It's been a very slow year for large social games, which given everything is to be expected. We thank everyone for running the games they have this year. Of the games we've had, all 6 had a mod that ran at least 2 if not 3 of the others. The small pool of mods is a bit of a problem, and not one we're certain how to fix other than modding even more games ourselves. So we would like to put it to you the community, how would you suggest we can fix this problem of a low modding pool?
We have heard a few suggestions already. Some of these are:
-Keeping an updated list in the OP of the Theme Market that includes everyone who is interested in comodding a game but may not want to or feel confident in doing all parts of the job. For example, some folks who are willing to do art and other assets but that's all they can contribute, or people who are interested in design but not able for whatever reason to run a game themselves, or who just want to be a part of the actual running of a game. This is a suggestion we're likely going to implement, and keep an eye out for a thread announcing this change or how to join any of the lists.
-Having a second queue which is geared towards non-anons or more challenge-oriented games that doesn't need to wait for the bigger LSG queue proper. While we like this idea and it's absolutely one we intend to consider, we still need to have games to fill it. If there's a lack of interest in this, it might not help resolve the problem.
-Because everything that goes into modding a game sounds incredibly intimidating for someone to just jump into, and some of what is daunting is all that goes into the permissions for running and creating a board and that the forum creation guide is out of date since Zetaboards no longer exists- Our very own CreativeMod1 has been working on a spreadsheet to automate a lot of the process. A similar one was used by the PCW mod team and he was working on expanding it to include Simple Machines should we ever be able to figure out how those work well enough to hand out boards that are hosted through MS. You can find it here! But this spreadsheet aside, are there other resources that could help games get designed or actually finished rather than remaining in queue limbo?
On the playerbase front, we are doing well, but could do better at preparing our newbies on what LSGs are and how to succeed in them. Silverclaw has been working on updating the Large Social Game glossary on the wiki with a lot of terms we use regularly (and is always looking for more suggestions). The newbie guide as we have has always been a good resource, and when he ran his recent non-anon, zoraster wrote up a really good quick and dirty guide post on playing. But are there other things we don't already have which could help more and make first games more enjoyable, and games in general more enjoyable? The resources we currently have are here
After Flash Mob, there will be a delay in any game running until after the holidays. Barely Survivor Survivor is slated to finish design work and be set to run very soon after New Year's, and with luck Pantheon will be prepared to run afterwards. So if you have a game already in Milestone 1 in queue, now is absolutely the time to put work in. If you've been working on something and you aren't in the queue yet, definitely join it! If you weren't sure that you'd have a chance to run your project for a long time, that is not a worry you need to have.
We have the Anonymous Character Poll coming up here soon too. A lot of the previous games of the year can already be voted on if you haven't already, and CaptainMeme and Malkon05 are hard at work planning for the ceremony when they release it, likely in mid-January.
Silverclaw has also revived the Crazy Scores system for players in LSGs. Unlike ELOs, it judges players according to voting records. We haven't seen these in a couple years so we're happy to see them make a return. VashtaNeurotic also took over updating ELOs for games from CC this past year so we'll also have those stats around too.
And that's where we're at currently. Please give us your input on the above ideas, what you would like to see, and any problems that we're not seeing and could be improved. Thank you for playing and running games and being part of this community, it couldn't run without you.
Mish Mash:
Since we're doing a Large Social Games update (which you can find above), we wanted to give an update on Mish Mash as well. You all have been killing it on the running games front. This is the most continually active with new games this section being in a long while, and it's all thanks to you all. We have no real concerns at this time, but would like to take the time to ask you all if there's anything you think we need over here aside from continual updating of the Ongoing Games OP (which xofelf will update soon). I would ask that if there's ever any concerns or problems you remember that we, the listmods, are here for you to contact at any time, so please do
If threads should be archived or removed from the Ongoing Games list, do let us know as well. Thank you all for playing and running games and we hope you continue to do so and have fun. If you're looking for a game to join in on, Codenames and Identity Reboot can always use more involvement.~The Mish Mods