Player Slot and Game Census

[Mr. Flay]

Yeah, sounds like a refinement to Thok's Law.

Nice work, Zor.

[Mr. Flay]

No, I'd say his hypothesis is pretty close to your data. Not everybody

plays

all the time, either.

Actually we're probably doing a little worse than 1:10, since the Mini Queue lengths are not getting any better, and neither is Large Theme. Not sure about Open...

[Mr. Flay]

I mean, essentially. Does more players = higher chance of games with good skill sets, or no?

Not in my experience; it's very 'random', mostly determined by playerlist and to a smaller degree by setup, in my experience. Larger games have a higher chance to have a VI, for example, but also that VI is a smaller percentage overall (usually). Complex setups can either attract good playerlists or be totally distracting and derailing to 'basic mafia' skills.

[Mr. Flay]

I'm guessing Vi is referring to 'supposed to' in the mod spreadsheet, but yeah I've never seen that confusion in practice.

[Mr. Flay]

It didn't follow us with the transition. Doing it in some manner may be possible, but there's disagreement about what it would look like.

[Mr. Flay]

I suspect Larges are highly seasonal/variable. Also the size of Larges you have listed makes me think there's a bunch of games about to end...

But yeah, overall we're still a little down since the Rollback.

[Mr. Flay]

I think we need to think about getting more mods into the system.

Interesting, since the old problem was too many mods for the playerslots. Or do you think it's that mods are running fewer games/year?

I could see that, actually.

[Mr. Flay]

I'm just not buying that the Micro Queue is choking off the Large Theme Queue, modwise. The audiences are SO DIFFERENT.

We just went through a glut of newly-qualified Large Theme mods after the backlog in MN/Open cleared last year. That might have spiked the number of moderators for a bit... the datapoint for that is to look at, overall, how fast are Large Themes starting/filling. Not a snapshot of playerslots.

[Mr. Flay]

Also, it would have taken me forfuckingEVER to complete ten games on site as a player. Not everyone plays multiple games at once, even as a newbie.

3/5/7/9 months and at least one game played in the queue you wish to run games in seems fair, if we're going to go that route. I also like some amount of minimum-RL-days-stayed-alive, but that can wait on automated game data.

[Mr. Flay]

I don't understand the urge toward parallel requirements; that's going to be hellishly confusing and difficult to track.

If the current requirements aren't turning out good mods, we should FIX them. Not open a separate way to get around them.

[Mr. Flay]

Flay can you answer this for the staying alive thing:

I wouldn't add length alive as a way to get experience. Making every player a part survivor if they want to mod quicker isn't a good idea (that and I'd say being night killed early is better then being lynched in lylo).

Quite simply, I'm not persuaded that people will play like Survivors any more than they already do. And if you keep the requirement for RL-days-alive low but realistic, it just eliminates the "played 1 game, got quicklynched D1, went on hiatus until time-to-mod expired" phenomenon that occasionally gets attempted.

[Mr. Flay]

Part of the wait is to file the edges off of impatient newbies, in fact. Impatience leads to game mistakes.

[Mr. Flay]

I think I agree with quadz, given the data we have available. If there were a shortage of players, we'd be seeing games cancelled. If anything there MIGHT be a shortage of willing mods, but it's hard to say right now (I haven't run anything since the Rollback, but that's because of time, not inclination).

That said, I can definitely sympathize with zoraster; we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. [cue discussion on automating signups and mining data that way]

[Mr. Flay]

Also, historically there has been little-to-no wait for Large Themes to go into signups. Hoopla's era contained the only backlog I can ever think of seeing since 2004.

[Mr. Flay]

Um, did I name the wrong List Mod? I think I meant Kinetic.

[Mr. Flay]

Eh. Ideally a completed Large [X] and a completed [X] Theme (2 if Micro) would qualify you for a Large Theme, but I'm not sure that would fly with the userbase. We have enough trouble with the chokepoint of Mini Normal. And then there's the possibility of just making a Large Normal with 14p. *shrug*

I'm not sure how the current scenario ISN'T subject to Thok's Law, though. If anything playerslots being down is making it worse sitewide, yes?

[Mr. Flay]

Considering posting rates, they're about as fast as they can go right now (posting is way up, deadlines are down) with our site style of play.

[Mr. Flay]

I've seen this repeatedly, and I have no idea what to do about it.

And with such high posting day one, come the next few days with lower posting it is easier for people to get 'bored' with the slowness.

It's making people not want to join games if they're not spammer-posters.

[Mr. Flay]

The number who play 10+ at once has always been vanishingly small (as a percentage).

[Mr. Flay]

The number who play 10+ at once has always been vanishingly small (as a percentage).

as a percentage of players or a percentage of player slots? because if you have a guy who is alive in 10, that's 1.5ish% of the total player slots, which isn't insignificant. Still, limits and what have you are crude at best measures for preventing site flaking having an outsized effect on the site.

As both you and cfj noticed, there are several ways of looking at player distribution. Even 1.5% is still small given that not every 10+ player flakes, of course. But we shouldn't encourage that behavior in unproven scummers.

[Mr. Flay]

You're....not? As zorotter said, you'll never bump up against the limit. It's not about

you

.

[Mr. Flay]

a large majority of players who clearly know how to set limits themselves

[citation needed]

No one is saying that limits will stay where they are now (or grow smaller) when they become sitewide. In fact most serious proposals reward non-flaking by increasing the limits to nearly the stratosphere

for those who prove they can handle it

. You assuming that this is about distrust or condescension really is off the mark.

[Mr. Flay]

I don't have stats showing this, that people who play in a large number of games (say, 5+) are doing as I say. But from my subjective view, I've DEFINITELY noticed this trend. That people who play in more games, as a whole, are typically

*shrug* What I notice, also anecdotally, is that people are STILL flaking on one game and signing up for another, or another two, almost immediately. I still see people have RL crisis up on them and have to drop several games, no matter how many they're playing. I don't play/have the stats to say what their average gameload is... but I doubt you do either. Overall I think our problem isn't so much with limits as the Total Lack of Consequences for Flaking.

Also, Zach, I likewise have no idea what you're talking about regarding disability.

[Mr. Flay]

Wow. Interesting that they've caught back up to Micros now.

[Mr. Flay]

Out of interest, the Large Normal queue, why is it so small.

I mean for themes there seems to be mostly more Larges than smalls but it is quite the opposite.

Is this because nobody wants to mod them, or is it nobody wants to play them?

It's hard to tell how many people actually want them, but I've seen a few grind away for weeks in signups. Willing to believe that had more to do with moderator than Normal/Theme, though.