VHL At 15 - How The League Has Changed Since 2010

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

The VHL is 15! For a variety of reasons, if you would have told me in 2010 that the VHL would still be going strong (and in reality, stronger) 15 years later, I wouldn't have believed you. This league, the sim league community, and the internet in general was in a such different place than it is now. In this article, I'm going to ramble through some of the major and minor changes I've seen during my time here. WARNING: There is going to be a lot of "old man yells at cloud" going on in here.

 

The Portal

 

The portal is hands down the biggest change the VHL has seen in the past 10 years, and sadly, I'll freely admit that it was something I was wrong on. I was 100% against the idea of moving any type of traffic off the forum (which to my slight credit, I've always been consistent with, but that battle was lost against the internet as a whole) and I believe one of the original purposes of the portal was to also host media spots, but this is easily the best improvement the league has made. Most of these will have their own topic, but we're now able to automate updating in the sim and greatly improve the time it takes to update your player. So how did this work 10 years ago?

 

Say you're me and always wait until Sunday night to do your point task. You'd write your media spot/graphic, wait for it to be graded (which is a topic that will be covered next), then add it to your update page, and then wait for the updater to approve your update (which was only done once a week). THEN you'd have to wait for the sim to be updated. This was an extremely manual process originally done by the simmer (who simmed both the VHL and VHLM in the same file) until eventually someone was hired to do this specifically on a more regular basis. Usually the sim would be updated twice a year (trade deadline and beginning of the playoffs) and maybe one additional time if we were lucky. This would be unheard of in today's world. 

 

Grading

 

That's right, your point tasks used to be graded, and you weren't guaranteed 6 TPE! As someone who was Head Grader for a number of years, grading was always near and dear to my heart. At the beginning, your point task needed two grades to be finalized, and you would earn the average of the two scores. Media spots were graded on Content (3 possible TPE), Grammar (2 possible TPE) and Creativity (1 possible TPE). That's right, we graded on grammar, and the grader would list every single mistake you made, from misspellings and incorrect punctuation to actual grammar mistakes like using the wrong their, there, or they're! Creativity just meant throwing some color and a picture on there. Graphics were also graded in 3 categories that I don't remember since I haven't ever done a graphic on this site, but I think it was something like content, creativity, and something else. I don't really, remember, but what I DO remember is it was common for people to only earn 4 or 5 TPE on their graphics. We used to have extremely high standards on our graphics to the point that I think many graphics today would only earn 3 TPE on this scale. Eventually, the "one grade" rule was instituted which said that if the grade you get was a 6, you didn't need another grade, but at some point, grading was just did away with entirely and every point task was given 6 points. I'm also going to tie in here that a media spot was only worth 6 TPE for 1 week regardless of how long it was, so there was no incentive to do a good @Gustav type 2,000 word article, but that didn't stop many of our members from doing so.

 

Welfare

 

While the portal is the best thing the league as a whole has ever seen, I'm going to say the introduction of welfare is the single biggest change that has kept me around. Before welfare, if you didn't do a point task, too bad! This started to lead to extreme burnout, especially since the multi-week point task claim wasn't around either. Therefore, the idea of welfare was introduced! At first, this only provided 3 capped TPE per week. Eventually, the pension system was introduced, meaning you can earn an extra TPE (up to 5 total capped TPE) for every player you had that reached 400 TPE, which was a decent amount back then since the weekly cap was 9 TPE and most people didn't cap every week since you needed a job to do so. Eventually this was changed to 4 TPE for welfare and only 1 player needed to get to 5 TPE. 

 

TPE Earning

 

That's right, I mentioned above that the cap was 9 TPE and most people didn't get it every week. Back then, there were no press conferences, trivia, or other ways to earn capped TPE. Essentially, you did your point task (hopefully 6 TPE), did a fan590 article or small graphic (for 1 TPE) then you needed a job of some sort to get 2 more capped TPE. For example, originally you needed to grade 8 point tasks in order to earn 1 TPE. Back in my day, we had to actually work for our TPE, and to be honest, it sucked!

 

VHLM/The Minors

 

If people think the VHLM or VHLE sucks now, they should have seen the VHLM back in the day. There was even a proposal on the table at one point to delete the league in it's entirety. At this point, I don't remember on how rookies/new players would have been handled, but the league would have looked very different and not in a good way.

 

I mentioned before that the VHL and VHLM simming was not split at this point, so everything was done in one large file. That meant if a VHL team was making changes and it overwrote your VHLM changes, too bad! The way new players were added to teams was also different. Instead of a GM pitching to a new member why they should play for their team, new players were put on waivers (I believe for at least 48 hours) and teams had 24 hours to put in a claim on a player to add them to their team. If multiple teams put in an offer on a player, then whichever team was higher on the "waiver priority" was given the player. Once you claimed a player, you were placed on the bottom of the priority. Before "new players" and "re-creates" were given separate waiver priorities, this meant that new members would often sit unclaimed for days at a time while GMs held onto their waiver priority to get the deadline re-creates.

 

With no portal automation, new players had to be created manually and added to the sim, which often took days because again, if there was a VHL change that took priority, you may be SOL. 

 

Chat/Discord/Mobile

 

This is the single change that is more so about the internet as a whole rather than the league itself, but imagine a time without Discord, without the ability to access websites on your phone, and without the ability to chat even a single member. That was the league back in 2010 (or at least I don't think chat was here when I first started, but came very soon after). In order to communicate with your team or the league as a whole, that meant you had to make a forum post! Teams would have their own locker rooms on the forum (and there was a HUGE debate on if locker rooms belonged at the top of the site or the bottom, and the correct answer is bottom) and all general communication took place in general discussion, point tasks, or the thunderdome. This meant that communication wasn't instantaneous! I could go to school or work and then come back and check on the posts that I missed in the past 7 hours or whatever and still keep up with the league! Nowadays, with everything going on in Discord, if you're not there when it happens, you basically don't see it and aren't able to participate. This is such a huge, fundamental change to the league and the internet as a whole that I don't think newer members or younger people in general can appreciate. Eventually we made a mobile site and then the portal and then Discord blah blah blah...RIP the forum

 

The Toxicity

 

I'm not really going to go into detail on this one since I'm coming up on 1,500 words and I think this has been covered enough in general, but if you think something like GenChat is toxic or being a GM today is toxic, you should have seen the site back in the day. I don't even mean the specific language that was used, but just the fact that not only did individual people go after each other, but actual teams used to have actual rivalries and go after each other. 

 

 

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

1,500 words

 

Claim 7/25-7/31

 

Also if I have this correct, I can claim the doubles week from Theme Week on the 7/18-7/24 claim and then the triples week on the 7/25-7/31 claim, correct?

Edited July 24, 2022 by Fire Fletcher

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

Claim 8/1-8/7