Planned Changes: Newbie Game Deadlines

[skitter30]

i personally think 14 day phases are overly long and aren't really necessary; days that go on that long tend to drag. it's not like people usually use all that time to come to a decision. I think that 7 days is long enough to think/deliberate/discuss without being rushed or making the day slog.

i do share the concern about the weekend thing; i'm v/la on weekends but i feel like there's a lot of people who are *more* active on weekends? maybe make weekends count as 24 hours? (which i suppose is equivalent to having an 8-day-long phase tho)

also i think newbie games sometimes have a not-insignificant amount of lurking/spells of low activity as newbies try to figure out what the heck they're supposed to be doing, and i think that super long dayphases don't help with that; there's little sense of urgency when you have literally two weeks to figure out what to do.

tldr: i like the change to shorter deadlines, but would prefer perhaps 8 days instead of 7 to accommodate for players who are v/la on weekends.

p-edit: 10 days for day1, and 7 days for later days would be cool too.

[skitter30]

you'd wait to start the clock till everyone posts?

sometimes people flake before/as they get their role PM and it can take a few days to get a replacement. i think i actually played a newbie game where that would have made the dayphase *longer* than 14 days iirc

[skitter30]

The strength of mafiascum, as I see it, is it's ability to cater to players who don't have the time available to post multiple times per day.

Our expectations have been that an active player makes at least one post a day

. If we set a one week deadline, that means that a player who meets those expectations will post 7 times during a single day. Is that enough to play the game?

i don't know if that's a super reasonable assumption; if people only post once each irl day i start wondering if they're active lurking and/or going to flake, depending on the content of that one post. and if people look like they're going to flake i'd prefer if they repped out earlier than later so that we don't have an empty slot for long periods of time later in the game.

like i feel like the argument 'ms caters to people who can't post super frequently and thus lowering deadlines in the newbie queue is not representative of the site as a whole' is kinda silly because i don't think that large numbers of such players, like, actually exist. beyond asking for an extension because of a replacement, i really can't think of a scenario where people were asking for a *longer* deadline. i can think of lots of times where people were complaining that the day was dragging and that they just wanted to come to a decision already, or that there's no reason to wait out the clock.

i feel like some of the people in this thread are talking about the typical player from like ten years ago or whatever, and not the players who actually play now.

There's something I call "the school rollover problem": changing the 5th-grade curriculum based on the results of the 5th-graders doesn't help anyone because next year it affects the current 4th-graders, who may be wildly different. In this context, we might be shortening the deadlines based on one group of newbies' preferences, but might end up later finding that the next group of newbies (the ones actually affected by the shorter deadlines) really want longer deadlines.

i really doubt that this is a problem; most people i talk to who don't like ms is because of the long deadlines and i can't imagine that trend will randomly change in the near future.