xofelf and I have been taking your feedback into account and are excited to announce a few changes to the queue system that we think will help a lot.
Plenty of people gave input on this and helped craft it, so thank you to xofelf, Haschel, and all the people who chimed in and gave feedback.
1. Modding Requirements
We're getting rid of the mandatory third mod requirement. Originally, it was introduced as a solution to help ensure new mods had an experienced mod with them, as well as a way to ensure every mod team had enough people spread around to cover any urgent matters. However, with us wanting to encourage more people to mod, we see that a team of three is not always possible. We do want to
heavily encourage
mod teams to include three people, but it is not a default requirement. All newbie mod teams may require a veteran mod to be on tap, handled on a case-by-case basis.That being said, if you're a mod who has had issues running games in the past, the listmods may require you to have a third mod on hand. These requirements will be handled on a case-by-case basis by the listmod in charge of that game. Generally, once you run a game to completion without any major glaring issues, you'll be able to run games in a two person mod team again. For particularly egregious errors or mod problems, harsher penalties may be handed out.
2. Queue Requirements
In order to make sure we have a better system in place for figuring out what games are actually close to being completed, and to help mods make the sprint to the finish line, we're adding some "milestones" for game creation. Notably, we want to make sure the listmod in charge is able to be attached to the game from an earlier point so they can get a better perspective on the game. However, there aren't enough listmods to go around for every idea that gets posted, so we're setting some breakpoints for the queue:
- MILESTONE 1: Your game has a logo, forums are created, and a basic game outline has been created. The outline doesn't have to include challenges, but will need to include number of players and initial twist ideas. At the point where you're ready with this, you submit your game to the queue, and a listmod is assigned to your game. Your game is added to the "current/upcoming games" list in the queue thread.
- MILESTONE 2: Forum skinning/graphic templates are completed, challenge ideas have been filled in, and twists have been finalized. The listmod in charge will give a time frame of when your game will run and announce a game classification (see item 4 below).
- MILESTONE 3: The game is fully completed: challenge writeups are done, intitial posts/permissions have been setup on the forums, and the game is ready to start. At this point, your game is ready to fire in the queue and casting may begin when it fires.
3. Theme Test Market/Looking for Co-Mods Thread
"Upcoming Game Ideas" will be used to toss out ideas for games and recruit potential co-mods. Unlike the current system, however, no games from this thread will have their status tracked. This will be a more lax, informal thread for games to incubate in until they're ready to fire. By keeping this thread to strictly these types of posts, we hope to differentiate better between a game being in idea phase, and a game having enough completed to be in active development. Currently, if you take a look through the upcoming game ideas thread, there are 23 games listed. When a new game is being "announced" so frequently, it lessens the impact an actually serious game announcement will have, so we're taking steps to ensure that the community realizes your game announcement is something important.
4. Survivor Classifications (Beta)
We're going to beta test the game classification system for a few Survivor games to see how it works. If it's not working, we'll can it or tweak it to make it better. This is only for Survivor games, because other games are run so infrequently there's no need for that level of classification (yet). This will require no additional effort on the mod team's part, and will simply be the way the listmod in charge classifies the game so players know what to expect. We will be using the system listed below, which is based on the system xof & I put together, mixed with some suggestions taken from the community (thanks to Haschel for the double points suggestion):
Spoiler: