to share your voice or not, legendary former VSN Radio podcast One and a Half Aussies @Berocka @dasboot will make a podcast segment with or about you. I can tell you from experience, this is a lot of fun. Since the show peters out every few months, this could be a rare opportunity to hang out live with these two clowns! 
 
Opening bid: $2.00
Minimum raise: $0.50

@bigAL There are already tons of great auctions so if it's not needed I understand but I am still offering my next players name as an auction if you needed more.

Eh, I don’t think removing that level of interaction is a big deal. Getting a new member to actually accept an offer and join a team is one of the largest hurdles in the recruitment process. It can be difficult for people who aren’t comfortable with forums to understand what to actually do. Making that process more intuitive and remove what is effectively just giants walls of text being thrown at new members would be a positive in my opinion.