6. 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.
So here I am, back again after ... I don't know, about a year's absence? Probably a few months short of that, actually. Anyway, I figured that it might be time to give this league another shot. I think that there were a lot of contributing factors to my leaving, some of them personal and obviously not related to the league, others that were things I saw as sort of critical flaws here. I am not entirely sure if they have been fixed, but I do think that I care less now. It is entirely possible that caring was the problem in the first place - because I was in so deep I could not really detach my early experiences here from new ones and so I became very "back in my day" about all of it. I don't know. Anyway, I guess I am just going to kind of ponder these things and see if I it reaches the required 600 words here. The first thing that I think started to drive me up a wall here was the clique-y nature of the league. Generally speaking, cliques in the context of this league are pretty harmless. We had the one issue that I'm not going to delve into, but by and large it is really just different groups of people sticking with those people rather than branching out. I think I struggled with that for two reasons. The first was I had become so attached to Orange County as a team, but our reputation, standing, or maybe more accurately image in the eyes of people in the league was low. Not because it was a bad franchise, but because people were just sick of us being good. While I understand that, I also started to feel that new members were being indoctrinated into that feeling by people who had never even interacted with members of our team. Which is where cliques start to suck in sim leagues. You fall in with some people, they shape what you think, and then it doesn't change. So you just keep repeating the same experience over and over and over. As I type this I kind of wonder is this what happened to me, more so on accident? I spent so long in Orange County as a GM that by the time I left it was really only people in that Discord that knew me well here. Of course league growth contributed to that, but I think that unfamiliarity caused some hesitancy from people to commit to my demands when I recreated. And ultimately that staleness is part of what led me to go inactive. It was the same experience all over again for me. Anyway, I saw an initiative today from Head Office trying to work to soften the impact of cliques on the way things go in this league, and that is encouraging. Next, I would probably say that one of the things that frustrated me the most was changing sims. I understand why we did it now, although I still have questions about the specifics of the system clock impacting results, though it is far past time for those. More frustrating was that because I don't think the huge issues with the existing sim were well articulated to anyone that didn't ask, I felt like we switched for virtually no reason at all, other than maybe to change who had the advantage in terms of testing/strategy knowledge/whatever. Maybe that still did influence it, I'm not really sure. I think that opened up a second frustration though, was that the change made the gap between haves and have nots in terms of testing ability a fucking canyon. Like that canyon on Mars or whatever. It was just stupid, and I still think there needs to be a greater sharing of resources to that effect, although it seems like teams are catching up. Anyway, really what drove me away as it relates to that was just that I had this plan for my player and it was based on a build I put together using the old sim, and then we switch to the new one, passing ends up super unbalanced, we had 2000 yard receivers, and I just said fuck this. I think that whole thing was rushed, still. Maybe. Again it depends on whether using the old sim for another season was even an option, which I can't claim to know. Lastly is an issue that I think is more recent, and it's this weird loophole where you can basically tamper people who haven't created yet and then we just let them force their way to teams who draft them whenever they damn well please. It's such a critical thing because now teams can essentially just have their cake and eat it too. Go all in to contend and face zero long term consequences because they just reload by drafting max earners who demand to play there in rounds two, three, whatever. I have no idea how you fix it other than mandating rookie deals like PBE does, but even that comes with pretty big challenges. Oh well, glad that's not my problem to figure out.
So here I am, back again after ... I don't know, about a year's absence? Probably a few months short of that, actually. Anyway, I figured that it might be time to give this league another shot. I think that there were a lot of contributing factors to my leaving, some of them personal and obviously not related to the league, others that were things I saw as sort of critical flaws here. I am not entirely sure if they have been fixed, but I do think that I care less now. It is entirely possible that caring was the problem in the first place - because I was in so deep I could not really detach my early experiences here from new ones and so I became very "back in my day" about all of it. I don't know. Anyway, I guess I am just going to kind of ponder these things and see if I it reaches the required 600 words here. The first thing that I think started to drive me up a wall here was the clique-y nature of the league. Generally speaking, cliques in the context of this league are pretty harmless. We had the one issue that I'm not going to delve into, but by and large it is really just different groups of people sticking with those people rather than branching out. I think I struggled with that for two reasons. The first was I had become so attached to Orange County as a team, but our reputation, standing, or maybe more accurately image in the eyes of people in the league was low. Not because it was a bad franchise, but because people were just sick of us being good. While I understand that, I also started to feel that new members were being indoctrinated into that feeling by people who had never even interacted with members of our team. Which is where cliques start to suck in sim leagues. You fall in with some people, they shape what you think, and then it doesn't change. So you just keep repeating the same experience over and over and over. As I type this I kind of wonder is this what happened to me, more so on accident? I spent so long in Orange County as a GM that by the time I left it was really only people in that Discord that knew me well here. Of course league growth contributed to that, but I think that unfamiliarity caused some hesitancy from people to commit to my demands when I recreated. And ultimately that staleness is part of what led me to go inactive. It was the same experience all over again for me. Anyway, I saw an initiative today from Head Office trying to work to soften the impact of cliques on the way things go in this league, and that is encouraging. Next, I would probably say that one of the things that frustrated me the most was changing sims. I understand why we did it now, although I still have questions about the specifics of the system clock impacting results, though it is far past time for those. More frustrating was that because I don't think the huge issues with the existing sim were well articulated to anyone that didn't ask, I felt like we switched for virtually no reason at all, other than maybe to change who had the advantage in terms of testing/strategy knowledge/whatever. Maybe that still did influence it, I'm not really sure. I think that opened up a second frustration though, was that the change made the gap between haves and have nots in terms of testing ability a fucking canyon. Like that canyon on Mars or whatever. It was just stupid, and I still think there needs to be a greater sharing of resources to that effect, although it seems like teams are catching up. Anyway, really what drove me away as it relates to that was just that I had this plan for my player and it was based on a build I put together using the old sim, and then we switch to the new one, passing ends up super unbalanced, we had 2000 yard receivers, and I just said fuck this. I think that whole thing was rushed, still. Maybe. Again it depends on whether using the old sim for another season was even an option, which I can't claim to know. Lastly is an issue that I think is more recent, and it's this weird loophole where you can basically tamper people who haven't created yet and then we just let them force their way to teams who draft them whenever they damn well please. It's such a critical thing because now teams can essentially just have their cake and eat it too. Go all in to contend and face zero long term consequences because they just reload by drafting max earners who demand to play there in rounds two, three, whatever. I have no idea how you fix it other than mandating rookie deals like PBE does, but even that comes with pretty big challenges. Oh well, glad that's not my problem to figure out.
