Midseason Reflections (Cairo Chronicles: Issue 6, 2042 Season)
Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2020 11:46 pm
2042 UMEBA Midseason Reflections
Cairo Chronicles, Issue 6, 2042 Season
After a little over a real-time month in the BBA universe and midseason in my first UMEBA season, I thought I might employ a bit of what @RonCo wrote in his recent post about team news. I think I’ve been a bit unsure on what team news was for, but after reading what other GM’s write and after Ron’s post, it has given me a new outlook on what team news can be. That it doesn’t have to be just spraining your arm patting yourself on the back, but taking a wide turn with it and having some imagination with it and incorporating it with the league.
I’ve liked how @Clayman has been writing some player profiles. I think that is probably what drew me to the BBA the most was the fictional universe. I’ve had a rough relationship with Major League Baseball because of Bud Selig and not a great experience with how my fantasy baseball hobby ended, so that has affected my baseball fandom. But I loved collecting baseball cards as a kid, playing Strat-o-Matic in my 20’s and then later playing fantasy baseball for a long while. I’ve never stopped liking the sport. So, I think being able to immerse myself in a stable, fictional universe with others who care is something that really inspires me.
In addition, @Clayman and @ca13 with their wonderful team news, in Athens and Beirut respectively, it has also shown me what team news can be. The Fighting Centaurs GM, Neil, also had a wonderful idea with forging a rivalry between Athens and Cairo - another imaginative aspect of what team news could be.
Surely I am able to be as active as I am with my Cairo franchise because of the pandemic. Being incredibly fortunate right now to be able to work from home, I wouldn’t be able to just load the league file during the day at my work computer. But on my laptop at home, I can easily load the file while doing work stuff and then come back to it and play around with my team when I have time. I think that if I were in the office all day, the motivation might be lacking to then sit back down in front of another computer and go through the machinations necessary to load the file and get into the game. However, this time for me during the coronavirus crisis may be helpful in at least one regard: it is forming habits with OOTP so that when things get back to normal, I will be immersed in OOTP and the BBA universe and the UMEBA so that I will want to get into the game and download the file and commit time to it. Without the immersion that I’ve been able to feel during this time, I’m not sure I’d have taken to the BBA universe so quickly.
OOTP is still kind of overwhelming to me because I still don’t know where to find certain menus inside the game just yet. For example, if I make a waiver claim, I’m still having a bit of difficulty in poking around to see the resolution of that. Part of the problem is sometimes I forget players’ names that I tried to sign as a free agent or simply new players on my team! I may need to figure out a system to take notes of these things. So that if I try to sign a free agent or put in a waiver claim on a player and I don’t get them, I can go to the transactions log and hunt for that player’s name.
A league is only as strong as its owners, but a league doesn’t run without a capable steward running the ship. And I have been really impressed with @recte timeliness and helpfulness in responding to queries and fairness when responding to them. And when a league has been going on for as long as BBA has, that is a tremendous achievement by the commissioner.
And on the note of helpful people, I was shown how helpful the BBA general managers were right at the beginning of my tenure when I was having trouble installing OOTP in the first place. I think of @Jleddy and @Jwalk100 immediately there. And for game and strategy questions, I’ve been a bit reticent to ask questions simply because I’ve been unsure if people would be willing to answer them. Quite the contrary though, as people have been very willing to explain their thinking with certain parts of the game, and I’ve been grateful for this.
The participation points and insistence on general managers producing content only enhanced my interest in wanting to get immersed again in a fictional simulation league. I had been in a pro basketball simulation league about a decade ago and clearly remember living and dying with how my team did in that day’s sim. I wanted that again as I steadily move away from being a fan of real-time live actual sports. Interestingly, I recently ended, or maybe just paused, a fantasy basketball league that I ran because I got fatigued with doing the lion’s share of posting on the league’s message board and writing most of the content. It is refreshing and inspiring to see so many people who want to be active participants in the BBA and I think that is another reason why I’m excited and grateful to be a part of this universe.