*I'm New and Here Were My Frustrations Joining

[SwankyPants31]

I'm not really sure I understand the concept of disagreeing with a post about a user's experience in general. Perhaps their ideas to revise the experience, but I'd say everything in this article is useful in that it'll aid us in making the experience more robustly helpful (by perhaps making the introductory experience more concise).

Apologies, to both you and Schwarz if my post came across as dismissive or abrasive, as that wasn't my intent. And yes, the "disagree" bit was more in regards to some of the suggestions/ideas and not the experience itself. For what it's worth I do like quite a few of the suggestions since I had some of the same issues when I first joined just a couple months ago. The main point of my post was just to point out that I think the OP really hit the nail on the head in regards to the rookie locker room.

[AsylumParty]

Apologies, to both you and Schwarz if my post came across as dismissive or abrasive, as that wasn't my intent. And yes, the "disagree" bit was more in regards to some of the suggestions/ideas and not the experience itself. For what it's worth I do like quite a few of the suggestions since I had some of the same issues when I first joined just a couple months ago. The main point of my post was just to point out that I think the OP really hit the nail on the head in regards to the rookie locker room.

Oh, na, no worries. I didn't take it like that at all. Just misunderstood your point. But yeah, I'm with you on sanitizing the Rookie LR.

[CLG Rampage]

I mean, conversations about which beer or soccer team is the best in the help channel aren't exactly helpful. So sometimes it can be more frustrating trying to find the answer that way than helpful.

...ping the RMs? They're there for a reason and are quick to respond, at least from what I've seen.

[goodfortunecoffee]

I had a somewhat similar experience the 1st week I started here. It's definitely a jumbled mess and creating a player and starting out depends more on discord than it should. They are working on moving the site over to a better forum tho I think.

[BaconBrother]

...ping the RMs? They're there for a reason and are quick to respond, at least from what I've seen.

I think the point is that it is a help channel, if you get sidetracked to other areas of conversations, take it to the general portion of chat

[Memento Mori]

Thanks for the feedback and welcome to the league. I'm always really eager to hear what newer people think because I think it's easy to lose the perspective a newer player has once you've familiarised yourself with everything.

If you need an invitation to our rookie discord as well, please contact a Rookie Mentor or a member of Head Office”. Now personally, I think this would be a great place to list (preferably with hyperlinks to their profile for ease of messaging) the Rookie Mentors and Head Office personnel. If I am brand new, I’m not going to know where to look for that information and there are a lot of forums to sort through and comprehend. Making information incredibly easy to find is helpful in retention of players, especially if they are new to sim leagues (everyone has to start somewhere and if they choose to start with you, you want them to stick around, right??)

100% agree and I really don't know why I haven't heard anyone say this before. It'd be extremely easy to link the profiles of the rookie mentors and/or Head Office there.

I now have three tabs open to create this player. The video, the forum post and my own ‘create a player’ window. Queue my starting to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information

Agree again here. There's a team of people working on moving us over to a different forum because everyone hates jcink, but we could certainly use jcink better than we are now. A new batch of rookie mentors has just been hired and I know that making things more concise is one of the things they're working on.

So I can’t just play via the forum, well, that stinks but okay, fine. I join the discord, get unsolicited messages (wasn’t aware that I’d receive PMs which would wake me up when I joined!), promptly change the server settings to not allow people to PM me who aren’t friends, and continue in grumblance because if it’s a forum thing, why am I required to apply via discord.

I get your thinking here, but at the same time it's kind of contradictory (I don't mean that in a pejorative way). As you've just identified, the forums are difficult to navigate and sometimes confusingly organised. Discord, at least in my opinion, isn't. There are some people in the league who rarely use discord, or don't use it at all. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people who use discord 99% of the time and only use the forums via links sent to them on discord instead of learning to navigate it themselves because that's easier for a lot of people. Most people fall somewhere in-between.

Now I take a pause, trying to figure out how I want to earn some money (and the next piece talks about retirement, I figure I haven’t even played a season yet, that can wait for now)

It does seem kinda weird that the retirement forum is so close to the top and that you have to scroll past the retirement forum in order to do 90% of the things you want to do.

This is all great, until I realize that ‘Hey, my posts are being marked as read, but there’s no ‘GRADED with my payout at the bottom.’ I think that my shitposts are unacceptable, start looking through the forum posts, through the older graded posts and see that ‘huh, even things that are definitely hardcore league material’ also aren’t being marked as GRADED with a dollar amount.

After asking for clarification for this rule, I learn and realize that not even the head of media is accurate on the forum, which, seems like a huge oversight.

So, these two sections confused me when I read them. There's a pinned post from 2017 written by the head of media in 2017 in the media section. The head of media is accurate on the forum, in this thread listing who holds every league job. I honestly hadn't even realised until reading your post that there was a pinned post written by the old head of media three years ago describing how they did grading three years ago. I don't know because I wasn't around then, but based on the context I'm assuming that there wasn't a media log in the bank spreadsheet (here, by the way) so graders would write the payouts in the thread and then bankers would input them. The part that is accurate now is that when your post is graded, an asterisk is added to the title - you can see that in the title now as yours has already been graded - and the details are put into the media tab of the bank spreadsheet. You have to scroll down a long way for today's date (though ctrl+F '6/11/2020' would take you there), where you can see in row 4652 that your post is 1685 words and was graded by Tesla.


My boyfriend tells me and screenshots “It’s in the media tab” except, when I looked at my bank log, there wasn’t a media tab. Either things aren’t loading correctly, or something was blocked and then unblocked

This will have been a problem on your end, the media tab is always public - sorry.

As for the Rookie League chat, it felt as though, especially since it was linked to “Rookie Mentors” that it was a chat meant for rookies of this sim league, but as I joined it felt as though I was alienated. I didn’t feel comfortable asking a question for help as I felt like an outsider (and this fully may just be my own anxiety talking).

The rookie chat is meant for rookies and is regularly purged of people who aren't new enough. I was recently kicked from the server because I'm too old to be in there now - having been on the site for less than four months. When I was in there it seemed really welcoming so I'm sorry that that hasn't been your experience.

I was wondering why there would need to be NSFL gms in a chat that is clearly geared toward new players and DSFL teams. Sure maybe for future scouting or communication, but surely that isn’t the only reason.

This is actually exactly why.

Add to this my frustration at the fact that it seems as the discord channels seemed disorganized, information was being posted multiple times, several different links, different users, I wasn’t sure what the most updated information was, and where I should find it.

Before I was kicked they were in the process of reorganising it - it may still be a work in progress so definitely worth giving some feedback to the mentors on how to make the links etc. the most useful and the most accessible.

Lots of good stuff in here and some of it is actionable right now so thank you again. I'm a media grader so I'll go bug Joe right now to unpin the post from the old media head and to create a new one with the updated grading system so it doesn't confuse anyone else!

[retrospace111]

Thanks for the feedback and welcome to the league. I'm always really eager to hear what newer people think because I think it's easy to lose the perspective a newer player has once you've familiarised yourself with everything.

If you need an invitation to our rookie discord as well, please contact a Rookie Mentor or a member of Head Office”. Now personally, I think this would be a great place to list (preferably with hyperlinks to their profile for ease of messaging) the Rookie Mentors and Head Office personnel. If I am brand new, I’m not going to know where to look for that information and there are a lot of forums to sort through and comprehend. Making information incredibly easy to find is helpful in retention of players, especially if they are new to sim leagues (everyone has to start somewhere and if they choose to start with you, you want them to stick around, right??)

100% agree and I really don't know why I haven't heard anyone say this before. It'd be extremely easy to link the profiles of the rookie mentors and/or Head Office there.

I now have three tabs open to create this player. The video, the forum post and my own ‘create a player’ window. Queue my starting to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information

Agree again here. There's a team of people working on moving us over to a different forum because everyone hates jcink, but we could certainly use jcink better than we are now. A new batch of rookie mentors has just been hired and I know that making things more concise is one of the things they're working on.

So I can’t just play via the forum, well, that stinks but okay, fine. I join the discord, get unsolicited messages (wasn’t aware that I’d receive PMs which would wake me up when I joined!), promptly change the server settings to not allow people to PM me who aren’t friends, and continue in grumblance because if it’s a forum thing, why am I required to apply via discord.

I get your thinking here, but at the same time it's kind of contradictory (I don't mean that in a pejorative way). As you've just identified, the forums are difficult to navigate and sometimes confusingly organised. Discord, at least in my opinion, isn't. There are some people in the league who rarely use discord, or don't use it at all. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people who use discord 99% of the time and only use the forums via links sent to them on discord instead of learning to navigate it themselves because that's easier for a lot of people. Most people fall somewhere in-between.

Now I take a pause, trying to figure out how I want to earn some money (and the next piece talks about retirement, I figure I haven’t even played a season yet, that can wait for now)

It does seem kinda weird that the retirement forum is so close to the top and that you have to scroll past the retirement forum in order to do 90% of the things you want to do.

This is all great, until I realize that ‘Hey, my posts are being marked as read, but there’s no ‘GRADED with my payout at the bottom.’ I think that my shitposts are unacceptable, start looking through the forum posts, through the older graded posts and see that ‘huh, even things that are definitely hardcore league material’ also aren’t being marked as GRADED with a dollar amount.

After asking for clarification for this rule, I learn and realize that not even the head of media is accurate on the forum, which, seems like a huge oversight.

So, these two sections confused me when I read them. There's a pinned post from 2017 written by the head of media in 2017 in the media section. The head of media is accurate on the forum, in this thread listing who holds every league job. I honestly hadn't even realised until reading your post that there was a pinned post written by the old head of media three years ago describing how they did grading three years ago. I don't know because I wasn't around then, but based on the context I'm assuming that there wasn't a media log in the bank spreadsheet (here, by the way) so graders would write the payouts in the thread and then bankers would input them. The part that is accurate now is that when your post is graded, an asterisk is added to the title - you can see that in the title now as yours has already been graded - and the details are put into the media tab of the bank spreadsheet. You have to scroll down a long way for today's date (though ctrl+F '6/11/2020' would take you there), where you can see in row 4652 that your post is 1685 words and was graded by Tesla.


My boyfriend tells me and screenshots “It’s in the media tab” except, when I looked at my bank log, there wasn’t a media tab. Either things aren’t loading correctly, or something was blocked and then unblocked

This will have been a problem on your end, the media tab is always public - sorry.

As for the Rookie League chat, it felt as though, especially since it was linked to “Rookie Mentors” that it was a chat meant for rookies of this sim league, but as I joined it felt as though I was alienated. I didn’t feel comfortable asking a question for help as I felt like an outsider (and this fully may just be my own anxiety talking).

The rookie chat is meant for rookies and is regularly purged of people who aren't new enough. I was recently kicked from the server because I'm too old to be in there now - having been on the site for less than four months. When I was in there it seemed really welcoming so I'm sorry that that hasn't been your experience.

I was wondering why there would need to be NSFL gms in a chat that is clearly geared toward new players and DSFL teams. Sure maybe for future scouting or communication, but surely that isn’t the only reason.

This is actually exactly why.

Add to this my frustration at the fact that it seems as the discord channels seemed disorganized, information was being posted multiple times, several different links, different users, I wasn’t sure what the most updated information was, and where I should find it.

Before I was kicked they were in the process of reorganising it - it may still be a work in progress so definitely worth giving some feedback to the mentors on how to make the links etc. the most useful and the most accessible.

Lots of good stuff in here and some of it is actionable right now so thank you again. I'm a media grader so I'll go bug Joe right now to unpin the post from the old media head and to create a new one with the updated grading system so it doesn't confuse anyone else!

Mori RM head when

[Memento Mori]

Mori RM head when

[The_Kidd]

Let me say first, you at least had someone you knew who already knew about how this works. I had no background period, when I joined in March. Some of the suggestions I see in the replies are similar sentiments I expressed in the rookie discord. I got lost a few times, working my way through the forums and trying to learn discord on the fly, and in return it hurt my player's career because I kept missing scouting interviews. There was a point where I just gave up and decided to wait for the draft before I got serious ---- didn't know the major ramifications of going this route.

It's been about 2 months and there are still some issues I have difficulty with: tracking down correct personnel, finding proper essential links, getting almost NO responses when I use forum PM unless the person contacts me first. There other things I just ignore at this point, but I'll save that for later.

I try to be more resourceful and not seem clueless, but too many times it's easier to track in on more experienced people and siphon what you can from them. I've had a few questions, about media, contracts, and other issues where no one could answer the question, regardless of the channel I was in. I haven't looked in a while because I dont know when I need to, but I hope the essential links tab is updated AND I wish they left brief descriptions about when you need that link. Moreover, putting that same subsection in the forum would help consolidate and better streamline the rookie learning curve.

Likewise, a directory of key personnel, outdated or not, would also be essential to list in the forums in that same subsection. The discord should also have a pinned list of essential usernames in each welcome channel, i.e. list the rookie mentors in the rookie channel, list the media, graphics, and podcasts graders in their development channel. I've been here since March and I JUST figured out that the users listed to the right on the discord pages are the ADMIN staff.

I just learned last week about what helps your draft stock. I think it should be mandatory that DSFL GM's, or their head scouts, greet all new users in the rookie discord along with the rookie team and then explain what they look for in a player so the player knows what to expect. They can also act as a subsidiary of support staff.

I dont want to steal you thunder because I'm working own my own piece too. I honestly think they are scared of belittling new people by not trusting them to think and adapt on their own but I believe that it's necessary to make them feel okay for being confused and overwhelmed and try to mitigate that isolated frustration that you, myself, and others have had and will have in the future.

[Huskies311]

Having a list of some league personnel (Rookie Mentors, DSFL GMs, all job heads, HO) in an accessible spot I think would be a great idea