Prompt 7 Wrote:Write 600 words or more on something about anything in the league that interests you. It could be related to statistics, a league issue that you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 600 words about your team’s participation on a Werewolf server or something.
I spent some time trying to think about a topic to cover and had a brief thought of how much does this even matter anyway? We in the league spend time writing up point tasks, wiki pages, media articles, and so on, but how much value are those actually? For the PTs and this offseason task in particular, I assume basically nobody reads them outside of maybe whoever is doing the grading. I noted something similar before when I read and selected some of the best submissions back in the day, and I know there have been a couple other users who have done similar media articles for other seasons.
But, going back to the question, what's the point? Why does the league encourage writing anyway? I can't say I've asked the people who were actually involved in setting things up, so I'm going to instead go over what I think the most likely motivations are.
1. Demonstrating commitment: Similarly to meeting the requirements for bonuses in a weekly quest in a game, having to invest a certain amount of time to produce something on a weekly cadence shows that the user is being involved. Without a framework of monetization, this is basically the simple "time is money" involvement. With TPE being rate limited the way it is, there isn't exactly a way to grind an unlimited amount (though there kinda is for league cash) and so the various PTs and such are basically weekly quests in the game format that is the league forums. The varying cadences of the different types of tasks also allow different levels of engagement - 15 minutes once a season can get a chunk of TPE from training camps and season predictions, 10 minutes/week can add on the weekly predictions and activity checks, 30 minutes/week adds in the PTs, and more time allows media, wiki updates, league jobs, etc. that expand earning capability a bit.
2. Creating community and culture: I see many of the required TPE tasks as gateways or onramps to getting users more involved with others in the league and help to create the culture for each of us. The various weekly tasks help generate the habit of checking the forums, the PT tasks are the demo sizes of media (writing/images), and the various cash payouts for discord activity help build the habit of interacting with others in the league. Sports broadly are interesting due to the combination of unpredictability and the environment around them - there are hundreds of sites, videos, etc. all talking about what's going on, analyzing the past in different ways and trying to predict the future. The ISFL is a reduced version of that - the media section of the forum has analysis, the history of how games play out build up rivalries, and there's tons of speculation during the offseason of what moves teams will be making in the draft and in free agency. PTs and the offseason tasks aren't directly producing that kind of content, but it does help to get the users in the mindset of thinking about different parts of the league.
3. Liveliness: With a schedule featuring a single fixed point activity on weekdays during the season (the sim release), it's plausible that most users could basically ignore the ISFL except for looking at the results on a daily or weekly cadence. With a userbase spread out all over the world, though, having tasks that promote activity at other times helps the users who aren't primarily checking in for the sim outcomes to still see new content on the forums and discord when they come to the site. I'd guess that seeing a bunch of new posts in a thread for a point task someone has already done wouldn't be a super exciting event, but it still helps everyone remember that there are others involved and that interesting things can happen at any time.
So, do I think that this writing is still a bit of a waste? Yes - I think each individual post is fundamentally not really useful in the grand scheme of things. However, I think that the total set of all users doing these is useful for the league, and so I'm not going to advocate for getting rid of them or to change them drastically or anything. And hopefully next season I'll be able to write about how Austin win the Ultimus rather than having to be sad about the lack of playoffs again.
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