Commissioner's Corner

[Will 4,660]

Commissioner's Corner
WRITTEN BY DRAPER/OTHER BLUE TEAM
 
An article featuring thoughts and updates on the goings on of the league from the Commissioner team. 

[Will 4,660]

Season 49 will shortly, perhaps even by the time you are reading this, be coming to an end. Although I've only been here for one previous decade-crossing, I presume it's always been something of a special moment when the league increments the 'tens' number by one. Season 50, however, must carry a special weight, especially for the few active members that have been here since very early on, some even from S1. The half-century mark. To put that into perspective and make it even more significant: On July 13th, the VHL will turn 9 real-life years old. Indeed, members have come and members have gone but for 9 long years now the VHL has been made possible by its members.

 

It's almost hard to get your head around that fact, that this league has missed but a handful of days simulation-wise in 9 years. And that doesn't say something only about the simmers and commissioner's of the past and present, but really everyone who has played a role in contributing to this league and keeping it alive even after all this time, no matter how small the contribution. It's quite monumental and the dedication that has allowed the league to get to this point is what gives me a bit of hope that it will live to see another 50 seasons. 

 

Of course, you don't just want to hear me get all sentimental here, so I'll move onto some of the good stuff - just as when we crossed into the 40's, some celebrations for this special occasion will be in order! I can tell you that the Blue Team and the administrators have a few special things planned already and we, together with the BOG and the members at large, hope to come up with some more over the course of the next few weeks. A lot of people have called for some kind of big change, something to spice up the league after 50 seasons - well, we hope to deliver on that. 

 

I'll leave you by saying that as we go past this milestone, I hope we all can continue putting in an effort to make it to the next milestone. Recruiting is hard and this past recruitment drive is evidenced by that, I've tried myself with little success so far but I will keep trying because I know that if I manage to bring in even one fresh member, the league will be better off because of it. As nice and important as it is to reflect on the past, it's also important to look to the future if this league is to continue for another 50 seasons and I would urge anyone who values the league as much as I do to keep trying to bring another person in who will value and enjoy it too.

[Will 4,660]

The VHL has been blessed over the past several seasons. We haven't had large influxes of new members, but we've been blessed that so many of the members that did join have turned out to be valuable members. From Daniel to Dangles and from ATW to Adwyer, and of course everyone else in between who has become an active member, I actually believe we've retained an abnormal amount of new members in recent seasons compared to the time period when I first joined the league. 

 

Now, that isn't to say that we don't have a recruitment problem and it isn't to say that there isn't still much work to be done. A quick look at the currently dismal S51 draft class affirms this. What it is saying is that there are still people out there waiting to join a (or, in some cases, another) sim league and, even after 9 years, the VHL can still be an attractive option for those people. I think this current draft class, S51, has really been an overdue wake up call to some of the league, myself included to a degree, that we need to do more to both get people to the site and keep them here once we arrive. 

 

The reformation of the VHLM waivers system was something of a Step 1 in what I see as a renewed recruitment effort on the part of the league. Indeed, it was an effort spearheaded chiefly (and quickly)  by Higgins, sterling, and flyersfan that is aimed to improve the crucial 'first impression' that the league leaves on new members. Instead of mindlessly waiting a minimum of 24 hours to be picked up off of waivers, new members joining during the season will be able to almost instantly hear pitches from and interact with VHLM GM's as those GM's try to win that member over and bring them onto their team. The hope is that this new process will better create the crucial excitement and engagement that will help new members want to stick around and want to grow their player in this league.

 

As I said above, keeping people here once they get here is one thing - getting people here in the first place is an entirely different, and quite possibly harder, beast. We've been talking a lot in the BOG about how we can get serious about recruitment and how we can adjust our strategies to get better results. The classic VHL recruitment drive format of offering large prizes and sending people off on their own just doesn't seem to be working. Recruiting is hard, frustrating, and speaking from experience, often a bit de-moralizing when you don't see results from your personal recruitment efforts. What we need is new strategy. Maybe that strategy that we need is some kind of targeted effort on a common front, I'm not sure. We're still trying to figure that out. What I do know is that we're going to need many people working together to accomplish this. 

 

And so, shortly we'll be looking to assemble a refreshed recruitment team to help brainstorm and execute new recruitment ideas. It's a tough job, but I hope we'll get some applicants willing to help us grow the league. In the meantime, I'm happy to offer 1 beautiful TPE to anyone who offers absolutely any idea on how we can improve recruitment. You can do this simply by posting your idea/suggestion in this week's magazine thread.

[Will 4,660]

Making the the update scale harsher is something that is brought at least every couple of seasons, but is usually dismissed on the basis that changing it to rectify problems caused by a handful of the most active members isn't worth making things tougher for your average member. While not a terrible argument, I'm not sure that I fully agree with it. The scale is and always will be the same for everybody (unless we got into things like archetypes, but you catch my drift), the playing field will remain level. Sure, it would be tougher for your moderately active members to reach high attributes, but it would also cause people to put some more thought and strategy into how they build their players and personally I don't think that's a bad thing.

 

In my recent 590 article on the update scale, I provided some charts showing how many players had X number of attributes above 85, 90, and 95. In hindsight, a better approach may have been to show how much of the league has particularly important attributes above a certain threshold:

 

Attribute	% of players with >=90
Skating	37.66%
Puck Handling	23.38%
Passing	19.48%
Scoring	40.26%
Defense	29.87%

 

The chart above shows what percentage of the league has above 90 in what I would consider the 'core' attributes. 40% of the league with above 90 in scoring and skating is perhaps an unhealthy amount. From the perspective of STHS, we can consider anything above 90 in any given attribute to be top-tier, elite, whatever you want to call it. However, one could say that the numbers in the chart above show that the update scale fails to make that distinction between good and great. Now, I'm not saying I would support changing the update scale to the point where the most active players would be guaranteed to dominate season after season. The league would be much less fun without some luck factor. But, as I said above, making some changes to the scale to better reflect how much TPE can be earned these days would force people to be more strategic and careful in their player builds, and additionally would create a little bit more differentiation between the most active members.

 

Aside from differentiating the top members, another issue is simply the amount of TPE around. For a player to get each of the 5 attributes listed above to 90 takes just 400 TPE - a number that some players manage to achieve in their very first VHL season. Such players then get to a point where their entire player page is 99's and they have nothing left to do with their TPE aside from banking. That isn't healthy from a sim standpoint (to have so many 99s) or from a league standpoint (no strategy to builds, less incentive to earn TPE). For example, In recent seasons I have always looked forward to depreciating Hans Wingate because it's so damn easy on account of every one of his attributes being 99. 

 

On the other side of things, it is possible that the easy update scale is something that makes the VHL attractive to prospective members and that's one of my main concerns with making changes to the scale. However, I also think it's possible that forcing more thought and strategy into player builds would boost peoples immersion in the league and perhaps even would give them more of a drive to earn TPE. It's not easy making changes to such fundamental parts of the league, but I have to think that changing the scale to better reflect how much is going on in the league these days would be for the better. 

[Will 4,660]

While our recent reddit recruitment drive has only yielded one new member so far, I can't help but be pleased at how many people participated in it as opposed to our more traditional recruitment contests and drives. Looking at the comments on the reddit thread, it is very nice to see that so many people were willing to take the time to get involved with this and leave glowing comments about our great league. 

 

I've spent a fair amount of time over the course of my stay here trying to recruit in the more traditional ways of finding places to post up our recruitment message, but so far I've had no luck. For me, this type of recruitment strategy that we used with the reddit drive is where I think recruiting needs to go for us: many people working together to get the word out. As for how this basic strategy can be adapted to places other than reddit..I'm not sure on that yet. It's definitely going to require some brainstorming, and hopefully our new full-time recruitment leaders can help find some targets once they get hired. I do think that if we can keep finding ways to provide a small incentive to do a small task like upvoting on reddit or even posting an ad on your local Kijiji, we just might find some more results than the usual recruitment drives where we say 'Here are the prizes you can get. Now you're on your own."

 

The fact is, recruiting on your own is damn hard and frankly it can get demoralizing when you spend all of this time trying to find a place to post an ad and you see no results. This is the main problem with our regular recruitment drives, in my opinion. People see the large prizes and at first it generates some excitement, but I feel like a lot of people likely get discouraged quickly. And speaking from experience, I can't blame them. With a niche site like ours, significant recruitment is going to require many people working together to 'sell' prospective members on the league. Finding places to facilitate that sale is the hard part. 

 

One last thing I wanted to touch on with regards to recruitment is the notion that the two-player system is somehow a band-aid fix for our recruitment woes, a criticism I've seen brought up a few times recently. My response is simple - it's only a band-aid fix for recruitment if you look at that way and, at the very least, the blue team and I assume most of the BOG doesn't look at it that way. From our perspective when we decided to implement two-players, there was a solid plan in place and there was clearly sufficient demand among our current members to support it. Truthfully, we hardly had recruitment in mind when we implemented it however the two-player system will create better drafts, more activity around the VHLM in games and locker rooms, and more activity on the boards in general. If you don't look at it as a band-aid fix for recruitment, then none of those things are bad things. In fact they're good things because having better drafts and more activity will only help in retaining members that we do manage to attract.

 

Calling it a band-aid fix for recruitment implies that the intention of it is to cover up our recruitment problems and pretend they don't exist. It is true that it will mask some of our problems when you look at say, the S52 draft compared to the S51 draft, however nobody is pretending the problems don't still exist and I think we're all smart enough to realize that recruitment is still the biggest obstacle int his leagues path. The new VHLM waiver system, new recruitment team structure, and even this recent reddit recruitment drive all prove that nobody is planning on quitting our recruitment/retainment efforts all of the sudden now that two-players is implemented. There are much more valid criticisms of the two-player system than this. 

[Will 4,660]

The Case for an Awards Committee

 

The idea of taking the privilege to cast the most important votes in the league away from General Managers is something that has been floated often over the past several seasons but came to renewed interest in recent weeks following the return of Jericho and his subsequent calls for award reform. In the past, the discussion on this particular issue usually came after a controversial awards ceremony but it never gained much traction.

 

The truth is that there are indeed cases of GM's making questionable votes that can be reasonably attributed to bias. I don't think that is actually news to many people in the league, but I have had the unique perspective of collecting the award votes for many seasons. That said, I don't think it's exactly rampant. The vast majority of GM's have cast votes honorably, in my opinion. In fact, there's even been some who have even tried to avoiding voting for their own players where possible. Although I appreciate those facts, it's unfortunate that our voting system is so easily called into question that these considerations have to be made in the first place. 

 

And that is the problem that I believe most people have with the current award voting - why have the General Managers voting when their votes are inevitably so easily questionable? And again, that isn't to say all GM's are the devil, but rather what's the logic in having them cast the votes when there are alternatives that could be seen as more legitimate. Hall of Fame voting, for example, has been questioned little. Another point is the fact that a GM's award voting is limited to a single PM with a Commissioner, where GM's are presented with stats for the players on the ballot and they simply cast a vote for each award. There's no discussion and, as we've seen in the past, there is sometimes little consideration of factors aside from the statistics presented on the ballot. 

 

Now, the main problem with a committee setting is that when thinking of the people who have proven their qualified to be casting the votes, there are GM's that comes to mind. Personally, I don't think that's a major problem but I can see how the optics of it would be strange. In the committee setting where there would be discussion and public voting, there wouldn't be room for obvious bias without getting called out. Obviously any GM's considered for the committee would have to have a solid track record to look back on. Deciding who should be on it and how it's structured is the number one hurdle facing an award committee. 

 

For now, those are my thoughts. None of this has come to fruition yet but the possibility of moving away from GM voting is being discussed. As usual, let us know your thoughts by commenting in the magazine thread. 

[BOOM 8,746]

[Will 4,660]

Making a return to the magazine after a long hiatus, I wanted to write today about a topic that has been brought up a few times recently and that is the length of the regular season. Not the amount of games but rather the actual amount of time, which generally is around a month and 1-2 weeks from the start of the season to the end of playoffs.

 

The talk has been about shortening it and the reason for it would be fairly obvious  - the long haul of the regular season is always the point of least activity for the forum, and the level of predictability lately has probably made that worse. It doesn't seem to matter how much activity the playoffs/off-season generate, it just doesn't seem to be able to carryover through the straight stretch that is the regular season. So essentially the idea would be to simulate through the regular season at a quicker pace. Of course there are many arguments against this too and I should say this hasn't been discussed in any official way.

 

I haven't looked at the method for it too deeply, but there's probably a couple of different ways it could be achieved. The simplest option would be to just simulate an extra set of games each day, so each team would typically play 3 games per day instead of 2. That may guarantee the regular season would never exceed a months time, but it could end up being as little as 24 days long under that simming schedule which might be too short - any change would obviously have to be reasonable, you can't be flyin' through it too fast. Another option would be to mess with the number of games per simulation day so that a different amount of games could be simmed each real life day, such as 12 or 13. That might not be so great however as you'd always have games played discrepancies. 

 

A third option would be to sim an extra day of games on a few days per week, sticking with the typical 10 games per day on other days. It could be the weekend or maybe Fridays and Saturdays, although 3 days a week may be necessary to make a worthwhile change to the length of the season. I think this would probably be the simplest option to trim a week or so off of the regular season, and it wouldn't be as onerous on Jardy/Higgins as simming 5 extra games everyday would be. Now as I said, there are arguments against this also. One is that some people already complain about their careers being too short and there didn't seem to be a lot of support for extending careers to 10 seasons, so this would just shorten it further for those people. Another would be that it doesn't really fix the problem of predictability.

 

This is just some brief thoughts, again, I haven't actually looked into much specifics on this and its more just a discussion piece at this point. So let me know what you think in the mag thread, could the regular season be shorter?

[STZ 5,360]

What you think you can just come and go as you please? You can..