Survivor Review Board: Discussion

[Crazy]

I think this is a decent idea, although it would have probably been much more useful a couple years ago than it is today, because now, nearly all games are running fairly smoothly without any major issues. I suppose this thread is in reaction to the "meh" reception that Bahamas got, but the game still ran from start to finish without any twist that was obscenely unfair (afaik) and also finished within a couple months' time. Not every game is going to be a gold standard, and that's probably just something we have to accept - review board or not.

I don't believe this review board should stifle any creativity from the mods. I don't think its goal should be to separate the "meh" games from the awesome games; I think all prospective mods

already

want their games to be awesome, and IMO that is enough incentive to drive people to try to create innovative, exciting games. So I don't agree with creating a list of challenges or twists that worked well or poorly, or entirely prohibiting that some challenges be done. That just makes the whole process far too mechanical.

I think the purpose of this should be to make sure that no drastic, extreme problems exist in any game. For instance:

-The mods should have enough time on their hands to mod the game to the full extent. I'd consider a requirement to prohibit a single person from running a large game. I'm not thinking of any game in particular, but the more mods there are, the less likely flaking will be an issue.

-No challenge should take an obscene amount of time. No Battleship or UNO challenges that go on for weeks. I think 72 hours is a reasonable upper limit for pretty much any challenge, with exception given only if the challenge is especially great and important to the game as a whole. Apart from this, I don't think any rule on challenges is necessary. While repeat challenges are annoying, they do not single-handedly kill games, and most mods will avoid doing too many of them, anyway. Also, twists can be implemented on overused challenges to at least make them fresher.

I could also see a rule that would prohibit obscenely painful time-based challenges, such as the first challenge in Mass Effect (which I admit I didn't anticipate it playing out as intensely as it did). I don't think posting challenges are necessarily a bad thing, but they can be done poorly. However, I think brutal endurance challenges can have a place when it comes to FIC or other pivotal moments.

-Twists should be left alone as much as possible. Everyone has different opinions on what is good or bad in terms of twists, and I don't think the review group should prohibit anything unless it is completely mind-numbingly awful or unfair.

Is this even much of an issue, anyway? Apart from Arkham (which shouldn't count, IMO, but that's another discussion), the last majorly controversial twist that I know of was the Legendary Box in Seafoam.

[Crazy]

Another thought came to be - after a game is long over, the stuff players remember is not the challenges; rather, it's the other players, and the alliances and drama, etc. Just like Mafia, a cast of players creates a Survivor game far more than a mod does. Well-designed challenges and twists are a great thing, but they're more the icing on the cake than anything else.

I recall Bahamas had trouble getting enough players to join. I joined to help the game fill when I really did not have enough time or motivation to play. I was probably not the only one. Bahamas also had other games to compete with, and IMO nobody can play to their full capacity in two games at once; at any given point, one game will be a player's "favorite" and the other will suffer as a result, even if only slightly.

Perhaps Bahamas' biggest problem was not the design or the modding; it was simply that the player group was spread too thin. Some were playing two games when they should have been playing one, and some didn't have the time or energy to play at all. I would also speculate that in general, players give more time to anonymous games than non-anonymous games.

Is there any way to fix this without causing bigger problems, though? Probably not. Allowing only one game at a time would probably make the modding queue far too long. I would say, though, that a game that has significant trouble filling up should probably wait a couple weeks rather than trying to pick up players that really shouldn't be playing a(nother) game, though.