Claimed:Letter To Young Shaka

[Shaka 228]

 

Dear Young Shaka,

If you're reading this it means my letter reached you safely. I'm writing to you from the future. The year is 2016. You're currently starting your journey into the time consuming,addictive universe of player simulations. I'm writing you to give you a little advice. In the six years it has been since you joined your first player sim league, the VFL, you have managed to both accomplish a ton and very, very little in your player sim career. For every positive thing you will do there will be an adverse reaction to that accomplishment. That will be the sad commentary of your first 6 years in the community. You'll create a multi-sport player sim universe, complete with unique rules, creation guides and two brand new simulators - and fail. You'll co-grandfather a future 20-season basketball league by painstakingly detailing every bit of the league's creation just to watch someone else copy and paste that hard work and succeed on his first fucking try. You're not sour about that or anything though. You will pour yourself into your leagues, try new things, trailblaze new simulators and fail every time because no player, no league, no idea will ever meet the expectations you have for it. You'll always want more, to do more and it will bury you into the ground every single time. By year six you will be widely considered as a member who goes inactive in most leagues. You will have 6 years of player sim experience, but very little actual player sim experience.

 

 

So this is my advice to you, the wide-eyed college junior, from a now married 28-year old - Don't take it so seriously. You don't have to be great at this. You don't have to lead the league in TPE. You don't have to create the next big thing. When you do that you burn yourself out and disappear for a year. You just have to enjoy yourself. Claim welfare if you want. Go inactive for a week if you want, but come back. Post about Game of Thrones, beg members to make you sigs and enjoy playing impractical make-believe about some young South African skater dude who is particularly talented at your 5th favorite sport. Create numerous players across multiple leagues that share the same names as your username, because that's not at all self-centered and people won't at all judge you for it. Embrace the process and maybe, just maybe, you'll stick around and find that it's enjoyable to just be one of the guys in a sim league. Don't let any failures distract you from the reason you joined the VFL in the first place - It's fun stuff.

Oh, and make sure to smash that Julie chick from UCF. She likes you dude and I hear she's a freak.

 

[CowboyinAmerica 2,887]

Claimed