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Quick Fix Game 28: Minimalist Elimination


Wyrmhero

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Cycle 7


Madagascar was lynched!
Droughtbringer was killed by the Eliminators!



Madagascar (4): phattemer, Araris Valerian, Devotary of Sponteneity, Kynedath

Kynedath (3): StrikerEZ, Madagascar, asterion137

Araris Valerian (1): Droughtbringer

 

Vote summary sheet.

The Cycle will end at 9PM GMT on Friday.

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Remember the rules about posting in this thread - You can only vote or remove a vote.

Player List

 
  1. phattemer
  2. Roadwalker
  3. Steeldancer
  4. Lemonelon
  5. A Joe in the Bush
  6. Crimsn-Wolf
  7. Kynedath
  8. Sart
  9. Straw
  10. asterion137
  11. Alvron
  12. Darkness_
  13. The Young Bard
  14. BrightnessRadiant
  15. Araris Valerian
  16. Droughtbringer
  17. StrikerEZ
  18. Madagascar
  19. livinglegend
  20. Orlok Tsubodai
  21. Jondesu
  22. Haelbarde
  23. Devotary of Spontaneity


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Aftermath

 

Araris Valerian wins!

 

...Seriously. As literally the only person to post last Cycle, I'm ending the game there and declaring him the winner by default.

There were 11 players left in the game, 3 of whom were Eliminators. We got one post by a Villager last Cycle, and that was it for activity for this Cycle.

I've said before that the most annoying thing for a GM is for players to go inactive because it messes with their balancing, but I understand if people have things suddenly come up in real life that pull them away. Having said that though, a 91% inactivity rate for a Cycle is highly indicative of something more wrong with the game, or perhaps that I've missed something somewhere.

Was it that there was no theme, no discussion, no roleplaying? This game was built in response to people saying that they don't have time to roleplay or respond to or write long analyses. This was meant to be the easiest game for people to remain active in, as all you had to do was to look at the vote spreadsheet and write three words in your post. At one point in the game, Orlok let me know that the link to my spreadsheet was broken. This was 46 hours into the Cycle, and no-one else had brought it up before then. Did anyone even look at that over the course of the game?

This was an incredibly disheartening experience, and quite frankly it puts me off ever running a game again.

Edited by Wyrmhero
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I wasn't using the spreadsheet much because I didn't have any idea about what to do with it until we actually killed an eliminator. I was planning on going from there and doing my analysis. I was just using the end of cycle vote spreads for my votes. I appreciated this format for a QF game, although I didn't realize that cycles were 48 hours until the game actually got going. I'm not sure where things went wrong, honestly, because I literally needed 5-10 minutes between 2 days to participate, maybe more if I wanted to change my vote multiple times. I don't think the activity level points to anything wrong with the game. I honestly think that this game shows that some of the players in our community aren't able to make the sort of commitment to consistency that these games take, regardless of the actual time involvement. It may be time to start having stricter inactivity penalties to see if that will help.

I do appreciate you as a GM Wyrm, and hope that you will run more games!

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. . . I feel terrible. I really do. I was trying to stay active, I just couldn't remember. I know it was designed to be easy to stay invested in, but since I couldn't do very much I think it just slipped my mind. I appreciate what you were trying to do though. It was fun. I'm sorry that this ended the way it did. I honestly think that all I can say is I'm sorry.

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Ouch. Just a tip to the Elims, I was going to try to stay active, and would have at least continued to vote each cycle, more than once most likely (I was going to code a message into my votes using the first letters of the people I voted for. Sorry Wyrm. I was trying to circumvent your rules, but only for fun purposes.)

Inactivity is literally game breaking. I’ve been guilty of being less active than I feel I should be, even missing a cycle here or there, but this was absurd. I wish I knew what to do about it, though I’ve already built an inactivity filter into the game I’ll be running soon.

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4 hours ago, Madagascar said:

Can we learn who the eliminators were?

The Eliminators were Kynedath, LivingLegend, and The Young Bard.

 

With regards to the idea of inactivity filters, I don't think that they really do anything - Inactive people don't care about whether they die or not, and it makes no real difference to the game whether inactive players are dead or alive.

Edited by Wyrmhero
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Well, I think the problem is serious enough to start temporarily banning people from games. Hopefully players care about being able to play in future games, and by going inactive you are threatening to ruin the experience for other players. It makes sense to me to penalize that with not being able to play the next game or two, except of course when real life stuff was the reason.

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There was no way in this game to tell the difference between an inactive, a lurker, and someone who just didn't want to vote. There were six living players who had voted in the previous cycle, and livinglegend and The Young Bard had voted in cycle five. It's entirely possible that some or all of them would have come back to playing next cycle. I know that I would have voted next cycle, I just didn't know who to vote for and didn't see any reason to not let Steeldancer get lynched.

I don't think players should be banned for missing one or two cycles. A pattern of inactivity would be more of a reason to prevent players from participating in future games, but a few days should not disqualify someone. I hope to participate in MR 26 and AG 4, and would really appreciate not being banned. 

Edit: 

Devotary of Spontaneity

Edited by Ookla the Haphazard
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I would thoroughly agree with banning people who drop out and don’t return, though as mentioned, I’d be wary of that with people who just don’t post for a cycle or two. Three total cycles in a row without a post would be enough in my opinion, though. Maybe less so this game, but there should have been no reason not to vote.

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I'm actually really sorry about disappearing. I just wasn't super invested into this game, but that's no fault on your part, Wyrm. It was partly because school has been busy lately and partly because I have just been feeling really down and unmotivated lately. I tend to go inactive about halfway through most games for some reason, and I don't know why. I want to play the next couple games...but I dunno, I'm not in a very good place right now both mentally and in school. And I made All-Area and I really want to advance to All-State, so I don't really need very many distractions. We'll see if I can handle anymore games for awhile. 

Sorry for the tangent, but again, I feel bad for going inactive near the end. I wish there was some way we could make the games more enjoyable for everyone throughout the entire game, not just the beginning or the end.

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22 hours ago, Wyrmhero said:

The Eliminators were Kynedath, LivingLegend, and The Young Bard.

 

Well, that's nice to know with Kynedath at least,I kind of kept voting for myself as a joke and to see if any bad guys would be able to resist joining in. Obviously, I ended up doing jack diddly with that but nice to know it worked how I pictured it. Sort of :P

Edited by Madagascar
Fixed sentence
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On 12/9/2017 at 7:13 AM, Araris Valerian said:

Well, I think the problem is serious enough to start temporarily banning people from games. Hopefully players care about being able to play in future games, and by going inactive you are threatening to ruin the experience for other players. It makes sense to me to penalize that with not being able to play the next game or two, except of course when real life stuff was the reason.

I didn’t sign up for this game, so maybe my stepping in with my $0.02 is a signal that this could be moved to the meta thread...

But I feel like banning people may be a little extreme.

I understand where you’re coming from. It’s a little irresponsible to claim you will have time for a game and then not participate.

But I don’t think banning is the optimal solution.

How do you improve your activity if you are no longer allowed to play?

I’ll also point out that every now and then a normally very active player who we wouldn’t want to ban can go inactive.

If we wanted to implement some sort of inactivity deterrent over multiple games, then I suggest it be a measure that still leaves it open for said player to become active.

For example, one possible alternative to outright banning (one of many, mostly just the one that popped into my head) is to give an player a sort of “probationary” period following a game of inactivity. Until they participated actively in a game, they would always be either vanilla town or vanilla elim (unless it was a true role madness game). This incentivizes activity somewhat, while allowing you to step back into the game with little difficulty if you really want to. It also means thaf if the game is balanced around a certain role, the person that holds it will probably be active, resulting in more balanced games. Personally, I believe it would make sense to adopt this measure, but if somebody else has a different take on this please speak up.

Another possible alternative is to avoid placing any rules whatsoever against inactivity, and encourage activity through means other than rules. Reaching out to people in PM is probably a great start, although honestly we should still do that even if the above is adopted. However, if we were going to take this route and succeed, we’d really need to step it up in how we reach out to inactives. If we wanted to do this, then there should never be a case where somebody falls inactive and they don’t get a PM from either their GM, mod, or both, asking politely what’s going on and encouraging participation. That would be the bare minimum I think, if it were to make an appreciable difference.

And finally, one last note. One cause of inactivity is that players who know they can’t be active will still sometimes sign up to flesh out a game’s numbers, because the GM has set a minimum for the game to run. I recommend that GMs start making games that can take a more flexible number of players. That would help things considerably and it wouldn’t be too difficult.

That post ended up being longer than I expected... Kind of a bother to type up on a cell phone. Still, I feel like somebody needed to comprehensively address the issue, even if that someone didn’t play this game.

Edited by Drake Marshall
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