A Gustav 30 in 30, #24: I Hate Bureaucracy

[Gustav 6,322]

 

One of my biggest ideas ever took almost a whole year to even become a work in progress.

 

 

Something that you may have noticed by reading other installments of this series is that I generally do my best to evaluate myself fairly. I've owned up to a few things I would have gone about differently today, and I usually don't try to sell myself or tell you that I'm perfect. A possible exception to that is in my writing about my time as a VHLM GM, a job I would say I was damn good at and I won't apologize for thinking so. With that, including the fact that I was one of the better ones at securing and developing waiver players, one would expect that to be one of my favorite parts of the job.

 

In those days, a GM had lots of control over the course of their team's roster as it related to waivers. A particularly active GM could take advantage of this by offering to lots of players and usually being one of the first to do so. A particularly active GM could also offer to players in unique and personal ways that could sway a player's perception toward their team. With this being what it was, forum-based waiver offers were something that reflected positively on those who did their job well.

 

The thing was, it wasn't always fair. Waiver players were great for non-competitive teams looking to fill spots and end up with a more active locker room, and they were also great for fringe teams who had a few good players but lacked depth. From the objective standpoint of winning games, though, waiver signings were bad for highly competitive teams with a real shot at the championship. Especially as the trade deadlines approached, fewer and fewer teams offered to players who would bring the average down at their positions, and some who I won't name specifically went on to win the championship in seasons like (hypothetically) S70 and S73 off of rosters full of then-legal capped inactives. It didn't help that the S70s were marked by a huge crackdown on VHLM management, which went from almost completely unregulated to highly structured with rules that both helped and didn't help.

 

There was really nothing that could have been put in place to make people make waiver offers, though, and the best that could really be done rules-wise was just a general "please be nice" statement that didn't really mean much. With rules changing and systems changing with it, I wrote an article that I'll talk about much more extensively in a future part of this series: a lengthy response to all that had happened so far. At the very end of the article, I first speculate on what would happen if we were to do something new and put the VHLM's waiver system on the portal.

 

It just so happened that right around the same time, the Board of Gustav had an ongoing thread about VHLM changes in a general sense. I brought this up there and pushed for it for a bit, getting some positive feedback that included the first and last time @Victor will ever say this:

Quote

Gus' suggestion of making this portalised is so good actually I think there's no point changing the waiver system until that's feasible.

...but things were very jumbled in that thread, support wasn't universal, and it mostly got buried.

 

This first happened in October of 2021, and when December rolled around and my semester was over, it was still on my mind enough that I took it to its own thread. I was really hyped about the possibilities that a new system like this would bring. First, automated waivers would mean no dodging new players, with the availability of roster spots becoming a guarantee rather than an option on the part of the GMs. Players would also gain control of their own destiny, choosing to join a top team and win a championship or go to a place able to offer them playing time and star status. It would also get rid of something else that annoyed me, which was sneaky GMs trying to lie about a player's opportunity ("we'll put you on the first line!" regardless of roster makeup) or their team's status ("we're the Cup favorites!" was thrown out there by at least three different teams in S68). The thread was somewhat active for a couple weeks, and then it died despite positive feedback. It just wasn't exciting enough for the group to want to bang it out.

 

When putting things in place, especially big things, there's always some understandable pushback. But this thread really didn't have all that much of it. My biggest concern was whether it would be doable on the portal end, but @Dil was both very willing to do it and not at all concerned about the workload. The thread crawled its way into early January with only minor issue taken with the original idea, but the necessary "let's do it" drive never showed up and the meta conversation was happening around the same time anyway. It received its first of many bumps around this time, and it was decided at this point to have the VHLM Commissioner team at the time poll their GMs about it. I thought this was pretty fair.

 

Except that a week later, GMs still hadn't been asked. The thread was bumped again to make this happen, and we thought it would. We then spent the next month going bump --> larger objection and alternate proposal --> bump --> bump with nothing happening and no feedback from the GMs. Portal waivers were sort of dead in the water at that point.

 

This wasn't exactly helped by feedback from the VHLM GMs at the time, who weren't happy that the system would be taking away a level of control from them. To be fair, this is understandable. The league already has its contentious situations at times where the updaters need to draw lines between what is and isn't acceptable for TPE, or when the mod team decides to make decisions about who can and can't be hired into jobs on behalf of commissioners, and no one really likes to hear that something they've always been able to do, to an effect that they likely see as positive, is no longer going to be something they're allowed to do. On top of just losing control, though, a very fair take is that it strips those particularly active GMs of their ability to out-waiver the others through effort. 

 

We did, thankfully, choose to roll ahead with this anyway. A workaround that we'd decided on was that GMs could still make their own waiver pitches to be automatically available on the portal, and a decent counterpoint that we used to justify the rest was that the amount of work needed to constantly be available and offering to outdo the others was unrealistic to expect from a GM anyway. And, eventually, after about three months of kicking around the BoG, Dil finally proposed moving forward with portal waivers by starting to work on it.

 

And got no response, because the idea wasn't vibes enough. Continuing to bump the post elicited replies along the lines of "I thought we were all done talking about this," when clearly we weren't because nothing had ever come out of it to conclude it.

 

Some things had happened in the background as well. I had talked with then-VHLM Commissioner @McWolf personally about some ways to address VHLM GM issues with the system, and I had a very good conversation with one of the proposal's larger opponents in @Spartan  that resulted in us finding a solid middle ground on the issue. Namely, he was concerned about my idea of auto-assigning players to teams when some may not even exist long enough to accept a contract, and we eventually agreed that it would probably be best to still require GMs to make offers officially by themselves. As far as I could tell, there wasn't anyone left in BoG that was against the proposal, so it was really frustrating to see "are we good to go?" met with literally nothing. Eventually, it got the green light from the blue team, and my* proposal finally was put into work.

 

*this was suggested before I ever brought it up by @Berocka, apparently, who has an angry podcast about my taking credit for it somewhere. I don't have any memory of that ever happening and always thought I came up with it independently. Let's just be happy it was pulled off.

 

We were promised a "by next season" in early May, but like all big projects, this wasn't the case (no hate here; I'm not exactly done with this series and my 31st season is coming to an end). Later on in 2022, Spartan and I became VHLM Commissioners ourselves, and that conveniently lined up with the system becoming ready. Portal waivers were finally rolled out in November of 2022, over a year from when I had first brought them up.

 

For better or for worse, portal waivers are still a thing today! Some aren't convinced that the system is perfect, and I understand that. But a year of fighting for it to happen finally paid off despite the best efforts of those of us in power to not care about it.

 

That part is mostly joking, to be clear. I love and trust most people in BoG and there are legitimate reasons why not everyone is rushing to implement all of my ideas all the time. It is times like these that make me wish that I could snap my fingers and make things happen instantly, but I also get that the league would probably have run itself into the ground by this point if I got to do that. Looking over the thread, I found that I actually did a lot less of the bumping myself than I thought, and it really was a group effort that contradicted the "I singlehandedly forced the system through" narrative I originally intended to take to this article. As a whole, no matter who it was, portal waivers took a really long time to make their way through the system, and I think that justifies this article's title anyway.

 

 

 

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

#14: Ello Gov'nor

#15: Weewoo

#16: Jolly Kranchers

#17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2

#18: I've Been Everywhere, Man

#19: The Sun Also Rises

#20: Ripple In Still Water

#21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3

#22: I Hate the Meta

#23: I Hate the Mods

[Victor 10,824]

43 minutes ago, Gustav said:

getting some positive feedback that included the first and last time @Victor will ever say this:

Compliments just become that much more powerful when they're rare x

 

45 minutes ago, Gustav said:

I'm not exactly done with this series and my 31st season is coming to an end)

doing better than VHL 40 in 40 tbh

[Dil 1,756]

I refuse to read words but you better not be bitching about me bitchstav

[Gustav 6,322]

1 minute ago, Dil said:

I refuse to read words but you better not be bitching about me bitchstav

 

Honestly you may have done more pushing for the green light on the project than anyone else.

 

Bitchstav likes to think that side only comes out when it's warranted.