Ideas to Fix the Recruitment Issues

[Will3 465]

The talk of this season has been recrment or the lack thereof. This has been most felt by the GMs and AGMs of the VHLM. This player crunch has severely impacted the competitive balance of this league. The point of this article is to come up reasons for the the downturn and find solutions to correct this problem.

 

I must start by stating that this hobby is a niche one. Most people would prefer to play the game rather than let a computer decide the outcome.  Sim leaguers are a different breed and a tight nit community. Indeed I have had the pleasure of many of my friends in multiple leagues. But while the VHL has the largest community out of any sim league, growth has been slow. Indeed the Covid boom which has brought in a many new players has ended. I believe that this boom comes down to time. The fall has been a busy time of year for many, myself including. Now that the holiday season has arrived, that busyness should increase. It takes time to be a productive member of this community, time that could be spent elsewhere. These are things that must be considered by the BoG going forward.

 

Now this the problem elaborated on, what are the answers? If we are to get more eyes on this league, we have to go viral. The league has used YouTube effective in the past. After all, it is how I ended up here. But I feel that we can do more that sponsor videos. There are videos of creating a player in something like the last College Football video game and follow the career path of that of player. I have watched these videos and have enjoyed many of them. As a true sim league, there is no game play to record, but the storytelling could be fantastic. And sometimes that is all it takes to attract attention. I would also make some changes to the value of written TPE task. I would increase the amount of TPE for 150 word point task to 3 TPE and reduce the amount of words for 6 TPE to 300 words. The reduction of words nessary to get the maximum amount of TPE would hopefully be less daunting for new players, leaving the big articles for the professional. These are my ideas for fixing our recruitment issues, unworkable as they may be.

 

 

While the league will not collapse overnight, this recruitment slump has created issues that if unaddressed could result in huge problems. What keeps sim leagues like this one alive is a willingness to change when things aren't working out. I have made the case for my ideas but please make the case for your ideas below. The BoG has been open in their search for ideas to fix this problem. It gives me so much peace about the future. Undoubtedly, a good solution to this recruitment issue will be found and the result will be a stronger VHL