Commish for a day: 2 essential league upgrades

[ctots 400]

As commish for a day, I would finally have a chance to implement my new point task option: discord interaction. The VHL discord server is a pretty cool place, but it would be cooler if there was more traffic there. Supporting evidence: Spartan said 'chat dead' earlier today. That's ironclad and factual.

 

"But temporary commissioner Bruise Banner, won't that drive people away from making content on the forum?"

 

Good question, random audience member, but you're stupid and wrong. If we reward folks for spending time in the discord, it'll grow the overall discord community of the league. New people will join up more often to the discord server, and will have more abundant access to people who can teach them the ins and outs of the league from inside a familiar social media application.

 

Secondary benefit: retention.

 

Discord is a multi-use chat app. People who use discord for VHL are also using it for other things - gaming communities, keeping in touch with friends, degenerate behavior, etc. Connecting our player base to their discord accounts will help us keep in touch with users, and thereby retain them for longer. A player who doesn't use the discord is as good as gone if they don't remember to visit the forums; a discord user is only a ping away.

 

"What are the specifics of the proposal, oh brilliant temporary commissioner?"

 

Listen, random audience members, this isn't really a town hall situation. This is really more of a case where I'm making a decree and you're obligated to follow it. It's not a leader's job to come up with a good coherent plan, it's my job to make a bold declaration. But since you've already interrupted and distracted me, sure, let's figure this out as a team.

 

Probably 2 TPE as a supplemental point task for discord activity would be fair, I think. You couldn't verify the amount of words typed into discord, but you could verify the number of posts sent, and that would serve a similar purpose. You could just search the server for posts by:[user] after:[last week date] and it would return the number of posts. I'm not sure how much activity would qualify for payment, though. Maybe something like 25 messages for 1 TPE, 50 messages for 2 TPE. Post up a claim thread, make users screenshot their own post totals & post that to the thread for the convenience of the updaters. Bing, bang, boom, we've got a brand new functional supplemental point task that will increase user engagement across both the discord and forums. You're welcome, VHL.

 

Now that I've cracked the case on that project, I still have a little time to tackle priority #2, the cash store. Money has a weird place in the league, and I'm only now starting to get a handle on the value that it represents to a player's career. I'm going to double down on my philosophy of solving two problems at once with my second action item: recruitment is no longer rewarded with TPE, but instead you get paid in store dollars or whatever they're called. In an ideal world, you'd set the dollar value such that a player could buy the same amount of TPE as they could have earned under the old recruitment system, but there's also some value to the flexibility of money over receiving TPE directly.

 

The point is: there would be more money going into and out of the store, players would be more heavily incentivized to recruit individually, and a cool-but-underused feature of the league would get to see a little bit of new life.

 

Just like any good leader, I'm going to hang up my hat early and retire on a high note. Those two changes should set the VHL up for success long into the future.