Ranking The Top Ten Biggest Changes Since I Joined The Site

[MubbleFubbles 1,290]

Hey there, I’ve been in the league for about nine years now with some small absences scattered in between, so I’ve seen a huge amount of changes in the VHL. Here, I’m going to cover the ten biggest (not ten best) changes the VHL has undertaken since I joined the site and rank them from 10-1 based on how much they’ve helped the league out. To kick off with, just a few smaller changes that didn’t make the cut that I’d seen that came to mind:

 

-          The change to point task claiming that meant you no longer had to wait for a review and could claim it for 6 TPE (unless later challenged) was a really good change for the league and especially for users who had English as a second language and graphic submitters who just were not artistic enough to get a 6 using the old method

-          The forum update that allowed for the use of tagging members was a great addition to the league, it’d be difficult to think about the league without tagging at this point.

-          The change to donations were fairly minor, but it was good that the league reduced the rewards earned through paying real money.

-          Those lottery changes eh? Well intentioned, but unfortunately unsuccessful, in fact probably the least successful change in the league’s history.

-          Although I guess that’s challenged by that one attempt to make Trivia answers not be shared, that went down real well!

-          Expansions and Contractions aren’t covered in this since they’re more a by-product of other elements being successful, but if you’d had told me in S58 that fifteen seasons after we contracted, we’d in fact go on to have DOUBLE the teams we had currently, I’d have called you crazy.

 

 

10. Brands

 

I had deliberated whether brands was one of the ten biggest changes I’d seen implemented in the VHL given it’s incredibly short lifespan. However, looking back to the announcements and seeing the excitement for the brands, the work that had been involved to create brands and that it was a big enough system to warrant giving weekly TPE to those involved in helping it operate, I think it ultimately does have to be considered as one of the ten biggest changes. To quite a few of the members here, when they hear the term “brands”, they immediately think of the EFL Player Brands (their VHL.com equivalent), however the VHL brands were much different.

 

The original idea spawned from a post by Bana in the BOG around Season 62, which I believe had also included input from Muffins, regarding allowing players the ability to gain sponsorships which would be used to improve their player. I forget exactly what the reaction to that BOG thread was, but I do remember that Devise and Quik took the idea and decided to go all in on it and came back with not only a sponsorship system, but also an off-season tournament (much like the Super Cup which was another Devise idea) on top. There’s very little information left on the forum regarding brands so you can find out more about how it originally worked here, but to give the short answer; six brands with logos inspired by real-world brands were each ran by a Brand Executive who would earn 2 TPE per week and would offer players a money sponsorship in return for joining their brand, which the top monetary figure offered being $3M per season. There were guidelines though as to who they could offer sponsorships for to set teams on course to be able to compete in an off-season tournament (to compete for the Sponsor’s Shield) that was held every non-World Cup season (which was different from when the Super Cup was brought in as the World Cup was moved to once in every three seasons allowing one off-season of rest for simming).

 

While it was an ambitious project and did generate some excitement upon it’s announcement, brands ultimately lasted only four seasons, with only two tournaments played in Season 63 and Season 65. Who won those tournaments? It’s difficult to say because unlike the Super Cup which has its own subforum for its history, there are so little remnants around of anything regarding brands outside of the announcement that I imagine finding the winner is just a case of searching through Season 63/65 media and jumping on the winners by chance. Part of me wonders whether the lack of long-term interest for the last two official off-season tournaments created is why our unofficial off-season tournaments such as the JST and the Pro-Am aren’t given as much billing on the forum as they could be.

 

The announcement made by Quik made it clear it would not be returning or be replaced and cited over-saturation of tournaments and a rapidly expanding VHL/VHLM as a reason for it’s closing. Personally, I think one of the biggest issues that prevented brands from reaching the highs that Quik and Devise had hoped for is that I think the idea unfortunately just came too early. I’m of the belief that any idea can have an amount of success with the right people involved, but, while Quik and Devise were certainly enthusiastic, the inaugural brand executives involvement left a lot to be desired, with most of the hired candidates predominantly being welfare players who didn’t really contribute to the league that much outside of having their player and some made it evident with the effort they put into their work that they were only in the job for the 2 weekly capped TPE it rewarded. Had the brands idea come to the fore about six-eight months later though, you could be launching it with any of the many super-active first-gens picked up in the Season 64-68 draft classes as brand executives, along with the Season 62-63 first-gens who were still after a job, to accompany Baozi who was undoubtedly the best Brand Executive. Another issue was that it just offered too much money around to players, and not necessarily players who had warranted it with their activity. A good example would be Konstantin Mulligan who, despite not doing anything other than affiliate welfare, managed to get himself signed to a max $3M a season deal. While money payouts were later fixed to only be given during the season of the Sponsor’s Shield, players like Mulligan getting big deals didn’t help the criticism it faced from those who felt the process was just about giving money for the sake of giving money.

 

Could brands work in the current VHL? I think there is potential to the idea and there is probably a way to make it work, but ultimately I don’t know how much activity the brand concept could bring to the league even at its most efficient. However, it’s a pretty clear number 10 as ultimately it was a hyped up idea that didn’t live up to expectations.

 

9. Project Player Two

 

The VHL decided that it wanted to go big for it’s 50^th Season anniversary back in July 2016 and that big thing was Project Player Two, a process which allowed players to have two concurrently active players at one time. Originally spawning from a suggestion thread made by Molholt in May that was also expanded upon by Victor, the concept was simple, why not just let members in the VHL have two players at once? The positives cited for such a move were more full rosters, more freedom to look into different builds and/or positions that one maybe would not be prepared to do if they only got one player at a time and more opportunities to experience different locker room environments (the old VHL was a lot more guarded when it came to having non-team members in their locker room). While there were some discussions that took place about Project Player Two in hidden forums, the thread was a pretty rare example of a whole concept pretty much being freely discussed in the open rather than Admin/BOG seeing an idea and then going on to make all of the decisions from there themselves behind the scenes. The idea was then officially announced at the start of Season 50, with ten members being randomly drawn to be granted the opportunity to make a second player at the Season 50 Trade Deadline to enter the Season 52 VHL Draft. One more lottery would take place in Season 51 to see which ten members could create a second player at the Season 51 Trade Deadline for the Season 53 Draft before Project Player Two was opened for all heading into the Season 54 Draft (The only restriction being that you could only make a second player three draft classes after your current player, a rule later amended specifically for GM second players allowing them to create second players whenever).

 

So running two players, was it basically just the same creating and updating process carried over for your second player? Not exactly. The main point of Project Player Two was that it was intended to be something to allow active contributing members more ways to enjoy the league, so to that end there was a limit that only one player could claim welfare for the week and that you had to submit two 6 TPE Point Tasks and two VHL.com’s (the limit then was one VHL.com a week) if you wanted both players to get the TPE for it. However, activities that could only be done once (such as trivia, fantasy zone and jobs) were able to be added to both players. Now that might not sound too bad for members currently in the league who weren’t there at the time, but bear in mind this was introduced in Season 50, a time where standard welfare was worth just 2 TPE (increasing to 3 and 4 depending on previous players’ TPE levels), VHL.com and Trivia were the only supplemental point tasks (reviewing was a league job) and jobs were not paying nearly as much and not as freely available as they are nowadays (e.g. GM was not a paying role at this point, only simmers counted as a PT replacement job), so to even have two somewhat decent players, you had to be doing two point tasks per week.

 

Ultimately this increased workload became an issue, with members who were originally doing fine with max earning in the VHL falling victim to burnout trying to keep two players around. In fact, the only group of people who seemed to consistently keep max earning both of their players were GMs, especially those who had been able to acquire both of their players. If there was one positive however, it did boost VHL player counts at a time where recruitment success was at an all-time low. From the drafts that took place during the Project Player Two era (S52-S58), I only counted six total first-gens who made the VHL through TPE earning (e.g. from exceeding 200 TPE, not because a team needed players), and this lack of talent was illustrated further by the Vancouver Wolves winning the Continental Cup in S56 despite icing just seven skaters.

 

Project Player Two was shut down at the start of Season 58 after the league contracted down from ten teams to eight teams (something I’d been pitching for quite heavily), but not all members were affected as GM’s were allowed to still have two players in order to assist easier transitions between General Managers (since this was in the era where GM’s were required to have one of their players on their team at all times). This was pretty understandable since GM transitions prior to Project Player Two were something of a nightmare, but pretty interesting as well given that GM’s having second players in the first place had the most opposition. This lasted a further ten seasons (although discussions for getting rid of them earlier took place many times beforehand) until the VHL shut off GM’s creating second players from the Season 68 Trade Deadline onwards in favour of removing the rule that required GM’s to have one of their players on their team.

 

Project Player Two makes a lot of sense at 9, given it just never upped the player base in a way that had been anticipated and instead the workload proved to cause people to tire of max earning and served nothing more than a band-aid to counter the low recruitment levels. It’d be interesting to think how Project Player Two would have fared if Molholt’s original suggestion of PT’s counting for both players would have been used instead, but at the same time it’s understandable why the league didn’t necessarily want to go in that direction given that’d generate more obstacles for new players to get through to get good playing time.

 

8. VHLE + Career Changes

 

A far cry from the VHL situation in the above scenario, the VHL in Season 78 (and now as well) was going from strength to strength with several talented first-gens coming in each draft season accompanied by large numbers of recreating players filling the VHL up to the point where they now had a total of 28 teams (16 VHL teams, 12 VHLM teams). However, even though those figures doubled the amount of teams we had just twenty seasons earlier, the league was still continuing to hit an upper limit, with pretty much every team having at least one skater playing on the third line and several VHL level goalies stuck in a backup role. While expansion could have potentially been an option, there are risks with continuing to add teams to the pro league as all it would take would be a dry spell in recruitment for a larger number of pro teams to be unnecessary, and removing pro teams to counter that should only be a last resort situation. Thus the VHL decided to introduce a third league into the mix, the VHLE, which would go on to be filled with teams (or relocated teams) from the VHL/VHLM’s past.

 

Before the VHLE was introduced, players who had earned over 250 TPE would move straight up to the VHL, but the VHLE now serves as a “middle league”, so the VHLE inherits VHLM players that surpass 200 TPE and players leave the VHLE once they surpass 400 TPE (though they can leave after they get over 350 TPE if a VHL team wishes to bring them up). There’s not really much I can say about the VHLE because unlike a lot of the changes covered in this article, I wasn’t here for it’s introduction (I wasn’t in the league between S75-S80). From my own personal experience, I think the league is fine. When I was on the Rush with The Board Game Clue On Skates, there were enough actives to keep me entertained in the locker room and Minion did a solid job on the activity front as well as our GM. I do get the impression though that this may not have been the case a season or two earlier as S78 and S79 were not exactly the deepest draft classes (not many active players past Round 2) in comparison to S82 (actives taken in the fifth round, one, Mo Probert, even undrafted), so while it isn’t pitched as a league geared towards retainment (which I thought was a questionable statement for the league to make given a player can’t really be considered to be a successful recruit until they make the VHL) I guess the activity of the E is still highly dependent on the success of the respective recruitment drives one-two seasons earlier.

 

Since I haven’t spent too long in the system, I can’t really offer many thoughts on what would improve the VHLE, though I stand by my suggestion I made in a VHL.com that players shouldn’t enter the VHLE Draft until they break 200 TPE, since new members currently face an overwhelming number of drafts in the off-season since the E was introduced, and in some instances active players have gone undrafted, likely because having GM’s pick more than 4-5 rounds of players who they aren’t going to immediately benefit from is pretty excessive.

 

On top of those changes to the VHLE though came mass changes to the length of a players career in the VHL. Players now can play a maximum of nine seasons (previously eight) after their VHL Draft and whereas depreciation used to factor in every season after your VHL draft, it now only accounts for the seasons you play in the VHL pro league. For example, a player who, after they are drafted, plays four seasons or more in the VHLM/VHLE, therefore playing five or less seasons in the VHL, will never face depreciation. However a player who plays all nine seasons in the VHL will now face a fourth season of depreciation. It’s difficult to comment on these because we won’t see any meaningful effects of these for a few seasons at least, but it will be interesting to see how players now no longer having their VHLM/VHLE seasons factor into depreciation will play into the state of the VHL.

 

And that’s really the big reason why this sits at number eight, we haven’t seen the full extent yet of what these changes will make to the league yet. While there are some people who absolutely despise the VHLE, I feel like there is a place for it in the league provided recruitment can average out three-four rounds of active players a season per draft.

 

7. Hybrid Attributes  

 

The most recent of the big changes that I will be covering, Hybrid Attributes were introduced just one and a half seasons ago at the start of Season 83. The main reason for these changes were as a counter to an exploit in the old process (which directly let you update to your attributes in STHS, the sim engine we use) where teams of players who had 40 Passing, 99 Scoring and 99 Defense would have an incredible amount of production in the sim while also being cap-efficient given the low TPE cost it took to get just those two attributes to 99. The reason that this was so successful is because the defense attribute effects your ability to pick up rebounds, therefore a group of players with 99 scoring and 99 defense could effectively shoot, collect shots that didn’t score and then shoot again at an extraordinary rate. It’s also worth noting that STHS wasn’t programmed with massive amounts of players at 99 which is evident by the fact that 1) it’s not EA’s STHS and 2) there were very few players in their NHL database that were above 95 in scoring, if any. The main benefactor of this exploit were the Vancouver Wolves, who went on to win three consecutive Continental Cups, only the second team in VHL history to do so. I’m not one of those who holds any ill-will towards their General Manager for doing so, but it was evident that changes would have to be made.

 

The VHL’s solution to the issue were Hybrid Attributes, a system that increased STHS values at a lower rate with formula for attributes that make it more difficult to hit the maximum 99 in an attribute. Scoring, one of the key attributes previously, was made exceptionally difficult to upgrade, requiring a user to add 645 TPE to get the attribute to 93, where it is capped, a huge amount more than the 185 it previously required to get to 99. In addition, the main hybrid attribute used to boost scoring, Offensive Vision, comes with a mandatory passing boost of the same value, meaning that the separation of passing and scoring would require some investment into other categories (Slap Shot and Wrist Shot).

 

It's difficult to get a full gauge so far on how Hybrid Attribute attributes are working given the small sample size, but so far it seems to be doing a pretty good job. We aren’t really seeing the low-TPE/high-scoring players dominating the scoring leaderboards, so that’s promising. One thing though that I believe still needs to be amended with the change to hybrid attributes is depreciation. Last off-season was the first season of depreciation in the hybrid attributes and players lost significantly less TPE than those in the old system, which meant they lost even less on top of that in the actual sim engine given that hybrid attributes upgrade attributes in STHS at a less efficient rate than before. For example, high TPE players who contested depreciation with store purchases in their final season were losing less than 100 TPE, whereas in the past it would be closer to double that. The lack of depreciation led to a lot of teams dealing with more cap problems than they likely would have in the old system, leading to a lot of teams having to trade their top players, not exactly a negative but for certain a by-product of the change. I imagine that this is something that’ll definitely be looked at though so might not even be a proper issue come next off-season.

 

It's position at seven is for a couple of reasons, one is that we haven’t seen it fully play out, but the second is that it was more brought in by necessity to mitigate and combat an issue, which I think is always going to limit it’s place on the list, but it’s a good change for the future of the league for certain.

 

6. Player Store

 

The earliest of the changes that I’m covering, I actually thought this happened in the first season of the site, but it didn’t actually go through till the start of Season 39. It’s also the change that covers the longest amount of time due to the number of tweaks it’s received over the course of its tenure. Like brands, this was a change that was brought forward by Devise as an effort to change the store from just a straight TPE purchasing gimmick where anyone with the money could get huge TPE purchases regardless of their activity to one with a bit more creativity. Originally, the store offered straight TPE, with six preset values ranging from $500K for 1 TPE to $7M for a monster 20 TPE. However, the new store in its first iteration changed things up by adding perks such as complete TPE reroll and magazine articles whilst also moving position changes behind a paywall that made sense given it used to just be something that could be agreed with acceptance.

 

The store didn’t necessarily get a great reaction at the start since many players were predictably unhappy at the loss of TPE, however future updates to the Player Store played their part in giving the TPE to the players on the condition they were active with VHL.com and Point Task upgrades getting added to the store in Season 40. The store then went on to add the mainstay depreciation fighters in Season 41 that have become must have items for pretty much all VHL players. The store was also open to purchases getting removed, with welfare/pension upgrades getting removed from the store in Season 49 due to concerns from the member base about being able to claim 5 TPE in welfare while Point Tasks were 6 TPE and…er wait a minute that last part sounded familiar. Weird.

 

The store as of Season 66 was moved to the VHL Portal making it easier to use for the most part and has added first-generation items geared to ease new members into using the store. I think the store as it is could use some minor tweaks, but nothing ground-breaking. For example, while it made sense when it was added to the store, the Point Task upgrade still existing in an era of two 6 TPE caps doesn’t really make much sense, along with better clarification on who can buy the First Generation purchases since I’ve seen several in the last few season get approved for players with recreate TPE.

 

I originally had this change to the store a bit higher up, but I’ve decided to put it at 6 just because it did take a while for the store to reach its top level.

 

5. Moderation

 

Prior to the last two to three years, to say that the VHL had a “relaxed approach” to moderation of member’s conduct would be a huge understatement. For the first five years I was in the league especially, it was incredibly rare to see a member face any punishment for unacceptable language, arguments, baiting or personal attacks, primarily because there weren’t really any rules or code of conduct in place or that were enforced that made sure that people knew where the line was. There was a bit of a push to increase moderation in the Season 60’s, in fact I was one of the moderators they hired, but we were basically told to just watch out for stuff getting out of hand, but without any guidelines at the time, what was out of hand and would I get the support of admin if I did address an issue that I felt got out of hand given there weren’t written rules to define such issues? I only did one thing as a moderator really and that was hide a dumb post that Matt_O made that, thankfully, there was some written info buried on the forum that I could use to justify hiding it because quite frankly I don’t want to see Alvin and his respective chipmunks involved in those acts ever again.

 

A proper stance towards moderation started to take shape after the Season 68 Playoffs, where an incident in the VHLM Finals thread containing the use of some inappropriate language subsequently led to a discussion in the SBA that saw their admin remove all welfare affiliate privileges from the VHL, meaning that a member in the VHL could not submit a VHL 6 TPE Point Task as an affiliate claim in the SBA. The discussions led to the VHL taking a long overdue stance on forum and discord conduct, with a Code of Conduct policy being created by Beketov a week after the incident that was subsequently updated by Fishy in 2021. Since then the VHL have also upped the number of moderators (currently 7) along with the responsibilities that they hold.

 

For the most part, I’m happy with what I’ve seen from the moderators. Every issue that I’ve brought up with them to do with moderation has been handled very well so I don’t have any complaints there. While I haven’t seen all of the bans, the vast majority of them I have agreed with (there was one I didn’t agree with that gave a member who was genuinely so befuddled it took him a month to realise we weren’t a CHEL league a two week update ban for multis who literally just joined the league, just tell them we don’t do multi’s here, delete them and move on), so again no real complaints there. If I were to give constructive criticism, the two things I would say would be getting other mods to read through ban thread posts before posting them (there was a particular instance where information was revealed in a ban post that was supposed to be private) along with making sure punishments get seen through to the end properly (Multi bans have occasionally had the VHL Rulebook syndrome where they’re written but not acted upon immediately, so players who should be auto-retired for being a multi don’t get set to retired immediately and wind up drafted or even playing the following season. This could potentially be solved by giving all mods updater privileges if they aren’t already).

 

Every change I have from here is a good change in my eyes, so Moderation hovering around the middle shouldn’t be taken as if it’s not a good change as I’d consider myself happy with the improvements to the league that moderation has brought.

 

4. Discord

 

The league has gone through many different versions of chat based apps for members to use. I imagine if it was like the other leagues I was in at the time that AIM or MSN may have been prominently used in the early goings of the league. This was followed up by the addition of a Facebook style chat add-on to the forum that certain members (Eaglesfan notably) were huge fans of, however it ultimately was removed due to the large costs. The league then later had a group chat around the late Season 40’s that I remember but I don’t actually remember much else about it or why it went. The league’s chat of choice became Discord in Season 56 with Higgins creating the VHL Discord channel. I don’t know if this is still the same discord channel that is used today or not, but this was the first instance I’d seen of the VHL advertising a Discord. Things definitely took a while to pop off though, I remember joining the channel around Season 62 (I made this article that was later pinned on the portal news page) and it was definitely lacking for members at the time, I think mostly due to the fact that members maybe didn’t want to go off the VHL forum to discuss the VHL and were concerned of the lack of forum activity that could occur as a result of moving to discord. While you could make an argument for forum activity taking a hit because of discord, I think the net benefits of discord outweigh the negatives and the discord has grown at an alarming rate, from 50 odd members when I joined in Season 62 to 699 today!

 

Probably the main thing that I consider as a positive for the discord is how it can be used to help new members. Back before discord, helping new members was limiting to back-and-forth PMs and forum locker room posts (the latter have definitely been the most impacted by the transition to discord) but these were dependent on waiting for the right person to be on the forum to respond to your messages. However, the discord allows new members to get help almost instantaneously with any problems they have, limiting their chances of leaving the league through frustration of not getting any answers to their questions.

 

I will say though that before moderation, I was not comfortable with the discussions that would take place in the discord. I remember a couple of instances in particular that sometimes made me regret my choice of advertising the discord in my help posts, I won’t go into the content of them since I don’t necessarily want to bring up people’s past transgressions if they’ve made improvements and already acknowledged that they were wrong, but the incidents in question definitely wouldn’t fly in today’s VHL and shouldn’t have been allowed to go under the radar in that era of VHL either. Luckily moderation has ironed that stuff out, but I remember those two incidents in particular having a significant impact on my desire to be a part of the discord and, while I’m glad that was eventually solved, it also took far too long to get to that point.  

 

Overall though, with the discord as it is, both on a general and a team level, I’d say I’m very happy with what it currently brings to the league, so I think 4 is a solid placing here.

 

3. Affiliation + 12 TPE Cap

 

While many people are obviously aware of the benefits that come from the affiliation with the Simulation Basketball Association and the Elite Football League, did you know that the VHL were once in discussions to make a football league with the same shared Point Task benefit a year before the EFL launched? In fact, I was the first person to pitch for the idea of a shared 6 TPE PT system between the VHL and a new football league, however as that post came in an old affiliate thread (threads for no longer active leagues used to be deleted), it’s been lost to time and the nearest I can find is this post here supporting the idea for a shared PT system. In fact, you can find the initial rulebook for the league that was set to be launched HERE. Unfortunately, the lead admin went away and, while I was down to be the simmer of the league, I had no intention of both being lead admin and simmer given that sims using our chosen sim engine (Madden) would take around an hour as opposed to the click of a button stuff you see today, thus the league died pretty much there and then. It’s pretty funny to look back to because I turned down an offer of joining the VHL’s blue team to help with that football league, so that would’ve made for an interesting alternate timeline!

 

As for the system that wound up getting used though, the EFL was created in July 2017 and it offered VHL and SBA members the ability to use 6 TPE point tasks they had submitted in those leagues in the EFL, but wasn’t immediately reciprocated by the other two leagues and it wasn’t until September that the SBA allowed EFL 6 TPE tasks to be used in their league and February 2018, the VHL joined the affiliation process, allowing for SBA and EFL 6 TPE tasks to be used in the VHL and vice-versa. Unsurprisingly as someone who was pitching for the VHL to do something similar earlier on, I really like that the VHL went in this direction and I think the move has paid dividends for all three leagues as members will have found it considerably easier to engage in multiple leagues in comparison to years past where you’d potentially be more reluctant to join another league at the thought of having to do a 6 TPE PT in two or three different leagues. There have been a couple of additional benefits to the affiliation process that I haven’t been a big fan of. One was the rule that admin and high paying league staff (e.g. simmers) would be able to claim 12, the maximum amount of capped TPE, with their welfare claim. My issue with this was that I strongly feel that everyone should have to do at least one task or job in the VHL to hit the VHL cap, even something as small as say press conferences or VHL.com, so while I wouldn’t have been against an increased welfare claim of say 9-10 TPE, I felt that jumping straight to 12 was excessive. In addition, that change didn’t go through BOG, which meant only people set to benefit from the rule contributed to the discussion which is a big oof for me. The other change was giving VHL.com’s and their SBA/EFL equivalents the same affiliation treatment as the 6 TPE PTs, which just seems like a bit of overkill in my opinion given VHL.com’s aren’t exactly as time consuming as a PT so don’t really need that treatment, although I think this makes even less sense in SBA where, with their Activity Check, capping over there for someone who does VHL PT’s and VHL.com was literally just a case of posting “I’m here” once a week, now that’s even been reduced to a button press from what I here. Maybe it’s just the era I’m from but the ability to max cap without any meaningful contribution to the site put me off it pretty quickly. But overall, the affiliation process in my eyes has way more positives attached to it than negatives.

 

The affiliation process was a far bigger process for the VHL than it was for the SBA and EFL though as with it came the decision to restructure their capped TPE along with an increase in the update scale. Members originally hit the cap at nine TPE, but to bring the league in line with it’s affiliates, the VHL increased that to 12. To account for the increase in cap, VHL.coms, trivia and job payouts all saw a pay increase along with a new additional method of earning TPE added in the form of Press Conferences, which are now a regular mainstay in non-job holding members’ TPE activities for the week.  This also marked a significant shift for the VHL as these increases meant that it was now possible to hit the 12 TPE cap without holding a job, while also (until around the early Season 70’s) allowed members who submitted welfare to hit the 12 TPE cap if they had a job. I think for the most part, I liked what this did for the league as opening up the possibilities to capping for people who are willing to invest time into the league shouldn’t be restricted to those holding a job, although personally I still feel like the job pay-outs of some roles are not fair reflections on the work put in. The change that was most interesting though was the increase of welfare and pension, which saw members with no players over 400 TPE (now 700) have their welfare claim value upped from 2 TPE to 4 TPE whereas Pension II, for members who had at that point had 2 players surpass 400 TPE, was increased from 4 TPE to 5 TPE. The curious thing about this in hindsight was that there was never really an explanation for this change as far as I could tell and it wasn’t to line up with their affiliates as from what I can tell SBA’s welfare was 2 TPE and EFL’s was 3 TPE. Plus the 6 TPE PTs hadn’t seen a TPE rise, so why did the “I can’t do a PT” replacement double? In hindsight, I think upping welfare by one to 3 (to match with the EFL) and pension remaining at 4 would maybe have made for a fairer representation of workload, but obviously once that change is made you can’t go back.

 

This was an incredibly good direction for the league to move in and it’s position at 3 is really only an indicator of how important for the league the top 2 changes have been.

 

2. Recruitment Focus

 

At the end of Season 57, an advertisement was posted up for a revamped recruitment crew, since the previous crew had fallen woefully short of expectations over the last year or so. The appeal of this job was the huge job pay increase of a full nine capped TPE (later updating to 12 when the cap increased a couple of seasons later), showcasing a new impetus on bringing new members into a league that had been struggling in that regard. In these hirings, the VHL brought two members onto their recruitment crew whose recruitment efforts have helped the VHL grow into the successful league that it is today, Beaviss and Spade. While Spade did a terrific job with his Reddit ad campaigns (of which we got a fair chunk of our league’s best members of the S60’s and present day), Beaviss went to high-profile Youtubers to arrange for advertisements to appear in their upcoming videos, our first of which was a NHL video game streamer called TacTixHD, who currently sits at other 100K subscribers!

 

While the reddit campaigns have stalled out over the last few seasons (but hopefully coming back to the fore soon) due to a issue with reddit’s regulations, the YouTube ads have continued to help our profile immensely and continue to play a part in bringing in even more of the league’s best new members. As a VHLM GM during the last YouTube ad (with RobTalksHockey), the new recruits that these ads bring is like nothing I’ve ever seen on a recruiting scale in 15 seasons of sim leagues, so congratulations to all those who have been involved in recruiting over the last 20 seasons or so, because you’ve definitely played your part in making the league what it is today.

 

The reason it’s not number 1 is simply because we probably don’t keep around the members we earn from these recruitment drives if number 1 never happened.   

 

1.  The VHL Portal

 

The VHL Portal actually was a thing around when I joined the league, but with nowhere near the interaction it has now, it was basically just a different way of showing the stats that the indexes had, so was very rarely used. Flash forward 26 odd seasons to Season 61 and we saw the first true implementation of the portal, which had members forgo the forum updating of the past in favour of a more automated updating system in the portal. While this did have an incredibly small number of people against it (one even retired because of the change) the change was considered a huge success and went from strength to strength with the addition of Portal drafts in Season 63 followed by Portal trades, free agency and player store in the following seasons. While Will was the man who made this happened and deserves so much credit for everything he put together to make this possible, this spawned from an idea by Devise who sent a PM to a limited number of members about the possibility of the VHL becoming more of a website rather than a forum based game. While unfortunately the PM didn’t garner much attention at the time (which was a shame because the idea was clearly a good one), Will went away and took the base of that idea and the following result was the portal that you see today that the league would very well be doomed without.

 

So for this one, since it’s so obviously the biggest and best change the league has ever made, I’ll just run through every single thing that the VHL Portal has improved:

 

-          Player Creation – Instead of having to make a topic on the forum that follows a template, users can fill in a pre-made template on the portal and have their player created. Players are added into the database automatically so no longer required for a roster updater to create them manually.

-          Signing a Player – GM’s can offer contracts to players through the portal. This being processed automatically meant that financiers and player store managers no longer had to manually add players’ balances to a spreadsheet. The player transaction is also automatically done upon signing, saving the admin from having to move a player thread topic from one team’s forum to another to indicate which team they are on.

-          Updating a Player – Users still link to their claims in the portal, but no longer have to do the maths on how much they’ve earned themselves or how much their attributes have improved which they had to do using the old way where members had to create a new topic to store their updates. Once claims are approved by updaters, the user may add their assigned TPE to whichever attributes they please with the update scale automatically calculated in the portal, an improvement on updaters having to edit a member’s player page manually with the amendment to the players attributes. Updates are processed for the next sim since the database gets updated with new ratings automatically, saving a roster updater from having to manually update players each week and getting players their update processed in a quicker fashion.

-          Trades – GM’s no longer have to manually post a trade on the forum, instead the portal gives them a form to fill in asking what they are giving up in exchange for what they are receiving, which is automatically updated in the portal upon approval from commissioners. This means that player threads no longer have to be moved to a new team forum by an admin, that admin no longer have to keep a draft pick tracker up to date manually since the portal tracks who owns which picks and thus also prevents teams losing track of what picks they have if several trades are completed in between manual update of the draft pick tracker. Also, the portal uses a consistent format for picks, meaning that there’s no confusion as to what pick is being traded.

-          Drafts – Draft classes are automatically compiled by the portal based on the draft eligibility of the respective draftees, meaning that admin no longer had to manually compile a list of available talent for each draft. Drafted players are moved automatically to their new team on the portal, meaning admin doesn’t have to manually move a member’s player page to their new team.

-          Releasing Players/Expiring Contracts – Players who have their contracts with a team expire automatically get moved into Free Agency in the portal, meaning that an admin no longer has to manually move their player thread from a team’s forum to the Free Agents forum. The automated nature means that a roster updater no longer has to manually release a player in STHS.

-          Welfare/Practice Facility – Welfare and practice facility no longer require posts on the forum, instead they are clickable buttons on the portal that are subsequently automatically updated. This prevents users submitting for these to having to put in claims while also making it easier for updaters since welfare/practice facility claims no longer need to be confirmed which makes sense as they are now tasks that can’t be submitted for incorrectly.

-          Player Store – Instead of manually typing in the purchase in a player store thread, users can instead claim the items in the portal-integrated player store. In addition, funds are automatically deducted based on the items bought meaning less calculations needed for the Player Store manager.

-          Retiring a Player – Retiring a player is now just a button click on the portal, that triggers the player’s retirement at the end of the season and removes them from a team’s roster and prevents them from being signed after retirement. This is an improvement on admin having to manually move a member’s player page from a team forum to the retired players forum, financiers having to manually adjust contract lengths in a spreadsheet for retirement and roster updaters having to manually remove retiring players from rosters in the sim.

 

And there are other things on top of that such as the automated Trivia and Award Predictions along with some stuff that I’m not sure how automated it is so don’t want to go ahead and say it’s automated when it isn’t. A clear number 1 if there ever was one.

 

Using for Weeks 7/24, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14

Edited July 24, 2022 by MubbleFubbles

[MubbleFubbles 1,290]

Week 3 Claim

[v.2 1,406]

idk how I missed this til now but what an amazing media spot.  I have it bookmarked to finish reading later lol.

[MubbleFubbles 1,290]

Week 4 Claim