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Sanderson Elimination: Questions & Answers and Game Meta Discussion


Metacognition

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STINK sat down on his chair, turned on his desktop and opened his pack of salted sunflower seeds. After that, he did some stuff that you don’t need to know about, but it ended up with reading the same thread you’re currently reading. The first unseen post was by Hael, but more specifically this one:

I know that I've usually had multiple ideas for games at any one time, with varying levels of complexity, and I was under the impression I'm not unique in that regard. If that's true of many people, I don't think people will mind too much if they can't run some of their wilder ideas. I guess that's more something which would need to be surveyed.
I'm aware that the mods are busy people, but I don't view the ideas I've suggested as anything you really have to monitor. If a rule is written out somewhere, there's a PM full of players who GM - they are just as able to say to someone who wants to GM "hey awesome. Have you checked out this link? It's got some helpful hints and tips for creating and running games, and some guidelines for how the game should work." If they choose to ignore all that, when it comes their turn to GM, you don't have to give them the go ahead to run their game until it's fine. I guess that last bit could be time consuming- curious, when people sign up to GM do most people keep to running the game they had in mind at the time?
The other time consuming part of the process is the designing and writing of rules/guidelines/articles. But that's what this discussion is for. And I would be happy to help work on writing drafts of that stuff, once ideas had been decided on, and it's quite possible others would to.
 
STINK read this, and thought of the following things while reading:
 
  1. Hael is indeed not unique.

  2. Complicated games are over-rated anyway.

  3. People in the GM PM shouldn’t have to link people to the Art of Game Creation thread anyway, or was this taking into account that if it’s a post not edited into an OP, then it will eventually need to be linked as a post.

  4. I currently plan to run the games that I signed up with, and my QF was planned.

  5. As for checking the rules of a game, this has already been brought up but the mods don’t have to check rules, and other GMs should be able to check them before the game.

  6. Articles sound way more fancy than it should be for an internet forum game :P

 

All in all, not many deep thoughts, but good enough reactionary ones. He was sure that the truly good thoughts would come at the end of reading the discussion. By this point, at least 6 seeds were gone, never to be seen again. STINK read Elenion’s post, and kinda mentally skipped over it. Sorry Len.

 

And it was a post by Meta! Those were rare, or at least were before he made about 5 posts in 10 hours. Luckily for you readers, Present!STINK has decided to format Past!STINK’s thoughts, rather than throwing them all at the same time.

 

You see what you just did here? You prioritized winning over everything else. This is why things don't change; not because there's not enough rules and regulations in place. People could spend more time RPing or other stuff, but instead, the focus for the majority of people right now is on trying to win the game rather than having fun. That's a part of what made a lot of the earlier games so much fun in comparison. Sure, people were still trying to win, but there was just as much of a focus on interacting with the setting that had been created. That's why there was so much RP in early games in comparison to now. Now, if you're not contributing to finding the Eliminators, then you're doing something wrong and are killed off for it. (whole colour scheme of SE posts don’t apply to this thread m’kay?)

 

STINK read this and mostly thought that this is a content-heavy paragraph, which is always fun. He couldn’t be bothered to check if Meta was correct in saying that if people didn’t contribute they weren’t killed, so he just said it’ll be right. But on to stuff that STINK could actually comment on!

 

First, “trying to win the game rather than having fun.” was a bit of a weird statement, after all, for some people having fun is winning the game! I guess for those people that don’t particularly care about winning the game then it mustn’t be fun for them. But STINK was pretty sure that most people enjoy winning the game, and at least want to contribute towards finding elims or killing villagers as elims.

 

You guys, the players, are dictating what kind of behavior and thus what kind of games you want via your actions.

GMs rarely receive much in the way of feedback when they write up end-of-turn scenarios and no one interacts with their settings and events. Thus, GMs become complacent about even doing write ups as much as they used to.

Everyone has to engage in the debates and investigation of other players or else be seen as suspicious and thus people that don't have much to say on that front (or are daunted by it) don't say anything at all; leading to more inactivity.

The fact that everyone needs to be aggressively going after the Eliminators turns more passive players away; thus creating a breeding ground of only certain kinds of players.

 

Secondly, was Meta no longer playing SE? There was such a clear distinction between ‘players’ and well, Meta posting. But that’s more of a side-track compared to his three points. STINK could comment on the GM one, thinking that when he had GM’d a QF he had stuck to a write-up written every cycle, but that it took a lot of time. Was there feedback? No, but in STINK’s eyes that just gave him more freedom to write whatever he wanted to write. As for the inactivity, I don’t really see people going ‘give us your thoughts on this singular topic or you are evil’ often. It’s more of a ‘this person is either lurking or being inactive, so could you comment on a topic?’, then they usually respond with ‘oh I don’t know what topic to comment on’ followed by the whole suggesting a topic thing. And on to the final topic of aggression, isn’t Meta someone that aggressively goes after eliminators?

 

STINK decided not to comment on the rest of the post, but instead move on as Current!STINK has realised that he is writing way more than he expected. So instead, know that Past!STINK agreed with the rest of Hael and Meta’s posts. And now Past!STINK no longer thinks, as we have reached current!STINK (who is still eating that same packet of seeds).

 

-------------------------------------------

 

So yeah, there’s some truly meta-rp about the meta in response to Meta. Was 50 minutes spent writing all of this just so I could say that? Maybe. But I feel like it’ll help demonstrate my next point, that being that another issue with RP is that it takes time. If I was to write just a response to those two posts like normal, probably wouldn’t have taken me as long at all, but instead I spent more time thinking about how to phrase stuff as STINK looking back on STINK rather than just talking, and the same applies to games. And I know, some people dedicate an incredible amount of time to analysing posts instead of RP, and maybe you can go talk to them, but there are a bunch of times where I’ve made a post in about 5 minutes and I’ve only really had the time to vote for someone, short explanation of it and then off I go. So that post looks like I’m being aggressive and playing for the win, right?

 

Also, the biggest problem with the whole ‘just let other people look at the balance of games’ is secret rules. So if we take a game such as LG26 where every single role is a secret and interconnected with every other role and needs a fair bit of balancing, what do you do then? In that case, just El and Nyali balanced as they were the GMs, and that was one of the most complex games recently. So there would need to be some people that could maybe look at secret games anyway, and be trusted not to leak anything and then not play the game as they have more information. Easiest way to do this would be through the mods choosing GMs that volunteer to do this to be on a pseudo ‘committee’ where they all discuss the game and stuff, as if being a co-GM is what allows you to balance, then complex games will end up with like 7 co-GMs.

 

I still think that co-GMing into GMing with an experienced co-GM is the best option right now for anyone looking to run a game, and advise anyone who hasn’t GM’d yet but wants to run a game, to start asking to co-GM for another game before your own. The GM PMs are there for a reason!

 

This is now 3 pages in a doc, so I’m gonna stop typing and let others respond so I can go back to my homework. Doesn’t look like I said much in here does it :P

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I'm going to throw my hat in the ring here just a little.

I thought about writing some stuff about player demographics and designing games for a wide, varied audience, nicked from MTG, but I have decided not to. This is ground that is constantly being retrod. There are just two things we need to keep in mind here: Firstly, people play SE for different reasons, and secondly, other players are also people. It is possible to please everyone if we foster a sociable and friendly community, while also ensuring that the games we play are designed to allow people to use their skills to the fullest. Randomness and rules issues are what will annoy the 'Spike' demographic more than anything (and I say that as a GM running a game with randomness and hidden rules, though in my defence I did ask that people were fine with it before signing up).  As long as you are playing the game to the best of your abilities and not working actively against your own team, then that's all I think we should ask for. We can't do this with rules; we need to do this through a community effort to encourage it. Splash upvotes around for roleplaying as well as analysis, for example, no matter how large or small.

This leads me on quite nicely to what I really want to talk about which Meta briefly mentioned: The experience as a GM.

Now, I love being a GM for you guys. I probably enjoy it more than being a player, as a matter of fact, and even after running so many I still have loads of games I am waiting to run (speaking of, I need to get back on the LG GMing list :P). There are many reasons I enjoy it - It lets me create a unique setting, allows me to do some writing, allows me to experiment with some different styles... But chiefly, there is nothing I enjoy more as a GM than seeing the players having fun with something I created. That is the biggest draw to me by far (if you're curious, my least favourite thing is coming up with titles for Turns >>).

However. GMing is very difficult work. You need to create the game, you need to balance it, you need to set it up, and there is a lot of ongoing work that goes into the game too. I am rather grateful for Kas's aid on my current game, because rollover will take anywhere between one-and-a-half to two hours, with the writeup and PMing and so on. There's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes which players may be intellectually aware of but not quite understand how lengthy it is. That amount of time will obviously differ depending on GM, game and how much they like doing writeups. But the possibility is there for it. Back in LG7, when I first GMed, rollover took a staggering 3 hours! Role madness takes forever.

Some longer-term players who have been in several of my games will have noticed something though, which is that my writeups have become a lot shorter lately. Some of that, such as in my Shardship game, was experimenting with different writing styles and so on. The rest of it though is that writing takes a very long time, and I very rarely receive any sort of thanks for it. I don't write for my own sake, though I do enjoy it, and I do want to practice with a view to improving my ability to write, At the end of the game, of course, there are the usual posts thanking me for running the game, but that is often it.

As an example, take LG28. I have so far written about 14 writeups, roughly speaking. I have had someone comment on them three times, I think. I'm not saying that I want people to stroke my ego, but I would like to know that they are appreciated. I want to know what you guys enjoy about them, and what you don't enjoy. I want feedback on it, and even if it's just a thank you or 'Great writeup Wyrm!', at least I know you've read it and I'm not just spending my time writing something no-one reads. The upvote system goes some way to fulfilling this, but doesn't exactly tell me much. I received 6 upvotes for Night 5's writeup, for example, from around 25 players still alive. What does that mean? Did 20 players not like it? Did only 6 players maximum read it? Am I spending an hour plus on something only 20% of my players actually like? I'm not fishing for upvotes here, but asking that a few people take the time to give some feedback once in a while. They are fluff, and unimportant to the game, but I spent time on it, and would like to feel it's not wasted. The same goes for players and RP, for that matter. The only way we will get more RP on the forum is if people respond positively to it, rather than not at all as it is at the moment. I am often guilty of this too.

Wading back in to some stuff that has already been said, the issue of inactivity is also a problem from a GM point of view. Much much more than it is for players. I personally cannot understand why anyone would sign up for a game they don't intend to or cannot play. It also is rather aggravating when you have spent literally hours and hours balancing your game as much as you can, for a Coinshot or an Eliminator to never show up and throw everything out of whack. I am at this point considering creating my own personal banlist containing players I won't give important Roles to or make Eliminators. And I don't want to do that, because that makes things more predictable. I try to encourage that through cool and fun gameplay, but if LG28 is anything to go by... It is something that makes me question why I make these interesting games if the players don't bother. That is perhaps rather negative and defeatist, but it is a thought in my head at times.

Now don't get me wrong. I enjoy being a GM, and I am certainly not going to stop any time soon. I like seeing the players run around in the game I have made and making use of all the things I have developed for them. I like doing writeups, and I like creating games. But I do feel that as GMs, we are taken a tad for granted. We are thanked, but it usually doesn't go much further than that. I would dearly love some thought-out feedback for any aspect of the games, as it's only through that I can improve as a GM. I think this is also valid for the players too; take a moment to upvote someone who has done RP, and let them know that you appreciate them taking the time to write it. Give them feedback to improve, if they want it. Critique them if they want it, but don't criticise them out of nowhere. I think a bit of positive community interaction would go a long way to making people feel more welcome here.

TLDR: Put the effort in and read the above, or you're exacerbating one of the problems as I see it.

Edited by Wyrmhero
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  • 2 weeks later...

I liked MR17 a lot for how it encouraged RP.

First, there was a cycle with no lynch in the beginning, which gave RPers time to RP and strategizers time to strategize. Strategy-loving RPers got to do both. RP takes time and effort -- first you have to create a character you want to RP with, then you have to figure out what they're going to do, and then you have to write the thing out, and then you might want to look over what you wrote and edit stuff, and maybe there's so formatting too, and if you're RPing your analysis you have to make sure your analysis makes sense, and so on, and so on. Having an entire cycle at the beginning where I didn't have to also bother with analysis was really encouraging for me to RP.

Second, Aman, the GM, gave me a character prompt. MR17 was set in the world of Red Rising, which I hadn't read at the time. I decided to make a character from a world I was familiar with, Roshar, and plop them into the Red Rising world. Aman's character prompt filled out the details and also gave my character, Nyanah au Thorne, a motive for being village. Since I didn't know the world too well, this was very helpful. I was able to RP off of the prompt, which I think improved the quality of my RP that game. I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, but it was also a game where my suspicions were spot-on. The RP definitely made me more engaged with the game.

MR17 was a good game for RP, and I think it should be looked at for ways to encourage RP without setting heavy-handed rules.

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4 hours ago, Wonko the Sane said:

NOTE: A large section of the following was originally typed in my PM with Seonid. When I realized how much I wanted to say, I cut and pasted, then finished it here. I intended to bring it up publicly eventually, and I didn't want to type it all twice. It would perhaps be better to wait for the end of the game, but this is on my brain right now, and I wanted to get it out there. This isn't in bluetext, but it is very much out-of-game; I just hate reading and/or writing bluetext for more than a few short paragraphs.

[Referring to the rampant inactivity] ...I intend to bring this up at the end of the game, because we as a community need to discuss this. I'm just as guilty, so I don't mean to cast aspersions on anyone, but this is a problem that needs addressing. The fight against inactivity has been a part of the game since the early days of SE, but rarely have I seen it destroy games with the depressing regularity we're getting these days.

You seem to feel the same, with your public pleas, but I feel that appealing to individuals is going to be ineffective, as your target audience is specifically the group least likely to hear you. Instead, we need to come together, outside the context of any particular game, and talk this out, like what we're doing for etiquette or rules complexity.

The fact that this is happening so regularly, no matter the game, players, or circumstances, means that the problem is systemic. We can't solve this by resolving to "try harder", unless we expect a large section of players to make significant sacrifices in other areas of their lives. And since there was definitely a time when playing this game didn't require that, we need to talk through what's wrong with the status quo.

What, systemically, causes players to go inactive so often, and to stay that way for so long? What changes can we make so that keeping up with things is easier and more rewarding? How can we help players who have gone inactive to more easily return to the game? What can we do, in the possibly-inevitable event that some players do go inactive, to ensure that the game survives it with minimal damage to the experience of the remaining players?

We need to talk these questions and others over, back and forth, and consider them from every angle. It's natural to jump to conclusions: I -- like, I would guess, so many of you -- immediately want to blame the current hot-button issues of complexity creep and a hostile game environment. But that only serves to rob us of a conversation we desperately need to have. Don't be afraid to voice your first thoughts, but don't stop with them either.

Maybe what's changed is simply the player base, and we need to accept that; working not to restore the game to what it was, but to help make it into a positive experience for the players of today. Maybe expecting a major change in activity is just plain unrealistic in the near future, and our efforts would be better spent designing games that can be fun even after losing a large number of players. Maybe -- a personal observation -- this community has gradually become more and more insular and esoteric, and newer players are being discouraged from participating by a wall of obscure and confusing jargon, dizzyingly intricate strategies, and frankly hard-to-follow references to older games; things that can enrich and streamline the game for more experienced players, but scare off newbies.

My point is that we don't know, and we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to consider every possibility, no matter how seemingly outlandish, before identifying the problem -- and long, long before we decide on a course of action. The Shard has never failed to impress me with its intelligence, levelheadedness, ingenuity, and compassion. Let's put that to work, people, and solve this problem as I know only we can.

Unfortunately, with the game still running, we probably can't discuss the specifics of the inactivity in the game just yet, but I do still have some thoughts.

I think one of the biggest things is people not really understanding, or acknowledging, the time commitments of these games. Really, any game probably requires, as a minimum, half an hour a day, reading the thread, and making a quick response. To contribute analysis or RP, you jump up to more like an hour and a half, at least. And depending on the format, you are expected to keep that up anywhere from a few days, to a month and a half (I guess that also depends on when you get killed). It's not a small time commitment, and if you skip that half hour, it makes it all that much harder to get back into it. I think a problem that does occur is that people don't actually work out how busy their life is for the duration of the game. Another problem is people signing up for games, and then not caring enough to remember they are playing. Another is having multiple commitments to games.

Some of this I've said before - I think ever game should have a strategy in place to deal with inactives, whether a filter, or pinchhitters, or whatever else. I'd also be interested in having some sort of CAPTCHA to ensure only people who read the rules actually play. But a new thought is that I think people should be actively discouraged from playing more than one game at a time, and particularly not two LGs at the same time. Ideally, rules of games should be available well in advance, so people can prioritize which games they join. I think a reason people ignore their time constraints is because the games are all so interesting, and they aren't forced to choose, so play both.

I personally haven't found the game environment hostile, although I'm both an R&R player, and someone who had been semi on hiatus, and will soon go on hiatus permanently, and do I think that game complexity has hurt people's ability to contribute discussion/analysis, I don't think that accounts for most of the inactivity.

You know what the problem with working out what causes inactivity? The lack of talking :P Ultimately, I think it's a mix of things. And that's going to require a mix of solutions. Recurring players need to be conscious of the effect of their inactivity on the games they join. Ideally, they are honest with themselves, and do their best to only play when they know they have the time to commit. GMs need strategies both to handle when players temporarily have to deal with life, and to deal with players not willing to put the minimum required effort in. New players need to be clearly communicated what the expected activity is.

Ideally change should come from the players, but not all the problems can be solved by players - new players who sign up and don't do anything, or players who have unforseeable emergencies. I think it would be valuable for the community to brainstorm ways for GMs to handle these sorts of situations.

On ‎10‎/‎12‎/‎2016 at 2:14 PM, Metacognition said:

Very well, then here's a rule specifically for you, Hael: You have to RP in each post you make, at least a little, and not take the game too seriously. I'll be watching. :P 

Apart from this post, and the one pointing to this thread, neither of which actually include playing an active game, I indeed kept to that. And it got me RPing. But the rule was a pretty silly rule that had little to do with the sort of thing I was talking about. You've repurposed it for the AG, which may help RP, although I found it hobbled me - it was harder to contribute lots of posts, or in a quick manner. The rules I was suggesting were less about forcing players to do something specific, rather providing easy to manage regulations to minimize the possibility, or impact, of players going inactive.

On ‎11‎/‎12‎/‎2016 at 10:06 AM, Wyrmhero said:

TLDR: Put the effort in and read the above, or you're exacerbating one of the problems as I see it.

Personal favorite use of a TL;DR!

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Something I thought of recently is that new players don't necessarily know what rules are enforced more than others. For example, a lot of mafia forums have etiquette policies, and a number of these etiquette policies say things about insulting other players and being a poor sport, but those aren't rules that are enforced unless someone specifically mentions it. Last year's mafia championship game that Hael participated in had a number of players openly insulting other players, but they were never called out. Not until Hael finally commented on it to the GM, and then the GM gave a notice. But it didn't stop the insults, and nothing else was said. While there may be rules in place, that doesn't mean those rules will be enforced.

17th Shard has a relatively small moderating team, considering our member base. And yet we have relatively few problems arise. Do you want to know why? Because the members themselves regulate the site. If someone gets negative, it's usually a member who says something about it and tries to help the other person understand why the 17th Shard isn't the place for such negativity. First contact is rarely with staff. Because the members have taken it upon themselves to adopt the rules and help others understand them. To help others adopt them too. This is why the Shard has been and will likely continue to be the safe haven that it is. It's not the staff enforcing rules, except in extreme situations where they must. It's the members upholding the rules and helping new people understand them as well.

We can do the same thing here. But it's going to take a concerted effort from the players, the moderators and the GMs to do. It's not just for the GMs to put filters in place and regulate inactives like that. It's not just for the moderators to blacklist chronic inactives. It's not just for the players to deal with it. It's for everyone to. That might mean an eliminator team killing an inactive or two. That might mean an extremely harsh inactivity filter. That might mean blacklisting people who don't contribute to the game in any way post signing up. That might mean trying not to lurk, even though it's strategically sound for you to blend in with inactives. That might mean restricting people from playing multiple games (or at least multiple LGs) at one time, as Hael suggested. Whatever it means, it needs to be done in tandem, with the support of the majority. Saying that you don't have to do something because someone else will handle it won't fix the issue. If you're not willing to take the responsibility of fixing the problem on yourself, the problem will probably never be fixed and the only person you'll have to blame for it is yourself for being unwilling to help.

This is not something one or two or five people can tackle. This is something that needs the support of the community as a whole, or it will never be fixed.

And this doesn't even have to be just about inactivity. If someone posts a super-complex game in the Game Creation thread and you're worried about the complexity of it, say something about that. Voice those concerns. Maybe help them break the game down into something more manageable that they still like but is balanced. We can all help each other. By helping each other, we'll be helping the games, in all aspects.

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Do you guys just hate me or something?

LG24: Attacked by the eliminators N1.

LG25: Attacked by the eliminators N1.

QF20: Lynched D1 on no evidence. Was village.

AG3: Ongoing, but go read it.

Assuming an average of 25 players per game with the standard 2 deaths on first turn, a person has an 8% chance of dying first turn. This is significantly higher than that.

At this rate I'm not going to put any more work into making characters anymore, it just isn't worth it.

Edited by Ecthelion III
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8 hours ago, Ecthelion III said:

Do you guys just hate me or something?

LG24: Attacked by the eliminators N1.

LG25: Attacked by the eliminators N1.

QF20: Lynched D1 on no evidence. Was village.

AG3: Ongoing, but go read it.

Assuming an average of 25 players per game with the standard 2 deaths on first turn, a person has an 8% chance of dying first turn. This is significantly higher than that.

At this rate I'm not going to put any more work into making characters anymore, it just isn't worth it.

Etch, you should have seen my first few games. :P I typically don't put a lot of work into making characters to begin with, but I do know your pain.  I died C1 in a couple of my first games, and in quite a few of them I was villager.  It happens.

In LG24...  I couldn't find out why you died there.  shrugs  Plus I got all cringey reading over that game.  I was so... naive.  shudders

In LG25, you were targeted because of 'How insightful you had been in previous games'

In QF20, you were lynched on a misunderstanding.  It could happen to anyone.  

In AG3, well, I can't say anything more than I did in-thread.

That percentage seems right, however, there are people who die more in the first cycle.  It happens.  A lot of it is random.  But keep playing.  Despite the fact that I always seem to find you and Len suspicious (sorry.  :P), I do enjoy playing with you.  If you feel like you're putting too much work into your characters for what you're getting from them, then maybe put a little less work in.  I tend to build up my characters as the game progresses, (If I put effort a character) so that I don't feel let down if they die early.   

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16 hours ago, Ecthelion III said:

At this rate I'm not going to put any more work into making characters anymore, it just isn't worth it.

That's an awfully defeatist way of looking at things. You're also not the only person dealing with a high death rate.

Here's some interesting statistics: the sum of all the characters/avatars who have been in every game played in SE is 1653. The death count is 1102, or 66.7%. This means that the average survival rate is 33.3%. Individuals with a lower survival rate than that die more frequently than the average SE player.

Here are the survival rates of a selection of players with lower survival rates than the average:

survival rates.jpg

A couple things I'd like to comment on this. Everyone, minus Ecth, that is higher than Seonid has played more than 20 games. Seonid, Hael, and Kas are all at 17-18 games. The rest, including Ecth, are between 10 and 15. There are some really low survival rates there. Mage is less than 10%. He's only survived one game, out of 15. That's kind of insane. Hael died the first 12 games he played. However, if we count just from the time people stopped making a hobby of Hael Hunting, his rate is 60%. 3 out of 5. Not too bad. And I imagine, it'll hold to about that. If he were to continue playing rather than going on a hiatus, I imagine his death rate would balance out at about 30%. Once you hit about 25 games, the survival rate you have is probably going to stay about the same, unless you make a concerted effort to change it, and even then, it's questionable.

Death is just something that happens. It usually balances out the more you play. The average survival rate for those with 20 games or more is about 30%. So less than the average SE player, but not by much. Certainly better than 20-25%. But that's because you've played more games and people have a better placement of you in terms of kill-necessity, and you've gotten better at being less suspicious-looking, no matter your alignment, so you'll probably by lynched less as well. Especially early on.

For example:

ecth death types.PNG

You've been lynched 7 times in your 12 games. 2 of those lynches were when you were village (so you accrued suspicion and couldn't deflect it....or your brother arranged your lynch because he was evil :P ), and 3 were when you were evil. You've been lynched every time you're evil. But I'll bet you've learned something every time you've been evil as well. You're probably learning how to avoid suspicion. That's what happens when you're evil. You learn. You get better. Eventually, you'll make it through a game without getting lynched as an eliminator. You might get vig-killed, but hey: at least it wasn't a lynch. And you'll improve from that. You've been killed by the eliminators once, and that was in MR18, towards the later part of that game. You've been attacked by the eliminators a couple of times early on as well, but you didn't die to them. And yes, attack cycle is rather different than death cycle. 

ecth death attack info.PNG

The first block of information is the cycle you take your first hit. The second block of information is what cycle you die. You've been attacked 4 times in the first 2 cycles, but you've only been killed 3 times in that same chunk of time. You tend to be attacked first between cycle 3 and 4, but you don't tend to die until cycles 5 or 6. That's...not bad. Sure, your death rate in the first two cycle is on the high side, but there are others with a high number of deaths in those same cycles. Orlok has been killed 7 times in the first two cycles. He can definitely relate, because he was really upset about it after the 4th or 5th time it happened.

Really, it's just about playing more. Those early deaths will average out. Your survival rate will rise. You've only played 12 games, which I get that that sounds like a lot, but comparatively, it's fairly low. There have been players who played 10+ games before they finally became an eliminator for the first time. Like I already said, Hael died the first 12 games he played. 12 games isn't enough to get into the true direction your stats are headed. That takes around 25 games. And I can practically guarantee you that your stats won't look like this 13 games from now.

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Wilson, can I rename you to The Data Overlord? Way to be optimistic. The real thing I'm bummed about is how all of these have happened in the last 6 months, so hopefully the pattern doesn't continue.

Just a note, though, at 58.33%, I have the highest lynch percentage of everyone who plays the game right now.

I don't care if I die overall, I know it happens and a C4-7 death doesn't really bug me, but the day one lynches and kills are literally the worst.

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2 hours ago, Ecthelion III said:

Wilson, can I rename you to The Data Overlord? Way to be optimistic. The real thing I'm bummed about is how all of these have happened in the last 6 months, so hopefully the pattern doesn't continue.

Just a note, though, at 58.33%, I have the highest lynch percentage of everyone who plays the game right now.

I don't care if I die overall, I know it happens and a C4-7 death doesn't really bug me, but the day one lynches and kills are literally the worst.

Yeah, I've had two of those now I think? And they definitely suck. I can tell you at least if I'm an Elim in any games coming up, I probably won't hit you N1 (or Wilson).

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I just noticed this conversation about activity levels, and as the founding member of the Contribution Crusade I feel impelled to respond to a few things.

On 1/9/2017 at 8:02 AM, Haelbarde said:

I think one of the biggest things is people not really understanding, or acknowledging, the time commitments of these games. Really, any game probably requires, as a minimum, half an hour a day, reading the thread, and making a quick response. To contribute analysis or RP, you jump up to more like an hour and a half, at least. And depending on the format, you are expected to keep that up anywhere from a few days, to a month and a half (I guess that also depends on when you get killed). It's not a small time commitment, and if you skip that half hour, it makes it all that much harder to get back into it. I think a problem that does occur is that people don't actually work out how busy their life is for the duration of the game. Another problem is people signing up for games, and then not caring enough to remember they are playing. Another is having multiple commitments to games.

Unless you're a speed reader, I'd say the minimum time to read through the thread is much longer than 1/2 hour per day. I'd say you're looking at least an hour. More if you want to analyze and/or respond to things. 

 

Quote

Some of this I've said before - I think ever game should have a strategy in place to deal with inactives, whether a filter, or pinchhitters, or whatever else. I'd also be interested in having some sort of CAPTCHA to ensure only people who read the rules actually play. But a new thought is that I think people should be actively discouraged from playing more than one game at a time, and particularly not two LGs at the same time. Ideally, rules of games should be available well in advance, so people can prioritize which games they join. I think a reason people ignore their time constraints is because the games are all so interesting, and they aren't forced to choose, so play both.

I personally haven't found the game environment hostile, although I'm both an R&R player, and someone who had been semi on hiatus, and will soon go on hiatus permanently, and do I think that game complexity has hurt people's ability to contribute discussion/analysis, I don't think that accounts for most of the inactivity.

You know what the problem with working out what causes inactivity? The lack of talking :P Ultimately, I think it's a mix of things. And that's going to require a mix of solutions. Recurring players need to be conscious of the effect of their inactivity on the games they join. Ideally, they are honest with themselves, and do their best to only play when they know they have the time to commit. GMs need strategies both to handle when players temporarily have to deal with life, and to deal with players not willing to put the minimum required effort in. New players need to be clearly communicated what the expected activity is.

Ideally change should come from the players, but not all the problems can be solved by players - new players who sign up and don't do anything, or players who have unforseeable emergencies. I think it would be valuable for the community to brainstorm ways for GMs to handle these sorts of situations.

I agree with all of this. Let me address a couple of these things:

What can Players do?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but one thing I plan on doing with the Contribution Crusade (or at least my part on it) is rather than just campaigning to lynch inactive players, I want to reach out to them via PMs and invite and encourage them to return to activity. 

Time commitments. These games do require a lot of time commitments, but there are some things that players can do to make it easier on others with busier schedules. For one: huge RP posts. I have a love/hate relationship with RP. It can be a lot of fun to read the stories that other people craft (I remember reading one player's story- I think it was @Alvron- where he had this big ongoing story with his character and an obligator pulling his strings, and it ended with his character pretending to be an allomancer in order to get the jump on and kill the obligator. It was epic. 

However, big RP posts like that take a LOT of time to read through, and can be distracting and even annoying when you're trying to find and analyze things directly relating to the game and votes. I would love to see players who post long RP posts add "TL:DR" tags at the top (or bottom) of their post with the important game information contained in it. I'd love to even see RP get its own color tag, so players can tell what to skip. So to take an example from the current game, I'd love to see this:

 
15 hours ago, Wyrmhero said:

His lordship up at the manor didn't want to see me, that was made plain clear to me. Didn't want to see anyone, as a matter of fact. I grilled his butler for the details, but the guy wouldn't crack. Never said anything about his lord even stepping outside of the place for a stroll in the garden, let alone a secret trip to murder someone. Laid low with a cold, he said. Seemed unbelievable that it'd happen now of all times. I'd trust a Terrisman not to lie though, not like this. Did make me suspicious, but not about the lord. Might be he was being made to be sick, some poisons could do that. But I'm no doctor, I couldn't just physic him back to health with a snap of my fingers. So for the time being, I had to pursue other lines of inquiry.

 

Of course, the village seemed happy to give me them. I came back into town to find an old man swinging from the gibbet, all beaten and bloody. Tensions were high, I knew that, but high enough to kill a defenceless elderly person? Hell, we could've stuck him in bed with the lordship, maybe the cold'd have done our job for us. But too late now. I guess the guy should have been killed by the old laws anyway, being a Soother. Didn't fancy the idea of the Inquisition paying a visit to our fair town. But that would've been all lawful, this was an act of murder, no matter which way you looked at it.

 

The law dictated that I should hang those responsible for what they did to him. Asking around, seemed it was done all democratically. Can you imagine? We overthrow the lords and ladies that pushed us down into the mud by right of birth, and the first thing we do with that freedom is kill each other. It hurt to think it, and I'd never said it, but maybe we were better off under The Lord Ruler. At least he kept the world running and didn't blight our crops or cover the skies in a choking, creeping darkness. Maybe we should be cursing the Survivor, not praising him.

 

Seemed the controversy, as it were, was about a guy being a bit of a smooth talker. Reginald, his name was. I knew him a bit; run into him a few times, sometimes literally. He was a petty thief, but ever so nice about it when I did catch him. “Sorry, Mister Sharpe,” he'd say. “Won't happen again, Mister Sharpe,” “Can you put that knife down please, Mister Sharpe, I'm rather attached to those parts and would like to remain attached to them.” Nice guy, for a crook. Never hurt anyone when he stole stuff. Guess it made sense that people would suspect him, considering he was a part of the village's underbelly. Even if they didn't, they might just be pleased to hang him. Just in case.

 

But again, despite what the law said, I didn't feel like he deserved death for it. Everything seemed to be different, these days. The law was solid as steel on punishments for these guys, but I didn't want to follow through. Hadn't followed through with Reginald before, wasn't going to start now. I could understand why they did it, I guess. Fear brings out these rash actions in people. Hell, if I was still here when it was going on, I might've been one of them. I guess I had my own laws to follow, and they were telling me something different this time.

 

I didn't feel like Reginald's escape-artist act itself was incriminating though. You can't blame a guy for not wanting to die. Sure, a few of the people who pointed the finger at him had some good points from what I heard, but not wanting to die? I can get behind that. Rather partial to life myself. Perhaps now, he'd be a bit more of an upstanding member of the community, help find the real guys responsible, and maybe cut down on the thievery. Or it was a ploy, and he was the guilty party. Either way, I was sure we'd find out soon enough, either by the noose or by a coin.

turn into this:

 
15 hours ago, Wyrmhero said:

His lordship up at the manor didn't want to see me, that was made plain clear to me. Didn't want to see anyone, as a matter of fact. I grilled his butler for the details, but the guy wouldn't crack. Never said anything about his lord even stepping outside of the place for a stroll in the garden, let alone a secret trip to murder someone. Laid low with a cold, he said. Seemed unbelievable that it'd happen now of all times. I'd trust a Terrisman not to lie though, not like this. Did make me suspicious, but not about the lord. Might be he was being made to be sick, some poisons could do that. But I'm no doctor, I couldn't just physic him back to health with a snap of my fingers. So for the time being, I had to pursue other lines of inquiry.

 

Of course, the village seemed happy to give me them. I came back into town to find an old man swinging from the gibbet, all beaten and bloody. Tensions were high, I knew that, but high enough to kill a defenceless elderly person? Hell, we could've stuck him in bed with the lordship, maybe the cold'd have done our job for us. But too late now. I guess the guy should have been killed by the old laws anyway, being a Soother. Didn't fancy the idea of the Inquisition paying a visit to our fair town. But that would've been all lawful, this was an act of murder, no matter which way you looked at it.

 

The law dictated that I should hang those responsible for what they did to him. Asking around, seemed it was done all democratically. Can you imagine? We overthrow the lords and ladies that pushed us down into the mud by right of birth, and the first thing we do with that freedom is kill each other. It hurt to think it, and I'd never said it, but maybe we were better off under The Lord Ruler. At least he kept the world running and didn't blight our crops or cover the skies in a choking, creeping darkness. Maybe we should be cursing the Survivor, not praising him.

 

Seemed the controversy, as it were, was about a guy being a bit of a smooth talker. Reginald, his name was. I knew him a bit; run into him a few times, sometimes literally. He was a petty thief, but ever so nice about it when I did catch him. “Sorry, Mister Sharpe,” he'd say. “Won't happen again, Mister Sharpe,” “Can you put that knife down please, Mister Sharpe, I'm rather attached to those parts and would like to remain attached to them.” Nice guy, for a crook. Never hurt anyone when he stole stuff. Guess it made sense that people would suspect him, considering he was a part of the village's underbelly. Even if they didn't, they might just be pleased to hang him. Just in case.

 

But again, despite what the law said, I didn't feel like he deserved death for it. Everything seemed to be different, these days. The law was solid as steel on punishments for these guys, but I didn't want to follow through. Hadn't followed through with Reginald before, wasn't going to start now. I could understand why they did it, I guess. Fear brings out these rash actions in people. Hell, if I was still here when it was going on, I might've been one of them. I guess I had my own laws to follow, and they were telling me something different this time.

 

I didn't feel like Reginald's escape-artist act itself was incriminating though. You can't blame a guy for not wanting to die. Sure, a few of the people who pointed the finger at him had some good points from what I heard, but not wanting to die? I can get behind that. Rather partial to life myself. Perhaps now, he'd be a bit more of an upstanding member of the community, help find the real guys responsible, and maybe cut down on the thievery. Or it was a ploy, and he was the guilty party. Either way, I was sure we'd find out soon enough, either by the noose or by a coin.

TL/DR:

I mildly suspect those that lynched Ecthelion

I'm not convinced that Dalinar (Reginald) deserves to be killed for trying to preserve himself

 

What can GMs do?

I fully support GMs working anti-inactivity mechanics into their games. This includes avoiding making the game too complicated, which as I know is more difficult than it seems. It also includes GMs creating inactivity filters, something that weeds out and eliminates people who are inactive for too long. And lastly, but not leastly, it includes creating mechanics that encourage and reward players for being active. I remember MR2 (I think it was- Meta's MR game about pirates on Dreok Crushthroat's crew) did this REALLY well. Rules weren't overly complicated, but players got a coin or two every cycle they posted and could use coins to purchase items. It was simple, but it made everyone want to participate every day so that they could earn their coin.

Edited by Herowannabe
Bah, formatting got screwed up and I can't figure out how to fix it. Just open all the spoiler tags I guess.
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