State of the Queue 2018

For large social games such as Survivor where the primary mechanic is social interaction.
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Post Post #1 (isolation #0) » Mon Jan 29, 2018 3:30 pm

Post by BROseidon »

I will mostly speak to #1. I think we've had this convo on Skype before, Xof, but it'll get things started here:

We should have some sort of standard scale to describe how "out there" at Survivor game is. A lot of the complaints around both MLS and Civ had to do with the fact that the games were more complex or more, err, out there than normal, without that expectation being set up front. Having some sort of objective set of standards by which a game can be measured and advertised with feels necessary. For example, we could decide that the baseline for a game is:

1) No more than 1 idol/starting tribe + 1 and 1 additional non-idol item
2) No more than 2 swaps
3) No ability to interact across tribes outside of challenges
4) The ability to PM
5) 1 person, 1 vote (barring items)
6) No ability for dead players to return
7) The only form of elimination is being voted out
8) No more than 1 player is eliminated via not being voted out

Then we could say that if a game follows all of these guidelines, it is considered basic. If it breaks 1-2, it's considered standard. If it breaks 3-4, it's considered complex, and if it breaks 5+, it's considered bastard. Note that I don't think this is literally the scale that we should implement (it would have Civivor as more bastard than MLS, which feels wrong), but it's just an example to get the conversation rolling.
Last edited by BROseidon on Mon Jan 29, 2018 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Post #3 (isolation #1) » Mon Jan 29, 2018 3:36 pm

Post by BROseidon »

I don't think it's bad to do things that are out there (I still stand by the core premise of MLS not being implicitly terrible, although a lot about that game could have used editing from a pretty objective standpoint), but transparency about how out there something is is important (the warning I gave for MLS should have been something along the lines of "the premerge will not involve voting anyone out, but instead be a long-term challenge with social elements")
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Post Post #15 (isolation #2) » Mon Jan 29, 2018 5:19 pm

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Okay guys I'm running Solitary I hope you all enjoy it*

*I am not actually running Solitary
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Post Post #19 (isolation #3) » Mon Jan 29, 2018 6:08 pm

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In post 16, xRECKONERx wrote:Hey, if there's a need for it, cool beans.
While I love Solitary the TV show and would totally host a Solitary meet, it would make a garbage forum game.
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Post Post #24 (isolation #4) » Tue Jan 30, 2018 5:45 am

Post by BROseidon »

In post 22, MattP wrote:Seems complicated to create a quantifiable scale when there are like 5 survivor games a year, why not just have the social mods mandate a specific warning be in place for games that are bastard like what exists for mafia games. I trust the social mods to have judgment about what is an appropriate warning for different games

Seems like a lot of unnecessary work to create this scale and it adds a layer of complication I dont think needs to exist

Im a grinch
Alternatively: Have the mods put down on paper how they would make that call in a consistent way so that people can't bitch about the mods being unfair later.
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Post Post #34 (isolation #5) » Tue Jan 30, 2018 8:55 am

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The whole reason to have an explicit set of standards is to have everyone on the same page about definitions so that we don't have that exact problem.

"Leave it to people's judgment," even if it's the same people every time, leads to people ultimately complaining because it didn't match what they thought. We should give everyone the same rubric to work off of.
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Post Post #43 (isolation #6) » Wed Jan 31, 2018 4:13 pm

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Okay but would people actually play Solitary though?
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Post Post #47 (isolation #7) » Wed Jan 31, 2018 4:47 pm

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In post 44, Vijarada wrote:is solitary a social game? because while our games do all emulate reality tv shows, they don't have to, and that's not what defines the lsg queue.
The joke is that it's very much
not
a social game. Like that's kind of the whole point.
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Post Post #53 (isolation #8) » Thu Feb 01, 2018 5:33 am

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IMO it's good to have a diversity of games in terms of mechanical complexity. Last year the pendulum definitely swung towards mechanics-heavy, and now I can sort of feel it swinging back in response to games like MLS and Civ.
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Post Post #54 (isolation #9) » Thu Feb 01, 2018 5:33 am

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Like having games that test new shit is good, but it's a problem when every single game is like that (which we saw last year for sure)
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Post Post #64 (isolation #10) » Fri Feb 02, 2018 2:37 am

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Eh dead players getting to vote out living players was pretty game-changing at a fundamental level.

Although it did give us Rend Blackhand which was lulz.
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Post Post #66 (isolation #11) » Fri Feb 02, 2018 4:09 am

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I think the warnings were enough from a plausible deniability standpoint, but that we were not transparent about the specific nature of the "dead players in pre-merge may be able to vote you out."

Even an oblique reference to "how you treat people matters" would have done the trick, IMO
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Post Post #67 (isolation #12) » Fri Feb 02, 2018 4:09 am

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Like some knowledge of that twist would have probably very changed how people played the game
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Post Post #75 (isolation #13) » Fri Feb 02, 2018 6:14 am

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The point I was trying to make is that there's also a difference between a returning player who will play rationally to their own interests vs players returning with no skin in the game so they are 100% going to fuck with people
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Post Post #97 (isolation #14) » Fri Feb 02, 2018 6:27 pm

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I mostly play Survivor like an AI plays Go.
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Post Post #99 (isolation #15) » Fri Feb 02, 2018 7:07 pm

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AlphaGo is actually the best Go player in the world so...
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Post Post #116 (isolation #16) » Sat Feb 03, 2018 4:51 pm

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In post 114, hiplop wrote:Bro did it
Technically it was BPC but yah
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Post Post #129 (isolation #17) » Tue Feb 27, 2018 11:16 am

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One thing I will say wrt the modding requirements is that, if we do drop the 3-mod requirement, we should still have a bailout plan if something happens to one mod. For example, Reck having to deal with car shit during Nexus would have had a much bigger impact on how that game was run if there had only been 2 mods.
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