[Meta] Newbie Experience (Formerly IC replace rate thread)

[fferyllt]

My initial reaction is that someone replacing out as an IC without a hell of a good real life reason should be disqualified from being an IC for some period of time. Maybe make them requalify from scratch.

Having an empty IC queue would make that kind of penalty hard on future games.

What kind of rewards are you thinking about?

[fferyllt]

I think that can be accomplished, but I think it's a longer term goal. Getting the newbie queue back up to strength really needs to happen quickly and both IC and SE players need to commit as best they can to completing their games.

[fferyllt]

I do my best to fill vacancies. For the record I think the 24 hour rule on newbie slots rule is counterproductive since it's mostly just causing newbie games to be short a slot for 24 hours more, and that's something that should change.

Disagree. Nothing turns me away from newbie games harder than having the majority of the game not be newbies at all

If I wanted to play in a game with a bunch of normal users, I'd join a micro. Which is what I do.

There should be

harsher

limitations on replacements into newbies. At no point should se/ic players outnumber actual newbies

Unfortunately, some slots would sit empty for a good while and games would stagnate. Which is a turn-off for the players still in the game.

Ideally giving Newbies first shots at newbie slot replacements maintains some balance. But, it doesn't always work out that way.

[fferyllt]

Not rand wolf

I can still play nice

Unfortunately, some slots would sit empty for a good while and games would stagnate. Which is a turn-off for the players still in the game.

Ideally giving Newbies first shots at newbie slot replacements maintains some balance. But, it doesn't always work out that way.

They don't stagnate though, the slots that are being replaced are the ones that already aren't playing

My experience has been that once se's + ic surpasses actual newbie players, I lose much interest in the game myself and the point of the queue seems lost

Not all replacements are due to people just not showing up to play, though. People ragequit. People have real life emergencies. People get discouraged and think their play is dragging the rest of the game down, etc.

That happens in non-Newbie games, too, but in my experience it happens pretty frequently in newbie games. Which is on top of players who flaked before the game started or midway through day 1 or whatever.

[fferyllt]

I didn't read the whole thread but my thoughts are having a 9 newbie player without SEs and an IC that doesn't play the game. The IC can chime in to the game to help the newbies, and the IC should also have an access to the scum PT which the IC can also help them with. The IC can also help the newbie player who's a PR. I think the newbie queue should just be for the newbies, not for the SEs.

You'd need two ICs; or otherwise internally the IC has already "chosen a side"

An IC for town and an IC for scum sounds great.

An IC for town who can't be killed and is basically a treestump is OP and varies a lot by player quality
An IC for scum who can't be killed and is basically a treestump is OP and varies a lot by player quality

Becomes "who has the better IC" more than playing/learning.
IMO bad.

I think you're imagining a much more involved, game-playing IC than would probably be the case based on what I've seen on other sites that provide coaches to all sides in the newbie games. I played a "newbie" game on at the Team Liquid site's mafia forum a couple years ago. the Town coach gave me absolutely no clues about who else might be on my team or if my scum-reads were valid or even made sense. He did let me rant via PM and answered theory questions (of which I didn't have many. We did shoot the shit about general mafia theory as peers, though). The biggest help he gave me was in figuring out how to use their forum app to do things like iso someone, and gave me an understanding of how their phases worked.

Based on the QT, the mafia coach was more involved, but I didn't think he stepped over any lines in terms of fairness. I was playing against that team, not the coach.

I think implementing something like that here would take a lot of effort and thought, and the number of players who have a good mentality for mentoring/coaching is probably smaller than the number of players who have a good mentality for ICing as we do here.

I'm not at all sure it would make sense to attempt that kind of change here.

[fferyllt]

the sign up threads are still out there. it's easy enough to sample how many new players /inned, how many games launched per month. Might be interesting to pick 2 or three months and compare them across 3 or 4 years.

[fferyllt]

Yeah, I'm thinking about doing it, too. I'd like some input about what would make a decent sample size. And also if there's an easier and more automated way to go about it.

I'd also be interested in doing something to track how many people keep playing after their first game, and what percentage are still playing a year later.

And do that over the same time windows maybe.

It would be a lot of manual labor.

Maybe psyche could make a bot!

[fferyllt]

Yeah, for sure. I'm thinking a baseline trend from a few years past would help put what's happening now into perspective.

[fferyllt]

This is awesome info!

I'm interested in seeing what you've gathered so far, and I am planning to work on this a bit, too. Since you were able to nail the trend down objectively, I'll start on a detailed look at 2017 games.

[fferyllt]

This is a high level summary of the data I've captured about finished 2017 Newbie games.



These games were all announced by the Listmods in the Newbie Queue in those months. There was one game that started in early January, but because it was announced in December, I arbitrarily chose not to put it in the stats. It would be easy enough to add it, if tracking the games by when they actually started is a better approach.

I decided to track replacement data not only because a lot of first-time newbies start their first games as replacements, but because I think unusually large numbers of replacements probably indicate there was something anomalous about the game that may have turned off players from finishing the game and potentially playing additional games here.

As ongoing games finish, I'll update the spreadsheet. I don't plan to make the detailed spreadsheet generally available since I have to capture activity data on individual players in order to calculate aggregates. I feel like there's probably a window after which a first-time newbie who played their first game should be considered an established member and no longer tracked in terms of whether they're still visiting the site, playing games, or whatever.

Thoughts about additional information:

Instead of tracking whether the player is still active "today", track if they're active 1 month, 2 months, 6 months after their first game finishes.
Track how many games they play in the following 1 month, 2 months, 6 months after their first game finishes

There was no way to capture most of this information without doing a bunch of brute-force effort looking at newbie listmod posts, reading games, etc.

At the level of granularity I've captured the info, it would eventually be possible to see if particular mods, ICs, SEs are involved in games with high conversions of first time newbies to established members. It would also be possible to see if certain game "cohorts" go on to play more games together and stick around longer. And I hope it will be possible to tease out some best practices: identify established mods and players whose games have an unusually high conversion rate, and then look at what makes those games different and presumably better for newbies. It may also be possible to see what kinds of second, third, fourth game experiences (which queues, which types of games, etc) correlate with continuing to play on-site months later.

If you have thoughts about summary data that would be useful to track, let me know.

I haven't decided whether to track prior years in this detail. It's a lot of work digging through the data manually.

One correlation of note is that May, the month with the most Newbie slot replacements so far this year (though not by much) was also notable in that 4 players who were in one or more newbie games at the time were sitebanned.

The May numbers were inflated by one game that had 13 replacements, most of which were newbie slots.

[fferyllt]

There may be something to that, though I think that the need for brainpower varies a lot from game to game even in the same queues. The game design and the player base in each game has an impact.

Some of the most challenging games I've played at MS happened in the Newbie queue. And some of the easiest, quickest wins happened there, too.

[fferyllt]

There's that, and it also insures that the majority of game slots are reserved for true newbies (1st or 2nd game) at least initially, and usually throughout the game.

Even so, some games evolve into "Battle of the Crotchety old ICs" by the end of day 1.

[fferyllt]

Personally, I don't think anything would be harmed by either perpetually or on a queue-optimization basis switching over to a 3-game newbie rule.

I also like the idea of more varied setups, though I think it would complicate a lot of things about the queue that are pretty simple and streamlined right now.

[fferyllt]

Can I just point out as someone who was a newbie 3 months ago that it was hella intimidating to see the other queues, I had zero idea what the fuck was going on lol

What were the intimidating things about the other queues?

(I had the opposite experience. I enjoyed the hell out of my first couple games after finishing one newbie game.)

[fferyllt]

There used to be a feedback mechanism. Needs to start up again.

[fferyllt]

It was nothing fancy, just a Quicktopic that Singer had in her signature.

https://quicktopic.com/47/H/SGy6LuW33BN

I think it fell into disuse because we don't use quicktopic now that private threads are a thing.

A survey like what zor used to do for large theme games might be a better approach. Mods could post a link in postgame, or someone could PM a link to players in completed games every couple weeks or once a month or something like that.

[fferyllt]

I'm interested in helping work on newbie feedback mechanisms, and will be continuing my data collection/analysis of 2017 games as they run to completion. Will be glad to help out on most anything though.

[fferyllt]

2. Newbie feedback
~By google forms?
Yes
~Something baked into the game?
Yes
~Just publicly in the thread post-game?
This is good, but it's not enough. We should be digging into the question of whether the current queue/format/setup gives Newbies the tools (and more importantly the confidence) to swim in the deeper pools at MS after a couple games.

[fferyllt]

In terms of making queue transitions easier/more painless I have some thoughts (as a game mod) about designing and running some micro/mini games that are meant to be explicitly newbie-friendly though open to anyone who's ok with abiding by the ruleset I'd want to enforce.

I don't really have any details worth sharing about it atm, but I get the impression there might be a need/demand for that kind of game occasionally.

[fferyllt]

A survey like what zor used to do for large theme games might be a better approach. Mods could post a link in postgame, or someone could PM a link to players in completed games every couple weeks or once a month or something like that.

If it's not too much work to the listmod, I had in mind the listmod posting the survey as soon as the game is finished.

Waiting until the game has been archived is waiting too long in my opinion since even if you archive liberally, newbies aren't likely to read the game after the first 48 hours or so of postgame.

I think it's a multi-pronged data gathering approach that's needed

- find out how the game went and what could be improved (should be done quickly). This could be done posting a link in the game thread at postgame, or sending out a PM to all newbie participants, including ones who replaced out. The data we'd miss without directly reaching out to players who got partway through the game and threw in the towel is probably some of the data we most want, though.

- check back in after a month or so and find out how the transition to playing non-newbie games has gone

[fferyllt]

Why do you need an ic?
The are many good ic posts out there already. Can't one just be updated as a new generic post for the start of all games by the mod.

Have the mod and SE's share the burden of the ic slot.

Good ICs do more than this. They speak up when a "teachable moment" occurs. There is no way to lay out all the contingencies that can/are likely to come up in one post, and even if there were, a post that long and dense with general info not yet specific to the game would tend to be glossed over.

Good SEs (who are usually qualified to IC, too) could also speak up about how theory and the current gamestate apply, but that's not something that a player who might have as little as 3 games worth of experience should be expected to do. It would also basically require that all SEs agree to the constraints that ICs play under.

A mod could also speak up, but there are two problems with that - it eats away a little at the real (in the mod's head) and perceived (in the newbie players' heads) impartiality of the mod. And it also requires a level of paying attention to what's happening in the game that would be similar to an IC player's involvement. I know some mods follow their games almost as immersed as if they were playing, but it's not a requirement of them, and if it were it would probably cut down on the number of people willing to mod

[fferyllt]

90% of ICs are shit though.

If true, that's a problem to solve, but I don't think it's an argument for expecting SEs to play the way ICs are expected to play.