So, just to clarify: we had
35
player applications for Hyrule, and 20
spectator applications. And this was only in the short window we left signups open... I had even more people PM me after the fact stating that they wish they had known about it. Hyrule was a pretty special case where we went from signups open to closed within 48 hours, then had the game open within another 48 hours. I don't know what caused the response to be so overwhelming: I do know a lot of people who applied were first-timers, so it may have been my involvement with it since I have friends who signed up, or it may have been the theme being such a popular one, or it may have been the waiting list for NAH swarming on this game since it was going in before NAH.Regardless, though, there were more people than we could possibly accomodate, and that's with our game being larger than most at 24 players. However, there's an issue with trying to run multiple anonymous games at once, and that is that either you'll have players signing up for both (and with the massive time commitment, I don't know that it's a great idea) or you'd have people be strictly separated into two different games. And if those games don't end at the same time, then we'd still have an issue of one group playing with one group while another group played with another group, and that ruins the point of the anonymity of Survivor.
What could work, however, is allowing a "massive" Survivor game (like 17+ players) to run at the same time as 1-2 smaller social games (The Mole usually runs 10-14 people; Big Brother is usually in that same range). I think you could just let these games sit in "queue" until they fill... meaning, they sit there until they sit there. That way, if there IS an overabundance of players for one of the tentpole Survivor games, the overflow can still get their fill of anonymous social mayhem by playing one of the smaller ones to hold them over until the next Survivor goes into signups.
There's also something worth saying about the fact that after ~1 month, the current Survivor game has usually dumped a significant portion of its playerlist. Perhaps we could, theoretically, have two Survivor games going at the same time, as long as the second one didn't get rolling until the current one had lost a good portion of its playerlist?