IBC

I can understand being bitter slightly about not simming. But really you're acting just as "bad" as I was when you threatened to boot me over my draft picks last year if not worse?

It's OK to keep it in here (meaning ExCo forum) that you think this is the wrong decision. YOU Were the one that went ahead and announced it to the league last night without any further discussion or appeal. I guarantee you if you said hey guys this is how I really feel or approached us individually that the vote would have turned out differently. I told BP before he voted last night that I was actually about to change my vote, or at least highly consider it. I never really got a chance to consider as you went ahead and threw everything into our faces immediatly and announced everything to the league.


That said, I can handle you being bitter. I don't really care and I don't mind that because everybody here myself included is going to be PMSing over an issue sometime. But as everybody has quoted already about the ExCo to be unified in decisions etc. WE have respected your personal wishes before with Josh and said hey fine, he REALLY is big time opposed to this and finds that personally intrusive, lets leave that alone. So don't act like we're going around trying to insult you.

What pisses me off though is your post in the injury forum with Zalaski that it's not your problem anymore. Yes it still is your problem. While you might not be simming, the injuries are a league wide problem and particularly and exco problem. If you don't want to deal with the injuries and want to be apathetic to league issues then frankly why are you remaining on the ExCo?

Basically either let it go or nut up and make some sort of appeal defense if you feel this strongly about it or else carry on with your role as an ExCo GM like the rest of us do. Redudent sentence that I don't feel like changing.

Anyway. I expected you to be bitter. I expect more from you than to spread your cheeks and shit all over the kitchen table during Thanksgiving dinner.

I am, quite frankly, shocked at your public behavior Bren. Had you approached me personally or the ExCo as a whole before going ballistic publicly concerning your feelings (and they are yours' alone) I may have considered changing my vote ... now there is no way I will.

When you publicly attacked my integrity over a TRC issue before you had all the facts we had an extensive private dialogue. In this case, your personal integrity was not attacked. The ExCo just implemented what nearly every other GM considers to be a common sense approach to siming during the playoffs - you alone feel your personal integrity was attacked. That was not my motivation -- if I wanted to fuck with you and disrespect you I would have voted for Josh to be reinstated.

No one has questioned any actions of yours in the past ... nor has anyone questioned what you personally might have done in the future. The ExCo simply voted to implement a procedure that they felt was in the best interests of the IBC.

In this case I would have considered your private thoughts and feelings if you chosen to share them ... you chose to take another course of action.

Put yourself in my shoes.
No public debate on the issue.
No ExCo debate on the issue.
Nobody bothered to ask me what I (as the individual directly affected by the issue) thought about it.
Yet for some reason the issue goes up for vote? Do you know what kind of backlash I used to get if I said "Here's a new rule" without ever discussing the issue with anyone at all? Doesn't matter if the rule is good or bad 9in this case it's terrible and stupid, and I'll get to why).
It would be one thing if Shawn just posted the vote and someone said "Hey, maybe we should discuss this first" but you ALL (except Brett P) voted before there was any discussion on the issue at all.
You guys didn't consider the potential consequences of your votes, you didn't discuss the issue and yes, I felt like you all need to be taught a lesson on the issue. You don't just toss up an issue for a vote like it's nothing. Those votes are the official decisions of the ExCo.
Then there's the slighting of my integrity issue. And yes, it was slighted, because the idea of switching for the last two weeks to a non-contender is flat out stupid for the reasons below. Rather than saying "This idea is unnecessary, we trust Bren" every single one of you chose a different route. Every one.

As for reasons why this decision in and of itself is ridiculous, stupid and ineffective.
One, you're confining it to the last two weeks of the season. As I said before, cheating can happen any time. One game a month makes for a 6 game swing over the season, which in the ALBeast (or anywhere), would be huge for any of the teams right now.
Two, teams in undecided races aren't the only ones with reasons to cheat. A team could want to cheat to get better seeding in the playoffs. A team culd just want to beat out a rival for bragging rights. A GM could force himself to lose in order to get a better draft position. This doesn't just apply to the bottom few slots, every spot up or down can be huge. I know I have more than once drafted a guy that the GM after me or a slot after him was planning on taking next. I've also seen GM's take the guys I wanted right before me on numerous occasions and I know the same exact things have probably happened for every single GM who gives a damn about the draft. A 1 game per month swing is 6 games, properly apply that to the right opponents, such as making a win against a team below you in the rankings into a loss and it becomes an even bigger swing. Switching to a non-contender has just as many pitfalls as leaving simming to a contender.
But you guys didn't consider any of that because you didn't conduct any sort of discussion on the issue. Oh, pardon me... Aaron made one post about it and the idea was so popular only Shawn commented on it over a 5 day span.

You guys screwed the pooch on this. You screwed up the process, you insulted me and you did it to pass a rule that is completely pointless, something you would have realized if there'd been a debate.

One other thing...

Brett's Alfonzo/Philips issue wasn't a DL issue, it was strictly a roster problem. Alfonzo isn't on the DL and Phillips didn't have to be out yet, he simply didn't want them playing last week. He posted to the DL forum probably because he wasn't sure where else to post it. As strictly a roster problem it is not my problem anymore.

Bren, I respectfully disagree with you on virtually every point you raise except how you feel. I can't disagree with that as how you feel is something only you alone know and control. I am sorry your feelings are hurt. That was not the motivation behind my vote - nor was it the motivation behind the vote of any other member of the ExCo.

The only thing I do agree with you on is that "cheating can happen any time" ... but the point you continually miss is that no one has accused you of cheating - past, present or future. This vote was not about you!

I simply voted as I did based on common sense and what I believed to be in the best interest of the IBC. I did not vote for or against Bren - rather I voted for a GM not in the playoff mix to sim the last crucial two weeks of the season as well as the playoffs so there would not even be an appearance of a conflict of interest. This is common sense ... just because the siming was done by someone in the playoffs in past doesn't mean it should be done that way in the future.

You are taking this way too personally - but hey - that is your choice. Just as it is my choice to strongly disagree with you about this issue. Not because I think you have or were about to cheat --- because on this issue you are just plain wrong!

Bren, it went up for a vote because you gave us that get shit done message, I doubt anyone thought it was that big a deal and we just went ahead and voted on it under the banner of "getting shit done."

You honestly think it's ok to vote on and decide an issue with zero debate at all? None?
You also think that GM's trying to get better draft picks aren't going to consider tanking during a sim? Period?

On the first issue I think you are dangerously wrong.
On the second, i think you're naive. We just had a thread a little while ago about questioning whether GM's were intentionally benching good players in order to rack up the losses.
There is a difference between 'getting shit done' and rushing an issue carelessly and unnecessarily, which is what happened here. The last two weeks of the season don't start until next week, 2-3 days of discussion before a vote would not have made it impossible or even difficult to implement the rule. What's more, the completely underwhelming response to the original post hardly represented a mandate from the league to 'get it done'.
My name was specifically mentioned in the original post on the issue, so yes, I do see it as personal.

um...let's play this out. Go back 4 days and start your discussion. The only argument against is that it would hurt your feelings? Or that you could have been doing it all along so changing now does nothing? We just wanted to prevent any possible conflict of interest. Chill the fuck out.

Fact 1. The two week concept is completely pointless (cheating can be done any time).
Fact 2. Playoff bound GM's aren't the only GM's with motive to cheat.

Those aren't arguments, they're facts that completely void the entire purpose of the decision you guys made.

Shawn, I'm still looking for an explanation from you personally as to why you thought that setting up a vote without any discussion was a good idea.

In fact, i still haven't seen an admission by any of you guys that you screwed up. I'm not sure how you can continue to deny that. I would think you guys would learn by example from my mistakes, but perhaps not.

Bren, you can confirm this with any number of guys that I've talked to, but my stance has been that it is bad for the league that you would quit simming altogether. Simming is a pain in the ass, it's extremely unrewarding, and consistent simming is something that often determines the long term success of a league, from what I've witnessed in the few years that I've been involved in the five or six leagues that I have.

If I'd known that you'd quit simming just because you (from what I can tell) misread the situation, I might not have voted for it. Not because I lack conviction on it one way or another, but because I thought/think that the best thing for the league was to have you continuing to be responsible for simming in general, as there is a pretty long track record of reliability that often isn't there in other leagues.

However...this wasn't a question of trust in you. It wasn't about you at all, if you cared to take the resolution at face value. You've misread the intentions of the rule itself as far as I can tell.

I don't know if you would have flown off the handle like you did if it had been approached in discussion first, and if not, I certainly wish that that had taken place.

But it is a good rule. It is not a mistake to have the rule. Whether the way it was gone about is wrong, I was a little sideswiped by it as well, and JP can tell you that I groaned when he pointed me to the vote and also when I saw that it was 4-1. So that is between you and Shawn and whoever else was involved in that discussion. I've only been getting to check the site over pretty short intervals for the last week or so, so bursts of things have tended to happen between my visits.

But I just think that you're wrong to say that having a rule like this is a mistake. If you're saying that it's a mistake just because crossing you is a mistake and "we'll be sorry" or whatever you've said, maybe you're right about that. And if you're saying that the process was a mistake, I tend to agree that we should have talked about it so that we at least knew where each other was coming from before we voted. But the rule itself is solid and something that every sim league should have in place.

I'm saying the rule is a mistake for the two reasons I've repeated multiple times. Cheating can be done at any time and EVERY Gm will have motive to cheat at some point. Suggesting that either is not true is simply naivete. Hell, if I was going to cheat, I wouldn't do it in the last two weeks, I'd do it in April or May, when no one is going to scrutinize or I'd do it one or two games a month. This rule is a meaningless masquerade. You pick a GM and you say "This is our guy, we stand by him, Period."

Unquestionably the bigger mistake is the way the issue was handled. It was a flat out fuckup. And not to target you Brett, but if you were sideswiped, why vote? at 4-1 you could have withheld your vote until there was a discussion.

I would not have mentioned resigning as simmer even if you had asked. I would consider such a statement to be coercive and inappropriate prior to the result of the vote, tantamount to Josh saying "approve my trade or I'll quit the league".

RedSox wrote:Unquestionably the bigger mistake is the way the issue was handled. It was a flat out fuckup. And not to target you Brett, but if you were sideswiped, why vote? at 4-1 you could have withheld your vote until there was a discussion.

Yeah I should have. My initial response was to do something along those lines or at least stall, but then I thought, it's an appropriate rule, and not knowing what discussion had taken place, I wondered whether additional discussion was a good thing and just voted. I should have waited to vote until I was aware of the status or stage of the debate/discussion, though, I agree.

So instead of being coercive and all that you're now threatening to take your ball and go home, creating a much bigger hassle for the league. Yeah, your approach is much better, a hundred times more mature than Josh. This is not to imply that you cheat, I'm simply going to counter your argument. While cheating can be done at any time, it is most obvious not just that it can be done but how it can be done during the last two weeks of the season, and it's impact is most likely the greatest.

Consider this situation: imagine that I had been in charge of simming in mid-May, when I was catching up to Ropers (I was 2 1/2 games behind him on May 15), and I cheated my way to a weekend sweep to get myself on top by 1/2 game. Certainly not OK, totally seems huge at the time, but meanwhile Ropers gets bit by the injury bug and I wind up running away with the division and those 3 games I cheated mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Now, suppose the same scenario took place with a week to go in the season, there is much less time for a confounding variable to show up that would invalidate the impact of that cheated sweep.

RedSox wrote:I'm saying the rule is a mistake for the two reasons I've repeated multiple times. Cheating can be done at any time and EVERY Gm will have motive to cheat at some point. Suggesting that either is not true is simply naivete. Hell, if I was going to cheat, I wouldn't do it in the last two weeks, I'd do it in April or May, when no one is going to scrutinize or I'd do it one or two games a month. This rule is a meaningless masquerade. You pick a GM and you say "This is our guy, we stand by him, Period."

Once again, you are stuck in suspicion about intent, rather than recognizing that this is about general perception. Sure the simmer can cheat any time that he sims. But people aren't paying attetion in May like they are in September. And if I'm the simmer and in a tight race and win fifteen in a row while my competition loses 12 of 15, I'd be wishing that someone else were doing the simming, because human nature is to be suspicious of that.

In LWNN, JB was in a race for his division with a guy that won something like 22 straight just in the last few weeks. We were all like WTF? But it was obvious that there was nothing questionable because someone else was simming. If by some coincidence that guy were the simmer, it would have been a very bad situation, because it's just really hard to believe that that guy, with a good but not great roster, could win 22 straight. And the fact that it happened in September was much more of an eyebrow raiser than if he'd done it in June. That sort of detatched suspicion is human nature, and that's what we're addressing here, the perception within the league, not the actual belief that anything was going to actually happen.

Another thing that I don't think has been mentioned, you have to understand that while certain guys know you (and again, you being anyone, really), not everyone in the league does. In the LWNN scenario, I barely know any of these guys. I have nothing to give me comfort that this guy or that guy wouldn't cheat because I'm so comfortable with his integrity.

I'd also add that a league that I was in for like a year literally fell apart because the commisioner was believed to be cheating. He had a good roster, but he won like 115 games and the WS, while simming every game of the season. Was he cheating? Again, I didn't know the guy. I have no idea. My guess was that he probably wasn't. But that doesn't matter. What mattered was that the suspicion within the league became strong enough that the whole thing crumbled. Guys were like, "what is the point in trying to build my roster if he's just going to control the results?" Whether they were way out of line doesn't matter. What matters is that the league died because of unsubstantiated suspicion.

I think the vast majority of members in the league know I have and will always put the interests of the league first (having made a single mistake in that regard which i know I will never live down) of the interests of my team. I want to win. A lot. theonly thing I want more than for me to win is for the league to be successful and strong.
This has come out before but you may not have heard about it. In our first season, Nils, who as Co-Commish and co-founder was much more active back then in managing the league, and I both made our respective LCS. He won his, I had one game to go with Nick. Ihad that winter quit a similar Sim basketball league because I felt sure that the league commissioner had manipulated the system to get himself and his 'cousin' into the championship, with him being the final victor. I hated to think how that would look in the IBC with Nils and I playing for the WS and what it would do to the league and our membership so i set up my team to lose that last game against Nick and, fortunately, they did. I have no problem admitting to that and I would make the same decision a million times over if presented with the situation again. The league as a whole means far more to me than a little icon at the top of the homepage. Like my decisions or not, evry decision I make, every opinion I hold as far as running or managing the league is made with the best interests of the league in mind.

As I type that last sentence, I realize I failed in that regard now. Is it in the league's best interest that I resign from simming? Probably not. No offense to JP and Brett but I don't like how cumbersome the currently proposed system is. I don't know whether the more modest way to go about rectifying that is to rescind my resignation or to submit myself for consideration for simming for whatever period the ExCo decides is appropriate, after some public discussion of course.

If you're suggesting that you resume simming once the playoffs are over or you're out of it, I can't imagine why that would require any sort of a vote or that anyone wouldn't welcome it with open arms. As I said, I have no doubt that that is what is best for the league.

The somewhat convoluted situation with what we have now is only because I have FTP issues, so Shawn has to be the one to actually upload the DB to the site. If the situation between JP and me doing a weekly exchange becomes an issue, we can overhaul that. He is just doing that as a favor to me.

One, I would not presume to say "ok, I'm back, gimme the ball"
Two, If the ball is handed my way, one, I could sim this week until the FTP issues are resolved, two, it doesn't HAVE to be an ExCo member that does the simming. just put out a call for volunteers, someone will step forward.

RedSox wrote:One, I would not presume to say "ok, I'm back, gimme the ball"
Two, If the ball is handed my way, one, I could sim this week until the FTP issues are resolved, two, it doesn't HAVE to be an ExCo member that does the simming. just put out a call for volunteers, someone will step forward.

Yeah, I understand that you were just looking for the appropriate way to go about it. If anyone disagrees with what I said, they can say so, but nothing was ever voted on in the way of future simming, nor was any desire for you to not do it expressed. Again, if someone has an issue they can speak up, but hopefully we can just move on with that understood.

As far as right now, I have zero burden. Was just asked to do it and said that I could if Shawn could upload the DB. I'd more than welcome any better options.

As far as this week, except that I'm not sure about transactions being updated (because I noticed that Kazmir was still on my team), JP updated the MPs and sent the DB to me, and once there were five votes to proceed I simmed Monday's and Tuesday's games and sent them to Shawn. So we should probably stick with those results I'd think. After tonight though, whatever you guys think. Just let me know one way or the other because I don't care.

Tigers wrote:Yeah, I understand that you were just looking for the appropriate way to go about it. If anyone disagrees with what I said, they can say so, but nothing was ever voted on in the way of future simming, nor was any desire for you [Bren] to not do it expressed. Again, if someone has an issue they can speak up, but hopefully we can just move on with that understood.

... So we should probably stick with those results I'd think. After tonight though, whatever you guys think. Just let me know one way or the other because I don't care.

1. I am not going to rehash my previous posts. This vote was not about Bren and I personally have no reservations about his siming consistent with the rules, i.e., when he is not in playoffs during the playoffs or the last two weeks of the season. In fact I think Bren siming is good for the league consistent with what Brett stated in previous posts.

2. I have no idea what the "results" are that are already done, but we should use them.

Finally - should there have been some discussion between ExCo members before this issue when public? Probably. Would it have changed the outcome of the vote? I don't know for sure - but my gut tells me no. Who is responsible for this becoming a public issue prior to some discussion taking place? All 6 of us have some responsibility but the person who took it public ultimately is the person who closed off any hopes for an internal discussion.

Bottom line: I accept my responsibility for playing a part in not having an internal discussion. Meanwhile I stand by my vote.