Doomsday

The consistent thorn in the EU's side, the legendary netminder getting the rightful immortality and praise they deserve. Congratulations!!

I accept

Not really for my mom since she's in a different city and also her mother's funeral was 2 days before so oof, kinda a rough year for her. For the wife though we went out for breakfast and I made some steak for supper; plus I roped the kids into helping me hide her gifts around the house for her to find so that was fun.
 
I am a simple man, gimme pancakes and I am a happy boi.
 
This is gonna sound nerdy as hell but does Pro Wrestling count as a sport even if it's all pre-determined? Because if so then good 'ole JR is full of them with the top ones being "Climb the ladder kid, make yourself famous!" and "As God as my witness he is broken in half". Kudos points to whomever can name the matches. If we aren't going to count wrestling though the best call of all time IMO is "And after 22 years... Raymond Bourque!" when he avs won in 2001 and Sakic immediately handed off the cup. Chills every time. 
 
-----------------
 
1. Are you surprised to see a Seattle Continental Cup victory?
2. Way too early prediction, who wins in S94?
3. Pineapple on Pizza, yay or nay?

@Will3 has accepted the position of Assistant General Manager of the Stockholm Vikings! Congratulations on achieving your goals of moving up in the AGM world, and I look forward to working with you!

Thank you @samx for believing in me to deliver as a first overall pick. I have loved being a part of this team, and we got so close to a Cup! Best of luck with the rebuild, and hopefully the assets you got for me can make it happen! Good luck Titans, it was an honor being your teammate the past four seasons!
 
Pumped to get started in Chicago with @badcolethetitan! Let's cause some chaos and bring the Cup back to the Windy City! 
 

@Doomsdaythank you for your time in Helsinki it is much appreciated! 
@SirRupertBarneswelcome to helsinki it is great to have you!
Cole thanks for the talks!
 

Thank you @samx for believing in me to deliver as a first overall pick. I have loved being a part of this team, and we got so close to a Cup! Best of luck with the rebuild, and hopefully the assets you got for me can make it happen! Good luck Titans, it was an honor being your teammate the past four seasons!
 
Pumped to get started in Chicago with @badcolethetitan! Let's cause some chaos and bring the Cup back to the Windy City! 
 

Thank you @samx for believing in me to deliver as a first overall pick. I have loved being a part of this team, and we got so close to a Cup! Best of luck with the rebuild, and hopefully the assets you got for me can make it happen! Good luck Titans, it was an honor being your teammate the past four seasons!
 
Pumped to get started in Chicago with @badcolethetitan! Let's cause some chaos and bring the Cup back to the Windy City! 
 

@samx Thanks for the trade talks.
 
@SirRupertBarnes Good luck in Helsinki, you were great for us in the time we had you!
 
@Doomsday THUG LIFE HUNGARY

Yes please 

I am so happy to be working in the E! I will work to make us the best team we can be.

@Will3 has accepted the position of Assistant General Manager of the Stockholm Vikings! Congratulations on achieving your goals of moving up in the AGM world, and I look forward to working with you!

I think a separate Builder thread is a sensible move and I will try to remember to do that for next season.
 
Not opposed to the minimum tenure requirement although I don't think that will eliminate anyone currently on the list as that would just be anyone who joined S74 onwards.

TALLY HO LADS

I promise this image made perfect sense in context.
 
 
The game of Mafia was invented in 1987 by a student at Moscow State University who has definitely never heard of the VHL. That student probably never envisioned Among Us the lengths to which the world would go to study the game, from profitable spin-offs to home-brew versions to even real mathematical research devoted to its analysis. Playing a game like Mafia requires intuition, wit, and lots of knowledge of game mechanics.
 
And running one takes even more.
 
My first exposure to Mafia came much earlier than I thought it was, when @Nykonax floated the idea of a game way back in May of 2019--this would have been S66. He ended up getting a decent-sized player list and making a game happen. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Not much that was being said in the game thread made much sense to me, and I walked away from the experience considering it largely forgettable. But, I was now aware that this was a thing that could be done on forums.
 
I must have retained that knowledge pretty soon after that, because I remember playing a game in the SBA right around the time of our affiliation fallout. That changed not much of anything about what I knew about the game, but I had retained the basic idea of talking during the day and doing things at night. I'd also joined the EFL (which I will openly admit was fueled by wanting affiliate checks), and in one of those affiliate leagues, I had my first exposure to Town of Salem--a game that you can find on Steam (although I've never played it) that is essentially just a fancy version of Mafia. It turns out that, as a fancy version of Mafia, Town of Salem (or ToS) is readily adapted to a forum game. I still didn't really know what I was talking about in the EFL, but they had a long rule thread and I was more comfortable hanging around there with it being a league that I knew had nothing against me being VHL-first.
 
By this point, it was clear to me that--even though I was clueless--the Mafia concept had managed to stick around for more than just a one-off in our affiliate leagues, and I'd also watched lots of people in those leagues play the games and like them a lot. It was something the VHL was missing, and I was bored--so I figured I should take matters into my own incompetent hands.
 
For those of you who are unfamiliar by this point, Mafia (in general) is a two-sided game consisting of an "informed minority," or an "evil" group of players who plot with each other behind the scenes to kill the others, and an "uninformed majority," or a "good" group who must use their own skills and find out who the bad ones are by talking out in the open (where the bad ones try to blend in and mess with their plans). There are lots of variations on this, many with more unique roles than others. I wasn't confident, so I eventually found myself digging through rule sets on some mafia game forum and settling on a game called Cult in the Jungle Republic where 12 of the 19 people who would end up playing were just residents of the town with no special abilities. We played the game, but most people didn't really like it for that reason--why would you want to play the game where you really couldn't do much aside from following votes? So, it was clear to me that to keep this thing going, we would need to go full Town of Salem--where every single player has a job to do and there are lots of layers to the game beyond just Town and Mafia.
 
Did I establish by this point that I had no clue what I was doing? Whatever. In any case, I relied on two things in equal measure to learn the game, without either of which the game would not be possible. The first was the Town of Salem Wiki, which has every possible role extensively documented with enough information that a game can be run if you read closely enough. The second was @omgitshim, who has every possible role also extensively documented in his head, as well as enough patience that a game can be run even if you're stupid. I spent lots of hours over lots of days dealing with both of those until I felt that I got the point, and then I finally put up the sign-up thread for the VHL's first-ever game of Town of Salem, just over a year after I joined the league and about four months after Cult in the Jungle Republic flopped. Check out the date on that one--is it really a surprise to anyone that we all had the time in our lives to get the game off the ground?
 
ToS #1 was a success, all in all. It took forever--no other game we've played has even started to approach Day 13--but it was a big learning experience for lots of people (myself included) and I had an absolute blast every time I started the night phase and got to see in real time who was taking shots at who. I stuck with asking OMG everything for the most part, but made it through my first game ever without a major crisis. 
 
I knew I'd run lots of games at the start, but I had no idea just how frequently I was doing it and I could never pull that type of thing off today. Within a week, I was signing people up for Game 2, and we'd run up 10 games between the end of March and the end of August--that's one game (which itself took just over a week on average between sign-up and last kill) about every two weeks over that time. I'm honestly shocked that we were able to maintain our player base that constantly, but I suppose that's all we had going on over the summer of 2020. In a way, I wouldn't doubt it if COVID was what gave us the amount of interested people to begin with, or if it was the reason why ToS caught on.
 
Regardless, lots of those interested people deserve my mentions. My handy-dandy stat tracking sheets give me all the info I need to tag those who have been involved the most--obviously OMG, but he and @eaglesfan036 have been considered our nastiest, most competent players from the very start. @Doomsday, @Ricer13, @jhatty8, and @Berocka can also all claim to have played just about every single game we've run (with Eagles, Berocka, and @Devise both running their own spin-off versions of ToS at one point or another). Some others who have stuck around consistently for a long time and are still active in our threads today are @Spartan , @Advantage, @N0HBDY, @rory, @Alex, and even @Ptyrell, who has never had a VHL player but has posted over 1,000 times on our forum for ToS and related games (including his own creative project, Town of Pallet). All of these and much, much more have made Town of Salem what it is, which is an awesome way for the community to really feel like a community. I've had so much fun watching everyone go at each other over the past four years (!) and I'm looking forward to a lot more.
 
To bring it back to being a point in the series about my own personal history, this wasn't the first time I decided to just do something fun for the community rather than waiting for it, but it was the most work I'd ever put into that. I think the league would be a much better place if it had more "just doing" in it, and Town of Salem is something I'll always be able to point to as an example of that. Even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the sim hockey part of the league (and therefore is just one of the "intangibles" on my record), I consider it one of my biggest VHL accomplishments and really feel that it deserves a solid place in this series.
 
 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:
 
#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name
#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?
#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?
#4: The House That I Built
#5: Can We Fix It?
#6: American Beauty
#7: The Kids Are Alright
#8: Dogs In A Pile
#9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake
#10: This Old House

DAVID

I could have been DC's GM if it weren't for you meddling kids--who knows what would have happened?
 
 
I also would have had way, way less to say about my time in the VHLM if I ended up being promoted in S68 with the addition of a couple new teams. The BoG toyed with the idea, but eventually they'd decided that they hated me some others were better fits at the time. But I was pretty darn good, after all...
 
 
...and my time was going to come eventually.
 
Cue @ShawnGlade fucking up.
 
I mostly joke because I think I would have been moved up sometime not far from S70 anyway. At one point, I was the one @Advantage wanted to take over Malmo eventually, and had the league known that he'd be giving up the team right after S70, they definitely would have waited a little bit on hiring me and done that instead. I almost could have flushed Malmo's hopes and dreams down the toilet too--could you imagine? At least two franchises should be glad I was unlucky.
 
But anyway, back to what I said earlier. When I joined the league, I knew Shawn as the builder of a solid player and a passionate GM in Davos who made a lot of moves that people questioned. Davos got made fun of a lot, even when they were good on paper. So did Shawn, by extension. Even when the team was good on paper, they just couldn't seem to piece it together. Which, by itself, wasn't a negative reflection on his management. With that being said, it certainly meant that when there was an actual shortcoming, the league picked up on it and ran with it.
 
After pinging Shawn, I hope I can keep it clear that I like him a lot while also fairly saying that I don't blame league leadership for considering it a red flag when he missed a couple drafts in a row without notice. Which is essentially all that presented a serious issue to the league. Things happen, and sometimes things matter a little more than this website--so when that runs to enough of an extent that the league has to BPA your picks and your players start leaving in free agency (future HoFer Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen was a big loss), it's enough for the league to also consider that maybe your team could use a bigger loser with more time and energy to devote.
 
I came across the BoG thread on the matter a couple seasons later when they let me in, and it actually started out as a discussion about (deservedly) removing Bushito as Calgary's GM after the Wranglers were functionally run by Dil and/or Blade for a few seasons on end. But S70's draft came and went with that thread up, and with Davos discourse becoming very public afterward, the topic quickly shifted. To be honest, things went into "who should we hire" pretty soon after that, and it was @Rin who pretty soon after that managed to avoid a lot of debate and lists and whatnot by recommending me specifically for the job. Really, the only bump in the road was Advantage bringing up that maybe I could run Malmo at some point--which he walked back later on saying that he wasn't sure what his plans were yet. So it was settled--I'd known myself that I was the heir to the Nighthawks and was a little bit disappointed to find out that it wouldn't be working out that way, but I've also mentioned before that S70 wasn't very happening in Mississauga and I was really excited when Beav contacted me to offer the big-league job. It was also cool to watch my then-both-former-and-future AGM @Berocka, who had just been hired in Halifax and made a questionable trade there, be moved over to run the Hounds because the personal connection we'd both built with the franchise was strong enough to warrant it.
 
With all the hype around me moving up, I was also a bit conflicted because I really didn't want it to happen the way it did. I'd seen Shawn's resignation post (the league asked him to quit instead of announcing it officially, but it was no secret) and subsequent discussion thread, and really did feel a bit bad. I also wasn't really sure how to approach the situation from my end. Here was someone I really had no issue with, whose team I'd inherited and would have to work with, who was a rostered player on that team, and who also probably was not a fan of me in that moment. I did reach out and we talked briefly, but we mostly gave each other some space at the start.
 
Something that was really important to me was the buildup of team culture. Davos was not in any position to win games in S70, and I'd heard a lot about how the team's community needed work. I didn't really want to deal with figuring out what that meant or how true that was, so I almost immediately created a new team server altogether. I followed the same exact strategy I had in building a locker room in Mississauga (which was mostly a carryover from my first season in Houston), which was to try to focus discussion into publicly accessible channels as much as possible and try to create a mutually beneficial environment for the team and the rest of the community. With the Hounds, I'd never had the need to bring in people who weren't affiliated with the team (and there were some cases where people would join the team for this reason!), but with a gutted and mostly demoralized roster, and no alumni network in my newly-created server, I decided to invite a handful of people who had been particularly good to me up to that point. I especially remember people like @Doomsday, @GlowyGoat, @McWolf, and @Esso2264 at the start, some of which would stay active in that server through my entire tenure even if they never made it onto my roster. On the roster itself was...really not much. We had the ever-reliable @Ahma on defense, and right around the time I was hired was when @Brrbisbrr (one of the nicest people I've ever met on this website) decided to make a comeback. Samuel Ross was my first Davos goaler, and he faced the absolute barrage of pucks faithfully in S70.
 
As you might guess, the biggest event of S70 was my hiring. I won't act like we won much of anything (we finished last, of course). My GM tenure had gotten off to a rocky start. I could have just thrown lines together and checked out until I finally got to draft in S71. But I felt that it was worth putting the time and effort into making a team run, at least a little bit, and I felt that our server benefited from that. I was really proud of some of the ways I felt appreciated by my new team, and haven't quite forgotten this article that's over 4 years old at this point. 
 
My first year with Davos reinforced a lot of what I already knew--that running your VHL team like a VHLM team and actually trying to see that your players have a positive experience instead of zoning them out and doing your lines when you have to is something that pays off. I'd much rather have the record I did in S70, and know that my team had a good time getting there, than have no connection with them and win a bit more. And while it's unfortunate that I couldn't do both of those things at once, you'll see as I cover the rest of my GM tenure that I don't regret it.
 
 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:
 
#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name
#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?
#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?
#4: The House That I Built
#5: Can We Fix It?
#6: American Beauty
#7: The Kids Are Alright
#8: Dogs In A Pile
#9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake

I'm so sorry for your loss. I doubt words can be much comfort right now, but this community is capable of so much good. Please let us know if there's anything we can do to help!

I'm so sorry for your loss. I doubt words can be much comfort right now, but this community is capable of so much good. Please let us know if there's anything we can do to help!

Jannula should already be in the HOF, and I will vote for him every season until the error is rectified.
 
I'm also interested in seeing if there could be a senior committee of sorts that searches for players like Jannula that should have been in the Hall, but were missed for whatever reason. 

Hail, warriors!
 
As Season 93 winds down, the time has finally come for Jarl Doomsday to add to the Halls of Leadership of the Stockholm Vikings, and is now actively seeking to appoint an AGM. No previous experience with an AGM/GM position or with STHS is required, but the Jarl does decree that whoever seeks this position should be full of zeal and passion, and have an open mind towards both learning and teaching. The challenges of promoting activity in the VHLE are no small task, and it is the single biggest aspect that the Jarl is looking for.
 
Regardless of your experience, knowledge, and tenure in the VHL, if you believe that you are the right person for the job, please apply! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on the forums or on Discord at doomsdayvhl
 

Hail, warriors!
 
As Season 93 winds down, the time has finally come for Jarl Doomsday to add to the Halls of Leadership of the Stockholm Vikings, and is now actively seeking to appoint an AGM. No previous experience with an AGM/GM position or with STHS is required, but the Jarl does decree that whoever seeks this position should be full of zeal and passion, and have an open mind towards both learning and teaching. The challenges of promoting activity in the VHLE are no small task, and it is the single biggest aspect that the Jarl is looking for.
 
Regardless of your experience, knowledge, and tenure in the VHL, if you believe that you are the right person for the job, please apply! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on the forums or on Discord at doomsdayvhl
 

Hail, warriors!
 
As Season 93 winds down, the time has finally come for Jarl Doomsday to add to the Halls of Leadership of the Stockholm Vikings, and is now actively seeking to appoint an AGM. No previous experience with an AGM/GM position or with STHS is required, but the Jarl does decree that whoever seeks this position should be full of zeal and passion, and have an open mind towards both learning and teaching. The challenges of promoting activity in the VHLE are no small task, and it is the single biggest aspect that the Jarl is looking for.
 
Regardless of your experience, knowledge, and tenure in the VHL, if you believe that you are the right person for the job, please apply! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on the forums or on Discord at doomsdayvhl