My thoughts on not counting VHLM seasons as part of 8-year career

[scoop 3,386]

thread for some reference

 

Personally, I am in heavily in favor of making a change so that a player's career clock starts later if they stay in the VHLM longer. I don't necessarily think it should be as simple as "your clock doesn't start until you move up to the VHL," because I think that would result in a lot more players staying down in the VHLM one season longer than they probably should. It's a change that will require some thinking, to make sure we cover any ways of taking advantage of it. Granted, if people try to take advantage of it in some way that is detrimental to the league, then we could just put a stop to them at the discretion of the Blue Team, but I think it'd be better to work out most of the kinks up front.

 

What I think is really important, though, is not alienating the new members that we are getting. The influx of new members from YouTube advertising (that's where we're getting a lot of these guys, right?) means we are adding players who are completely new to sim leagues. I think this is a really good thing, but we need to make sure we take care of them. For the most part, they aren't going to simply be able to jump into earning 8+ TPE per week; it will take some time for them to get used to things. Let's say there is an active player with 60 TPE in the S61 draft, while I'm at something like 240. My lead will likely only continue to grow even after this player gets more accustomed to earning points weekly, and it could very well take an additional three seasons for this player to make it out of the VHLM and reach the amount of TPE I had in my rookie season. If he starts his VHL career in S64 after being drafted S61, that's two seasons of VHL player before hitting depreciation. I think that would be a problem.

 

I do think we need to look at how it would impact the VHLM, but if we have more active welfare players in the 100+ TPE range working toward the VHL, that's a good thing. Granted, we might be sacrificing their initial experience in favor of their later experience, so it might actually make it more difficult to keep the members right away. That being said, I don't know exactly what the best solution is, but I personally think that doing something to make things easier on players who have to spend a couple extra seasons in the VHLM is generally a good thing.

[diamond_ace 3,107]

Agreed - we've been discussing it in the Board for some time now. I'm heavily in favor of a change; to be honest, I'm not really that concerned about people taking advantage of it, as people will always do what's just inside the rules, that's part of sim leagues (how many times, for example, do people throw out a PT or a few 590s so they can stay down and get achievement tracker). That is, however, the primary argument against, and there are definitely people more concerned about that side of things. Ultimately I think something will get done, it's just a matter of what exactly, and how quickly it's agreed upon.