A Gustav 30 in 30, #14: Ello Gov'nor

[Gustav 6,468]

 

I cherry-pick a BoG post to make myself look good.

 

 

You may have heard of a little thing called the "Board of Gustav" in the past, and you also may have noticed that I wrote 13 whole articles about myself and the time I spent in the VHL before I ever got around to mentioning it. Have whatever opinions you'd like about how I/we sit there behind the scenes and work around the clock to create schemes to screw over your player specifically, but the fact is that I had to earn it.

 

Anyway, I was brought into the BoG almost immediately after I became GM in Davos. At some point in January of 2020, Bek reached out to me to offer me a spot, and I accepted. I wish I had something more exciting to say about that, but I'd finally been picked for something without it being a big deal (VHLM expansion) or a controversy (my VHL hiring). Awesome.

 

There were a few big topics at hand when I joined the BoG. This wasn't all that long after the SBA affiliation drama first went down in public, and there was a mostly-finished thread on the matter that still had updates from time to time. It was there that I was able to read some of the behind-the-scenes talk, which was interesting in a few ways that I don't think I'm at liberty to elaborate upon. But as a whole, I don't remember there being anything terribly exciting that was happening at that moment. Experience now tells me that BoG expansion typically happens when the current BoG stops doing things (at which point anyone no longer active is also usually removed), and this probably was no exception then.

 

I remember hanging back a little bit at first, because I still had a bit of imposter syndrome over being included in the group that had been doing VHL administrative stuff for years on end. The first thread I put up was a little stupid (a minor suggestion to officially change graphics guidelines to explicitly allow multi-week claiming, rather than just quietly letting people do it in the first place. No one really cared and I got laughed at a bit for this). I like to think my next suggestion was a bit more helpful, though, and I did some work to solidify the affiliation that we had with the EFL. At the time, the EFL was going through lots of changes brought about through direct influence of SBA leadership, most of which had also made their way onto the BoD of the EFL. So, the EFL ended up with just about the same leadership as the league that didn't like us, and had even started adopting some of the same infrastructure (their portals had merged by this point). I think this was cool for the EFL, but I was also fairly concerned about what it meant for our league--one complaint the SBA had about our past affiliation was that it was fairly casual (so there was no reason to bring it back? I never fully understood that extension of it). If one affiliation was blocked from coming back, partly because it wasn't very strong, then what would happen to our other affiliation that also wasn't all that strong and was now a partnership with mostly the same people? Because of this, I found my first niche by advocating within the BoG for stronger EFL affiliation and reaching out to @Turner (then-head of the EFL) about related things. The first thing I ever made happen in the BoG was mutual acceptance of each other's theme weeks--there was a time where affiliate PT claims were eligible for the additional doubles week between the EFL and SBA, but not between the EFL and us. So it was small, but it was still a thing that I pulled off.

 

The one thing I specifically made happen early on in BoG that I'm most proud of concerned the player store and some of the options contained therein. Would you believe that a PT doubles week used to be double the price it is now? What if I told you that you would have to spend $7.5 million on a full doubles week or $10 million on the biggest uncapped TPE package? What about $3 million on the point task upgrades, for nothing more than just capped TPE? Also, what if you were a first-gen player in the VHLM and couldn't make the two uncapped first-gen purchases with your first VHLM contract? One thread I opened addressed all of these issues, proposing drastic cuts to player store prices. Depreciation fighters were then (and are now) easily the best purchase for a high earner, but a mid-level earner could reasonably make other choices under an improved pricing system. Unfortunately, it took about 9 months of bureaucracy and inefficiency for this to finally be pushed through, but most of the numbers I initially suggested remain the prices for those items today. The next time you buy a doubles week for half of what it used to be, slip me a TPE or two.

 

Aside from this, the issue of the day in the earlier S70s was huge amounts of league growth and the handling of multiple expansions in both the VHLM and the VHL. By the time I'd joined, some of this was already done, but I got to be part of the planning process for the addition of Miami to the M and the addition of four teams (Chicago, London, LA, and Warsaw) to the VHL. The way this happened in either case wasn't that we figured out ourselves that we needed to expand--rather, the commissioners told us--but it still felt cool that we had the chance to be part of it. Particularly, I remember the Warsaw team name and the London logo being sort of up in the air (we were warned by @Victor that the London logo looks really stupid to anyone living in the UK, but it was free and no one had an actual issue with it). Some of us also had some issues with the logo choices. It's absolutely fair to say that the league has trended more into the complex, modern e-sports sort of logo as time has passed. And whether that's something you like or not, some of us wanted sports logos that actually looked like sports logos--I was one of a few who wanted things like (for example) the Chicago logo to a.) not have as much stuff going on and just look like something I'd actually wear on a hat, and b.) not have a huge block of text over it that tells me what I'm looking at. The logo should be clean and recognizable on its own! But third-party artists are usually unwilling to negotiate. We had a bit more control over Miami as a whole, though, coming up with the name in BoG and evaluating the logos. The artist for the Marauders logo actually gave us a few rounds of stuff, and we ended up with something that was (in my own opinion) a little less stupid.

 

I've been on the Board of Gustav for a long time, and I've been part of lots of different things that are their own different stories. But before some of the bigger changes the league has seen, back when we were still in what lots of us considered the good old days, there was time I spent getting used to things in the administrative world. This was my first real foray into being important, having a role where I was expected to contribute to league policy and define how stuff worked. And while the biggest development of the early S70s was finding ways to make the league's new teams look cool, it was still a big part of league history that I remember being part of. I think some of these early developments did a lot to teach me how to engage in making things happen, so that when even bigger things happened later, I'd be prepared to help out.

 

 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:

 

#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name

#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?

#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?

#4: The House That I Built

#5: Can We Fix It?

#6: American Beauty

#7: The Kids Are Alright

#8: Dogs In A Pile

#9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake

#10: This Old House

#11: Go Directly to Jail

#12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball

#13: How I Messed Up Davos

[Victor 11,009]

I have given you so much quotable content over the years I feel like I should be getting royalties.