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Avakael · 05-31-2017, 12:05 PM

HAHA I DON'T HAVE CANDY, I HAVE A HELPFUL POST

2500ish words. Hopefully, this article qualifies for the SMJHL media bonus as it is sort of about S36 draftees.

(Just a note: the Fantasy Wrapup I promised IS coming, soon. I haven't finished it because I haven't had much motivation, but it'll be out soon because I need to buy equipment before the season starts and so on.)

About a year ago, I was signing up to this website for the first time, too. It was weird, and bits of it turned me off, but I powered through it because this community isn't exactly my first rodeo. Now I spend more time here than on reddit. I'm writing this post because I wanted to tell people what they can expect, and hand out some advice I think is pretty crucial to know early on if you get hooked and stick around for the long haul. So, here we go.

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First thing on your plate: the SMJHL Draft.

The first thing of significance that'll happen to your player is that you'll be drafted to an SMJHL team. I never really stopped being involved in the Detroit Falcons after I moved up from there to the Buffalo Stampede (and became the assistant general manager a couple months ago), so I like to think I know a bit more than most about how this will work.

The first thing you need to know is that while the actual draft process is set and organized, none of the general managers in the SMJHL are "experts". Assuming you're reading this on the same day it gets posted, we're about maybe a week away from when the SMJHL draft is going to actually happen. That's not long enough to meet even half of you, never mind try and guess who is most likely to stay active for the next couple of seasons. As a result, when we do the SMJHL draft, we're basically making our best guesses.

So what I have to ask is this- don't get offended if you don't go super high. It's not a slight against you; only you really know how cool you really are (and you're probably super cool and underrated wherever you get picked in a draft this big). The people who go first in the SMJHL draft are probably going to be well known and respected site veterans who just finished an awesome career (perhaps as long as 3 real world years long) with their first or second player, and are recreating to go around again. Veterans with a record of participation in the community are considered most likely to stay active, and that certainty is what pushes those people into the top pick spots.

The good news is that if you're an active participant on the site and in the community, you're absolutely going to get noticed by the SHL teams before you're drafted to one about 2 months from now. The SMJHL doesn't just serve as the tutorial league for you; it serves as their extended scouting period for them, and when the SHL draft happens, the order will look a lot different. I can guarantee you: whichever team picks you is genuinely looking forward to having you. The only thing that teams value more than having good picks for your class are actual championships.

I can also guarantee that unless you make a player and then somehow don't collect any TPE, AND don't say a word to a single other person on the site, someone is going to draft you (and even then, it often still happens just in case the selected player returns to the site). SMJHL teams only get most good players for a couple seasons, and then they move on; as a result, we're all constantly fighting just to fill the roster.

If you can't get enough of this site, and being drafted high in the SMJHL is something that matters to you, here's the things you should do to make us more likely to grab you as early as possible on the night.

Be active on the forums and on the main SHL Discord. We're here to have fun and make friends. People who make friends become invested in the community. People who are invested in the community stick around. If you become a familiar face to us between now and the draft, you'll go pretty early.
Introduce yourself directly to us SMJHL General Managers. Most of us want to know more about you, but don't have the time to hunt you all down to chat one on one. Some of us won't even know much about you beyond the little survey's you're filling out for TPE. If we know more about you, we're more likely to take you. If we know that you particularly want to be on our team, we'll remember that, and we'll keep that in mind when our picks come up in the draft order.
Claim every little bit of TPE you can. The SMJHL general managers aren't going to worry too much about the actual differences between you all; you'll be capped to 350 TPE applied while you're down here anyway. But we are going to notice if you're trying to get every single available point you can to apply to your player. So figure out every last speck of what you can actually claim, and claim it.
Go and start making league $$$. This post is being put in the SMJHL media section. I'm not just making it to help you; I'm also making it because I know the media graders are going to pay me in SHL dollars by the word. SHL dollars are used to pay for bonus training (weekly) and equipment (once a season), and you'll probably need about 8 or 9 million SHL dollars to buy every piece of equipment and every week's training, and that's just until the SHL draft happens. The best way for new players in the league to earn SHL dollars is through media contributions. Luckily for you, the media graders are currently offering doubled payout for every article about S36 draftees that isn't a basic presser (i.e. questions and answers session). Take advantage of it right now, and it'll save you effort later. You can write articles; you can make fancy signatures for other draftees in the graphics forums. You can even sit down and do a podcast if you're inclined that way (and there's several members on this board who make the majority of their training money through a regular podcast schedule).
Ask questions. We slowly fine tune stuff over time, but to be honest, the various things you'll be asked to do to improve your player can be pretty weird and unclear at times. If you're not sure, ask someone and they'll help.

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Your first season.

You're going to line up for your SMJHL team, and it's going to be pretty cool. The program we use to simulate the league is quite detailed; a game readout will be a very, very long document and you'll be able to "read" the entire game, in full, and view a lot of other documentation on the simulation index to boot. The Simon T Hockey Simulator was actually designed for leagues where 1 person controls the entire team as General Manager / Owner; we've put a spin on it here and essentially used it for a pseudo roleplay site.

THAT SAID... don't be surprised if your player isn't all you thought he'd be in the first season.

In an ideal world, we'd all play point per game seasons, all of our teams would win a playoff series, etc. This is the sports world. There are winners and losers. Roughly an eighth of you are going to lift the Four Star Cup, but roughly a quarter of you aren't going to make the post season. I play for Buffalo; my SHL General Manager is ThatDamnWalrus; his player is Brynjar Tusk. He was selected 2nd overall in the same draft year I was for the Vancouver Whalers, and his player managed just 3 points that season. That sucks. So here's the bright side for that.

The Simon T Hockey Simulator software is a capricious little ratfucker. We don't truly understand it, even at the SHL level; we certainly know which skills you should invest in for your player to be better at x, y or z, but more complicated stuff like figuring out which line setups click the best is almost always done by taking the STHS league files and running a lot of test simulations to see which combinations are most likely to be successful. While it will generally give games and results that reflect the superiority of one player or team over the other, it will always give outliers, and they'll sometimes be funky. The best way to guarantee that your player will do well is to read the guides on what you should invest in, and act accordingly. Your player might still not be all that he or she was hoped for, but it won't be your fault.
You are a rookie. This is your first season. Your player isn't expected to be a superstar yet. Nobody walks into the league as Auston Matthews and sticklifts a reigning Norris winner for an unassisted goal in their first game (REMEMBER WHEN THO LOL). But if you earn TPE consistently over time, eventually you'll have a stud who IS a superstar.
This is the SMJHL. To all intents and purposes, it's technically an entirely different league to the SHL. There's a lot more parity between the best and worst players compared to the SHL. Many of the specific STHS settings are different. Just because your player isn't doing well here (despite having a lot of TPE for the class), doesn't mean he or she won't be just fine out there.
The SMJHL is tutorial island. The main things you want to learn how to do on tutorial island are learn the basic controls, chop wood, learn how to fish, start a campfire, and eat the cooked shrimp. Then after briefly fucking around with a few instructors, you'll go underground, and learn how to mine, smith a dagger, and use it in combat. We're here to show you how it works, and while we try and serve an important purpose for the league, nobody is going to worry about your SMJHL player's performances. Most of the SHL GM's probably won't even check the index; all they will check is your player's TPE, how much SHL cash you have, and how active and involved you are in the community.

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This community and your place in it.

This is an internet forum with hundreds of people on it. Naturally, we don't make that happen and keep a league going for as long as it has thus far without baggage; that baggage takes the form of expectations and unwritten standards and past drama and drama that we wish was past drama already, and so on. None of it ever really threatens the continued future of the league, but the boat does rock, and when the boat rocks it can be a bit uncomfortable here.

Every major influx of new members has influenced and eventually changed this league. It's a natural process of every online website; any healthy community will continually add new blood, and the new blood will do things differently, and the things they differently will irk the old people, who liked the old norms of how things happened and don't see why they should change. My own draft class in particular has a lot of tags attached to it- people think we like Discord too much, people think we like spreadsheets too much, people think we're too soft, and half a dozen other stupid things with no real right or wrong answers because they are values judgements. Long term, these things don't matter.

So here's a few important things to keep in mind for the future as you get more and more involved here.

You don't owe anyone on this site anything other than following the rules. People are going to have hopes and expectations for you, especially if you're on their team, and if you don't turn out to be what they want, there can be conflict. I'm not saying that you should go out and just fuck over people because you feel like it; that'll earn you a bad reputation pretty quickly. But don't chain yourself to a team because you feel obligated to stay there at the expense of your own fun.
You have no obligation to be the slightest bit invested in any ongoing drama, even if it involves the team you play for. Some locker rooms get a bit tribal, and sometimes there's genuine hatred between different groups of people. If you've read up on some drama, and after thinking about it, that drama sounds stupid to you, that'll be because it is stupid. If you want, you can ignore it and nobody will judge you for doing that, because this is an imaginary roleplay hockey league on an internet forum.
People who have been here for longer than you might tell you that your opinion doesn't matter as much as theirs accordingly. That's a load of shit. If there's a league discussion going on that you're interested in and you think you have something to contribute, say it. The people in head office (i.e. the people who actually make decisions on that kind of thing) are normally reading unless the thread has gone off the deep end already (you'll understand what I mean when you see it), and if they see a legitimate thought or suggestion on a current affair, they'll consider it on its merits and not your post count.
The fastest way to be a respected part of the site is to make a meaningful contribution. There's a lot of league jobs around; media and graphics graders, player updaters, fantasy managers (check that out by the way), point task staff, bankers, and so on. Almost all of these different areas are required jobs to keep the site going, and all of them wind up asking for extra staff to help at least once a season. Only a handful of specific individual jobs require more than an hour or two of work from anyone a week (like being the league simmer), and of those listed, only the player updaters need to do more than menial information management. Plus, they all pay out extra SHL cash that goes towards your training.
All of that said, don't be that_guy.jpg. There's a few people on this site with bad reputations; they got those reputations for doing something really shitty to another team or player, or being an asshole beyond the point of all reasonable discussion, or just doing something monumentally stupid in general. You'll identify them yourself fairly quickly if you've done any time on an internet forum before. Most of them stop being that_guy after a while, but nobody ever completely loses the label and it sucks to still have it if you're not really that_guy anymore.

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Overall, this site is a cool place, which is the truth behind every website full of people trapped in Hotel California. If you read this far, I hope you stick around and enjoy it!

.bojo · 05-31-2017, 12:08 PM

Don't trust Avakael: He eats babies

Yeah, real babies. Lives by the hospital and everything.

Avakael · 05-31-2017, 12:10 PM

Quote:Originally posted by Bojo@Jun 1 2017, 01:38 AM

Why u do this Bojo

JR95 · 05-31-2017, 12:23 PM

A+ runescape refference

ztevans · 05-31-2017, 12:31 PM

Also, new people, <a href='index.php?showuser=1157' rel='nofollow' alt='profile link' class='user-tagged mgroup-13'>Bojo</a> smells bad. Like a cross between a hog farm, cheap cigarettes, and regret.

Avakael · 05-31-2017, 12:35 PM

Quote:Originally posted by ztevans@Jun 1 2017, 02:01 AM
Also, new people, <a href='index.php?showuser=1157' rel='nofollow' alt='profile link' class='user-tagged mgroup-13'>Bojo</a> smells bad. Like a cross between a hog farm, cheap cigarettes, and regret.

Then you didn't add enough garlic to the hotpot

.bojo · 05-31-2017, 12:38 PM

Quote:Originally posted by ztevans@May 31 2017, 11:31 AM
Like a cross between a hog farm, cheap cigarettes, and regret.

Says the guy with STORMY THE FUCKING PIG as his avatar.

[Image: giphy.gif]

ztevans · 05-31-2017, 12:42 PM

Quote:Originally posted by Bojo@May 31 2017, 11:38 AM

Says the guy with STORMY THE FUCKING PIG as his avatar.

SAYS THE GUY WHO KNOWS STORMY'S NAME. Don't act like you aren't about that Canes life.

.bojo · 05-31-2017, 12:51 PM

Quote:Originally posted by ztevans@May 31 2017, 11:42 AM
SAYS THE GUY WHO KNOWS STORMY'S NAME. Don't act like you aren't about that Canes life.

Yeah, so what if I have an autographed hockey puck from Stormy sitting by my bed. What's it to you?

Also I just looked back on facebook because it reminded me of a photo I took with Stormy. Good times.