State of the Queue 2018

Klick · Post Post #120 (isolation #0) » Tue Feb 27, 2018 9:21 am

so uh

I know people have had issues with mods doing questionable things in their games recently. And making sure mods don't do anything that will piss players off is a good thing. But I think we're going a little too hard on the other extreme at the moment.
We've got a mod deficit. It's not that we don't have any mods, it's that these mods aren't completing their games in a time that matches player demand. I would reckon that many of these mods just aren't willing to go through the long, winding steps required to get a game they're happy with through the queue in such a short time. Adding more and more hoops for mods to jump through is only going to make that problem worse.

Quality in games is good. We're pretty well-known for having high-quality LSGs, and it's a good idea to try and keep that rep. But lower game quality is a problem that can be fixed with slight adjustments to the way the Queue works. We already have LSG mods looking over each game, it's easy enough to just get them to confirm the balance and twistiness of a game. We don't want to overdo it and have an unnecessarily intricate solution that creates an even bigger problem in mod supply.

I'd like to ask some upcoming mods with games in production: what are some of the issues that are stopping your game(s) from being ready sooner? Lack of co-mods, life issues, difficulty getting through the Queue with how it's structured, etc. We should be working toward fixing this problem, so it would be nice to know what's causing it.

Klick · Post Post #123 (isolation #1) » Tue Feb 27, 2018 10:09 am

The proposed solution being submitting certain aspects of your game to the LSG mods for ranking in how twisty they are? In reality, it doesn't create much more

work

at all for mods. But when mods have to send their games to the LSG mods and have them look at every little detail of the game before they can progress through the queue, that takes extra time and is another obstacle in the way of finally getting a game in the queue.

I think the game review thing is a smaller issue on top of a larger underlying problem. Mods have to go through a lot before they can even think about their game actually running. Using my own game as an example, had NAH been run under today's ruleset, I'm not sure it would have ever made it through the queue. Not because it wouldn't be good enough to run, but because the task of getting it through would have looked so daunting that I probably would have told CC I wasn't interested from the start. And I know that the current process has also stopped me and others from getting a few other game ideas off the ground, whether it be because I couldn't find co-mods (with the required experience) or because the idea of getting a game through the Queue seemed too arduous to accomplish.

The biggest issue, in my opinion, is the co-mod requirement. Look at the current list of games that need co-mods:

Spoiler:

Almost all of these teams are two-person teams just looking for a third for their idea. And I'd also argue that almost all of these teams would be basically fine to run as two-person teams, if we're being honest.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't necessarily agree with how stringent the modding requirements have become and some of our mod supply issues would be resolved if we cut back a little on that. Mod supply was never a problem until harsher mod requirements became the standard.