As someone who's concerned about expanding, if we're coming across as just not wanting to deal with anything different then we're not explaining ourselves very clearly at all. I agree with pretty much everything you say here, so we definitely have a lot of common ground. I'll try and be more clear about what my exact issue is:
I see there being both benefits and negative effects to the game as a whole if we add new teams. The benefits I see are new faces, new players and relieving pressure on the queue. The main problem I see is that for every pair of teams added, gamerunning becomes more difficult. There are more tabs to juggle, more interactions to manage, more comments to post, more entries to judge, more threads to read, even more memories to choose at the end. There are ways to work around that but working out those ways also requires more effort and changes to the ways games are structured (or getting a helper more often, but a lot of gamerunners already have someone helping them). More characters also starts to erode at the small feeling of the game, even though 16 new characters wouldn't destroy it in my opinion, it's just something to keep an eye on whenever we think about expanding.
The disadvantages I've listed there are permanent disadvantages. Every time we expand they happen, and they don't ever go away. Every time we add two more teams it will always be harder to run games, and the game will always feel that little bit bigger. Therefore, if we're going to do it, I feel like the benefits should also be permanent. And the benefits I'm seeing from expanding aren't permanent ones. We would relieve pressure on the queue for now (and that said we'd only get halfway through it at most so that's not even fixing it particularly) but it would inevitably build back up again, especially if we're getting extra attention due to the DW move. We would have new faces for a while but eventually they would be absorbed into the fabric of the game just like the last new faces, and the people who feel like we're stagnating on characters would start feeling like that again.
I recognise that having some more characters naturally means more chance of drops every week, but I don't think 16 characters is going to increase that rate high enough to avoid the bottleneck (or widen the drain enough, whatever metaphor we're using). So I think it's a move we need to consider very, very carefully, because it's risking making the game harder to manage for current players forever in return for relatively short-term benefits to the game as a whole.
no subject
I see there being both benefits and negative effects to the game as a whole if we add new teams. The benefits I see are new faces, new players and relieving pressure on the queue. The main problem I see is that for every pair of teams added, gamerunning becomes more difficult. There are more tabs to juggle, more interactions to manage, more comments to post, more entries to judge, more threads to read, even more memories to choose at the end. There are ways to work around that but working out those ways also requires more effort and changes to the ways games are structured (or getting a helper more often, but a lot of gamerunners already have someone helping them). More characters also starts to erode at the small feeling of the game, even though 16 new characters wouldn't destroy it in my opinion, it's just something to keep an eye on whenever we think about expanding.
The disadvantages I've listed there are permanent disadvantages. Every time we expand they happen, and they don't ever go away. Every time we add two more teams it will always be harder to run games, and the game will always feel that little bit bigger. Therefore, if we're going to do it, I feel like the benefits should also be permanent. And the benefits I'm seeing from expanding aren't permanent ones. We would relieve pressure on the queue for now (and that said we'd only get halfway through it at most so that's not even fixing it particularly) but it would inevitably build back up again, especially if we're getting extra attention due to the DW move. We would have new faces for a while but eventually they would be absorbed into the fabric of the game just like the last new faces, and the people who feel like we're stagnating on characters would start feeling like that again.
I recognise that having some more characters naturally means more chance of drops every week, but I don't think 16 characters is going to increase that rate high enough to avoid the bottleneck (or widen the drain enough, whatever metaphor we're using). So I think it's a move we need to consider very, very carefully, because it's risking making the game harder to manage for current players forever in return for relatively short-term benefits to the game as a whole.