Offseason Point Task - 25th Anniversary Special

[3lewsers]

ph

[Asked Madden]

This league has been going for 25 seasons, I have been here for 2 of them. There are a large number of things this league means to me, running through them all would likely take me well over 400 words but here we are.
This league first and foremost gives me an outlet for my competitive nature. With the onset of Covid my usual outlet for this - rugby has taken a huge nosedive as the last thing I want to do is catch and bring it back to my family all down to wanting to beat some other people on a field. Instead I get to watch from the safety of a computer screen as my dot fails time and again to get to the quarterback.
Friendship - when I got invited to this league by a friend who saw the r/nfl reddit Post I had massive pre conceptions. I assumed I wouldn't find anybody similar to me in this sort of thing. Well, I was extremely wrong. I now have a group of people on here I speak to and banter with on the daily. They all have the same sort of hobbies and likes as I do varying from 18 up to 40s. It's a very eclectic group of people on this site, but the birddogs have managed to make me feel like family. The Sabercats are some of the most hyped people I've ever met and they have the most wholesome locker room in existence - I can't wait to play out a long ass career with Crowder and never leave this place.
Pain - Until today literally everything I've done in this league has been typed up meticulously on my phone. Point task? Phone. Scouting convo? Phone. 7000 word mock draft? Yup, phone. The only thing that has broken the habit is the new grading job... Which would be a bit too laborious to do on the phone. This has completely destroyed my thumbs.
Controversy! Who knew a fake teams fake twitter could cause so much controversy? Who would think a fun mis-judged off season activity could spawn such vitriol. Why do made up rankings of fake computerised players bring people out in droves? Controversy and passion. This league has both in bucket loads.
Work. If I put this much effort into my own job I'd be a lot better off. You get out what you put into this league. Rocking two jobs and writing enough media to chuck money away for fun has meant I spend more hours in the day on this than working.
Enabling. The day I managed to get rid of my Marvel Topps account was a lovely day for my irl wallet. The introduction of Dotts has awakened something in me long left dormant. Like a junkie picking up a crack pipe, I'm starting to twitch.

[WildfireMicro]

When I joined the league some months ago, I mainly did it because I was going crazy from the quarantine. This league is a time sink, so it definitely helps in that regard. But over time some things in the league have come to mean a lot of things to me and other people. Here is what this league ultimately means to me:

I guess the main thing this league, amd many other leagues, mean to me is an escape from the pressure and stress of the real world. Let's face it, the real world is scary and stressful, especially this year. Between the election and the pandemic, we have all been extremely stressed out. But sports gives us an distraction from the real world, but even real sports have been ruined by politics. The good news about sim leagues is that they don't have to follow the real world, especially this league that is set in the future.

Another thing this league means for me is companionship. You make a lot of good friends and rivals here that can result in lasting friendships. I know i met a lot of good people here that I would definitely talk to outside of sim circles. If you're a part of this league I am sure you'll make at least a few friends if you stick around for a while. Heck when I took my hiatus I still kept in contact with some people.

Another thing it represents for me is a place for me to show off my creativity. The freedom of renders makes it so that people can come up with any backstory they want. That leads to a lot of creative minds making incredible media and graphics. Seriously I have been extremely impressed with what some people can come up with and I definitely love creating my own player stories. It definitely helps that I have a creative mind and I go a little stir crazy if I don't exercise it every so often.
I guess what I am trying to say is that this league has come to mean quite a few things for me in the short time I have been here. From meeting some great people, to getting a distraction from the stress of the real world, to being able to flex my cretive muscles. Here's to 25 more seasons International Simulation Football League, and I'll see you all in the DSFL draft.

[zeagle1]

Honestly this league has been the highlight of my pandemic. I joined in the S25 reddit class on a whim and I have met tons of great people and have made tons of awesome memories with them. The league has basically consumed my free time since I decided to join the Portland war room halfway though S24. Randomly deciding to join the war room was an incredible decision, as it has led to me meeting and becoming friends with so many incredible people across the league. Being drafted to Arizona was another huge moment for me, I truly did not expect to hear my name called that early, nor to Arizona at all. I was driving and listening to the stream and I nearly crashed my car I was so surprised. Building on that, finally getting to join the Arizona war room was incredible as well. ISFL war rooms are very different from DSFL war rooms in my experience.

I had no idea what to expect from a sim league when I joined, the forums were confusing, and looking at dots spazzing around a football field was not rewarding in the slightest. I remember watching the prospect bowl (Go Tokyo Drifters!) and asking myself what I had gotten myself into (Jackie Daytona's four pick sixes in four games didn't help), and was considering backing out of the league and going quietly inactive. Luckily I decided to stick around through the draft (Mostly because South kept talking to me and I didn't want to disappoint him by going IA). Being scouted was bizarre, just having random people slide into my discord DMs and ask me random questions was a bizarre but fun experience.

I'm not gonna lie though, draft night was a major disappointment. I wasn't the most talkative prospect in the chat, but I was very high up in TPE and had thought every scouting interview had went well. I wasn't expecting to be a first round pick, but when the second and third round picks went by, I was starting to get frustrated. I ended up falling all the way to the first pick of the 8th round or something crazy. Half the OL drafted before me are IA, but who's counting. I am glad I fell as far as I did because it meant that I got to be on a team with tons of great early picks who turned out to be great users. Go Pythons!

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[Arkz]

So, like a lot of people I'm sure, this all started out as something interesting to do during quarantine. With COVID, I found myself working from home and with a second computer around that wasn't being clogged up with work stuff. Sports were still not going on, and it was looking dicey that sports would even come back. I always liked to write, so I figured there would be something out there that would scratch both itches. Then I came upon a post in r/NFL and got involved with a (usually) wonderful community. While there are some rough edges here and there, for the most part I've felt like this has been a very welcoming and dedicated groups of users. If there's something that you want to do, all you need to do is voice it and someone will help you out. If you want to help run a team, you can find yourself in a war room. If you want to help out behind the scenes, you can go ahead and find a league job. If media is more your thing, you can write great content or create interesting graphics and make progress that way. And if you just want to go out and produce on the field and focus on that, you're empowered to make that happen.

My first season with Portland was such a great experience. We had a lot of turnover in the roster and in management, but there still was (and continues to be) a feeling of forward momentum and teamwork. I was elected as one of the captains of the team, helped out with the Game Balls and sim testing, and was eventually invited to join the War Room. It was gratifying being recognized for my effort and work that I put in with the team. At the end of the day, we're all out here messing around with a some dots on a screen and a forum to host all this information. Its the people that come together and fill in the gaps of that skeleton that really make this league and make it a place that we always want to come back to. It certainly wasn't for the impressive gameplay of DDSP 16, that's for sure. I'm looking forward to my seasons ahead in the league, continuing to build up the Portland Pythons and Yellowknife Wraiths and my brand in the league. What started out as a little thing to do on the side between meetings has become a real hobby, and I have the community to thank for that.

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[Kotasa]

ph

[Huskies311]

Right now, we are approaching my 12th season in this league. I’ve been a part of this community for over 18 months. There has been a lot of ups, and some downs, that I’ve experienced but this league has given me a lot and for that I’ll always be appreciative.

First, my greatest memory in this league, by far, is when I played in the Ultimus for Baltimore as a player and GMed Portland in the Ultimini on the same night. I worked so hard, along with Saba, to get a ring that season and the feeling of winning the Ultimini is the best I’ve felt in this league. Baltimore lost unfortunately but I was proud to be in it regardless.

I also loved Norfolk. I was a part of the inaugural class, and still hold many of the players and people around it like slm, gucci, and scorp in high regard. Building something from the bottom up is something everyone should experience in a sim league. For example, I still remember coming up with the #FearTheFleet motto and it genuinely makes me happy everytime I still see someone use it.

On the management side, I absolutely loved being PPT head and giving back to the league on that side of things. Playoff predictions & the wiki updates may not be perfect, but they were mine, and it’s something not everyone in sim leagues can say they’ve done. 

Also, I want to shoutout here some of the best people in this league:

Duilio, scorp, nunc, Eco(rip), Doug, slm, Bigred, jkortesi, dewalt, saba, Starboy, & butters. People like you make the league what it is

[gucci]

I found this league pretty randomly actually, I had just given my two weeks notice at my job, and was sent back to my office from the client site without any security clearances. No longer being able to work on actual work I spent those last two weeks essentially playing on the Internet. At the time my favorite player on my favorite team was undergoing a meltdown, very publicly. All I could do was watch Reddit and continue F5ing, as I needed to know what was happening and my team wasn’t participating in the free agency chaos. Then I saw a post about a forums based “sim league” by a user named iamslm22 and decided to check it out. After creating a Quarterback named Brock Landers, I began earning all available TPE, writing media, etc. Despite all of this I went 85th in that draft, as every team that needed a QB had chosen one, and I hadn’t joined this weird app called discord until the day before the draft aired. Well I was pissed off, but I worked with the Norfolk GM, the aforementioned iamslm22 and changed to Wide Receiver where I would have a very good season and eventually sweet talked my way into going 1OA in the NSFL draft to the Arizona Outlaws.

After a few great seasons there, my work situation was flipped on its head as the stability of my company took a hit after we missed out on a contract that I was set to work on. Needless to say I went inactive and left the beginning of a hall of fame caliber career behind and started anew. The season I recreated happened to be during the next big r/NFL class of S22, where the head office entrusted me (at the time a player with a good reputation but a penchant for mischief) with a DSFL franchise that would become the Dallas Birddogs. I (and my trusty sidekick Kyle) put in a lot of work to draft the single greatest collection of players ever taken in the same draft. The result was beautiful, Dallas has become a breeding ground for some of the ISFL’s best, even if the end product hasn’t always been there on the field. Kyle and iStegosauruz took the reigns and continued drafting excellent talent and fostering a great LR environment. At this point I had been drafted by Honolulu, called up, and our underappreciated GM Dwyer had lost hope with the league. Raven picked me to be a stop-gap at the GM position and to train his eventual replacement, Siddhus, the new head GM in Honolulu in how to be a GM. We’ve overachieved, we’ve underachieved, but now it’s time to take the next step.

Through it all I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with the league. I may be critical of how the league actually functions, but these are just the concerns of a GM who wants to make his players happy. Every day I look forward to just being a player again and sitting back and enjoying what we all came here for, to watch our fake player’s dot move around the field and win shit.

[Z-Whiz]

This league means quite a bit more to me than I ever expect it would. When I first joined, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I saw a random post on r/dolphins and gave it a look over. I lingered for a day or two then decided to create my character. I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into or if I would stick with it. I typically start career modes in Madden or Fifa and by the time I get through one or two seasons, I get board of the team I’ve created and slowly stop playing. This was completely different. I owe that in large part to the culture in the London locker room when I first joined. All the guys there were great, the brought me in right away and made it feel like a family. With the pandemic, I haven’t been able to do much athletic competition, so something like twitter has given me that edge and thrill of talking trash and backing it up (even though it’s mostly RNG). It’s all been in good fun. Sure, maybe I’ve gone a little far once or twice, but that’s water under the bridge.

I went from not even knowing how to work discord or navigate the forums to being the GM of the Arizona Outlaws. I was about to end that sentence with “in a short few month”. Then I checked my profile. I joined in May of 2020. I honestly can’t believe I’ve already spent 6 months in this league. I'm usually bored and down with role play games like this after a month or two. The time really has flown by. Within those 6 months, I’ve self-taught myself (with the guidance of others) how to write and run scripts for simming and brushed up on my photoshop skills that I hadn’t used in over a decade. This league has been an incredible outlet for my creative abilities. I might not be the best at either, but I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do.

I’ll close with this… The night London won the Ultimini was possibly the happiest I had been since the lockdown hit. The discord channels were popping and the drinks were flowing. I was legit celebrating like the Dolphins had won the Super Bowl. That’s how much that team and this game meant to me. It didn’t feel like little dots moving across the screen anymore. It felt like my teammates and I had earned that victory through hard work and an idiotic amount of sim testing. I truly care about this league and the people I have met through this league.

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[shadyshoelace]

Wow, it is the 25th anniversary of this league! Happy birthday NSFL ISFL, I hope you enjoy this even though 25 is a pretty dumb age because you don't get any cool new benefits like you did when you were 21 and now you have to face the fact that you're closing in on 30. I guess now you don't have to pay an extra surcharge when renting a car, so that's cool, I guess.

It's pretty crazy to me that I've been in this league for damn near half of its existence, joining during S13 when it seemed like the league was already well-established. Now I guess I'm an oldhead. Anyway, this league means a lot to me. I joined in 2019 when I was unemployed and living in a new city and generally not doing too hot, and the community welcomed me and became a great support system that got me through some tough times and has continued to become one of my favorite things to be a part of as life picked back up, then dropped again with the pandemic. But over everything else, I want to use the rest of the words I have to type for this point task to shout out a group of people who are my favorite part of the league and the reason I had such a good time starting out and stuck around in the league: you know them, you love them, it's the pride of the San Antonio Marshals, the Fab Five (plus also some guy named Cooter).

@Duilio05, my favorite mountain man, my first partner in crime GMing, my facial hair idol. What a badass dude who does badass environmental work, it's just a shame we had to become conference rivals when we got to the big leagues. Love you pal.

@Frick_Nasty even though you root for the wrong NU, you're still cool in my book. Truly a legend of this league, our teams had some great battles over the years and I'm proud of the work you did with the Yeti. Can't wait to see you get into the Hall of Fame, and I hope Nero can join you someday.

@terriblehippo it's been a while since we've chatted, but I can't overstate how much of an impact you made on everyone in SA. Pound for pound one of the funniest people in the league, you may not hop into discord all that often but when you do it's a nuclear bomb of good times.

@Baron1898 man, I'm so glad we got to share a big league team, if only for a short time. Morgan Marshall was ripped from us too soon, but Powers is kicking ass so that makes me happy. Your media is always some of the most thorough and well-researched in the league, and I hope to see more of it soon.

@timeconsumer no one in this league needs to be told how awesome you are, but I'm going to do it anyway. You took a shot in the DSFL draft on a bunch of first-gen creates and produced five of the most involved users of that era, and I say produced because you made this league a blast to be in and showed us all the ropes. I couldn't be happier that we were teammates for so long and I don't know what I would do without you in a locker room to talk beer with.

Well I blew past the word count, but I guess that's what happens when you have such a special group of people to write about. Happy birthday ISFL! #MarshallUp

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