Oh sure, I was just thinking we could try and run it as a high pressure, very short time limit competition, like a game jam or hackathon-type thing. But I expect a much longer deadline like the original had would be more likely.
It actually looks like most of the games are yet to see the light of day, or even make it onto hosting lists. But I do see some I recognise, like Mind Screw and Majora's Mask, GoldenEye, Gatecrash, Wu-Tang.
Kind of tangential to that, I did rather enjoy that thing we did a while back where we had a game-creation contest in teams, where people who just wanted to do one bit (roles, flavour, whatever) could sell their skills. Maybe we could revive that to revitalise the queues. It could even be a short time limit, high pressure thing: each team has, say, 48 hours to create as complete a Mini as possible. It could even have the additional theme of "make a sequel/reboot of an existing game" if we wanted to push that.
I'm not saying continuing a series is a bad thing, and there are plenty of plus sides. There just aren't enough differences with any other FTQ to deserve a different queue. That doesn't mean I would be anything other than pleased to see more sequels in the FTQ.
I'm not sure that we're talking about a new queue, in so much as we may be talking about material that we feature on MU for recruitment and/or cross-town purposes.
Annorax is proposing a new queue, which I'm disagreeing with. I agree with you that sequels make for good games, although it might be a bit speculative to suggest that non-MTGSers will feel more invested in a sequel they never saw the first one of than any other game. But who knows, it might encourage them to go read the original. Definitely an avenue worth exploring (Cyberspace 2: This Time With Fixed Mechanics)
I'm not saying continuing a series is a bad thing, and there are plenty of plus sides. There just aren't enough differences with any other FTQ to deserve a different queue. That doesn't mean I would be anything other than pleased to see more sequels in the FTQ.
It's full of sequels and reboots, but that's the idea: we have metric tons of strong designs and strong stories that we can revive as a recruiting mechanism. This queue wouldn't be for us (well, maybe for the designers who want to go back to the well), it'd be for the players on MU, etc that we want over here. I want to take some of these players from other sites who read our games, see we've had some great games over the years, and go back to wherever they play now and turn them into active players on MTGS. I think a queue designed to let them experience the same kinds of great, unique to MTGS games we have would be a hell of a marketing tool to convert those browsers into active players.
The community's been shrinking for a while now & I think this has the potential to get a lot of fresh blood and new perspectives into our community.
What you're saying is we need a queue that highlights the best MTGS has to offer, games which showcase the quintessential MTGS creativity. This is literally the point of the FTQ, your idea is just limiting to only to sequels/reboots for no good reason. Games which are not part of a series can be every bit as creative and high quality as those that are, and FTQ committee is what helps ensure that the games that run are the cream of the crop. Why limit it to games which are part of a known series?
But that's exactly what the FTQ is for, yours just limits it to sequels or reboots of a previous game. As you've noticed, there's literally nothing stopping someone running multiple games in a series, and at a PCQ/FTQ that can even give them an edge, but the games are not sufficiently different to come anywhere close to meriting their own queue.
Gosh, if only we had a type of game that we could have rolling signups for that was small and relatively uncomplex so that new players could join in too. We could call them "simples" or "easys".
To be absolutely honest, how exactly do we know what games the playerbase wants? The only metric we're working on right now is the speed at which sign ups go, but those are heavily affected by the reduced size of the playerbase. The specific case of the slowness Star Trek currently in signups (and GoldenEye before it) can easily be explained by the playerbase being unable to support three large games at once. We already knew this when we decided to convert the Specialty queue into a PCQ-run thing, but somehow we've ended up trying to run three large games at once anyway. This is a bottle neck that *should* clear up once Mind Screw finishes and we're not running a third, PCQ game any more.
If we're serious about working out what the player base wants (which we should be), we have to do it properly. This would probably involve sending a survey to every active member asking them what they want to see. Beyond that though, if we're looking towards growth in general, I think it goes way beyond people not wanting to play the game currently in signups and those signups taking a long time.
Totally agree that not reading your role PM should not be allowed. I'm surprised such a rule doesn't exist, but I guess that's because it's supposed to be assumed that doing it on purpose is incredibly underhanded, especially since games require confirmation of role PM receipt (which implies read).
So do we think it would be a good idea for Star Trek to close signups until Mind Screw finishes and open up signups for a Mini instead, with apologies to Annorax.
That's pretty extreme Az. The market clearly supports larger games as evidenced by the fact that we have two large games running right now. What we clearly can't support is three large games at once, and I'm pretty sure we worked that out like 6 months ago when we did our last round of queue restructuring. I am completely on board with the idea of running 1 Specialty and 1 Normal at a time, and X Minis and X Micros. It does seem very silly to try and fill a third large game (while one of the existing games is still on Day 1 no less) rather than let a Mini slide in first. The problem is clearly just in managing the queue and signups rather than in a total absence of player demand.
1) The obvious flaw is that running smaller games alongside signups for larger games risks making the larger games fill even slower as Micros siphon off players. The playerbase at the moment is very small, which makes it not very surprising when large games take a while to fill, but Micros are so small and seem to be almost exclusively played by experienced players that I don't think they'd add much other than just scratching an itch. I think signups could be handled better though: Golden Eye mostly took so long to fill because two other large games (Mind Screw and Ace Attorney) were ongoing and were still heavily populated. It would have been sensible for a smaller game to post signups instead, since there's no way we could support three simultaneous large games. The other solution is for people to make smaller large games (certainly GoldenEye's 16 is a good place to start), so they take less time to fill.
That being said, I could be persuaded to allow Micros to fire more frequently, but I don't really see how it helps do anything other than let people scratch an itch while risking making Large games take even longer to fire.
2) I thought were already pretty lax on spam infractions, particularly if the consecutive posts add sufficient content. That being said, it seems excessive to me make multiple posts while catching up and I don't feel that multiple posts helps with readability. What's wrong with writing thoughts in notepad or whatever as you read and then making the catchup as one post? I don't have a problem with someone, say, putting a PBPA in a separate post to questions addressed to another player, but making 6 posts in a row with one question each or with stream of consciousness thoughts while rereading is irritating.
This is, however, a question for you moderators. I don't even know what the official forum policy on multiple consecutive posts is.
Voting Thread
It actually looks like most of the games are yet to see the light of day, or even make it onto hosting lists. But I do see some I recognise, like Mind Screw and Majora's Mask, GoldenEye, Gatecrash, Wu-Tang.
Annorax is proposing a new queue, which I'm disagreeing with. I agree with you that sequels make for good games, although it might be a bit speculative to suggest that non-MTGSers will feel more invested in a sequel they never saw the first one of than any other game. But who knows, it might encourage them to go read the original. Definitely an avenue worth exploring (Cyberspace 2: This Time With Fixed Mechanics)
What you're saying is we need a queue that highlights the best MTGS has to offer, games which showcase the quintessential MTGS creativity. This is literally the point of the FTQ, your idea is just limiting to only to sequels/reboots for no good reason. Games which are not part of a series can be every bit as creative and high quality as those that are, and FTQ committee is what helps ensure that the games that run are the cream of the crop. Why limit it to games which are part of a known series?
If we're serious about working out what the player base wants (which we should be), we have to do it properly. This would probably involve sending a survey to every active member asking them what they want to see. Beyond that though, if we're looking towards growth in general, I think it goes way beyond people not wanting to play the game currently in signups and those signups taking a long time.
That being said, I could be persuaded to allow Micros to fire more frequently, but I don't really see how it helps do anything other than let people scratch an itch while risking making Large games take even longer to fire.
2) I thought were already pretty lax on spam infractions, particularly if the consecutive posts add sufficient content. That being said, it seems excessive to me make multiple posts while catching up and I don't feel that multiple posts helps with readability. What's wrong with writing thoughts in notepad or whatever as you read and then making the catchup as one post? I don't have a problem with someone, say, putting a PBPA in a separate post to questions addressed to another player, but making 6 posts in a row with one question each or with stream of consciousness thoughts while rereading is irritating.
This is, however, a question for you moderators. I don't even know what the official forum policy on multiple consecutive posts is.