In post 420, chamber wrote:We aren't looking to replace the normal speed that we play at, if anything we are looking to supplement it. The normal speed of play on MS is the newbie game speed, so the newbie games should stay that speed, offering a space for faster paced games (as in 3:1 and 1:1) is something to consider, but it would be marketed as such. Perhaps over time if that section of things grew sufficiently, newbie games could follow suit.
I feel strongly like that's getting things the wrong way round. Newbies will play newbie games first because they are newbies. Like, I probably wouldn't touch a Micro Game that had 7:1 days until I'd completed a Newbie game, because I'd feel like Newbie games are where I should go first and just part of easing my way into the community. At the point Newbie games are 14:1 are at least double if not more the length of any other game I've encountered, I probably never do a Newbie and never end up exploring other parts of the site [I mean, that's what actually did happen to me, from experience - I've never really dared venture into the Micro Queues]. I also think that the end goal is not "replacing the normal speed"; it's recognizing that mafiascum's normal speed is a hell of a lot slower than the normal speed of every other community; that this is intimidating to newer players; and that an intermediate 'bridge' would be useful - and heavy emphasis on the word bridge there. My immediate intuition is that if you cut the length of newbie games, people wouldn't then want to cut the length of
all
other games; it's that newbies would participate in say, 7:1 days, which are longer than what they normally come from, realize a) that longer days are actually kind of cool and b) they can totally play at the level and want more, and then move on to longer days like the current site standard of 14:1. The aim is to provide them (us) with some sort of way to get over the speed gap between where we come from and this place here - move from our standard to yours via way of a middle ground.
EDIT: obviously though, it'd be worth collecting more data. I did like the idea someone mentioned earlier about polling newbies/dissatisfied players - I may have lapsed from a few games, but if it was a relatively short SurveyMonkey thing or some such, I'd definitely have filled out a poll regardless. I think you could raise a nice bit of data without being intimidating that way. Then you can ignore my personal anecdotes when it turns out the real demand is for year-long days.