I know nothing about Facebook. Is the price monetary or just a blot on your soul?
Once you join Facebook, you lose all legal rights to your soul. It may not be a "blot",
per se, it just doesn't belong to you any more. A lot of people seem fine with that.
I can well believe ... indeed I'm certain of it ... that there
are ASL players who have never, ever tried any form of "online experience" for ASL -- not even browsing a discussion forum or signing up to a mailing list. At most, they might use an on-line retailer to purchase their ASL products. Such people are 100% satisfied with their ftf games and don't need anything else. There's a very good chance that they only ever play the same opponent (which might be themselves), or a small local group of opponents. They're not interested in going to tournaments (and probably would know nothing about them, other than whatever they see written in the
ASL Journal).
Whether these people constitute a
majority of ASL players is the great, unknowable question. We can speculate on it forever, but we'll never get anything close to a definitive answer.
And then, of course, there are the people who know all about VASL but simply aren't interested in using it (for whatever reason). It would be marginally easier to get an idea of how many players fall into that category, but only marginally. You could try and run online surveys but of course there's no guarantee that you'll get anything approaching enough data to be able to speculate reasonably. (A lot of people may
browse a forum without ever
participating.) I personally know of several ASL players who do play VASL (at least sometimes) but never read online discussion forums.
So ... basically Pitcavage makes a statement that's meant to sound authoritative and thoughtful but is actually quite meaningless. He doesn't know and
can't know the answer to the question that he puts forward, and no-one else can know the answer either. All it does is try to cast "shade" onto the question of whether VASL is "important". I repeat my earlier translation of his comments: since VASL isn't important to
him, he's assuming that it can't be important, period.