A Gustav 30 in 30, #25: I Hate the VHLE

[Gustav 6,436]

 

Let's be real, you knew this one was coming. This has been me for years on end about this topic.

 

 

Something that really ground my gears over the later half of the S70s was the addition of tons and tons of new players to the VHL player base. This was something that was great when we first saw it in the S60s, but as with all beneficiaries of VHL systems, I prefer to take my help and slam the door in the face of anyone who comes looking for it afterward.

 

I'm kidding about that last bit, of course. But if multiple expansions in the S60s, followed up by four teams being added to the league in S72, wasn't enough of an indication that times had changed, some other things should have been. For one thing, the league's efforts to tap into different sources had taught us that those different sources will yield different responses from one group or another. For example, we learned that paid Reddit ads (as opposed to making posts in one community or another) did literally nothing and gave us literally no one. @Matt_O learned that attempting to recruit even through comments on PornHub was more effective than that, but only in that we got someone who didn't stick around to create an account. Most importantly, though, we learned just how much of a different beast that YouTube could be. We've had YouTube drives that worked well, for sure, but we've also had some that didn't. The difference in that, though, is that sometimes YouTube drives don't work and really mess with league numbers. An example of this was in one of our first YouTube drives in S69, where we advertised with @TheFinnFTW and got basically no one who stuck around, despite way more players than we wanted being created and way too many of those being goalies (curiously, the second time we went to that channel, it worked pretty well). We've had some others work the same way. Most recently, the S93 class was filled up pretty nicely by a drive that led lots of us to believe that we'd just ended a period of stagnant recruiting, but the vast majority of those who flooded in never ended up being substantially active.

 

But, the emergence of YouTube recruiting and the fact that it DID work okay enough sometimes was enough for @Beaviss and the rest of recruitment crew to consistently try to prove the point that the never-before-thought-sustainable levels of recruitment that we'd seen for a bit could in fact be kept up. And most of the time, this actually worked as intended. Those too new to see it would be super impressed to see it today, and it's my opinion that some of what happened then is still an influence on the memories of some who complain about the state of recruitment today. The thing was, that just kept on growing the size of the league. This would go from a great feature of the times to a huge issue practically overnight when things went off the rails and a last-second drive was shoehorned into S74, right before to the trade deadline.

 

The player turnout was the player turnout to end all player turnouts. The S75 class was (and is) the largest of all time thanks to an effort to prove a point that we had nothing to worry about. Very quickly, VHLM rosters filled to the point where the league had completely filled up, sparking the decision to develop a never-extensively-used framework by which teams could place players in their junior lineups in STHS. We hadn't seen a recruitment drive, nor a draft class, of that magnitude ever, and it bring sprung upon an already full league was nuts. But oh well, we'd just added a whole bunch of teams to the VHL, and most YouTube recruits drop off quickly anyway. Give it a couple seasons and we're probably fine.

 

The sheer size of the S75 class somehow also unfortunately coincided with a large amount of a particular VHL demographic. I'm sure you've come across players in your life who may as well not exist on Discord or the forum, who don't earn TPE outside of a weekly check in on the portal. It wasn't just some new players around this time; it was lots of them. I had warned about this much earlier on when we first moved Practice Facility to the portal and noticed a worrying trend of players who only clicked the Practice Facility button every week and nothing else. In just about all of these cases, the player was completely uncontactable on the forum and sometimes hadn't even visited the forum since creating. It was almost as if (and I didn't entirely doubt that) these were people who had no idea the forum even existed and were just checking the portal every week until they eventually disappeared. Well, by the later half of the S70s, Welfare was also on the portal, and the earning potential of players who never left the portal had tripled. The term "clicker" arose behind the scenes for players like these, in reference to all of their activity coming from clicking buttons, and we suddenly had an army of clickers on our hands who also suddenly had the capacity to break out of the M.

 

It wasn't just pure clickers, to be clear--high earners never had anything to worry about, but we had an army of low- and middle-earners on top of this that VHL GMs wanted nothing to do with. A few seasons later, we had players with multiple seasons of VHL experience going completely unsigned, GMs letting rookie contracts expire rather than giving roster spots to their players, and VHL-ready prospects having no place at all on their rosters. The roster spots that were available, as a consequence, were practically nonexistent, and I can speak to the trade market being very deadlocked at the time with most rosters right up against the cap. 

 

Clearly, something needed to be done. This time, it was once again Beaviss asking the league to do something about it, but this time it was something other than just asking for expansion. Something that Beav had always argued for aside from expansion, and something that he deserves more credit for than he gets, was larger team rosters. I don't disagree with this myself--more people on your team means a more active server and a stronger team community. His post had mostly to do with this at first, but there are also obvious challenges to trying to create larger rosters. There is no world in which GMs will not just want to run with their highest TPE players on the ice as much as possible, and expanding the cap will just make it so top teams can keep more top players (rather than encouraging rosters themselves to fill). Plus, a system that attempts to enforce larger rosters sort of loses steam if those larger rosters can't be maintained by the size of the league. For better or for worse, the BoG decided against it, but the problem still existed.

 

It was originally @Victor who put forward the idea of a third league, but it was more of a junior league/farm league system than what the VHLE eventually ended up being. It's a very long thread, and I'll really only cover the highlights, but you already know that the long story short is that the E ended up morphing into its eventual state by the end of it.

 

From the start, I wasn't crazy about the E league, and I remember @Fire Tortorella probably being the BoG member who was most on the same page as me. For my part, my initial objection wasn't necessarily to the third league itself--because I did see how it created a space for the people who were past the VHLM but couldn't make it in the VHL--but I hated that it made the path up to the VHL longer and more difficult for everyone. To me, it was unacceptable that players would take longer (in some cases far longer) to make it to the VHL, in a league structure that supposedly prided itself upon player development. In fact, there was a point back in the day when the VHLM cap went from 200 to 250 and I hated it. I proposed lots of alternatives, from trying to adapt Beav's original proposal to even just doing nothing and letting people disappear until we were back to OK--objectively a bit of an asshole move, but also objectively low-stress and still in keeping with the idea that the VHL should be full (though not overfilled) with active players.

 

Additionally, there was a debate over the intended purpose of the E and I didn't really like either end of it. On one hand, we had people who promoted the E as a system for everyone and wanted no situation that didn't involve the E for any player (a point where I clashed really strongly a few times with @bigAL). On the other, the E was being internally promoted as some sort of dumping ground for clickers, which I really objected to on philosophical grounds. From my perspective, this would be degrading the E as undesirable and creating a rift between the league's high and low earners. If a low earner were put in the E and then just forgotten about--because the system then circled back to that first point, where we decided it had to be that way--then VHL teams could wait and never see that player develop before the end of their rookie contract, at which point they could just let that contract expire and continue cruising along with their friends who earned more. Which I guess wasn't too dissimilar to my idea of doing nothing, but I still defend the difference as this way being the fake-nice way of achieving that goal that also unnecessarily lengthened everyone's player development.

 

And to the end, I fought the decision to implement the E league, for reasons that lots of you have seen in lots of posts. I did a lot over time to get that word out there and became one of the league's prominent E haters--something that was backed up by complaints from across the league that someone's locker room was dead or that their teammates were all inactive or that (in some cases) their GM didn't even try to talk to the players. I kept that up for about as long as it was needed, and until the fall of the E, which is a story of its own.

 

Although I do recognize the part that the VHLE played in keeping things running, that's about as far as my opinion ever shifted on the matter. Even when it was clear that it was going nowhere and it seemed like it never would go anywhere, I still wasn't afraid to speak up about it and highlight what the league could be without it. And for those who believed in the same, I'm glad I could represent that feeling.

 

 

 

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

#24: I Hate Bureaucracy

[Corco 1,251]

Thank you for putting into words what I had been looking for since I rejoined the league (a full elaboration on the story of the E), having went inactive right around the early/mid S70s. I agree with all of your points in this article, and I’m happy it’s gone; it is really crazy to think that we actually had too much recruitment at one point, where were all of these clickers when Project Player Two was implemented!

[Victor 10,971]

9 hours ago, Corco said:

Thank you for putting into words what I had been looking for since I rejoined the league (a full elaboration on the story of the E), having went inactive right around the early/mid S70s. I agree with all of your points in this article, and I’m happy it’s gone; it is really crazy to think that we actually had too much recruitment at one point, where were all of these clickers when Project Player Two was implemented!

I mean you've just got your information from the most biased source possible on the subject. 

 

14 hours ago, Gustav said:

It was originally @Victor who put forward the idea of a third league, but it was more of a junior league/farm league system than what the VHLE eventually ended up being

I mean it's been a while but I don't recall suggesting anything other than what it became.

[Corco 1,251]

10 minutes ago, Victor said:

I mean you've just got your information from the most biased source possible on the subject. 

True, but I am in agreement that the removal of the VHLe is probably better for the long-term health of the league. I mean no offense to them when I say this, but I don't believe placating to members (clickers) who aren't really bringing anything of substance to the league other than a low-earning player hitting buttons in the portal is a good way to grow the community. I would have been in favor of a free-market approach, letting the low-TPE tweeners sit unsigned in Free Agency until they earned enough TPE to be worthy of a roster spot, but I understand that my opinion may be a bit draconian on the subject, given the popularity of the Welfare Program we have (a program that I actually do like). Overall though, it seems like it was a good enough solution at the time to what was an precedented situation in the VHL.

[Gustav 6,436]

36 minutes ago, Victor said:

I mean you've just got your information from the most biased source possible on the subject. 

The biased source is happy to be taken seriously in any case. 
 

37 minutes ago, Victor said:

I mean it's been a while but I don't recall suggesting anything other than what it became.

I won’t act like I closely read through ALL of the thread but you were the first to mention a third league and there was some question as to its format at first with junior/affiliate terminology being thrown around. I also won’t act like I understand all the nuances of how those systems work IRL either so I’m probably not the best source on what to call any given proposal. 

[Victor 10,971]

1 hour ago, Corco said:

Overall though, it seems like it was a good enough solution at the time to what was an precedented situation in the VHL.

Yeah this is ultimately the main thing.

 

1 hour ago, Corco said:

I mean no offense to them when I say this, but I don't believe placating to members (clickers) who aren't really bringing anything of substance to the league other than a low-earning player hitting buttons in the portal is a good way to grow the community.

This is the problem with using Gus as your main source of information though, that was never really a consideration. Anyway here's a snip from the BOG last year when we started discussing removing the E, so you can see where he and I stand on this (I'm responding to Gus here). The higher cap VHLM we have brought in basically does what I wanted.

 

[Garsh 1,193]

16 hours ago, Gustav said:

 

by complaints from across the league that someone's locker room was dead or that their teammates were all inactive or that (in some cases) their GM didn't even try to talk to the players. I kept that up for about as long as it was needed, and until the fall of the E, which is a story of its own.

 

 

 

Well based on that then sounds like we need to abolish the VHL cuz i've been in some pretty dead locker rooms at that level too.  Looking forward to your new crusade 

[Gustav 6,436]

6 hours ago, Garsh said:

Well based on that then sounds like we need to abolish the VHL cuz i've been in some pretty dead locker rooms at that level too.  Looking forward to your new crusade

 

Well sure, a dead locker room is a concern. I'll defend VHL locker rooms a little bit because they suffer from lower player turnover than the other league(s), plus everyone is less new so there's not only less pressure to go out and make oneself known and draw connections, but there aren't as many people who need help and all the conversations started by questions about the league just don't happen in the first place.

 

My line is whether that inactivity is the GM's fault. Personally, I've been in some "dead" locker rooms that are dead in the sense that there isn't much conversation, but I personally have never been in one where I felt that the GM was making no effort to create it. Both of these things would never be true in a typical M server, for example, but they can be true in the VHL and that's where the distinction between lack of activity and lack of GM activity needs to be drawn.

 

I'm not saying that a lack of GM effort doesn't exist in the VHL, and I definitely know of cases over the years that I'd identify as such (which you can, in fact, see me talking about in BoG if you know where to look). I have also never identified all VHLE GMs as being part of this problem (I've only ever had one GM in the E, who was @Doomsday and he was great). But what I will say is that I consistently came across far more complaints of this nature that were related to the VHLE than the VHL. Not all of it was the GMs' fault, but I don't think that anyone would agree that "my GM doesn't respond to my Discord messages and hasn't said a word in our server in months and never scouted me or told me I was being traded" (as a real example I've come across) is an ideal situation.

 

 

7 hours ago, Victor said:

This is the problem with using Gus as your main source of information though, that was never really a consideration. Anyway here's a snip from the BOG last year when we started discussing removing the E, so you can see where he and I stand on this (I'm responding to Gus here). The higher cap VHLM we have brought in basically does what I wanted.

 

TBF your screenshot deals with a different issue, which is the longer pathway up to the VHL and my personal disagreement with how depreciation works in relation to it. It's a good representation of how we feel about that but doesn't really have anything to do with the statement it quoted.

 

If we're talking about the issue of "placating to clickers" and whether that was the goal, I think that's a topic that can mostly be talked about independently of my E hate. I do think that thread was full of a lot of acting like we were doing something really nice to clickers, and there was a lot of mention of "giving" them a "competitive environment" that they can enjoy and whatnot. Honestly, I'm not sure that was ever anyone's intent but it was certainly something that was brought up as a selling point for the idea whose ultimate purpose was really to clear up VHL rosters and make clickers none of a GM's concern.

 

 

9 hours ago, Corco said:

True, but I am in agreement that the removal of the VHLe is probably better for the long-term health of the league. I mean no offense to them when I say this, but I don't believe placating to members (clickers) who aren't really bringing anything of substance to the league other than a low-earning player hitting buttons in the portal is a good way to grow the community. I would have been in favor of a free-market approach, letting the low-TPE tweeners sit unsigned in Free Agency until they earned enough TPE to be worthy of a roster spot, but I understand that my opinion may be a bit draconian on the subject, given the popularity of the Welfare Program we have (a program that I actually do like). Overall though, it seems like it was a good enough solution at the time to what was an precedented situation in the VHL.

 

This was exactly what my "do nothing" approach was and I'll still defend it that way. Let's say there's a season where we have an ad REALLY blow up, like far more than in S75. Are we then obligated to change the entire league structure to accommodate this if we see that ad as a one-off? Or would it be better to accept that the league as it is can't satisfy all those sudden and unexpected needs? Besides, with most people that join big drives going IA soon after, one would expect that the league could naturally ride the wave. Players that are resilient enough to earn well through that should have no issue staying on rosters and would likely be the ones who we would have gotten to stick around anyway.

 

I guess that's an extremely capitalist/survival of the fittest sort of thought process, but I feel like there would be very limited harm done to people who are currently members and I'd rather protect their interests before catering to those who haven't done anything yet.

[Beketov 9,041]

15 hours ago, Gustav said:

If we're talking about the issue of "placating to clickers" and whether that was the goal, I think that's a topic that can mostly be talked about independently of my E hate. I do think that thread was full of a lot of acting like we were doing something really nice to clickers, and there was a lot of mention of "giving" them a "competitive environment" that they can enjoy and whatnot. Honestly, I'm not sure that was ever anyone's intent but it was certainly something that was brought up as a selling point for the idea whose ultimate purpose was really to clear up VHL rosters and make clickers none of a GM's concern.

If I recall, and it's been so long that I could DEFINITELY be wrong, the bigger issue wasn't so much the clickers that you describe as literally being unreachable as they never come onto the forum or discord; they were kinda a whole separate thing. The problem was the people who were mostly just clicking PC and welfare but were still active and engaged in the league. These were people that were active by every metric but had absolutely nowhere to go because of a lack of space and GM's not wanting them. That was the bigger concern, especially with the "leave them to rot" idea because it would basically be saying "hey so we built these systems to be used in the way you are using them but we deem you as being disposable and not worth having around so like, get more TPE or go die". Obviously I'm exaggerating a bit but you get the point. It's a lot easier to have the mindset of "they'll sort themselves out" when they are users you never interact with but it's certainly a lot harder when it's people that are actively messaging us because no GM will even give them a 4th line offer and they have nowhere at all to go. Hell some of them as I recall were doing other tasks, just maybe not max earning every week and that wasn't good enough. 

 

I will never say that the VHLE was going to last forever because frankly we were never going to have the kind of recruitment that would keep it necessary forever but I will say that my experience with it (and I know that's anecdotal and can't be taken as the experience of everyone) was perfectly fine and felt honestly like a lot of complaints were being waged by people who never tried to experience it themselves and just wanted to pile on the hate train.

 

Either way it's done now because it needed to be done; sadly this entry in your series wasn't as enjoyable as the other ones since it seemed to just re-iterate points you've long made but hey, it's out of the way so maybe we get into more interesting ones again now  

[Corco 1,251]

40 minutes ago, Beketov said:

" when they are users you never interact with but it's certainly a lot harder when it's people that are actively messaging us because no GM will even give them a 4th line offer and they have nowhere at all to go. Hell some of them as I recall were doing other tasks, just maybe not max earning every week and that wasn't good enough. 

Did the VHL actually have full rosters (12F-6D-2G) at this time, or at least more than the VHL of old 6F-4D-1G? Was reworking TPE salary brackets considered as well?

[Beketov 9,041]

51 minutes ago, Corco said:

Did the VHL actually have full rosters (12F-6D-2G) at this time, or at least more than the VHL of old 6F-4D-1G? Was reworking TPE salary brackets considered as well?

100% full: No; you'll basically never get GM's to do that when it just means their higher TPE players sitting on the bench more. Gus covered the option in here:

 

On 10/8/2024 at 10:15 PM, Gustav said:

Something that Beav had always argued for aside from expansion, and something that he deserves more credit for than he gets, was larger team rosters. I don't disagree with this myself--more people on your team means a more active server and a stronger team community. His post had mostly to do with this at first, but there are also obvious challenges to trying to create larger rosters. There is no world in which GMs will not just want to run with their highest TPE players on the ice as much as possible, and expanding the cap will just make it so top teams can keep more top players (rather than encouraging rosters themselves to fill). Plus, a system that attempts to enforce larger rosters sort of loses steam if those larger rosters can't be maintained by the size of the league. For better or for worse, the BoG decided against it, but the problem still existed.

 

I can't fully recall on the brackets side of things but I do believe we had recently changed them; I know we had also allowed like a buffer cap of extra room teams could be over if they took on extra players but it didn't help much. It wasn't so much a pure salary thing, just GM's wanting to min/max their rosters which I can understand. Why pay the 450 TPE player to put him on your third line when you can just tun your first line 1200 TPE guys there?

[Gustav 6,436]

5 hours ago, Beketov said:

Either way it's done now because it needed to be done; sadly this entry in your series wasn't as enjoyable as the other ones since it seemed to just re-iterate points you've long made

To be fair, it’s deserving of inclusion in the series for that same reason. I can’t just decide NOT to talk about it, especially since I’m also spending this part talking about things I had issues with. 
 

But 5 more to go, and I think they’ll be worth your time.