Offseason Point Task - 25th Anniversary Special

[Yeenoghu]

I feel quite fortunate to join the league when I did, for a few reasons. My player is S24, so I joined as part of a normal-sized class the season before a giant Reddit recruitment wave. This meant I got to have a wonderful rookie experience in London and then turn around and promote the same type of experience to a much larger group of users. When I am asked what my favorite part of the league is, I always say scouting and helping new users without hesitation. Even though I largely made my mark on the league due to research into the sim, I have had much more fun seeing rookie players succeed and generally interacting with other new users across the league. During my first season in the DSFL I was not as involved with sim testing as some of our other war room members, so I felt that I needed to pull my weight by owning the scouting process. I got to meet most of the users from the S25 class this way, and I still talk to many of them every day. When I look back at my time in the league so far, that offseason was the high point and I am very excited for the next time that the league is able to do another Reddit draft. From the Prospect Bowl to the arbitrary rivalries that get formed between users, there is something very fulfilling about seeing other people experience the same joy that I did when going through the drafts for my first time.

I am equal parts continually impressed by the innovations each new rookie class brings and happy that I do not have to compete with them all for draft position. We have new users every season that write programs for the sim, make Discord bots, or crank out enough media to vault themselves into the top 10 bank accounts, and they raise the threshold a little bit more each season for what it takes to be considered an 'elite' user. I think I would have no shot at being drafted first overall in the most recent classes after seeing what some of the prospects have been able to accomplish. Personally, I am most excited to see the new opportunities that await the upcoming rookie classes with DDSPF21. While the league veterans will be relying on existing logic and conventional wisdom, I'll be interested to see if some new sets of eyes will be able to pick up on some new tactics and strategies that do not currently exist in DDSPF16.