Claimed:One Year On Since We Changed The All-Star Game - Was It Worth It?

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For our newer VHL members who are still with their first player’s career, the VHL All-Star Game hasn’t always been like this. Originally the All-Star game took place during the off-season and the All-Star participants were decided by the members in a league-wide vote, with the top vote getters earning the starting spots. In addition, there was no draft as it was purely a North American Conference vs European Conference matchup. The new All-Star system has now been in place for just over a year now having been implemented at the end of January in Season 47, but have the changes worked?

 

The Change In Teams – Good Change

 

 

 

While the Conference matchup setup was an easy way to generate teams and set up voting, I do think that the change to having a block of VHL players to pick from regardless of conference is probably for the best considering what we’ve had in recent seasons where one conference has had four teams be as good or even better than the best team in the other conference.

 

Removal of Complete Member Voting – Bad Change

 

 

 

There are some people out there who wanted to see this removed because of “bias” in voting where players would just vote for players on their own team, but quite frankly, that was never a real issue. Looking back on the times where we did votes, I can’t really see an instance where a player who absolutely didn’t deserve to be in the All-Star game got in because of a perceived bias, and of course that should be how it pans out. Even if an entire team voted just for their players who didn’t deserve to make it, they would eventually be outvoted by the remainder of the league voting for who deserved it. In original topics discussing the change to the All-Star Game, it seemed as though members were initially going to be able to vote for the starters in each game, which would be a good thing, but that has since seemed to have been lost to time and it appears that either the captains fully select the team or the players are just randomly assigned lines.

 

Voting also brought some more activity onto the public forums which, for a brief point, was negated by voting for All-Star Captains. Since All-Star Captains have pretty much been decided without contest the last couple of seasons, that activity has now been lost. I’m also not particularly thrilled with some of the voting I’ve seen in the BOG regarding All-Star votes, as I’ve seen quite a few instances of members just straight up copying and pasting other people’s votes, which is lazy as fuck. It's also taken away one of the few slightly meaningful things that the members of league were in a position to vote for themselves, leaving them with just the last two All-Star players at each position, the Best Leader voting (which in itself is somewhat pointless considering that just makes a shortlist which then the BOG use to decide a winner that they probably would have selected anyway) and the Slobodzian Trophy.

 

Timing – Neutral

 

As I’ve discussed in previous topics, from a neutral perspective the regular season can get stale as fuck. With playoff races pretty much decided twenty games into the season, it’s just one long monotonous crawl to the playoffs where there’ll finally be some action (It’s refreshing to see that some of the admin have talked about speeding it up in the future though). Putting the All-Star game at the trade deadline does add something to the season that mixes things up a little bit, but at the same time comes at the cost of usually delaying a regular season sim, therefore just making the season that much longer, so the positives only really equal the negatives.

Edited March 2, 2017 by Salt

[JardyB10 4,865]

I mean, we could sim regularly scheduled games on the same day as ASG (in fact I might sim a half-day tomorrow with the ASG to make up for the me disappearing/site downtime fuckery), but I feel like throwing it all up in one batch kind of cheapens the ASG a little bit and makes it less special, when making it mean more was part of the original aim with the change.

[Devise 4,475]

22 minutes ago, JardyB10 said:

I mean, we could sim regularly scheduled games on the same day as ASG (in fact I might sim a half-day tomorrow with the ASG to make up for the me disappearing/site downtime fuckery), but I feel like throwing it all up in one batch kind of cheapens the ASG a little bit and makes it less special, when making it mean more was part of the original aim with the change.

 

Rewards for the Asg might make people more invested and be okay with a lack of a sim. But even then it's tough as the stats in the game doesn't really matter.

 

All star best of 3 games instead of one with some light prizes or awards given to people who do well? I dunno. Just thinking aloud honestly.

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