Shindigs

$69 and we're back to that again.

Draft picks and relegation are in essence two different ways to do the same thing. Relegation removes the worst team from the league. Draft picks reward the worst teams with better picks to hopefully stop them being the worst teams. But it is very much a "pick one, but only one" type of deal. Because as Spartan pointed out, you can't be able to trade draft picks if the team you trade them to can leave the league. Drafting requires a close system, but relegation isn't a closed system. Also as a Swede where everything is a relegation league, I can tell you it's a bit of a tire fire most the time. It leads to massive instability in the franchises. It does mean that the bottom teams who are just "playing out the season" in a closed system are instead fighting for their lives. But usually they are bad enough that it doesn't make any actual difference, and instead makes it so 7 game series will decide if their franchise almost dies or not. The junior system sounds like the absolute worst case scenario of what Gus was advocating against in the jardy podcast Opinion thread though. So would agree that's probably not the solution. Arguably if the league ends up in a position where the M gets completely clogged, that seems like a good time to consider the possibility of letting the capped recreates move up to the E during a season. Simply to open up roster spots as needed in the M.

Good stuff @ForeTwenty, it's really nice to see you get right into it with the TPE opportunities, capped and uncapped. You definitely look like you'll be going places. The league currently has a pretty sizeable defenseman deficit as well: So whether you knew it or not, you picked the perfect position. If you keep up the kinda work you're showing early. The sky really is the limit. The piece was nice too. I always enjoy reading these kind of backstories of the players. It really fleshes them out and gives you a more immersive experience, imo.

Man, I feel like there may be a Clue Tape™ ad in here somewhere. "Now that' alotta damage!"

I mean it's impossible to argue with that statement 10/10. I still don't know how you get beat up in a fight by a board game though. BGCS' legend just continues to grow. Is there anything this "supposedly" inanimate object can't do?

Change of plans. @Alexandre outbid me on the interview. So time to up the heat in here. $42

Unfortunate, but I wish you the best of luck. May your Defensive stats be dank, and your memes fresh!

70.69

$69 Yeah, I went there. #TeamClue represents!

So your player is a playmaking defensive defenseman, and you live to make awful (read: awesome) puns? I find this highly relatable! Too bad we couldn't get you in the Miami locker room together with Mia Khalifa and Bo.

https://www.eliteprospects.com/player/11116/akim-aliu They already got pretty close. Though obviously brought up in the Canadian Junior system, he's still from there.

$51 Starting to get a bit too hot though.

Can relate to that quote, though I still take the opportunity to do plenty of dumb shit myself. To even out the scales a bit.

I just wish I could be honestly.

On the waiver point, automatic assignment of 1st gens from waiver isn't ideal. Teams would obviously still need to want to claim the player in the first place. Same as it is now. But when we end up situations like Miami and I think Mexico this year where we have bots getting 15+ minutes of icetime 40% into the season, while other rosters are full. That is an issue. The "least goes first" similar to the NHL's "worst goes first" just means that after the teams have shown interest there is an order in which they get dibs on the player. That should even out the distribution a lot. Putting it on a completely new player to assign themselves to the correct team isn't really fair on the new player. Maybe just an agreement between GMs to not be trying to fill your literal last roster spot when another team can barely field a team would be enough though. As that wouldn't put as much work on any one governing body. It would spread the responsibility to not be a hoarder among the VHLM GMs instead. This again requires all the GMs to buy into being a developmental league, rather than trying to do everything in their power to win at all times. Which is hard to do, honestly. If we didn't like winning we'd hardly be playing sim hockey in our spare time, would we? On the point of "Every team should still have recreates". This assumes a perfect world where every team DOES have active mentoring recreates. Miami has 0 to the best of my knowledge (outside the GMs), our only truly "veteran" player has never once been in the Discord, at least never sent a message as far as I know. So putting forwards things that *should* happen, but aren't *actually* happening as the reason we can't change something, doesn't really make sense. Now if recreates were evenly spread, that would fix that exact issue. But it wouldn't fix the issue @bigAL brings up. Which is what I have been struggling with this season. The feeling that you start so far behind the recreates that you feel like no matter what you do, you'll always just be worse than them (Unless you're Mia Khalifa and the sim just loves you). That's not a feeling that inspires most people to stick around. Max earning a full seasons so that on the last day of the year you can reach the TPE they had on day 1 is very, very demoralizing. Which finally brings us to the E. I'll agree that purely from a community standpoint, subdividing it, especially if it is a relatively small community like VHL will usually lead to issues. But that assumes that we make decisions based only on the community itself, while not accounting for what actually brought the community here in the first place. Which is to say, some dank spreadsheet hockey. Yes, at some point most of us will likely not stay around because of that. We will stay around because of the amazing community. But at first we come for the hockey. So if sub-division is needed to make the very first part of your sim hockey career more enjoyable. Then maybe you need to consider making compromises by subdividing the community like it has been. Where exactly that compromise should ideally be is the very hard part, and we're basically arguing the details of that here. But arguing no sub-division at all feels unrealistic. Final though: The E also suffers from something else, it's too new. We have this really cool super competitive (in theory) league called the CHL IRL. No not the real CHL, the European CHL (WHY DID THEY NAME IT THAT?!). Which just about no one cares about. Why doesn't anyone care? Because it's too new, it has no lineage. There is no history making it something to covet, unlike the soccer Champions League. That has lineage (and boatloads of TV money) which makes it arguably the biggest thing in all of Soccer. The two leagues use an effectively identically setup, yet one is #1 and the other is meh at best. Is it because the hockey CHL is a bad league? Or is it just a young league that still needs to get its lineage and create the rivalries that make it matter? Counter-argument: The E sucks because Västerås is in it, which to be fair is true. Also @JardyB10 specifically stated he was tired of this topic. So I'll tag him just to force him back here, you're welcome!

So I have this weird annoying thing where to me almost all perfume/deodorant smells purely like chemicals. I don't ever perceive them as the smell they are "supposed" to have. It just smells like someone dumped a chemical plant on my olfactory system. There has been one (1) exception to this in my entire life, where someone actually smelled like Jasmine + some other flowery stuff that I can't recognize by smell, instead of smelling like a chem vat. This makes stuff like public transportation suck for me, as I'm basically sitting there borderline dry-heaving the entire time. Does anyone else have that weird quirk, or is this purely a me thing?

Rumor has it that proud #TeamClue member and AGM @MubbleFubbles legendary Clue-engine™ powered spreadsheets may have played no small part in the success enjoyed by the LV team. Some argue that their teambuilding exercises (Yelling at bots) also have a positive impact on morale and team cohesion.

You can turn that feature off, actually. I can't remember how cause it's been years. But you can.

Thank god they had plenty of Clue Glue™ at hand.

Getting a head start on your hard hitting articles I see.

Juha Ikonen (I think that's what you were saying anyways) is very, very Finnish. Also calling Finns Swedes is a) Hilarious and b) a good way to get stabbed by Finns. Your Swedish accent is, interesting. But so is my Canadian, eh? So can't feel too sory about it, eh? Really my accents are limited to my Swedish accent (which is the "Missouri accent" of Sweden, so FML on that one) and Bond-villain Russian. But honestly the kind of answer you gave to the HoF question was quite exactly what I was after. A story about unlikely heroes, that could only be told by someone so damn old they were there. Now in retaliation for you (very correctly I might add) calling me a nerd in Nurx' podcast thread. I will rate this podcast in the dumbest way possible: Considering you're an engineer and that is all at most pre-calc (I think?). It really should be a walk in the park. Also the math software I used sucks, which is why the i in the partial Euler's formula looks like a fleshy appendage connected to the equally ugly pi. Also, how exactly does saying you're not a nerd and also wanting to invite DnD podcasters as your dream guests add up? Looks kinda sus to me. But again, it was a good answer. Assumed you wouldn't go with a boring fanboy answer, but rather something more interesting. I used to be part of the OG following of RollPlay when they started the PnP streaming craze back in the days. The Shadowrun group I played with for years was actually the community group from there. Sadly I kinda stopped with RPGs at some point, but it was always good fun. Even though Shadowrun is an absolute tire fire of epic proportions. They actually have rules that require you to square/take the root of things mid calculation...in a tabletop game. Just why?

$17

Sometimes you just take a lot of D to the face. It's just part of being a Dman, really. Mia knows all about it too.