New Queue Structure Proposal

[zoraster]

voyeur and follower i think are slated to be added soon, but kind of on the backburner. no promises on that.

[zoraster]

I don't think anyone is saying that a majority prefer normals. That's obviously not true. the argument is that a sizable minority prefer normals. And the question is whether you improve things by changing this up. Or, for example, are all you're doing is pulling the same players from the Mini Theme queue over to the Mini Normal one (or the Flavored Normal queue or whatever it is). That's not really a net win unless those games are better.

[zoraster]

Why is it a problem if merely 30% like a certain type of game? I like symmetry considerations as much as the next guy but it's a silly thing to base policy on. I'll grant you the moderator point, but I think I'd prefer some variation on BBmolla's proposal if we wanted to work on that.

My point is that I don't know if normal games need their own queue, specifically. If we're funneling 7 games through the theme queue for every 3 games through the normal queue, wouldn't it be wise to find a way to make our queues more efficient?

why? We have queues that move at different speeds. This doesn't seem like a huge problem to me. A bigger issue would be if player demand is exceeding the supply of certain types of games. That's probably true of Large Themes, and it's occasionally true of Micros. It's usually not true of Mini Themes and Opens.

[zoraster]

why? We have queues that move at different speeds. This doesn't seem like a huge problem to me. A bigger issue would be if player demand is exceeding the supply of certain types of games. That's probably true of Large Themes, and it's occasionally true of Micros. It's usually not true of Mini Themes and Opens.

It's arguable that we have an artificially inflated supply of Mini Normals that far exceeds the demand for them, but I think that might not actually be the case. Depends on which version of the Mini Normal signup statistics we've seen thus far in this conversation are accurate.

Possible, but players have a huge number of other choices. Two micros, two opens, two mini themes, and whatever large themes are on offer. Plus any replacement opportunities out there and if they want they can play newbies. And that's not even counting games that they may be expecting to go into sign ups soon.

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As for efficiency, I'm not sure what you mean reck.

[zoraster]

fwiw this is my last play slot census data (which measures a slightly different thing than pure games):

[zoraster]

how many did you send it out to?

[zoraster]

i hope your hydra only gets half a vote

[zoraster]

I would hate to be accused of being pedantic by shea again, but I do feel like I need to point out that you ask two questions (the bold one and the explanatory question) where the answer to either is the opposite meaning to the other.

Would you play in a normal game that featured light flavor?

*
For example, would it bother you if you had a character name associated with your role PM, as long as the flavor didn't intrude elsewhere?

The answers available are:
1.

Yes

I would play in a normal game that featured light flavor/

No

it would not bother me if I had a character name associated with a role pm
2.

No

I would not play in a normal game that featured light flavor/

Yes

it would bother me if I had a character name associated with a role pm

[zoraster]

that has me believe that the percent of mini-normals has actually increased over the past couple of years?

[zoraster]

i don't think the survey is hopelessly flawed, but i do think it will need to be read with a pretty big grain of salt, particularly with the lack of user verification.

[zoraster]

that for anyone who feels strongly one way or another they could submit as many surveys as they want.

[zoraster]

I think the survey was the right call. Just the execution could have been a bit better. That's always the danger with just doing something: it avoids the paralysis of public discussion's lack of consensus but without any review and editing there are probably going to be issues.

[zoraster]

The biggest problem for Large Themes is supply, I think. Large themes routinely fill quickly even with their fairly large numbers. In the nearly two years I've been doing this now, I've only had a wait time (where there were three+ mods who wanted to have their games in sign ups at a time) twice and only a significant wait (like... 3 weeks) once.

It's one of the reasons I've pushed to relax the requirements to mod a large theme, which ended in sort of the compromise of the three micros counting as a regular game (if I had my druthers I'd probably relax that a bit further).

[zoraster]

Speaking completely without any basis in data, I think that's probably the opposite of the overall trend.

[zoraster]

I'd be willing to consider ad hoc respected mods who wanted to run another large theme whose games were under a certain number of players still left (a game with 7 players left might take a month and a half to complete at the outside, but require very little mod activity). I am not really interested in having someone have two games that have 20 players alive in each going on. I think that's just asking for disaster.

[zoraster]

assuming each is a unique response n=93

[zoraster]

i'm far more okay with random distribution than relying on fake claims provided by the moderator. I think some mechanism to make that happen and make sure it's random would be positive, but that could be an NRG side thing.

[zoraster]

i'm receptive to shaft.ed's idea (and yours before), but it needs a NRG-side randomization, and the actual roles would need to be standard named (e.g. "You are Darth Vader, the Town Gunsmith")

[zoraster]

I'm not very excited about further fragmenting the queues for marginal gains.

[zoraster]

because you're dredging up a hibernating and exhausting thread to offer your two cents without even bothering to read what was said in it.