Is it time to dissolve the newbie queue?

[Thestatusquo]

For as long as I've been a member of this site, the newbie queue has been a constant. It served several roles. Generally, it helped new players become accustomed to the unique way we play mafia here on this site, it provided a proving ground for a vast influx of new players that acted as a buffer between players who are more likely to flake and the general queues, it let players who were nervous about jumping right in to the regular queues get their feet wet first and it was also a place where people learned the basics of mafia if they have never played before. In general, there was high demand for these things and the queue fired frequently, often leading to shortages of both moderators and IC players to guide the newbies during the game.

It is my contention that the queue no longer fills those roles and further to the point, there is no longer the strong demand for the queue to justify its existence, and the slowness of the queue is more likely to turn newbies away than it is to make them stay on the site.

The basics:
In the past 36 days, the queue has fired 7 times. This is a rate of about once every 5 days. That is a tremendously long wait time for a new player who is just joining the site to have to wait to play a game. We live in an age of instant gratification and plenty of other options. If you sign up for something new and you're excited to try it out you don't wait 5 days to do so. Directing newbies to a specific queue where they have to wait long times to get in their first game makes it more likely they will leave the site without actually playing. This is not good.

More to the point, lets look at some of the other purposes. I would argue that a lot of them do not exist anymore.

First, as MS has become less about the original group of people who first started playing here who moved over with Mith from GL, MSs style has become less unique. I would argue that the way mafia is played here is not that unique anymore. We've adopted a lot of the standard things that make mafia the same in a bunch of different places: faster deadlines being the big example. The meta on this site isn't drastically different from other sites that I've looked at, which is largely a function of mafiascum sourcing most of its most active members from other sites. At the same time, the prevalence of the MS wiki has also made it so that the way that Mafia is played on other sites is more like how its played here than it used to be.

As previously noted, there is no longer a massive influx of newbies. The queue is not frequently firing, so the demand for games for explicitly new players is no longer there.

The problem with newer players flaking is less of a problem if there are fewer newer players. Say if we got 40 new players in a week and they all jumped into the queue and half flaked each week that would be a disaster. Since we no longer have that many new players per week it would be less disastrous if they flaked.

I think if this is still a concern (albeit a mitigated one) its goal could be much better achieved by implementing a limit on the number of games new players may play rather than directing them to queues that never fire.

The last two issues are also less of a concern. As mentioned previously, with the prevalence and comprehensiveness of the wiki players know more about mafia when they start playing than they ever have before. It's just much more rare to get players who had literally never played before, or who had played once on an unrelated forum and then found us via google searching mafia. Simply put, our newbies are less clueless than they used to be.

tl;dr:

The newbie queue does not fire quickly enough. This is indicative of a lack of demand for the queue. Many of the reasons we had the queue in the first place are no longer true, and even if they were true, directing new players to a queue where they may have to wait around a week to join their first on site game is not an effective way to retain new players.

It's time to get rid of the newbie queue.

[Raskolnikov]

Normal queue for minis is still pretty decent for newbies, when I joined I had an early mini and the experienced players were really helpful to me there.

[Spiffeh]

I believe that this is a good idea and deserves consideration from people that matter more than I do

[ironstove]

A lot of the people signing up for the newbie queue are not even newbies, I think it's just a formality and some players like to create multis to play as newbies in the queue.

I do think it's kind of redundant. I think maybe we should let people sign a general queue and people looking for non-newbies/higher skilled/more serious gameplay in mafia should join a separate queue.

It's counter-intuitive to have newbies join their own queue, rather than mix with everyone else. I agree we could restructure it, but with that said things have worked fine so far IMO, so I don't have a strong desire to see this change occur.

[mhsmith0]

IMO the newbie queue serves a few purposes:

1) Push people who are highly likely to flake and/or just not like playing mafia out of the rest of the site
2) Give newer players a chance to play games where a majority of the people are at or near their experience level
3) Give newer players a chance to play games with a slot that is there specifically to help them learn and (theoretically) give them an example of quality play in a game that may or may not otherwise have people who particularly know what they're doing (even if the level of ICing can sometimes leave a lot to be desired [IMO], the fact still remains that those games DO serve as an area where teaching and feedback are relevant, whereas in basically any other queue you're going to really struggle to ever see any kind of useful/constructive criticism)

Essentially, I don't think that the gains from those 3 items are especially swamped by the problems inherent in having a somewhat lengthier amount of time between when people /in and when games start. I'd agree that the length of time issue is worth trying to figure out something for (allowing people to do 3 newbie games as newbies was a partial potential solution, but it's fairly clear that this isn't actually making that issue go away), but I don't think "kill the newbie queue" is really the answer.

[Thestatusquo]

I literally already covered those things in some detail. Restating them does nothing to defeat the arguments I made.

[mhsmith0]

I don't think you'd really covered #s 2 and 3 at all, much less in detail (obviously you discussed the 1 issue at length)? Saying that there are fewer true newbies, and that the wiki contains resources that some people who ARE true newbies might use, doesn't really diminish the value to (some) newbies in having game formats where most people are at similar still/experience levels, and where there is (sometimes) an actual emphasis on learning/teaching.

Fundamentally, the substantial argument you made is that a firing rate of 5 days is substantially too small, and that this turns off newbies. Is there any evidence that this is really the case? I guess if this is an idea to be taken seriously (and I think it's a fine thing to discuss even if I currently disagree with your conclusion), having surveys among the people who HAVE been newbies would probably be useful, in terms of how much of a turnoff the wait time was, whether they felt that the newbie game format was conducive to learning, what they think might have been more effective for their experience both in terms of learning and enjoyment, etc.

[Ircher]

I would say the wait time (though it's been a long while for me) is somewhat higher than some of the other queues (notably the mini normal queue). I agree with mhsmith though that that alone is not enough to kill it.

[mastina]

and some players like to create multis to play as newbies in the queue.

This is explicitly against the rules and in fact is actually considered a form of cheating. I mean, they can take newbie slots as a replacement legally, but /inning as a newbie when actually an alt is against the rules.

I would say the wait time (though it's been a long while for me) is somewhat higher than some of the other queues (notably the mini normal queue). I agree with mhsmith though that that alone is not enough to kill it.

Ditto this, but also worth mentioning: the Newbie Queue Listmod has one of the highest turnover rates as of recently. We've had more changes in the Newbie Queue's Listmod than we have had in any other Queue's listmod.

Not only is every transitioning period a time where things are obviously going to be done at less-than-optimal efficiency, but also the relative lack of experience helps contribute to, as it were, taking time to get settled into the position. The Newbie Queue also has more work than most other queues. There's ICs to track (we have a whole forum which is underused for it even), there's newbies to check, there's lots of problems that occur in newbie games that the listmod has to take care of which usually won't happen in other queues, and so on and so forth.

It's a really hard job. A really, really hard position. And it takes a fair amount of time to get into it. I'm willing to bet that one or two years down the road, if PenguinPower is still our Newbie Queue listmod, that the queue will be running at an improved efficiency on par with other queues or even exceeding said rates.

The wait time is a bit of an issue, but it is a symptom of a problem that can be fixed easily and which by my understanding PenguinPower is working on fixing. (More or less, the problem isn't any one particular thing, so much as it is a combination of things. Needing better advertisement, needing a better environment, needing more or some things, needing higher quality players and/or higher quality teachers to set better examples to newbies, and so on and so forth.)

When you have an infection on a limb, you don't chop the limb off. You find the appropriate antibiotic, and you let your immune system do the rest. That's more or less what I think we should be doing, and from my understanding it's more or less what we

are

doing. It's not going to be an overnight success, but it's a long-term battle which I feel is worth fighting and can be won.

[Thestatusquo]

I think literally all of that is irrelevant to the reason the queue hasn't fired, which is that there is a shortage of newbies. It's not like theres a huge crowd of clamouring newbies who are not having their needs met because of mod turnover or lack of efficiency, even if those things do exist.

And actually, yes. When something is unnecessary you get rid of it. I see literally no reason for the newbie queue to continue existing other than "we've always had one."

When something stops having a purpose, you don't keep pretending it does for no reason.

[Firebringer]

I agree with the op.

[callforjudgement]

One thing that bothers me here is that the claim is that a 5-day wait is too long for newbies. That might be true, but on the other hand, that seems really fast for a queue over here. Typically if I /in for a game, I'd be expecting to wait a few weeks before it was ready.

Maybe I just play in slow queues, but my worry is that without the newbie queue, finding a small game that's appropriate for a newbie will be very difficult because it'll fire even slower. We'd probably have to compensate by putting many more "newbie-friendly" setups into the Micro queue and trying to encourage more experienced people to join them; Micro and Mini Normal are the only two queues which I feel are easy to accommodate newbies, and I'm not aware of either firing particularly quickly.

[Thestatusquo]

What is "appropriate for a newbie."

What does that mean to you?

They're not 5, they just haven't played mafia on this site before.

[SpyreX]

I think most could be done by simply placing the core setups as common in the open queue and mods vetting.

[Eddie Cane]

What is "appropriate for a newbie."

What does that mean to you?

They're not 5, they just haven't played mafia on this site before.

some setups are more confusing than others

[Lycanfire]

I'd imagine Newbies would perform much the same in the Normal queue (which they are able to jump to if they want). The main difference is that I think they would perform much worse on their second game, because site culture finds shitplay acceptable.

[Zachrulez]

I mean the general premise for killing the queue is a lack of demand from the OP. The argument seems really shaky when you consider the whole history of the queue and just it's period of peak demand.

Edit: viewtopic.php?p=25923#p25923

It's probably worth reading this post even all these years later.

"This forum could be considered a test-drive for the site, as well as a place to learn as you play. It has been created to enable those new to mafiascum to jump right into a game, while receiving all the help and coaching they ask for. Hopefully, these games will help with learning the basics of rules, strategies and roles. Asking questions of our more experienced players is fine (and encouraged) during game play, and nobody should worry about their mistakes ruining anybody's fun."

What do you think happens to newbie membership to the site once you take away these things? It's easy to say they have no value, but I think that's cheapening what the existence of the queue actually does.

You're not going to get any of the kind of help offered in the newbie queues in a game outside the newbie queue... so let's not even pretend like any of these things will be provided to newbies (and if they were that it would be anywhere near the level of the newbie queue.) if we ever actually did chuck the queue.

[Zachrulez]

Also adopting smaller setups like a 7p newbie setup would reduce the number of newbies required to start a newbie game from 6 players to 4.

I'm not trying to pretend like that's an easy answer here if activity is really a problem, but that would make it easier to start more games and reduce waiting time when/if that's a problem.

[Plotinus]

In the past 86 days, the open queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 17 days.
In the past 56 days, 5 large theme games have entered sign ups, at a rate of once every 11 days
In the past 41 days, the micro queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 8 days.
In the past 33 days, the mini theme queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 7 days.
In the past 31 days, the normal queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 6 days.
In the past 29 days, the newbie queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 6 days.

The newbie queue is the most active queue.

[Plotinus]

Also, newbie games need a ton of replacements because newbies forget about the site or realise mafia isn't really their thing. The amount of replacements would really be untennable in other queues, but we get replacements pretty quickly in the newbie queue. I've modded newbie games that had upwards of 20 different people playing in them because of all the replacements, but I was able to find replacements within a day all of the time -- usually i get 2-3 SEs PM me within a few minutes of putting out the request and then I wait a day for a newbie (and often find one) and then the slot is filled. In another queue, this wouldn't be feasible at all. Imagine all those people flaking from a game in another queue. it would take weeks to fill all those slots and the game would probably be abandoned.

[Lil Uzi Vert]

Me and Shea surprisingly agree on something.

The Open Queue needs to go too as well. Demand for that has ceased entirely.

[Alisae]

Yo why don't we take out all of the queues while we're at it.

[Lil Uzi Vert]

Maybe word has spread around the Internet that site meta has gone down the drain? I know a lot of newbies aren't a fan of 2 week deadlines so when you couple that with potentially being introduced to current site meta through SEs and even ICs in your first game, it's very very hard to want to continue playing on this site.

[Thestatusquo]

In the past 86 days, the open queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 17 days.
In the past 56 days, 5 large theme games have entered sign ups, at a rate of once every 11 days
In the past 41 days, the micro queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 8 days.
In the past 33 days, the mini theme queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 7 days.
In the past 31 days, the normal queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 6 days.
In the past 29 days, the newbie queue has fired 5 times, at a rate of once every 6 days.

The newbie queue is the most active queue.

Is it time to dissolve mafia scum dot net?

Although, you clearly changed the time you used to further point. If you extend those queues out to the same time frame I used for the newbie queue three of the queues are more frequent than newbies.

[Thestatusquo]

I think most could be done by simply placing the core setups as common in the open queue and mods vetting.

Maybe that would help the open queue fire more frequently than every 17 days jeeeeeeesus.