GEORGE IS GETTING UPSET

[Gustav 6,420]

Preface: I don't hate anyone and I hope I manage to come across as making light out of a situation rather than being all whiny.

 

Fellow people of the VHL, I speak to you to tell you that for the first time since I just wrote "upvoted" on a Reddit recruitment thread and didn't specify that I upvoted both posts in question (which I think was a stupid reason), way back when I was just starting out in the league, ONE OF MY UPDATES HAS BEEN DENIED! More specifically, you may remember that I wrote this article earlier this week, which hung around presumably under review for a few days before the POWERS THAT BE decided that my VOICE must be SILENCED. More specifically, it must be so callously ELIMINATED FROM EXISTENCE because my article was not sufficiently "league-related" and it is one of supposedly many that have supposedly lately supposedly crossed the line into supposed irrelevance. 

 

Yes, I only spent one bullet point (and 53 words, for the curious) talking about things that have to do 100% directly with the sims and the results thereof, while the rest of the article was more of an update about me personally. That, though, does not constitute grounds for denial, and I'm here to explain why.

 

 

-I may have been slapped for contributing too much. This point is mostly just speculation, but let's say I took out most of the words, kept the one bullet point that is 100% inarguably "league-related", and wrote exactly 150 words. That would leave me with an article that says substantially less and is far lower in quality (in my opinion), but is about 35% "related" in the strictest possible definition of the word. My article ended up being 412 words, and by extension around 13% strictly related, but is a much better read than anything I would have written to keep it to 150 otherwise. Had I done that, though, my article would have been proportionally more conforming-to-the-standards-of-the-tyrants and could, on a stupid technicality, be argued to be "more on-topic" despite being worse and adding no new strictly "on-topic" information. And would it have gone through then? Possibly! 

 

-I have a very long history of doing this and seeing it approved. I just searched up things I've written with "life update" in their contents and found this, this, and this, all of which spend substantial portions of their word counts talking about things that aReN't LeAgUe-ReLaTed and one of which arguably spends none of its word count at all on the matter if you're a hardline stickler (which I'll get to in a moment). And that's far from an exhaustive list of things along those lines I've written about. I like to use the forum as a journal sometimes, and it's always gone through. So, if standards are going to change, why not at least warn me? I had no reason to believe that what I wrote didn't meet the league's quality standards. And SPEAKING OF WHICH...

 

-What is quality? I'd imagine that a lot of updater guidelines focus on holding things to a certain standard of quality, which is fine. An obvious issue with that arises when we realize that quality is a very subjective concept, and what is good to one person may not look good to another. I think I'm at the very least literate, and I've never had a problem getting my point across in writing, so it's not like I'd ever have something denied because it wasn't written well enough. To argue that my writing doesn't meet the league's standard of quality would have to involve taking a shot at its content itself rather than the way it's written. But how do we decide what content is good enough and what content isn't? I think it's time to take it to the court of public opinion, where we see that my article this week, as of now, has received 7 reactions, which is more than any other VHL.com article since June 23rd (which I had to go back 6 pages to find). Clearly, the content of my article presented something that the league's members wanted to, and did, read and enjoy. In fact, it went above and beyond the standards of public reception. It's completely out of the question to say that the article does not meet an acceptable level of quality and interest. So, it's very safe to conclude that what the updaters are told the league wants is far different from what the league actually wants to see, and it's in situations like these where we should examine the policies that we're enforcing.

 

Finally, a bit of a philosophical point:

 

-What is league-related? Am I only supposed to talk about my player or my team? Am I only supposed to give an overview of the standings and stretch it out until it meets the word count? What freedoms do I have with my writing if there's going to be a crackdown on what is and isn't related to the league? And let's not forget this--as a sim league, we are a community, and the very foundation of a community is its members. This isn't strictly a roleplay forum. We don't all run around pretending to be our players and acting like the sims are actual games happening in real life. We speak as real people behind screens operating numbers in one big sim file--which is exactly what we are. I, myself, am a much larger part of our community than Jerry Garcia or Taro Tsujimoto or even Art Vandelay (sometimes). So, is news about me not league-related? I'm as league-related as it gets!

 

 

To make sure this gets approved, and to get my point across, I present to you exactly 150 words of entirely non-entertaining drivel that technically meets the guidelines of acceptability:

 

 

The Los Angeles Stars wanted to compete this season, but it has not been working so well. They wanted to be good, but instead they are bad. After drafting defenseman Callum Murray 3rd overall in the S84 VHL Entry Draft and goalie Art Vandelay 1st overall in the S84 VHL Entry Draft, it looks like they will be good one day. The Los Angeles Stars are 6th in the North American Conference, with a record of 10-16-5, behind the Calgary Wranglers and ahead of the Vancouver Wolves. This does mean that they have made improvements after finishing last in the entire league last season and ending up with the first and third overall picks in the S84 VHL Entry Draft, which they used to select goalie Art Vandelay and defenseman Callum Murray. We will see if the Los Angeles Stars are able to improve this season or maybe next season.

[Nykonax 1,564]

13 minutes ago, Gustav said:

The Los Angeles Stars wanted to compete this season, but it has not been working so well. They wanted to be good, but instead they are bad. After drafting defenseman Callum Murray 3rd overall in the S84 VHL Entry Draft and goalie Art Vandelay 1st overall in the S84 VHL Entry Draft, it looks like they will be good one day. The Los Angeles Stars are 6th in the North American Conference, with a record of 10-16-5, behind the Calgary Wranglers and ahead of the Vancouver Wolves. This does mean that they have made improvements after finishing last in the entire league last season and ending up with the first and third overall picks in the S84 VHL Entry Draft, which they used to select goalie Art Vandelay and defenseman Callum Murray. We will see if the Los Angeles Stars are able to improve this season or maybe next season.

now this is the vhl.com content i come for

[N0HBDY 1,119]

35 minutes ago, Gustav said:

-I have a very long history of doing this and seeing it approved

You’re right if your previous article was denied I think we should launch an investigation into you past pt’s and revoke if needed

[Daniel Janser 2,170]

1 hour ago, Gustav said:

The Los Angeles Stars wanted to compete this season, but it has not been working so well. They wanted to be good, but instead they are bad. After drafting defenseman Callum Murray 3rd overall in the S84 VHL Entry Draft and goalie Art Vandelay 1st overall in the S84 VHL Entry Draft, it looks like they will be good one day. The Los Angeles Stars are 6th in the North American Conference, with a record of 10-16-5, behind the Calgary Wranglers and ahead of the Vancouver Wolves. This does mean that they have made improvements after finishing last in the entire league last season and ending up with the first and third overall picks in the S84 VHL Entry Draft, which they used to select goalie Art Vandelay and defenseman Callum Murray. We will see if the Los Angeles Stars are able to improve this season or maybe next season.

You could have added that LAS drafted Callum Murray at 3rd and Art Vandelay at 1st in the S84 draft to add some more welcome league related content.

[Enorama 2,038]

1 hour ago, Gustav said:

-I have a very long history of doing this and seeing it approved.

 

Pretty sure it was specified in your denial that this is a new measure of pushing things back towards league discussion as it's been slipping away from us for months, if not years at this point.

[Gustav 6,420]

37 minutes ago, Enorama said:

 

Pretty sure it was specified in your denial that this is a new measure of pushing things back towards league discussion as it's been slipping away from us for months, if not years at this point.

 

Sure, but I'll draw your attention to the only point I'd call 100% serious:

 

2 hours ago, Gustav said:

if standards are going to change, why not at least warn me? I had no reason to believe that what I wrote didn't meet the league's quality standards.

 

[Spartan 4,403]

I denied it so I'll comment for fun and for the glorious forum content.

 

2 hours ago, Gustav said:

I think it's time to take it to the court of public opinion, where we see that my article this week, as of now, has received 7 reactions, which is more than any other VHL.com article since June 23rd (which I had to go back 6 pages to find). Clearly, the content of my article presented something that the league's members wanted to, and did, read and enjoy. In fact, it went above and beyond the standards of public reception. It's completely out of the question to say that the article does not meet an acceptable level of quality and interest. So, it's very safe to conclude that what the updaters are told the league wants is far different from what the league actually wants to see, and it's in situations like these where we should examine the policies that we're enforcing.

I'm going to assume this is very tongue-in-cheek/joking, but correct me if its not. People can write personal stuff that resonates so much more with the community than stuff relating to any of the three leagues. We see most of those in the General Discussion (see recent political threads, pregnancy/birth announcements, updates on health, etc.) and those also get pretty solid engagement. Unfortunately, engagement/forum content =/= meeting requirements for tasks.

 

2 hours ago, Gustav said:

I'd imagine that a lot of updater guidelines focus on holding things to a certain standard of quality, which is fine

Quality is mainly taken into consideration for graphics and career tasks, and even then it really just means "did this person put in at least a decent amount of effort and/or does it look good." Sure, good is also subjective but we can generally all identify low-effort graphics - for example the ones that look like someone just put a team logo on top of a jersey without literally any other elements or actions taken. There are graphics we accept that don't take hours and hours of effort like some of the best sigs around the league, as we recognize not everyone has been making graphics for years. But even if stuff isn't high quality or high effort, we still have the VHL.com section for people to toss their quick/low effort graphics into and get 2 TPE. We've tried to sort of remove the subjectivity of "quality" with stuff like reviews/game recaps/articles/media spots by providing specific word counts with the intention to make people think a bit in order to spit out some words, but those also need to be primarily league-related.

 

2 hours ago, Gustav said:

So, is news about me not league-related?

From an updating perspective, no. We're generally looking for content largely centered on the players, teams, users and leagues - but we obviously understand that interactions occur in the community as well and that is considered league related. We had a whole theme week about appreciating other users, but that is largely from the lens of interacting within the league and its community. Personal anecdotes and updates, which while I enjoy reading and encourage you to keep posting in the general discussion subforum, doesn't fall under that umbrella. For example I talk about my day in my podcast sometimes, but it's about 5 minutes or so while the other 25+ minutes are about stuff around the league. I still get to claim it for 2 weeks since a significant majority of the content is league related.

 

2 hours ago, Gustav said:

So, if standards are going to change, why not at least warn me? I had no reason to believe that what I wrote didn't meet the league's quality standards.

It didn't necessarily need a formal announcement since it's not a rampant issue, just one that has seemingly become more common in recent weeks which I correlate to summer and people doing more interesting things away from the league and choosing to talk about that in their PT's. There have been articles completely non-league related and updaters generally noticed that we could probably be a little less lax when we see things slipping. We've done the same with press conferences before, cracking down on the less than a sentence answers, and with videos a few months ago which were skirting guidelines. It's really just trying to make sure we don't stray too far from the guidelines for tasks - which can always be revisited in the BoG. Either way though, I think even if we warned instead of denying, we'd probably be having this same sort of conversation except it'd be "updaters don't like my content" instead of "updaters denied my content."

 

Oh and also the three things you linked - the first life update was completely non-league related and could have been denied but guess it slid, that was probably me. The other two are actually significantly league-related, talking about your player vs the two brief sentences in the vhl.com that got denied. Cheers.