05-23-2024, 03:57 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-03-2024, 08:49 PM by wetwilleh. Edited 1 time in total.)
So, I’m new here, but some of you will likely have seen me poking around several other sim leagues. My primary league is the Victory Hockey League, where I hold several league jobs and I am an avid TPE earner, and general under performer. I’m also in the SBA, was in EFL (surely a few of those people made their way here, or were here already!), GOHLS, SHL and now ISFL. I’m mostly here for the Affiliate Check, I won’t lie. I have never really been a football fan, I tried paying attention to the NFL for a season, I think it was the 22-23 season? Never really clicked for me, and I never really cared for any of the minutia beyond the highlights. I don’t know much about positions, strategy or the sim engine. I actually can’t even tell you yet what sim engine this league uses. One day I’ll find out!
All that to say I will read Discord pings, I will get just enough money to get my training and such. I’ll probably miss some random predictions every now and then, unless a wonderful GM or Discord bot reminds me. But I also probably won’t be going anywhere, since well I’m fiending for my 1 TPE in the VHL. And to be honest I generally earn pretty well in my secondary and tertiary leagues as well, even if I don’t keep up much with the day to day stuff. I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much in the general Discord servers, and I’ll be honest I don’t love the message to earn system, but that’s fine, I can just write some articles every now and then, get some contracts and play that way. That’s the beauty of sim leagues!
I made an Offensive Lineman, a position I definitely didn’t have to look up afterwards to figure out what they actually do. Turns out they just stand there being big and messing with the little punks trying to sneak by. I also learned what a pancake is, and I must say they’re slightly less cool than I expected. But I will certiainly hurl a few chumps in my time. But why did I pick a position I didn’t know and don’t really care for? Because who would care for them! I’m sure there’s some freak out there dying to play an O-Liner, but lets be honest far more want to be any other offensive position, and well any other defensive position. No interceptions, no yards, no field goals. So if I’m going to vaguely pay attention, I should be the one to suck up being the position that everyone needs, but no one wants to be. It’s only fair, and that is my service to the league. I have no problem not checking, and not finding anything interesting in my stats, and enjoying the chats and the wins coming from the extra offensive wiggle room. And if I get asked to switch positions, I’ll do it, why not. I just want to be useful, play some games, win some games and then re-create. I have no desire to have a lasting legacy, I probably won’t be a household ISFL name, I will likely never hold a job here. But I’ll earn my TPE, I’ll make my money, and I’ll help my team. And to the GM that will come to appreciate that, you’ll have my services for as long as you’ll have me. I may never even learn the other team names, and if you ask, I’ll re-sign until I am a husk of a player.
So enough about how boring I plan to be, what upside do I bring? Well I am generally very Discord active. I don’t spend a lot of time chatting in general mass servers, but if you strike up a conversation in a locker room, I’ll at least toss you a reaction. I’ll say “woo team” and “football yeah!” whenever you ask, within my business hours of course, and I’ll support your every move even if I have no idea what they mean. I am your GMs dream player. I’m also in no rush, I’ll stick through a rebuild, I’ll hang out in the minors until the big team is ready. I’ll ride the bench for as long as needed. I’ll take the minimum contract, whatever term you want. And I’ll build however you want! In fact I prefer to not have to think about it. Someone let me be their glorified bot, and I will be thankful, for my 1 TPE a month. This is the power of affiliation, and I will forever be thankful for the few TPE that will be thrown my way. I don’t have a frame of reference for the ISFL yet, but I have made several 1500+ TPE players across several leagues, I have written probably hundreds of thousands of words (dear god that’s multiple adult novels, I should really do that instead), and have met hundreds of other members across dozens of teams.
I spent most of my sim league time as a university student, then worked a desk job, now working on heading back to school (bleh), so I find myself in front of a computer quite a bit. And well I’m pretty efficient at getting computer tasks done, so I find myself with way too much staring at a computer doing nothing time. Just like this actually! I tend to write in bulk, I have my eyes set on a T6 equipment, and I’ll probably be too busy later to do it anytime other than right now. So here I am, writing a boatload of words, introducing myself to the league and using whatever I can to get my earning out of the way!
It’s been about a thousand words here about me, my history and my intentions with your league. Now lets talk ball. Who is Oandon Lolanin? Why the freakish name? Why Latvia? Well alright, I’ll start with a story and the long-running joke about names. It all started with my second VHL player, Landon Wolanin. I wanted a name that sounded like a real hockey name, and in fact there was at the time at least a Landon and a Wolanin playing in the AHL or NHL, both were flip-flopped between the leagues for a while. But, I also wanted the initials to be LW, standing for his position, Left Wing. So when I joined SBA and EFL, I kept the scheme going, but this time for positions I didn’t understand at all, as a way to actually maybe partially remember what position they played, which would lead to what that position does, leading to what that player should be good at. So then came Wandon Rolanin and Fandon Solanin, Wide Receiver and Free Safety. Candon PoFanin the Center/Power Forward, Tandon Eolanin the Tight End, SanGon SoFanin the Shooting Guard/Small Forward, Quandon Bolanin the Quarterback. Maybe a few more, most were fillers for EFL and SBA teams that I bounced between. I doubt I would have remembered any of them had it not been for that ridiculous naming scheme. I already forgot the existence of Splash Zone, which was the first time I broke it, and then I picked it back up with Landon Dolanin in GOHLS. I strayed away for a bit, but it is back for ISFL, at least until I figure out the football positions. Oandon isn’t the cleanest of the renditions, but it’ll do the trick, at least until I change positions.
Who is he going to be? Well the Player Guide told me he would be like 310lbs as an Athletic OL, which is pretty huge, I made him 6’6 just to add to the freakishness. Normally when I’m doing this I look up the position and who is actively playing it and then just steal one of their histories and hope no one notices. Literally the only Offensive Lineman I recognize is Jason Kelce, and well that feels like cheating these days, even if I had previously based another player on another Kelce long before him and Taylor Swift got together. Now it feels too easy and too obvious. I guess John Madden was apparently also an Offensive Lineman, but that doesn’t really help me since I’m not that old. Even looking through random Reddit posts people seem to agree on Joe Thomas being the most famous, being the first to play the position. Basically what I’m getting at here is that I decided that I would have to abandon my usual strategy and just make stuff up.
So I tend to default to Latvia for my country of origin, no idea why. Latvia is somewhat of a niche tertiary nation in hockey, there’s very few in basketball (which I also don’t pay attention to), none that I know of in football, perhaps I’ll look into that later, but I’ve always enjoyed their colours, Latvia can be very pretty, and well it’s just random enough to be interesting. So I looked up Latvian cities to get started and it took me about a quarter of a second to figure out where I would be from. One does not just see the city named Ogre and not want to be from there. Big freak of a man, lives in the middle of nowhere in Latvia, he’s got to be from Ogre! Ogre has a school, which is basically called Ogre School, but in Latvian, so why not have gone there! The rest is basically history, I really made it out to be some long-winded and elaborate story (and perhaps part of me wanted it to be, you know, for the money) but it really was that simple. Sometimes you’re scouring the internet for the perfect inspiration and it just appears and you take it thankfully and graciously.
Now onto personality. I haven’t put much effort at all into thinking about it, so some of this will likely be half brainstorming and half actually canonizing it. I had always wanted to have a real roleplay character, but I honestly don’t think it’ll be this one, so sorry for getting your hopes up. What I do enjoy though is subverting tropes, and I don’t want my massive freak of an Ogre to be dumb and jock-like. I generally think he would be very clean, disciplined and most of all smart. I like playing as smart, quick and crafty players. It helps me pretend like I know anything that is going on, and maybe I can find a crack in the meta and exploit it. It also helps that Speed often represents the “being good” attribute, particularly at lower TPE values, so it all kind of plays together. I’ll obviously be strong, and probably max that out, as it seems to be pretty essential for my position, but I really want to find a way to be crafty. Playing wide and getting the chance to move around a lot could be an option, being a personal support to some lethal wide offense. I do notoriously think running teams are dumb, and I think all plays should be thrown. I know there’s like strategy and things along those lines, but running two yards into a wall of ogres doesn’t sound effective or interesting to me. So being able to push the play long and outside, or create gaps to cut inside is how I’ll pretend to be interested in the position. I don’t want to maul, hence why I didn’t pick that archetype. I don’t need to bowl people over, I just need to secure and guide them to a position where they can’t effectively stifle my offense. I won’t be the highlight reel, but I will be the hidden gem. It just makes me feel good okay?
I imagine that Lolanin is a real health nut, an avid gym go-er, and probably a runner. I would assume that he wouldn’t be throwing weight around but instead doing slow, controlled reps. Pure exertion is for the game, and in his training, he’ll learn how to control his body, prepare it for contact, and elongate his unfortunately likely shortened lifespan (poor tall people). He would be an academic, both of the game and of niche interests. I doubt he would have social media, he might not even carry a phone. He would live out in nature, in a secluded area, at least until his letter came in the mail, or a driver from the team came to pick him up at the end of the offseason. Maybe he would live on a lake, and fish and grow his own food. He’s a real icon in my mind. A testament to what it means to not be typing essays about fake sim sports for fake sim money. Let me have my self-insert fanfiction.
Now surely he isn’t good at something, if I plan on him being good at football (I do), and at being healthy (I do). Perhaps he is a bit of a loner (seems likely), and perhaps he never makes major connections with teammates or the league (maybe), but maybe he has a real cult following. I know in the hockey analytics community at least there are some real statistical darlings, particularly among defensive forwards and sheltered offensive defenders. Maybe he can be an inspiration to football nerds around the world, maybe he’ll even become just mainstream enough to guide fantasy football addicts to select his team’s O-Line without checking the players. Maybe he’ll stay with a team long enough that people will just assume the team’s O-Line is good forever, without noticing any of his other teammates. And after he is gone, perhaps his old team would still hold that number one spot in people’s minds until they watch it all burn behind him. That would be a pretty good career in my mind, and would honestly be the best I could hope for in my first career here.
So it is my first career here and I spent a decent amount of time yesterday trying to figure everything out, and honestly I think I figured out at least one or two things, but not much. I’ve never been in a Claim Thread league before, I’ve always been blessed with a really great portal. I fear I may be an absolute nightmare when it comes to actually applying my TPE, and I will probably cry a few times claiming it as well. I started off spamming my thread with individual claims instead of putting them all together. Soon I imagine I’ll end up on a team, I know some people reached out to me already to welcome me, so it’ll be nice to actually land somewhere and bully someone for answers about everything. I did just about everything on my TPE list, which made me feel pretty good even if I’m pretty sure some of them won’t be applicable for me but that’s fine. I’m not here to perfectly optimize everything so it’ll all work out in the end. I do really want to get that Equipment out of the way though, hence why I didn’t stop a long time ago and break this thing into multiple chunks. Every time there’s a 2x First Media bonus I write a bajillion words just to feel like I properly optimized the opportunity (maybe we are min-maxing here, I may be lying to myself). But I do think it would be a great opportunity to stand out a bit here at the start and maybe start making a name for myself. I don’t want to get lost in the field of other random first-gens. I don’t plan on overtaking any veterans here but I at least want to be a promising first-gen here. I’ll try to promise to not burn out on you! I’ve never taken an extended break from sim leagues, ever since I started taking them seriously in 2021 or so.
I must say the team names and brands are far more whimsical than I’m used to which I do appreciate. Too many times I mix up leagues with the same like 8 team cities and the same colours and logos and brands all jumbled together. It’ll be easy to remember which league has the Dallas Birddogs. I’ll have to figure out what a Birddog is at some point.
It’s nice to see some familiar profile pictures in the various chats and some familiar usernames on the forum. I know a few people probably came over before me from the VHL after our affiliation announcement, so there should be at least a few people I can ask for help from. I talked through my player creation with some SHL people who were very helpful. Many of us are just in it for the vibes, and something else to click on every now and then for funsies. But at least I don’t have to be the odd one out!
I’ll have to figure out the update schedule and where we are in the season, and who the movers and shakers of the league are, but for now I’ll mostly just be waiting to see what team I land on, and who happens to be there! It is nice to have next to no idea what is going on, because the novelty of just getting to land somewhere random and make do is pretty fun, even if I am somewhat of a sim league veteran at this point. I still always love diving in and seeing what happens, and ideally meeting some fun people along the way. I have no idea what the size of the userbase is, I know that was an issue in the EFL, and honestly still in the SBA as well. Recruitment is a hard thing to do, and while affiliate users can help, finding players where this will be their primary league drives action, activity and enjoyment. Even for the players tagging along, having people engaged and interested in bringing people into their hobby really helps.
I think it’s really interesting the number of independent software projects that seem to exist around player building, site analytics, Discord Bot usage, trackers, stats and records, Trading Cards. It is really cool to see so many different people willing to invest their time and skills into making this a better place. Hopefully one day there can be a consolidated effort to centralize this to a site, integrating claiming and building players automatically. I have a lot of respect for the Graders and Simmers managing all of these moving parts. I couldn’t imagine putting together a project on this scale without major automation, but here we are, and it all seems to work well. The browser popups are pretty genius actually, and the formatting work, and leading that into the wiki creation is very cool. I’ve never been a web developer in my Computer Science experience, I’ve always been on the data analytics and back-end programming side, but it seems like a really clever series of systems.
I think the Wiki in particular is something that a lot of other leagues lack, maybe not in the actual implementation, since I spent WAY too long yesterday putting mine together, and I may not update it outside of the TPE incentives, but having dedicated places to store not only the outstanding performers, but the average laymen of the league, players that would otherwise be lost to time. And it’s a place where the objective stats and the subjective experience really align into a place where you can really see both the personality of the people, in a permanent and available platform, but also the history and the ever interwoven aspects of teams, players, managers, seasons and leagues. Being a hyperlink away from any given other player is a rabbit hole that I’m sure has kept many a person interested for many an hour. While I may never do it myself, I’m proud to be contributing to a project that someone might remember decades from now and check in on, just to see the rich recorded community that we built. Bit emotional isn’t it! Now based on my math I should be coming up on the number of words I needed to secure my equipment, and with that I will say hello, goodbye, and see you next month, when I have to write something to get my TPE in the VHL! Hopefully I kept on topic just enough to earn me my cash and you won’t have to hear me ramble too much for a long time!
All that to say I will read Discord pings, I will get just enough money to get my training and such. I’ll probably miss some random predictions every now and then, unless a wonderful GM or Discord bot reminds me. But I also probably won’t be going anywhere, since well I’m fiending for my 1 TPE in the VHL. And to be honest I generally earn pretty well in my secondary and tertiary leagues as well, even if I don’t keep up much with the day to day stuff. I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much in the general Discord servers, and I’ll be honest I don’t love the message to earn system, but that’s fine, I can just write some articles every now and then, get some contracts and play that way. That’s the beauty of sim leagues!
I made an Offensive Lineman, a position I definitely didn’t have to look up afterwards to figure out what they actually do. Turns out they just stand there being big and messing with the little punks trying to sneak by. I also learned what a pancake is, and I must say they’re slightly less cool than I expected. But I will certiainly hurl a few chumps in my time. But why did I pick a position I didn’t know and don’t really care for? Because who would care for them! I’m sure there’s some freak out there dying to play an O-Liner, but lets be honest far more want to be any other offensive position, and well any other defensive position. No interceptions, no yards, no field goals. So if I’m going to vaguely pay attention, I should be the one to suck up being the position that everyone needs, but no one wants to be. It’s only fair, and that is my service to the league. I have no problem not checking, and not finding anything interesting in my stats, and enjoying the chats and the wins coming from the extra offensive wiggle room. And if I get asked to switch positions, I’ll do it, why not. I just want to be useful, play some games, win some games and then re-create. I have no desire to have a lasting legacy, I probably won’t be a household ISFL name, I will likely never hold a job here. But I’ll earn my TPE, I’ll make my money, and I’ll help my team. And to the GM that will come to appreciate that, you’ll have my services for as long as you’ll have me. I may never even learn the other team names, and if you ask, I’ll re-sign until I am a husk of a player.
So enough about how boring I plan to be, what upside do I bring? Well I am generally very Discord active. I don’t spend a lot of time chatting in general mass servers, but if you strike up a conversation in a locker room, I’ll at least toss you a reaction. I’ll say “woo team” and “football yeah!” whenever you ask, within my business hours of course, and I’ll support your every move even if I have no idea what they mean. I am your GMs dream player. I’m also in no rush, I’ll stick through a rebuild, I’ll hang out in the minors until the big team is ready. I’ll ride the bench for as long as needed. I’ll take the minimum contract, whatever term you want. And I’ll build however you want! In fact I prefer to not have to think about it. Someone let me be their glorified bot, and I will be thankful, for my 1 TPE a month. This is the power of affiliation, and I will forever be thankful for the few TPE that will be thrown my way. I don’t have a frame of reference for the ISFL yet, but I have made several 1500+ TPE players across several leagues, I have written probably hundreds of thousands of words (dear god that’s multiple adult novels, I should really do that instead), and have met hundreds of other members across dozens of teams.
I spent most of my sim league time as a university student, then worked a desk job, now working on heading back to school (bleh), so I find myself in front of a computer quite a bit. And well I’m pretty efficient at getting computer tasks done, so I find myself with way too much staring at a computer doing nothing time. Just like this actually! I tend to write in bulk, I have my eyes set on a T6 equipment, and I’ll probably be too busy later to do it anytime other than right now. So here I am, writing a boatload of words, introducing myself to the league and using whatever I can to get my earning out of the way!
It’s been about a thousand words here about me, my history and my intentions with your league. Now lets talk ball. Who is Oandon Lolanin? Why the freakish name? Why Latvia? Well alright, I’ll start with a story and the long-running joke about names. It all started with my second VHL player, Landon Wolanin. I wanted a name that sounded like a real hockey name, and in fact there was at the time at least a Landon and a Wolanin playing in the AHL or NHL, both were flip-flopped between the leagues for a while. But, I also wanted the initials to be LW, standing for his position, Left Wing. So when I joined SBA and EFL, I kept the scheme going, but this time for positions I didn’t understand at all, as a way to actually maybe partially remember what position they played, which would lead to what that position does, leading to what that player should be good at. So then came Wandon Rolanin and Fandon Solanin, Wide Receiver and Free Safety. Candon PoFanin the Center/Power Forward, Tandon Eolanin the Tight End, SanGon SoFanin the Shooting Guard/Small Forward, Quandon Bolanin the Quarterback. Maybe a few more, most were fillers for EFL and SBA teams that I bounced between. I doubt I would have remembered any of them had it not been for that ridiculous naming scheme. I already forgot the existence of Splash Zone, which was the first time I broke it, and then I picked it back up with Landon Dolanin in GOHLS. I strayed away for a bit, but it is back for ISFL, at least until I figure out the football positions. Oandon isn’t the cleanest of the renditions, but it’ll do the trick, at least until I change positions.
Who is he going to be? Well the Player Guide told me he would be like 310lbs as an Athletic OL, which is pretty huge, I made him 6’6 just to add to the freakishness. Normally when I’m doing this I look up the position and who is actively playing it and then just steal one of their histories and hope no one notices. Literally the only Offensive Lineman I recognize is Jason Kelce, and well that feels like cheating these days, even if I had previously based another player on another Kelce long before him and Taylor Swift got together. Now it feels too easy and too obvious. I guess John Madden was apparently also an Offensive Lineman, but that doesn’t really help me since I’m not that old. Even looking through random Reddit posts people seem to agree on Joe Thomas being the most famous, being the first to play the position. Basically what I’m getting at here is that I decided that I would have to abandon my usual strategy and just make stuff up.
So I tend to default to Latvia for my country of origin, no idea why. Latvia is somewhat of a niche tertiary nation in hockey, there’s very few in basketball (which I also don’t pay attention to), none that I know of in football, perhaps I’ll look into that later, but I’ve always enjoyed their colours, Latvia can be very pretty, and well it’s just random enough to be interesting. So I looked up Latvian cities to get started and it took me about a quarter of a second to figure out where I would be from. One does not just see the city named Ogre and not want to be from there. Big freak of a man, lives in the middle of nowhere in Latvia, he’s got to be from Ogre! Ogre has a school, which is basically called Ogre School, but in Latvian, so why not have gone there! The rest is basically history, I really made it out to be some long-winded and elaborate story (and perhaps part of me wanted it to be, you know, for the money) but it really was that simple. Sometimes you’re scouring the internet for the perfect inspiration and it just appears and you take it thankfully and graciously.
Now onto personality. I haven’t put much effort at all into thinking about it, so some of this will likely be half brainstorming and half actually canonizing it. I had always wanted to have a real roleplay character, but I honestly don’t think it’ll be this one, so sorry for getting your hopes up. What I do enjoy though is subverting tropes, and I don’t want my massive freak of an Ogre to be dumb and jock-like. I generally think he would be very clean, disciplined and most of all smart. I like playing as smart, quick and crafty players. It helps me pretend like I know anything that is going on, and maybe I can find a crack in the meta and exploit it. It also helps that Speed often represents the “being good” attribute, particularly at lower TPE values, so it all kind of plays together. I’ll obviously be strong, and probably max that out, as it seems to be pretty essential for my position, but I really want to find a way to be crafty. Playing wide and getting the chance to move around a lot could be an option, being a personal support to some lethal wide offense. I do notoriously think running teams are dumb, and I think all plays should be thrown. I know there’s like strategy and things along those lines, but running two yards into a wall of ogres doesn’t sound effective or interesting to me. So being able to push the play long and outside, or create gaps to cut inside is how I’ll pretend to be interested in the position. I don’t want to maul, hence why I didn’t pick that archetype. I don’t need to bowl people over, I just need to secure and guide them to a position where they can’t effectively stifle my offense. I won’t be the highlight reel, but I will be the hidden gem. It just makes me feel good okay?
I imagine that Lolanin is a real health nut, an avid gym go-er, and probably a runner. I would assume that he wouldn’t be throwing weight around but instead doing slow, controlled reps. Pure exertion is for the game, and in his training, he’ll learn how to control his body, prepare it for contact, and elongate his unfortunately likely shortened lifespan (poor tall people). He would be an academic, both of the game and of niche interests. I doubt he would have social media, he might not even carry a phone. He would live out in nature, in a secluded area, at least until his letter came in the mail, or a driver from the team came to pick him up at the end of the offseason. Maybe he would live on a lake, and fish and grow his own food. He’s a real icon in my mind. A testament to what it means to not be typing essays about fake sim sports for fake sim money. Let me have my self-insert fanfiction.
Now surely he isn’t good at something, if I plan on him being good at football (I do), and at being healthy (I do). Perhaps he is a bit of a loner (seems likely), and perhaps he never makes major connections with teammates or the league (maybe), but maybe he has a real cult following. I know in the hockey analytics community at least there are some real statistical darlings, particularly among defensive forwards and sheltered offensive defenders. Maybe he can be an inspiration to football nerds around the world, maybe he’ll even become just mainstream enough to guide fantasy football addicts to select his team’s O-Line without checking the players. Maybe he’ll stay with a team long enough that people will just assume the team’s O-Line is good forever, without noticing any of his other teammates. And after he is gone, perhaps his old team would still hold that number one spot in people’s minds until they watch it all burn behind him. That would be a pretty good career in my mind, and would honestly be the best I could hope for in my first career here.
So it is my first career here and I spent a decent amount of time yesterday trying to figure everything out, and honestly I think I figured out at least one or two things, but not much. I’ve never been in a Claim Thread league before, I’ve always been blessed with a really great portal. I fear I may be an absolute nightmare when it comes to actually applying my TPE, and I will probably cry a few times claiming it as well. I started off spamming my thread with individual claims instead of putting them all together. Soon I imagine I’ll end up on a team, I know some people reached out to me already to welcome me, so it’ll be nice to actually land somewhere and bully someone for answers about everything. I did just about everything on my TPE list, which made me feel pretty good even if I’m pretty sure some of them won’t be applicable for me but that’s fine. I’m not here to perfectly optimize everything so it’ll all work out in the end. I do really want to get that Equipment out of the way though, hence why I didn’t stop a long time ago and break this thing into multiple chunks. Every time there’s a 2x First Media bonus I write a bajillion words just to feel like I properly optimized the opportunity (maybe we are min-maxing here, I may be lying to myself). But I do think it would be a great opportunity to stand out a bit here at the start and maybe start making a name for myself. I don’t want to get lost in the field of other random first-gens. I don’t plan on overtaking any veterans here but I at least want to be a promising first-gen here. I’ll try to promise to not burn out on you! I’ve never taken an extended break from sim leagues, ever since I started taking them seriously in 2021 or so.
I must say the team names and brands are far more whimsical than I’m used to which I do appreciate. Too many times I mix up leagues with the same like 8 team cities and the same colours and logos and brands all jumbled together. It’ll be easy to remember which league has the Dallas Birddogs. I’ll have to figure out what a Birddog is at some point.
It’s nice to see some familiar profile pictures in the various chats and some familiar usernames on the forum. I know a few people probably came over before me from the VHL after our affiliation announcement, so there should be at least a few people I can ask for help from. I talked through my player creation with some SHL people who were very helpful. Many of us are just in it for the vibes, and something else to click on every now and then for funsies. But at least I don’t have to be the odd one out!
I’ll have to figure out the update schedule and where we are in the season, and who the movers and shakers of the league are, but for now I’ll mostly just be waiting to see what team I land on, and who happens to be there! It is nice to have next to no idea what is going on, because the novelty of just getting to land somewhere random and make do is pretty fun, even if I am somewhat of a sim league veteran at this point. I still always love diving in and seeing what happens, and ideally meeting some fun people along the way. I have no idea what the size of the userbase is, I know that was an issue in the EFL, and honestly still in the SBA as well. Recruitment is a hard thing to do, and while affiliate users can help, finding players where this will be their primary league drives action, activity and enjoyment. Even for the players tagging along, having people engaged and interested in bringing people into their hobby really helps.
I think it’s really interesting the number of independent software projects that seem to exist around player building, site analytics, Discord Bot usage, trackers, stats and records, Trading Cards. It is really cool to see so many different people willing to invest their time and skills into making this a better place. Hopefully one day there can be a consolidated effort to centralize this to a site, integrating claiming and building players automatically. I have a lot of respect for the Graders and Simmers managing all of these moving parts. I couldn’t imagine putting together a project on this scale without major automation, but here we are, and it all seems to work well. The browser popups are pretty genius actually, and the formatting work, and leading that into the wiki creation is very cool. I’ve never been a web developer in my Computer Science experience, I’ve always been on the data analytics and back-end programming side, but it seems like a really clever series of systems.
I think the Wiki in particular is something that a lot of other leagues lack, maybe not in the actual implementation, since I spent WAY too long yesterday putting mine together, and I may not update it outside of the TPE incentives, but having dedicated places to store not only the outstanding performers, but the average laymen of the league, players that would otherwise be lost to time. And it’s a place where the objective stats and the subjective experience really align into a place where you can really see both the personality of the people, in a permanent and available platform, but also the history and the ever interwoven aspects of teams, players, managers, seasons and leagues. Being a hyperlink away from any given other player is a rabbit hole that I’m sure has kept many a person interested for many an hour. While I may never do it myself, I’m proud to be contributing to a project that someone might remember decades from now and check in on, just to see the rich recorded community that we built. Bit emotional isn’t it! Now based on my math I should be coming up on the number of words I needed to secure my equipment, and with that I will say hello, goodbye, and see you next month, when I have to write something to get my TPE in the VHL! Hopefully I kept on topic just enough to earn me my cash and you won’t have to hear me ramble too much for a long time!