First, a quick chronology of the queue:
I joined the site in 2015. Even if I look back at games run before that, I can't really pretend to have a good handle on how things felt back then.
When I joined, the site was in the time I would call the "golden age of opens." (I don't know when it started; input from older users would be much appreciated.) During this time, the open queue seemed to be fairly popular, and there was a core of classic setups that were getting run all the time. It's hard to tell exactly when this ended, but I would guess around early 2018. It seemed like the queue slowed down, and classic setups got less popular as newly designed setups started getting run more.
At the start of 2019, the Open Setup Challenges began, and they remained pretty popular throughout the year before eventually dying out. I have considered reviving them, but I felt like they were pretty restricting and I would rather encourage people to design setups using elements they like than elements that other people like.
Since that has trailed off, the queue has become more and more dominated by micro games.
So, I gathered some data. All my collection started in 2016, since it's sorted by year and I didn't want to investigate back into times that I wasn't really familiar with.
Raw data (you can skip this part):
Spoiler: Setups run in the Open Queue, by year
Spoiler: Open setups run in the Blitz Queue, by year
Spoiler: Open setups run in the Micro Queue, by year
Okay that last one took
way
longer than I thought it was gonna. Anyway. Figure a setup has some level of popularity if it was run at least three times, not all by the same person. Filtering these out and sorting by number of times run gives us (bold = approved setup):My original goal of doing this was to look for setups that dropped off in popularity around 2018. There are in fact several: Stack the Deck, Fire and Ice, Diffusion of Power, Jungle Republic, Pick Your Poison, Tit for Tat, and Making Friends and Enemies were all run a lot of times between 2016 and 2018 and not much afterward.
The main thing I'd like to figure out is, is it because the setups are bad, or is it because they got shoved out by the rise of new/creative setups in 2018 and 2019 and we could try to bring them back?
It would be great if I could get both:
- Thoughts on these setups from newer users (ideally 2019+), and whether you would play them if people were to run them nowadays
- Thoughts on these setups from older users who remember when they were popular, any insight into why people stopped running them, and whether you would want them to come back
