Problems with the Queues

[skitter30]

mini theme has been super slow over the past few months (barring a few exceptions)
i would say almost as slow as open queue

[northsidegal]

I do notice that there is some element of hypocrisy in my argument. I'm claiming that it's inefficient for opens that could be run in the open queue to be run elsewhere, and if we would only make it easier for them to be in the open queue then the total amount of games being played would increase. But this in some sense contradicts my earlier point that queues are valuable because they prevent splintering.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say that we got rid of the Mirco queue entirely. All of the games that would've otherwise been in the micro queue could still be run, they'd just be run in different queues: Micro Normals in the Normal queue, Micro Opens in the open, so on. The opposite of doing this would be introducing

more

queues--if, say, we split the Micro Queue into two separate queues, say the Micro General queue and the Micro Theme queue. Theoretically, one could argue for this using the same arguments that I'm using now: that having a Micro Theme queue would increase total games played because it'll free up games that would otherwise be in the Micro General queue, and so on. At the extreme end of this, we can imagine a separate queue for every game that would be run, whereupon we find that we don't really have any "queue" at all, we've actually gone to the "entirely separate signups" model. The same arguments that I'm using now with regards to efficiency and how Opens are blocking other queues, brought to an extreme conclusion, leads to exactly what I argued against before--a total lack of queues!

My only thought in response to this is probably just "meh, there's really no need to bring it to an extreme conclusion, there's probably some optimal middle ground".

anyways, this is all totally pointless musings and none of it matters at all i think with regards to the current discussion.

[Not Known 15]

Could be as extreme as an open game where the players vote for what setup to play after the game fills, or it could just be a monthly poll of what setups players want to play, to be posted for anyone considering modding an open.

The first option is not good; we don`t need mods avoiding the queue to avoid a specific setup, and we don`t need mods modding a game they don`t like either(which will drag down game quality).

[gobbledygook]

mini theme has been super slow over the past few months (barring a few exceptions)
i would say almost as slow as open queue

Which is odd because it used to be the most frequented game queue.

[Not Known 15]

mini theme has been super slow over the past few months (barring a few exceptions)
i would say almost as slow as open queue

Which is odd because it used to be the most frequented game queue.

The normal queue has lots of interesting possible role/modifier combinations and has the massive advantage of being properly reviewed; in that queue games are balanced and well done nearly all the time (although mistakes can still happen, they are rare) while the mini theme also hosts ... less reviewed setups. Or setups not everyone might like and take more time to fill(cult.....); and the micro themes are normally played in the micro queue anyways.

[northsidegal]

I think the Mini Theme queue is hit particularly hard by the moderator/player disparity, a problem that normals don't have at all and a problem that is fairly limited when it comes to opens. With Opens, if you're modding a pre-existing setup, there's almost certainly some subset of people who will be interested in playing: it may be a highly specific audience, as with a multiball setup, but

most

existing setups should have people willing to play. With a Mini Theme, your setup idea could potentially be a total miss with prospective players, leaving you "dead in the water" in the queue, I guess.

(this is somewhat unrelated to the open queue, although i guess the thread

is

"problems with the queues" and not "open queue reform")

[gobbledygook]

That makes sense.

[Churros]

As someone that has the Open Queue as it's favorite queue, and was disappointed to see its situation only getting worse day by day, I can try to give some insight on it.

Every queue has a different appeal and one of the reasons that you only see some players in a specific queue if you pay attention. The Open Queue appeal and difference is that its the most straightforward queue after the newbie. The setup is revealed from the start, therefore there's no claim shenanigans, fearmongering on PRs (for either team, for example no town PR worried of a sudden ninja or roleblocker, or a mafia worried about a unexpected role), and it also is straightforward on how balanced the setup to the players.

In a certain way, the Open Queue is "basic", but at the same time, that trait can be charming to some players (like me). Even though the queue is dead now, I remember witnessing the recently finished Purgatory setup be filled with acceptable speed. When I ask myself why, I end up with the idea that it's because Purgatory is an unique/fun setup but at the same time very simple. The kind of setup that shines on the queue. Look at the most popular setups of the open queue (White Flag, Purgatory, Jungle Republic, Forest Fire, etc) almost all of them have their unique twist or good interaction between roles

Lots of the Approved Open Queue setups are really boring though. They are basic like they are meant to be but they missed on the fun part. If I ask myself if I would like to mod one of those, the answer is probably no, I would only mod one of those to be able to go to another queue, and that's probably one of the reasons that the queue is empty. I think most of the players in the Open Queue would be new players or at least not veterans, which are often tired of same-y or small setups and go for large or complex games, but the Open Queue can't actually hold those new players because of its problems.

When I think about that, it might even affect player retention, because the normal setup has a lot more going for a newbie to understand than the Open one. As a newbie that played first in the Open Queue after my newbie, I remember finding the normal queue often confusing because I didn't know every role there was in the game, but the normal queue had a variety of them. T-Bone has a point about the Open Queue being newbie-friendly, but it probably shouldn't be only because the setups are too basic, but because all mechanics, possibilities and roles are properly explained from the start, which causes less confusion/shenanigans.

For that we would need to do what everyone already concluded: Changing the approved open setups. But there might be other stuff as well.

One thing that might help it more is to conciliate three things that the community seems to be enthusiastic about, what might make everyone happy (hopefully). Those three being:

1. More setups from the Month Challenges being run without being taxing
2. Reinvigorating the queue and as the staff wishes, making it have both player and new player retention
3. More marathon games

Ok, how to do it you might ask.

What about a Monthly, or Bi-Month (each 2 months), Marathon Weekend, in which the winning setup of the Month Challenge gets run?

The problem with trying to run approved open setups in the marathon weekends is that there's not enough players at the same time because of organization. You constantly get players to run smaller games, but only few shots on larger setups. While trying to always run the winner of the Month Challenge normally is too taxing, there's not enough mods, the queues aren't that fast and games often last a lot of time under normal deadlines.

However maybe all that could be solved by:

At the start of the Monthly Marathon, already open the sign up thread for the Approved Open Setup, the weekend beginning in a friday night or saturday morning, and this large game happening in sunday noon, which would be when most players would be available regardless of timezone. With that, this is what I see happening:

1. A wider acknowledgment and even introduction to some to the Monthly Challenges/Open Setup Discussion/Modding Discussions, especially to newer users that by playing some quick marathon games, might end up at the same time learning more about how the forum works and getting more active in the community.

2. A highlight for the Monthly Challenges, especially the winning setup, since currently lots of those cool setups don't get run anywhere, only getting archived in those threads.

3. A motive for people that aren't into modding discussion to actually participate in the feedback on the Monthly Challenges which would help to create more Open Setups that are attractive/fun to players.

4. A fun little event every month or each two months that players could look forward to. It may not look like it, but good/fun marathon games can be

very

memorable as recently shown, and they are a lot easier, quicker and simpler to get into. I've seen quite a lot of players that just signed up in the site to test out the marathon weekends when they are happening.

5. Give feedback and test the open setups to officially introduce them into the approved list, making the approved list more attractive to both players and mods.

It would almost work like an official or at least alternative process of approving new Open Setups.

The main beef against it is that I'm not sure doing it Monthly would work out, while I'm confident that doing it each 2 months would probably have always enough players, but it might not be frequently enough to actually draw the benefits of the idea to its true potential.

Another important point is to make a standard about the timing of those marathon weekends and announce them considerably early to accumulate interest and attention. Maybe always being in the last weekend (saturday/sunday) of the month is good enough, while opening the marathon forum for reading during the week (not for games, games would only be able to be run in saturday/sunday).

I really think it could work, with the biggest problem being who would run that winner marathon game. It shouldn't take much time though.

[Churros]

About the idea of adding 3 slots, I think it's sound although it can make such a slow queue even slower, but the micro idea might be a bad idea not only for damaging micro queue for little reason, but because those 3 slots can probably be utilized more optimally in my opinion by:

2 Open games in the approved setup list

1 Experimental open game by an experienced mod

That would:

1. Make sure that new mods aren't taking too long to get their first attempt at modding, avoiding them losing interest on it completely.
2. Making it very likely that, with a renewal of the setup list, there's an interesting, approved, balanced game in sign ups.
3. Making it possible for experimental open setups to be run in it's own "sub-queue", while at the same time not hurting the new mods or approved, standard setups sign ups.

[Ircher]

More marathon weekends? Sounds great to me!

That's a very good analysis churros.

[popsofctown]

I don't necessarily no why new mods can't mod heavily reviewed, untested setups. I think the thinking is that the mod's lack of following as a mod and the setup's lack of following as a setup would be additive and make it a queue clogger, but the copypasta nsg did from S_S showed that first time mods don't seem to have dramatically worse rates of filling and I'm not really sure untested setups fill slower in the open queue. I think they actually fill faster.
I would be okay with or even endorse maintaining a restriction that the mod didn't design the open game themselves, that would kind of safeguard against individuals who only want to mod to see some really edgy maybe too edgy idea get implemented, and even if stringent requirements on review were in place that could still lead to an average decline in quality as such mods eventually first-time mod the attempt that barely passed review. But, as it stands experienced mods are allowed to go through the backlog of deserving Monthly Design Concept high-rankers and mod them so that they see their first outing, but a first time mod is not able to, and I don't see a reason why not.

[northsidegal]

The Marathon Weekend Open Setup group already exists as a method to test new open setups during marathon weekends. As far as just having more marathon weekends I'm not going to comment, but as for whether or not it would serve to increase the amount that experimental setups are tested, I don't think that making it "official" would do anything that isn't already really being done.

[RadiantCowbells]

Ok but I think that we're missing the forest for the trees here
When we're talking about cutting queues instead of blaming a queue structure that has worked for years and years we need to talk about the underlying problem of why queues don't pop
and I think that problem is, very succinctly, people not queuing for games.

And we're in the middle of a quarantine where the amount of people who have free time available is at an all time high and we should be seeing more people playing but we're just... not
And I look at, like, secrethitler.io having to cancel signups due to overloaded servers and EM and a lot of resistance websites having the same problem and MU having this big resurgence but it's not happening here

there simply isn't either the amount of people coming to the site, people staying after their early newbie games, or long term player retention to maintain the site
We are on our last legs as a site due to sheer lack of participation / appeal / whatever and we're looking at bandaiding a solution rather than actually solving anything

[popsofctown]

The pedits reinforce that my take is apparently "spicy" with Churros mentioning "experimental" setups being run by an "experienced" mod. I just don't really see why those are coupled.
Amrun ran Fusion Mafia last year because it was one of the contest winners that hadn't gotten picked it up. A large number of people felt the balance looked okay which is why it made first that month. We played it and the postgame had a consensus that it's a little too townsided for it to get run again. But it wasn't like some sort of playing with dangerous chemicals, the setup wasn't awful, it was just a couple percentage points against the scum. If an inexperienced mod had run it I just don't see how it would have been particularly different. If the setup hadn't been run at all it would have been particularly different and that's kind of what's more likely to happen currently? If you want to support first time modding, it seems like it's probably more excited as a first time mod that if you joined site in April, someone you played with designs a game in July, the idea of being the one to trial it in November is more exciting than digging up Jungle Republic or something that hasn't been run since you started the site but that the veterans tell you "trust me it's some good mafia". It's not as contemporaneous and exciting.

There's nothing "experimental" about administrability, these are open setups. I've heard of really old setups having an action resolved incorrectly with the same rare frequency as a new open setup. Open setups divulge everything up front and dry ink and wet ink are equally easy to decipher.

[Churros]

The Marathon Weekend Open Setup group already exists as a method to test new open setups during marathon weekends. As far as just having more marathon weekends I'm not going to comment, but as for whether or not it would serve to increase the amount that experimental setups are tested, I don't think that making it "official" would do anything that isn't already really being done.

It actually would. The Marathon Weekend Open Setup really fails at its objective, because what is mostly run in marathons that have plenty of ground to quick testing, is much smaller games because most of the time it's a cyclic flux of players in different timezones, while in the sunday night or saturday night, at least one large is run because it reaches a peak of players, where a approved setup could be run.

Making it official and monthly or bi-monthly would also conciliate it a lot more with the Monthly Challenge's time frame, because currently we have 2 or 3 marathon weekends each year which is not nearly enough to test stuff since we only get 1 or 2 peak games with a decent size of playerlist to test such large setups of 15p or 13p.

The potential of connection on those things that way would be good in my opinion, that's how I view it.

[gobbledygook]

RC: Don’t those sites cater to marathon-speed games? I thought MS was always known as the slowest mafia site around. Unless there is a drastic change in how fast games run, we won’t be able to appeal to those types of players.

[skitter30]

i think there's been an uptick in players in the newbie queue over the last week or so

the other queues have been firing the same-ish as before i think

[OkaPoka]

I think this site whether you like it or not - is getting more and more suited to a faster meta, deadlines are moving down, people are posting more (don't quote me on that one)

Maybe we should split the queues on activity levels

[northsidegal]

As far as long term health of the site I have little to say. I'm certain that it's already apparent from my posts, but really my primary concern here is the Open queue. I will say that I think, regardless of the general matter of overall site health, the disparity in games being played between the Normal queue and the Open queue is indicative of some specific issue with the Open queue rather than just a symptom of a dying site.

Actually, I think I have little else to say on anything until T-Bone or other site administrators respond.

[Churros]

Pops untested setups for first mods is both a good and terrible idea and that's probably why we shouldn't do it.

It lets the Open Queue have the potential of having more unique games from the start, but it also will make the work of reviewers incredibly more taxing because imagine needing to talk it out with every newbie moderator why they can't put X or Y role in their setups or why they should change that, etc. It's what the normal reviewers already do for more experienced mods that go for that queue and doubling that demand for a small benefit of removing "one modded game" to join the experimental ranks isn't worth it. It's gonna make it slower and more taxing overall.

Making an attractive list of first setups to the first time mods and in their second run letting them go their own way seems more reasonable. I get your point though.

Another problem would be since they have no experience, even if balanced their setup might clog up the experimental queue itself with something that's not really "experimental", but mostly a slightly different version of a very standard setup which would only prejudice the testing of setups that might have more potential (I don't think anyone with a bit of experience would try designing an experimental setup similarly to a standard one, I envision that as more of a rookie mistake in which the newbie would insist on making "his own" setup, only to make something that already exists in the approved section, which would make the experimental queue pointless/ less useful) .

[popsofctown]

That is not what I said at all though, I specifically said allowing first time mods to run reviewed setups that a different user has designed, your whole post attacks a position I don't hold.

[OkaPoka]

untested setups for first time mods can be run in micro queue

[Churros]

That is not what I said at all though, I specifically said allowing first time mods to run reviewed setups that a different user has designed, your whole post attacks a position I don't hold.

I misunderstood in that case. I don't have an opinion about that point, other than I think to make the process easier overall, it would still be for the best to have first-time mods run it from a list they can select. But I don't know, what you said could work.

[popsofctown]

That is not what I said at all though, I specifically said allowing first time mods to run reviewed setups that a different user has designed, your whole post attacks a position I don't hold.

I misunderstood in that case. I don't have an opinion about that point, other than I think to make the process easier overall, it would still be for the best to have first-time mods run it from a list they can select. But I don't know, what you said could work.

I'm still fine with giving people a list when they come to the queue asking for resources. But if someone shows up to the queue wanting to run a reviewed setup someone else made that hasn't been run yet, I want that unbanned.
Basically I think the first time modding rule should be rewritten to "as a first time mod, you cannot run a setup you have designed".
A setup needing to be reviewed applies to everyone anyway.

[OkaPoka]

what if newbie mods can run micro opens that are approved by some form in the open queue even if its designed by them