AJ is Commish for a Day

[AJW 2,201]

If I were commish for a day...

 

I'm just gonna get right into it. 

 

 

New Welcome to the League

 

I don't like how members are welcomed to the forum. I'd get rid of the bot and hire 4-5 people as a welcoming committee, this is not the recruitment team. Recruitment team can bring people in, this team can be retention from joining. Each of these 4-5 people would receive job pay and their job requirements would be simple. When a new member enters our league, one of the welcoming committee members reaches out via forum message or replying through creation thread, and directs this member through our league, like a tour guide and a first step buddy. It would make sense to create a discord server with these committee members, create a bot for when new members join, and then just put a reaction/emoji on each message for which new member you are going to reach out to.

 

I believe the instant one on one connection would boost our retention like crazy. Most of our welfare clickers and literally any IA, I could put my life savings down that they did not get that first connection, therefore did not develop further in our league.

 

If you think this is just a VHLM GM's job then you're wrong. A player enters our league and is directed to choose a team from the bot and waiver page, VHLM GM's don't get a word in until a player sends interest. From that small window you could easily lose someone's interest with no human connection.

 

I've been seeing a lot of people replying to new creation pages and welcoming new members. I'd just pay those people to be on the team.

 

Promote Supplemental Tasks + Checklist

 

Why are people only clicking welfare and practice when the extra 6 TPE from Supplemental Tasks take 10-15 minutes to do? Maybe not all GMs promote them but why can't the league just do that ourselves?

 

The way I see we can defeat this problem is by creating a weekly checklist of tasks you can do with the link to where to do them. Right on the front page of the forum. Tells people what to do each week and then the Welcome committee and VHLM GMs can have less stress on directing people what to do. Obviously our job is to teach the ropes, but why baby people with information? We did a survey with majority of people being in their late teens to mid 30's, I feel you are all capable of reading something on a screen.

 

More Jobs in General

 

People want to work if you give it to them. If I took over I'd make a league suggestion box post for more jobs. I bet you there's a lot of members out there with great ideas to benefit this league. Why not get more jobs? 

 

We can literally create a small workplace here and I feel like with the right job pay, so many members would put in good work. The VHLM GMs got a pay increase from 2 to 4 TPE and I feel like I'm sweating my socks off each season with how good each GM is at running their team. Everyone wants to be competitive and I feel the pay increase helped a lot. This season I thought Houston would run away with it, just look at the standings now.

 

My new job ideas:

 

Make VSN great again - Hire everyone, anyone, LITERALLY ANYONE. VSN can be such a great source for the whole league to follow weekly but not everyone does. Alex has done a good job running it but he's only one person. I'd hire a team of like 10-15 active writers and just go crazy. Have a couple people working on different projects and pump out top tier content. Hire even one or two more graphics people, why not?!

 

Welcoming Committee - Which I explained above. Take the first step on your road to VHL greatness in the right way with people to help guide you from the start.

 

Stats collector - You can never have too much stats and numbers. We're all number geeks here, our sim engine is literally just numbers. I'd hire at least 1-2 more members to collect more data just to have it. If we have more data we can do more fun things with it, graphics, articles, even posting more on the portal for people to see.

 

Portal Updater - Dil's gone, I think it's only Josh working on the portal? I could be wrong... but why not just hire another person or two who knows how to do it. Give an extra hand and help grow our portal which is easily one of if not the nicest portal across all sim leagues. A small team of people coding and working together.

 

Any other job you can think of to benefit the league - read that again and you'll understand it.

 

Graphic  Drives

 

TPE giveaway on graphics. We always did the banner for the cup winners, I missed those. We could do different themes every season... NOT THEME WEEK THEMES. More themes like - throwbacks, hockey card, cup winning moments, first goal/first save, rookie highlight... I just randomly thought of those in 1 minute. I'm sure there's more themes we could easily do. I just feel like it brings fun competition and everyone can hype up/ enjoy other member's work each season. Also with graphics I feel there is a lot more room for creativity with visuals than media spots, so either learn how to make them or watch everyone else take your TPE lol. This can make our league more attractive to the audience.

 

New Minor System

 

Combine the VHLE and the VHLM into the same minor league, have the cutoff remain at 400 TPE. The VHLM is becoming more and more competitive every season. Miami just sold their whole team in hopes to rebuild, now they have a full squad of waiver players and they're winning games. If the VHLM had those 8 extra teams to trade with, Miami wouldn't have sold their team that heavy, waivers would have been spread out more and you would realize more that teams like Philadelphia shouldn't be able to run through the entire league in the first half of the season just because they're spam playing two capped dmen with 99 endurance. 

 

This would 100% result in teams having a lot of IA welfare clickers.

 

Yeah that's fine, after 3 seasons they become Free Agents and can sign to anyone.

 

Oh they're still resigning to your team?

 

Well that sucks, you can only sign to a different team each season after. If you're drafted you play 3 seasons. Then sign to whatever team you want, the next time you resign then you have to change teams.

 

Oh they're resigning each season and staying in the minors?

 

No they're not, the new minor system has a 5 season cutoff. A season is roughly two months real time:

 

5 seasons x 2 months = 300 days roughly

300 days / 7 days a week = 43 weeks roughly

6 TPE x 43 weeks = 258 TPE

Base 30 TPE + 258 TPE = 288 TPE

 

If you have been in our league for 10 months and haven't hit the TPE cutoff, let alone 300 TPE, then you are definitely not active. I'd rather just retire your player and let the 50 TPE first gen take your ice time. You can recreate and restart the long system again if that's what you're here for, just remember you only get 5 seasons muhahah.

 

No VHL team wants a welfare earner at 400 TPE. Retire them they're old and shit.

 

If you think that new players wouldn't like the new minor system: That's because you aren't teaching them the value of earning TPE and developing their player. They should want to join our league and earn as much as they can to be as good as their teammates. Be a good GM and bring the fun.

 

 

 

Just random thoughts going through my brain. Bye

Edited July 5, 2023 by AJW

[Banackock 8,143]

Hi

[Beketov 9,103]

2 hours ago, AJW said:

I'd get rid of the bot

Excuse you, I personally welcome each and every member!

 

2 hours ago, AJW said:

The way I see we can defeat this problem is by creating a weekly checklist of tasks you can do with the link to where to do them.

That actually wouldn't be hard as just like part of the forum sidebar. Mind you people who never leave the portal or mobile would almost never see it. I'm sure we could get one added to the portal that auto-checks things off and such but I'm not a dev so I can't really speak to the ease of that.

 

2 hours ago, AJW said:

Portal Updater

Yes we do really need this, Portal development is tough when only one person, who has a lot of other commitments to boot, really understands how to do it.

 

2 hours ago, AJW said:

Miami just sold their whole team in hopes to rebuild, now they have a full squad of waiver players and they're winning games.

Except that they wouldn't be if the cap was 400 because those waiver players would be borderline useless. 200-400 is a weird range where arguably you're too good for the VHLM (IE you make picking up a waiver player pointless because you are better and they just get shit minutes) but you aren't good enough for the VHL where you just get dominated by 1500 TPE players. We've repeatedly seen this when the cap is increased, VHLM GM's care more about hanging onto high TPE borderline actives because they make the team better rather than caring about waiver players. There are reasons we separated the VHLE off that aren't just "we need to throw the inactive somewhere" that people seem to think it is.

[AJW 2,201]

17 minutes ago, Beketov said:

Except that they wouldn't be if the cap was 400 because those waiver players would be borderline useless. 200-400 is a weird range where arguably you're too good for the VHLM (IE you make picking up a waiver player pointless because you are better and they just get shit minutes) but you aren't good enough for the VHL where you just get dominated by 1500 TPE players. We've repeatedly seen this when the cap is increased, VHLM GM's care more about hanging onto high TPE borderline actives because they make the team better rather than caring about waiver players. There are reasons we separated the VHLE off that aren't just "we need to throw the inactive somewhere" that people seem to think it is.

 

Adding a TPE checklist to show people what tasks to do, adding a welcoming committee of people to help guide you, and adding more jobs for more TPE opportunities would increase the weekly average capped TPE earning of our community. 200 TPE in a season wouldn't seem so crazy to hit if people understood that it takes only 10-15 minutes a week to earn 10/12 capped while doing welfare. If we had more opportunities to grow our new members, as well as more people motivating and teaching newer members fully and properly how to earn and advance in our league, then I fully believe the number of IAs will start to decline. Need that first connection and people skills before you start considering changing the cut off.

 

And believe me we have the bodies and people willing to work for us lol. Our TPE is all capped, whether it's job pay or point tasks so why not give the people job pay and improve our league in instead of just their own player.

Edited July 5, 2023 by AJW

[Beketov 9,103]

6 minutes ago, AJW said:

Adding a TPE checklist to show people what tasks to do, adding a welcoming committee of people to help guide you, and adding more jobs for more TPE opportunities would increase the weekly average capped TPE earning of our community. 200 TPE in a season wouldn't seem so crazy to hit if people understood that it takes only 10-15 minutes a week to earn 10/12 capped while doing welfare. If we had more opportunities to grow our new members, as well as more people motivating and teaching newer members fully and properly how to earn and advance in our league, then I fully believe the number of IAs will start to decline. Need that first connection and people skills before you start considering changing the cut off.

I’m not talking about just the number of inactive and stuff though. If your goal is to compete what’s more enticing: A new player with 30 TPE or a player at 300 TPE that has been earning 6/week for multiple seasons? The waivers don’t stand a chance against high TPE players and the GM’s are more interested in keeping people from earning big TPE because they get to keep the players longer. This is precisely what happened last time the M cap was higher. Having the cap be lower means that most players are in and out in 2 seasons so there’s no reason to incentivize them to stay.

 

8 minutes ago, AJW said:

And believe me we have the bodies and people willing to work for us lol. Our TPE is all capped, whether it's job pay or point tasks so why not give the people job pay and improve our league in instead of just their own player.

I’m not opposed to it, just need the jobs to actually make sense instead of just existing for the sake of existing. If everyone is getting their TPE from jobs you end up in a situation where there’s barely any content being produced because people don’t need to earn elsewhere. That’s aside from the risk of a “too many cooks” situation if every position suddenly had way more people doing it.

[Banackock 8,143]

AJ, you talking check list like SHL has? If so, that’s 10/10. 

[AJW 2,201]

1 minute ago, Beketov said:

I’m not talking about just the number of inactive and stuff though. If your goal is to compete what’s more enticing: A new player with 30 TPE or a player at 300 TPE that has been earning 6/week for multiple seasons? The waivers don’t stand a chance against high TPE players and the GM’s are more interested in keeping people from earning big TPE because they get to keep the players longer. This is precisely what happened last time the M cap was higher. Having the cap be lower means that most players are in and out in 2 seasons so there’s no reason to incentivize them to stay.

 

Minors could easily create a fair play rule if we got enough players. Players need to play 10-15 mins minimum or something. It's the minors and it's going to be competitive always but it's easy to make it enjoyable. Spartan and Gus turned the VHLM into an amazing place in only a couple seasons, I'd just let them commish it all. (No hate to VHLE Commish I just don't work for you lol).

 

1 minute ago, Beketov said:

I’m not opposed to it, just need the jobs to actually make sense instead of just existing for the sake of existing. If everyone is getting their TPE from jobs you end up in a situation where there’s barely any content being produced because people don’t need to earn elsewhere. That’s aside from the risk of a “too many cooks” situation if every position suddenly had way more people doing it.

 

If you're actually interested I would love to further discuss this

[AJW 2,201]

2 minutes ago, Banackock said:

AJ, you talking check list like SHL has? If so, that’s 10/10. 

 

YES EXACTLY !!

[Spartan 4,531]

I'm replying to this one because there's a lot of suggestions in here and I have some strong opinions on a few of these. Buckle up.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

I don't like how members are welcomed to the forum. I'd get rid of the bot and hire 4-5 people as a welcoming committee, this is not the recruitment team. Recruitment team can bring people in, this team can be retention from joining.

I'll preface my thoughts by saying I think the recruitment team has generally been fine over the past few seasons. There's been a push to be a bit more organized and delegate tasks fairly across members. However, from my personal understanding and semi-outsider perspective, I have no idea what the recruitment team does on a weekly basis to be earning more TPE than our VHLM GM's. In theory, the recruitment team is constantly working to engage people outside the VHL to convince folks to join. Maintaining Twitter is great, but I don't think we've had a single new person join from social media in the time I've been in the VHL - so like 3 years now. No other social media platform comes to mind as being successful (outside of the old Reddit posts). A recruitment drive on someone's YouTube channel might be the most in depth I think recruitment gets, but that didn't happen for this season and I reaaaalllly doubt is such an intensive task to plan that the entire team is spending their full weekly "recruitment team work time" on coordinating those ads. If Recruitment is getting paid more than VHLM GM's, then I'd fully expect them to be the welcome committee and the pseudo-mentors that you're referring to. You guys already have the unique Discord role to identify yourselves, why have it if not to be a resource? So I'd put this responsibility fully on the recruitment team, not expect a new group to pop up beyond Recruitment and our VHLM team to work with new members. There's only so many people interested in teaching new players (VHLM GM's and AGM's), our pool to hire from is limited already.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

The way I see we can defeat this problem is by creating a weekly checklist of tasks you can do with the link to where to do them. Right on the front page of the forum. Tells people what to do each week and then the Welcome committee and VHLM GMs can have less stress on directing people what to do. Obviously our job is to teach the ropes, but why baby people with information? We did a survey with majority of people being in their late teens to mid 30's, I feel you are all capable of reading something on a screen.

Cool idea that I enjoy in the SHL. However, I like it there because I'm not that active in their LR's since I'm on my second player already and am fairly hands off. For a new player, I think that being hands off is not optimal. We automated waivers to shift the VHLM GM role to be able to invest more time into following up with their players and babying them when needed, push more personal touch into the day to day life. Everyone is capable of reading a screen sure, but I don't know how many new players are going to spend the time to research and self-teach themselves the site. If we can get a checklist it's great, but the onus to me is still on our M staff to not only teach new users, but push them to improve over time as well. That will require handholding.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

Why not get more jobs? 

This is going to be more GM oriented, but the pool to hire from has substantially shrunk from pre-VHLE days. We basically removed 16 people on average from the VHL and VHLM pools since they're running the 8 E teams. People want jobs sure, but the league wants to hire quality and capable people for those jobs otherwise we just create more of a mess to clean up if/when things go wrong. Bek seems to be covering it as I write this ffs.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

Make VSN great again - Hire everyone, anyone, LITERALLY ANYONE. VSN can be such a great source for the whole league to follow weekly but not everyone does. Alex has done a good job running it but he's only one person. I'd hire a team of like 10-15 active writers and just go crazy. Have a couple people working on different projects and pump out top tier content. Hire even one or two more graphics people, why not?!

VSN already has literally no bar to be above to join. All you have to do is follow the slightly higher requirements for their product, and actually do something weekly/bi-weekly in order to claim pay. So if people already aren't doing weekly VSN content, then hiring more people doesn't change anything. And no, I wouldn't raise VSN job pay at all. It's just writing an extra vhl.com within a Media Spot for the extra 2 TPE.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

Stats collector - You can never have too much stats and numbers. We're all number geeks here, our sim engine is literally just numbers. I'd hire at least 1-2 more members to collect more data just to have it.

What stats/data does STHS offer that isn't already tracked in its output? The only thing that comes to mind is GA/TA but people have scraped the PBP's in the past and the numbers are nonsensical, or at least absurd to analyze.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

Portal Updater - Dil's gone, I think it's only Josh working on the portal? I could be wrong... but why not just hire another person or two who knows how to do it. Give an extra hand and help grow our portal which is easily one of if not the nicest portal across all sim leagues. A small team of people coding and working together.

Probably the #1 job in my priority list if I could control job applications and hirings. We should have at least 2 more folks in this role yesterday.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

TPE giveaway on graphics. We always did the banner for the cup winners, I missed those. We could do different themes every season... NOT THEME WEEK THEMES. More themes like - throwbacks, hockey card, cup winning moments, first goal/first save, rookie highlight... I just randomly thought of those in 1 minute. I'm sure there's more themes we could easily do. I just feel like it brings fun competition and everyone can hype up/ enjoy other member's work each season. Also with graphics I feel there is a lot more room for creativity with visuals than media spots, so either learn how to make them or watch everyone else take your TPE lol. This can make our league more attractive to the audience.

While this is a neat concept, there's 2 issues. One, it is only for one subgroup of VHL PT creators - excluding anyone who writes or podcasts. Big no no. Two, even with the banner contests for cup winners, it usually ended up becoming a bit of a popularity contest since folks would just plug their teammates' and friends'. If we decided to start denying bonus TPE to any winner found to solicit votes or have friends assist in soliciting votes, then I'd be ok with cup banner contests only.

 

3 hours ago, AJW said:

Combine the VHLE and the VHLM into the same minor league, have the cutoff remain at 400 TPE. The VHLM is becoming more and more competitive every season. Miami just sold their whole team in hopes to rebuild, now they have a full squad of waiver players and they're winning games. If the VHLM had those 8 extra teams to trade with, Miami wouldn't have sold their team that heavy, waivers would have been spread out more and you would realize more that teams like Philadelphia shouldn't be able to run through the entire league in the first half of the season just because they're spam playing two capped dmen with 99 endurance. 

Nope nonope nope noipe enope nopenopenopeope. Hard pass on undoing seasons of work on making the M more balanced and less of a competitive hellhole while also curbstomping the new player experience. Sure, they can get stomped when they get to the VHL at 450 TPE right now, but they will at least experience being a solid player in the M, then struggling a bit with their role in the E, before learning they aren't the best and to grow into a larger role in the VHL. Or just be quality depth, whatever it is. I think it's a fairly accurate path right now in comparison to the typical NHL draft prospect's tbh. I would consider a smaller M cap increase to 250 or 300 if we genuinely abolished the E, but definitely not to 400. The current M system works as well as it does because under hybrid attributes, the 50-200 TPE range can perform very similarly under the right conditions.

 

---

Overall though I like the creativity and thought provoking content. Good avenues to pursue for sure, I just don't agree with some of the ways you've proposed. 6.9/10

Edited July 5, 2023 by Spartan

[Beketov 9,103]

8 minutes ago, AJW said:

Players need to play 10-15 mins minimum or something.

That’s super hard to regulate though. Easy in real life but in the sim you could easily end up in situations where Simon just says “fuck your lines, Imma do what I want” and everything goes wonky.

 

Aside from that I’ve always been personally on the “let GM’s do their job” side of the fence that doesn’t like forcing certain line choices on them.

[Spartan 4,531]

2 minutes ago, Beketov said:

That’s super hard to regulate though. Easy in real life but in the sim you could easily end up in situations where Simon just says “fuck your lines, Imma do what I want” and everything goes wonky.

 

Aside from that I’ve always been personally on the “let GM’s do their job” side of the fence that doesn’t like forcing certain line choices on them.

Yeah Gus and I have been pretty decent with making sure rules are useful, clear, and also easy to regulate. Part of the VHLM activity definition change was reliant on that, we can't do weekly IA checks (which I should do this week) looking through every VHLM player's update history, and also go through their forum history. It's just not sustainable.

[Subject056 1,246]

12 minutes ago, Spartan said:

 Maintaining Twitter is great, but I don't think we've had a single new person join from social media in the time I've been in the VHL - so like 3 years now. 

We just had someone recruited from our Instagram account recently! ... I know it's just one person so far, a work in progress for recruitment for sure. But there's still hope! 

[AJW 2,201]

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

I'll preface my thoughts by saying I think the recruitment team has generally been fine over the past few seasons. There's been a push to be a bit more organized and delegate tasks fairly across members. However, from my personal understanding and semi-outsider perspective, I have no idea what the recruitment team does on a weekly basis to be earning more TPE than our VHLM GM's. In theory, the recruitment team is constantly working to engage people outside the VHL to convince folks to join. Maintaining Twitter is great, but I don't think we've had a single new person join from social media in the time I've been in the VHL - so like 3 years now. No other social media platform comes to mind as being successful (outside of the old Reddit posts). A recruitment drive on someone's YouTube channel might be the most in depth I think recruitment gets, but that didn't happen for this season and I reaaaalllly doubt is such an intensive task to plan that the entire team is spending their full weekly "recruitment team work time" on coordinating those ads. If Recruitment is getting paid more than VHLM GM's, then I'd fully expect them to be the welcome committee and the pseudo-mentors that you're referring to. You guys already have the unique Discord role to identify yourselves, why have it if not to be a resource? So I'd put this responsibility fully on the recruitment team, not expect a new group to pop up beyond Recruitment and our VHLM team to work with new members. There's only so many people interested in teaching new players (VHLM GM's and AGM's), our pool to hire from is limited already.

 

To be honest this is fair to ask. Since joining the recruitment team myself and Subject have fully taken over the Instagram posting daily. We're trying to both post 3 a week and then kirb does a player of the week for us. We both had a week to do twitter as well. I can't really speak on behalf of all Recruitment, that would be a Thad question. He does take charge for us which is amazing and I know Mubbles is doing the recruitment draft class trackers too.

 

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

Cool idea that I enjoy in the SHL. However, I like it there because I'm not that active in their LR's since I'm on my second player already and am fairly hands off. For a new player, I think that being hands off is not optimal. We automated waivers to shift the VHLM GM role to be able to invest more time into following up with their players and babying them when needed, push more personal touch into the day to day life. Everyone is capable of reading a screen sure, but I don't know how many new players are going to spend the time to research and self-teach themselves the site. If we can get a checklist it's great, but the onus to me is still on our M staff to not only teach new users, but push them to improve over time as well. That will require handholding.

 

Hand holding to a certain extent. Do you think I want to baby my players all season to earn? No. I want to teach them their resources and then once they get to the VHLE they can manage on their own. Having the checklist can eliminate the future hand holding of repetitive questions and confusion in TPE earning.

 

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

This is going to be more GM oriented, but the pool to hire from has substantially shrunk from pre-VHLE days. We basically removed 16 people on average from the VHL and VHLM pools since they're running the 8 E teams. People want jobs sure, but the league wants to hire quality and capable people for those jobs otherwise we just create more of a mess to clean up if/when things go wrong. Bek seems to be covering it as I write this ffs.

 

I can give you a full list of post-VHLE day members who are ready for jobs. When creating more jobs you need more supervisors like yourself, commish of the VHLM for GMs like me. If we had new jobs, people would progress through the ranks more, create more experience opportunities for newer members, and create a stronger chain of active members for our jobs. 

 

Adapting and changing is always the goal, why plateau and not expand more.

 

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

VSN already has literally no bar to be above to join. All you have to do is follow the slightly higher requirements for their product, and actually do something weekly/bi-weekly in order to claim pay. So if people already aren't doing weekly VSN content, then hiring more people doesn't change anything. And no, I wouldn't raise VSN job pay at all. It's just writing an extra vhl.com within a Media Spot for the extra 2 TPE.

 

Bring in new people with the fire to write for VSN. Maybe a new crowd on the team is due? VSN creates beautiful and researched work that not every average member can produce.

 

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

What stats/data does STHS offer that isn't already tracked in its output? The only thing that comes to mind is GA/TA but people have scraped the PBP's in the past and the numbers are nonsensical, or at least absurd to analyze.

 

I was leaning towards more stuff that people like Victor do. Tracking members cup wins and all that fun stuff. The more the merrier in my eyes! Collecting that data is always a fun and relaxing way to earn TPE for some folks.

 

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

Probably the #1 job in my priority list if I could control job applications and hirings. We should have at least 2 more folks in this role yesterday.

 

Yes yes yes yes

 

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

While this is a neat concept, there's 2 issues. One, it is only for one subgroup of VHL PT creators - excluding anyone who writes or podcasts. Big no no. Two, even with the banner contests for cup winners, it usually ended up becoming a bit of a popularity contest since folks would just plug their teammates' and friends'. If we decided to start denying bonus TPE to any winner found to solicit votes or have friends assist in soliciting votes, then I'd be ok with cup banner contests only.

 

Totally agree with this!

 

24 minutes ago, Spartan said:

Nope nonope nope noipe enope nopenopenopeope. Hard pass on undoing seasons of work on making the M more balanced and less of a competitive hellhole while also curbstomping the new player experience. Sure, they can get stomped when they get to the VHL at 450 TPE right now, but they will at least experience being a solid player in the M, then struggling a bit with their role in the E, before learning they aren't the best and to grow into a larger role in the VHL. Or just be quality depth, whatever it is. I think it's a fairly accurate path right now in comparison to the typical NHL draft prospect's tbh. I would consider a smaller M cap increase to 250 or 300 if we genuinely abolished the E, but definitely not to 400. The current M system works as well as it does because under hybrid attributes, the 50-200 TPE range can perform very similarly under the right conditions.

 

---

Overall though I like the creativity and thought provoking content. Good avenues to pursue for sure, I just don't agree with some of the ways you've proposed. 6.9/10

 

Lol totally just an idea, I really like the M and E where we are! Thanks for the responses Spartan  

Edited July 5, 2023 by AJW

[Spartan 4,531]

2 minutes ago, Subject056 said:

We just had someone recruited from our Instagram account recently! ... I know it's just one person so far, a work in progress for recruitment for sure. But there's still hope! 

That's fantastic! Glad things are starting to get going, and I'd love if all those avenues become more consistent and get a wider reach over time. But that still means we need the stuff that works, aka Reddit/YouTube, to continue on a seasonal basis. Just not ready to put all the eggs into those other, unproven baskets yet. But I give you guys a pass for this season since the recruitment team basically completely turned over.

[Spartan 4,531]

17 minutes ago, AJW said:

Thanks for the responses Spartan

And you get more as a bonus!

 

17 minutes ago, AJW said:

To be honest this is fair to ask. Since joining the recruitment team myself and Subject have fully taken over the Instagram posting daily. We're trying to both post 3 a week and then kirb does a player of the week for us. We both had a week to do twitter as well. I can't really speak on behave of all Recruitment, that would be a Thad question. He does take charge for us which is amazing and I know Mubbles is doing the recruitment draft class trackers too.

So Mubbles' stuff I get since I think it's manual. I could probably work with him to not make it manual if he's interested. RJ had portal API access which made it a script he just ran weekly, afaik Mubbles was doing his draft class stuff manually which I don't think is optimal, even without API access.

 

The rest of y'all though, just echoing the sentiment of I don't think Insta/Twitter have as much of a reach as we expect for replenishing draft classes on a seasonal basis. Do you guys have set internal metrics that you aim to reach, or grow over time? Twitter/Insta give you guys metrics like views, engagements, profile visits, I'd probably set goals for those and re-evaluate over time if those are being met and improved upon - otherwise it's just doing something to be busy without really focusing on the results coming out of it. Which I know you guys aren't doing, just wanted to highlight the metrics/improvement portion as something to guide your work.

 

17 minutes ago, AJW said:

Hand holding to a certain extent. Do you think I want to baby my players all season to earn? No. I want to teach them their resources and then once they get to the VHLE they can manage on their own. Having the checklist can eliminate the future hand holding of repetitive questions and confusion in TPE earning.

I don't think anyone wants to babysit players all season to earn. I sure don't, but I still send out weekly check-ins to my players who haven't updated (or try to bc sometimes I burn out and forget) because it's just the nature of a GM role. Especially at the M level where the job is explicitly to mentor, engage and retain newbies. If handholding for a season or two is what's needed to make people really understand how the league works, I would expect that to be done. We made changes to waivers and increased pay specifically to incentivize that type of commitment and effort.

 

17 minutes ago, AJW said:

I can give you a full list of post-VHLE day members who are ready for jobs. When creating more jobs you need more supervisors like yourself, commish of the VHLM for GMs like me. If we had new jobs, people would progress through the ranks more, create more experience opportunities for newer members, and create a stronger chain of active members for our jobs. 

 

Adapting and changing is always the goal, why plateau and not expand more.

Yeah DM me about this since I'm curious how many non-job holders right now are actively looking for jobs beyond GM'ing. I can already see AGM/GM applicant pools first-hand, the other stuff I don't pay as much attention to.

 

17 minutes ago, AJW said:

Bring in new people with the fire to write for VSN. Maybe a new crowd on the team is due? VSN creates beautiful and researched work that not every average member can produce.

AFAIK this is a pretty open thing. Just ask Alex to be part of VSN and then meet the requirements, don't think it's anything too formal. Maybe @Alex could bump VSN openings to the site to let everyone know they are always happy to have more writers. Personally though, I think VSN is better as a one-off or once a season job since on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, it ends up being one of the most burnout inducing jobs on the site. I've seen too many people fall victim to VSN.

 

17 minutes ago, AJW said:

I was leaning towards more stuff that people like Victor do. Tracking members cup wins and all that fun stuff. The more the merrier in my eyes! Collecting that data is always a fun and relaxing way to earn TPE for some folks.

Someone should eventually start getting trained to replace @Victor in the HoF department since I doubt he will do the sheer amount of seasonal background legwork with updating the HoF subforum forever. I'd support that being a job or two.

 

 

Edited July 5, 2023 by Spartan

[AJW 2,201]

6 minutes ago, Spartan said:

The rest of y'all though, just echoing the sentiment of I don't think Insta/Twitter have as much of a reach as we expect for replenishing draft classes on a seasonal basis. Do you guys have set internal metrics that you aim to reach, or grow over time? Twitter/Insta give you guys metrics like views, engagements, profile visits, I'd probably set goals for those and re-evaluate over time if those are being met and improved upon - otherwise it's just doing something to be busy without really focusing on the results coming out of it. Which I know you guys aren't doing, just wanted to highlight the metrics/improvement portion as something to guide your work.

 

Loved everything you said just wanted to comment on this.

 

Me and Subject are mostly just grinding to build our following on the Instagram right now. Only hovering above 200 followers but have gained quite a few since we took over. In all honestly you won't start seeing great results from there until we have a season or two of posts to knock down the outdated posts lower on our page. Feel like we got a good system going so hopefully by the end of summer we can have a bit of a groove going. Just gonna take some time.

[Alex 3,257]

15 minutes ago, Spartan said:

AFAIK this is a pretty open thing. Just ask Alex to be part of VSN and then meet the requirements, don't think it's anything too formal. Maybe @Alex could bump VSN openings to the site to let everyone know they are always happy to have more writers. Personally though, I think VSN is better as a one-off or once a season job since on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, it ends up being one of the most burnout inducing jobs on the site. I've seen too many people fall victim to VSN.

I'm always looking for writers and graphics people, was actually planning on putting a job posting up later this week, just busy with IRL stuff right now.

[Banackock 8,143]

Hey

[Victor 11,023]

1 hour ago, Spartan said:

Someone should eventually start getting trained to replace @Victor in the HoF department since I doubt he will do the sheer amount of seasonal background legwork with updating the HoF subforum forever. I'd support that being a job or two

There's probably quicker ways to do it too, but I personally enjoy the process and it keeps me up to date for awards/HOF type discussions. But I wouldnt say things need to stay the exact same way, if only because no one has been able to do it consistently despite best intentions.

[Spartan 4,531]

33 minutes ago, Victor said:

There's probably quicker ways to do it too, but I personally enjoy the process and it keeps me up to date for awards/HOF type discussions. But I wouldnt say things need to stay the exact same way, if only because no one has been able to do it consistently despite best intentions.

I think that's fine, moreso meant that it'd be good to maybe get someone to learn from you on what all you maintain and how you do it. Just because everyone's time in the league is finite, can't expect people to be around forever.

[AJW 2,201]

4 hours ago, Subject056 said:

We just had someone recruited from our Instagram account recently! ... I know it's just one person so far, a work in progress for recruitment for sure. But there's still hope! 

 

 

May as well show everyone how we've been doing so far  Two of our posts alone reached 200+ accounts each.

Edited July 5, 2023 by AJW

[BOOM 8,818]

Multiple leagues have the checklist now, including the ISFL, SSL and obviously the SHL as mentioned. I've found it useful on a couple of occasions after joining the SSL as I learned that forum. 

[animal74 1,855]

On 7/5/2023 at 1:39 PM, Victor said:

There's probably quicker ways to do it too, but I personally enjoy the process and it keeps me up to date for awards/HOF type discussions. But I wouldn't say things need to stay the exact same way, if only because no one has been able to do it consistently despite best intentions.

@AJW @Spartan  As a stats nut (and VSN History Writer), I would love to help out with stats, etc. more. Again, not to take anything away from Victor and others who have done stuff in the past, but I feel there is lots of data (Team Records, data cleanup, etc.) that could be gathered and cataloged that would add value to the league.