theme week A Rebrand of the VHLE

[Grape 528]

The VHLE gets a lot of hate, and most is rather deserved. Majority of experiences appear to be negative, with the stopgap to the majors being overly draining to both engagement and enjoyment. First gens go here to die, and recreates simply plug their ears and chug along to get through this brief stint. The work of the GMs is iffy, with scouting being rather poor and drafted players in some cases sitting around with no communication from their new bench boss for multiple weeks. While the TPE range it covers is typically where people fizzle out naturally, the league does not do the best job attempting to remedy that. With the vast amount of inactives sitting between 200-400 TPE, why not do something with that. With more consistent recruitment and the VHLM continuing to have life injected into it, a minor expansion (bring back Yukon) and shifting of the TPE caps to cover the empty space provided with the removal of the VHLE from active player usage and to take in everyone who’s still kicking would fix it on that end. It’s been shown that it’s possible, and that the VHLE is overall redundant. But I am not someone who likes to waste resources. We have all these assets for now defunct teams, so why not do something with them?

 

Introducing the VHLI, or the Inactive League. Using the now defunct team logos, we can assemble a league focused purely on GM development. People coming into the league wanting to learn how to become a GM or just want to do some team playtesting can become a GM of one of the inactive teams. These teams will be granted access to the pool of inactives ticking all the way up to whatever the VHL minimum cap would have become. Throwing on all the bells and whistles, like a draft, free agency, and a trade deadline, it will have the same feel of regular leagues, except the locker rooms are dead, although not much of a change for the VHLE and some M teams. It would provide a more casual experience, meant for learning and not necessarily pure competition, and is there to build proficiency in STHS and team building, as well as test out and learn possible new strategies that can be implemented in other leagues. An addition that could possibly be made is a player editor as well, in which GMs can be given access to their players’ and tinker with them, although that might be a step too far. The league will be made up of eight teams, with the six current VHLE teams making up the main bulk of it. Adding onto it, we will see a return of a long defunct team in the Madrid Thunder, with a logo of a charging bull with it’s back half morphing into a sort of lightning bolt. Two completely new teams will be birthed from this as well, with a team in France, either in Paris or Bordeaux, filling a long standing hole in the European sector of the VHL, as well as a team in the Netherlands, likely Amsterdam, dotting up Western Europe which has been somewhat lacking in league representation.

(534 words)

[Daniel Janser 1,982]

If you go west, go Portugal... I hear Braga is a secret hockey hot spot...