Disconnection: My Story

[Gustav 6,407]

So I read @Renomitsu's article in this same section of the forum, and I was about to make a long-winded response when I realized...well, I haven't earned my last 2 TPE for this week. And given that I have a few hours to do so, I'm going to do so. My response is mostly just a lot of talking about myself, but I think it's kind of relevant.

 

I know how it feels to be disconnected from a sim league. I lost all interest in the PBE early on this summer (through no fault of theirs) and the EFL came soon after that. That's something I've mentioned a couple times around our forum, and it's something that I have no doubt many of you reading this article already know. But there's something that you probably don't, and it's something that I only told a couple people about--I came very close to being burnt out in our own lovely little league as well.

 

In fact, before this season started, I only didn't step down from my GM job because I forgot to send the message to the commissioners when I intended to. I actually had my resignation letter typed up right here on the forum, and decided to (literally) sleep on it as I had an early shift at work the next morning. I then went to work, got to thinking, and before I could get home I had a plan for what I was going to do this season. So, I decided to follow through on that--I reasoned that perhaps I had stopped caring because Davos had not done well the past few seasons, and had therefore taken away my reason to care. It was time to flip things around, both because it was now realistic to do so and because I knew I couldn't take another consecutive season of being right at the bottom of the league (Davos holds the league record for most consecutive last-place finishes from S70-72, right at the beginning of my tenure, and I would have tied that last season if it weren't for finishing 15th last season). Though I made sure to rarely show it in public, I hated being a laughingstock, even if I believed that my team and I were generally respected.

 

Was that right, and did I do the right thing? Maybe. It's also reasonable to say that I made the selfish move in sticking around when, for a couple weeks at least, I felt completely disconnected from my GM job, if not from the league as a whole. I'd even go so far as to call myself a bit of a hypocrite, as I've always personally believed that the league deserves a high standard of activity and devotion from its GMs and I know there was a short time when I don't believe I lived up to that in the slightest, at least on the inside. And if that offends anyone who considers that a mark against me, I apologize for it. But turning things around and competing was the kick in the pants I needed to be interested again--I could now actually care about sim results, my team had a chance to do things, and my numbers could no longer be chalked up to the "bad team inflation factor" that's the source of quite a few VHFL-related complaints. 

 

In this specific case, what worked for me was having something specific happen that made me more interested in what was going on. I get that in general, it's going to be hard to find that something specific. There might not even be a something specific, and I'm not going to tell anyone to go out and find it because not being able to find it could end up being a point of frustration that could just make the problem worse.

 

Speaking in general, I think it's been difficult to feel fully supported by some aspects of the community lately. I've found the league server hit-or-miss for some amount of time now, and I recently pointed out that forum activity has dropped off as a whole. Something I found interesting in the comments was that some of the league's more veteran members noted that activity tends to decline over the summer. That's not something I ever found out myself (until this year), but given what happened this year, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a general trend exists. So, if it does, it's logical to think that anyone's drop-off in interest is, at least partially, due to a lack of engagement with the forum that's driven both ways--dropping off yourself and not engaging is one thing, but there could also be a lack of things to engage with that naturally leads to a lack of engagement by itself. But, if we continue the assumption that there's less to engage with over the summer, it stands to reason that there's going to be more to engage with, and that many of us who have found it difficult to stay interested here over the past few months may find that interest returning as content again begins to be generated on the same level it was before.

 

There's my long-winded Gustav post, I guess. Not sure how much it's relevant or how much it helps, but there it is.