rpanons | Everything is under control

Rundown:

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Concerns?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

no, i'm trying to explain to you that your actions speak louder than your words. you can say you love new people all you want, but when you slap any interested players in a 3, 4, more month long waiting list? it's not welcoming or appealing. instead of making yourselves look exclusive, you really should close applications until you get a certain number of free spots.

I don't really think you're trying to explain anything to me, I think you're trying to judge a system that you don't really understand. It's really not as simple as that, and that suggestion isn't viable for the way the game works (and has to work)--there is a rolling turnover so that a character gets replaced on a team weekly as soon as another player drops. This is why apps are always open!

Aather is welcoming of new players, but those players that are apping into the game are also aware of the fact that they may have to wait a couple of months at the outside (more than two months for a new player is pretty much the worst case scenario that happens when there is a significant backlog). It's a mutual agreement, and while there are obviously people that take issue with this, there are also those that understand that there isn't an easy fix for it.

Except that your system, quite frankly, sucks if it means people have to wait half a year just to get in, but which point they likely aren't even interested.

You say you're welcoming, but as another anon said: actions speak louder than words.

I'm not sure where we're getting "half a year" from "two to three months in a bad time?"

As one of the people arguing for expansion so more people get in, I think people are misunderstanding. The game is set up so that there are teams. The teams all have to play in games every week, unless it's a game to help a team make up for the fact that they have recently been losing games (which are called loser games). These games have to go on twice a week. As a player, I confess I'm confused about this so-called "game fatigue" as it hasn't come up in any of the discussions on plurk, in mod posts, or anywhere else; people have mentioned being tired of too many games happening, but not the size of the game affecting them or the fact that a game has to happen period. (And if it is coming up now, I think it has less to do with the size of the game and more to do with how frequently games have been happening for a year, no matter how many characters are available to play in them.) I think it's just a hectic time for players and people are forgetting that slow downs tend to happen around times of the year.

But at any rate, there has to be an adjusted growth so that the game can continue to run that system. It works and people do get in at a pretty steady pace. It's just ... the drain for people getting in, so to speak, is a little clogged right now, so we're discussing the means of getting more people in. I'm personally not fond of how people have to wait for months to get in, and the idea that it's their "problem" agitates me. I also think the game has attracted more attention since the move to DW, and there are a lot of players interested. Therefore, more slots should be made available to appeal to the demand of the game.

That said, the system of the game can't change. But what I see as a "system" of the game is different from others, who are coming up with reasons that quite honestly look like reasons to keep it the same because they don't want to deal with anything different. The system is a set number of teams (which can expand, but at a slowed rate) with a team of knights. If it expands too fast, it becomes unwieldy for the games that everyone is able to play in, and cannot be barred from. (However, there are sometimes "knights games" and "heroes/teams games," but those are not meant to happen frequently.) However, the game hasn't expanded in a while, so players are arguing for new teams.

Sorry if anything was unclear.

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.

Everything is under control

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