Game Classifications

For large social games such as Survivor where the primary mechanic is social interaction.
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Post Post #50 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 2:48 pm

Post by BROseidon »

What I'm getting here is that our standards aren't meaningfully differenting between our games.

Which means we are all designing to the same complexity, or some of our standards need to be reworked.
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Post Post #51 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:07 pm

Post by BROseidon »

In post 40, Haschel Cedricson wrote:Swaps and Shakeups: 2. There were multiple swaps at unpredictable times.
We should maybe define the swaps one a bit more because I hard-disagree with this and think anything 2-swaps and below should be a 0 and that 3 or 4 swaps should be a 1.
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Post Post #52 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:12 pm

Post by PrivateI »

In post 51, BROseidon wrote:
In post 40, Haschel Cedricson wrote:Swaps and Shakeups: 2. There were multiple swaps at unpredictable times.
We should maybe define the swaps one a bit more because I hard-disagree with this and think anything 2-swaps and below should be a 0 and that 3 or 4 swaps should be a 1.
Also this depends on the size of the game though.

Something like <=16, 1 swap; 16-20, 2 swaps; 20+, 3 swaps?
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Post Post #53 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:20 pm

Post by Cephrir »

I think 3 swaps should qualify as a lot
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Post Post #54 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:21 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Here's a few looks at the formula.

Image
Standard Deviation: 2.610

Image
Standard Deviation: 3.338

Image
Standard Deviation: 2.217

Image
Standard Deviation: 2.353

Image
Standard Deviation: 3.194

My reasoning for those formulas is I figure Mechanics/Twists is the most important one to know about and Eliminations or Swaps are factors but ultimately not the most important ones.
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Post Post #55 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:23 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

In post 51, BROseidon wrote:
In post 40, Haschel Cedricson wrote:Swaps and Shakeups: 2. There were multiple swaps at unpredictable times.
We should maybe define the swaps one a bit more because I hard-disagree with this and think anything 2-swaps and below should be a 0 and that 3 or 4 swaps should be a 1.
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Post Post #56 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:23 pm

Post by D3f3nd3r »

My opinion is that you’re allowed one swap per four rounds of the pre-merge without getting any twist points (meaning you’re allowed one if your pre-merge is four rounds or less, two if it’s eight or less, three if it’s between nine and twelve, and four if it’s anything more than that. Being in a tribe for three to four rounds is perfectly fine, but when you get to more than that consistently it can get unwieldy.

Size should matter but so should the merge timing.
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Post Post #57 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:37 pm

Post by Shadoweh »

My opinion on this is the minute you introduce swaps you're introducing twist points because, if y'all recall, survivor didn't originally have swaps at all.
The part where we think 3-4 swaps is normal is the part where our normal meters are broken.
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Post Post #58 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:41 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Swap were introduced by season 3, though. I think one is not twisty at all. If anything, I would say 0 swaps is as twisty as 2 swaps.
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Post Post #59 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 3:50 pm

Post by Shadoweh »

No, absolutely not. You're saying that from the perspective of how we expect 2 or more so 0 would surprise people. But looking at it purely from a game-building perspective instead of people's expectations, any time you swap it's a twist that changes the game state from what it is to something else unexpected and often out of the player's control. 26 seasons had swaps which means 17 didn't, weighted towards early seasons, and of those 5 have had two.
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Post Post #60 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:04 pm

Post by hiplop »

2 swaps is a lot more than 1 swap.
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Post Post #61 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:14 pm

Post by D3f3nd3r »

But also, the show tends to have 18-20 players whereas our games are getting bigger and bigger.
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Post Post #62 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:34 pm

Post by zoraster »

Also consider that as a PLAYER, a swap is ALWAYS at least somewhat "twisty" because it fundamentally changes the calculus of how the game is being played. Everyone anticipates there being a tribal merge and plans around that. IF there are 3+ tribes and a lot of people, you might figure there's an early merge to go to 2 and plan around THAT.

But swaps are different because they can happen almost any time and are pretty hard to plan around.
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Post Post #63 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:36 pm

Post by PrivateI »

In post 61, D3f3nd3r wrote:But also, the show tends to have 18-20 players whereas our games are getting bigger and bigger.
Bigger and bigger seems inaccurate. One of the last few games, as well as the game currently in signups, has had 16 players.
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Post Post #64 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:45 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

At any rate a single swap, while not "vanilla", should certainly be considered "standard" for 1 point instead of "complex" for 2 points.
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Post Post #65 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:03 pm

Post by PrivateI »

Forgive me if this is completely off-topic, but I want to offer some pushback to the idea of doing this in the first place. Are any players, besides seasoned players, complaining about the complexity of new games? I realize that there have been some missteps in the last year, but I feel like this could be a step back rather than a step forward, for a few reasons.

First of all, I feel like mods, in general, are relatively open about entirely new game mechanics. Civvivor notwithstanding, games that had fundamental differences such as One World and MLS were fairly transparent about what was going to be happening in their games. Even Civvivor didn't fundamentally change the game--it just introduced a lot of elements at once that, in retrospect, may have been ill-advised. So I guess the question is, what is this trying to prevent?

My larger concern is that the LSG Queue would become similar to the American education system. That is, just like American schools have been criticized for "teaching to the test" when standardized tests have been implemented, having a standardized rating system could lead us to a queue where mods try to compose a game with either as high or as low a score as possible, and that seems suboptimal. I think we could readily see people making more barebones games, or games with increasing complexity, in an attempt to attract a specific kind of player.

With that said, I don't think having a rating system is the worst thing we could possibly do, but I think we should have a bit more dialogue about the reason for doing it before implementing something that could completely shake up how games work on MS.
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Post Post #66 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:04 pm

Post by BROseidon »

This isn't about designing to complexity and more about effectively communicating to players how potentially "complex" a game is.
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Post Post #67 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:10 pm

Post by PrivateI »

I'd still want to know if that's warranted. It seems like this is an overreaction to a problem that, by and large, hasn't existed in games to this point. Like I said, your own game, MLS, was pretty straightforward with what was going to be happening, people (including myself) just didn't read rules, and some people chose to bitch about it. I just don't really know where the idea that we need a model that conforms to every game is coming from, and would like to spend some time talking about the "why" rather than the "how".
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Post Post #68 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:14 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

MLS was not straightforward with what was going to be happening during the signup phase, which was the problem. During a game none of this matters at all. During the signup phase? It matters a lot.
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Post Post #69 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:25 pm

Post by PrivateI »

"Portions of this game are heavily non-standard. Because of the upfront nature in which these will be presented, we refrain from calling the game bastard. Nevertheless, be aware that the conventions that you are used to will be largely broken."

I don't know what we would want to communicate with a number that wasn't communicated here.
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Post Post #70 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:28 pm

Post by hiplop »

In post 65, PrivateI wrote:That is, just like American schools have been criticized for "teaching to the test" when standardized tests have been implemented, having a standardized rating system could lead us to a queue where mods try to compose a game with either as high or as low a score as possible, and that seems suboptimal.
i dont think anyone would do this

also mls was a ridiculously bigger departure than ur sayin
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Post Post #71 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:40 pm

Post by PrivateI »

MLS was a big departure from "normal" Survivor. I'm not discounting that. I'm saying the following:

1. MLS was a one-off. Do we need another enhancement to a system where, now, games have to go through a "Queue and Review" process to get played?

2. Is there a scenario where a single number is going to communicate more than "Portions of this game are heavily non-standard...the conventions you are used to will be largely broken?" If not, then this classification system is useless to even limit the one (1) unique aberration we've had in MS history.

3. The only game besides MLS that would likely be referred to is Civvivor. And, yes, Civvivor had a lot of unique elements. But the fact is, we've had "twistier" games, with the same levels of disclosure. No one complained, for example, about Hogwarts. So what is the difference?
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Post Post #72 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:55 pm

Post by BROseidon »

The problem is that Civivor was super twisty while being communicated as explicitly not-twisty because the mods legitimately thought the game wasn't "that bad."

The point of this is creating a standard so that when the signup says "this game is X twisty" everyone is on the same page as to what that means. Even if two people may disagree on what "highly twisty" means, having an agreed upon standard means that I at least know that when a game is called "X twisty" I have some reference of what that means.
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Post Post #73 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 6:09 pm

Post by hiplop »

I loved MLS. I wish I knew I was signing up to something like that.

I don't get why you think "players get what they are going to play" is a bad thing ever
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Post Post #74 (ISO) » Mon Feb 12, 2018 10:04 pm

Post by KingdomAces »

The premerge for MLS flat out was not Survivor. There's an argument for saying that it was barely even a social game. There's a difference between conventions being broken and it actually being something else entirely. That being said, I think I remember the biggest complaints being that jigsaws made the game overly reliant on a single skill, and the fact that there was constantly 19 other people to talk to with no way to trim that number down was way more relationship juggling than anyone was prepared for, and that created psychological problems worse than any twist possibly could. The mechanics themselves were much less of an issue than I think people are currently implying.

I kind of agree with PI that implementing a system like this could actively change how games are designed, rather than just how they are presented, though I think Movie/TV Show/Video Game age ratings are a more applicable comparison. If producers know that they are going to be getting the maximum rating, that gives them licence to go way overboard with the mature content, even when it's completely unnecessary. (Noting that I'm not anywhere close to being an expert on the subject, and that pretty much everything I can say would be hearsay. I'm only like 80% sure that has been an actual issue.)

How any of this should affect any official policies, I'm not sure. I spent way too long writing this so now I'm burnt out. I may or may not consolidate this and make a point/suggestion later. I think I had one initially, but I've long since forgotten what it was.
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