Quick Fix 52: Dancing in the Mists

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Just now, Gears said:

A question to people: What "felt off" with my kill choices? I don't really understand why everyone thought they were weird.

 

Personally don't think they were wierd, though I guess I thought you killed them for different reasons. Danex and Quinn I assumed were killed because on Mat/Kings flips they looked significantly better. 

1 minute ago, Gears said:

I mean, I was planning on PMing Jondesu before the game since they were returning, and I always find varied perspectives on the game to be interesting. 

I mean it was more the why of the liranil kill D1, but you could have been hoping that Quinn and I would take up the thread arguing as well

[Archer]

Well, that was foreseeable, but the elim team reveal isn't as disappointing as I thought it might be. Mistakes were made, the game went sideways, ah well. 

I feel jokingly validated for sheeping Illwei, even if I'm really sorry how that turned out for you @The Unknown Order. You die early a lot.

Quote

 

To Archer, when all is said and done: I genuinely think your reasoning on Tani is terrible. Even if you found the mark, that was just chance. It’s like LG74!Wei. I don’t care if the individual is an elim or not, that reasoning is too bad to stand. You eliminated so many people from the PoE for no reason, changed what you thought about Tani’s posts, moved Danex from category to category, and so many other issues with this process. I think you are a great player, but on this issue, there is distinct need for improvement. -Gears

On the one hand, you did a good job poking holes in it and made me doubt myself afterwards. But on the other hand, your counter-arguments were in bad faith (being evil and all). In the shoes of a villager, I knew Quinn was good. Same with Mat and Illwei, deep down. I feel like those were generally accepted and I didn't need to rehash it. I also correctly surmised you'd split up your PMs, so even if one of them was evil, there was more elims to hit in the other pool. After C2 everyone in there but Tani and Bridge-Four had two or less posts. Could the elim team have been PizzaPower, Xino, and Jondesu? Sure. If so, did we have any reasonable chance of catching them? No. If there's not someone on the elim team who is responsive and talkative, it's hard to get any of them. So either this was a winnable game or it wasn't, and I decided to proceed as if it was.

My biggest error was I was completely wrong about the NK reasoning. But I stand by my argument that we should have left the potential elim in the high octane pool be until the end and targeted the other people. Unfortunately, Tani received cover from villagers, not frightened elims and we never got close. 

@Bridge-Four Good first game! What was up with the grey text? 

Oh, and GMs, you did swell. I like the dead doc formatting, and the write-ups were good. Overall, it was a nice quick game.

[Mat]

22 minutes ago, Gears said:

A question to people: What "felt off" with my kill choices? I don't really understand why everyone thought they were weird.

If I had known I would have said in thread  

[danex]

13 minutes ago, Gears said:

I would like to talk about pinch-hitters. More specifically, the concerning trend of inactive pinch-hitters. Pinch-hitters are intended to be an active replacement for an inactive person, but the people who tend to sign up for a pinch-hitter position often do so because they are too busy to play the game, which is exactly the opposite demographic we want as a pinch-hitter. The problem is that an active person able to play the game would just... sign up for the game. I don't know if this is a problem that can truly be solved without forcing some people to just not play. 

I recently came up with a solution that might kinda fix the entire inactivity problem, but it’s almost definitely too involved to actually happen. it’s a sorta “activity economy”.

Every player starts with an activity score of 10. (Or 20 or 100 or anything really. Really only matters that we all start at the same number.) The more active you are, the score goes up, and the less active you are, the score goes down. Every single game has the potential to alter your score by 1, up or down. The way it’s measured is that the GM sets a “post count par” for their games. The number is not shared with the players. If their final post count at the end of the game exceeds par, they get +1 point, if it’s less, -1. (Par would be adjusted by cycle too, to account for when a player is eliminated. Like, C1 might have a par of 5, and C2 might have a par of 10. Whenever you were killed is the par number you must match.) 
Then the way the system actually helps inactivity is that when GMs are putting up their signup threads, they could set a required Activity Score that you must have in order to sign up. So games that are designed to be more intense and more discussion heavy can be limited to the people we know are going to discuss more.

I don’t know if I really like this solution, it does kinda feel...dictatorial. And just kinda mean. But it is a solution. Not that it matters, it’s much too complicated of a system to actually be implemented. But it’s interesting to think about theoretically.

[Quivil]

6 minutes ago, Archer said:

My biggest error was I was completely wrong about the NK reasoning. But I stand by my argument that we should have left the potential elim in the high octane pool be until the end and targeted the other people. Unfortunately, Tani received cover from villagers, not frightened elims and we never got close. 

It'd be nice if you'd accused me of being elim on a day when I coulda been on for the whole cycle. There's a reason I asked Quinn for help.

 

This was fun. I finally got to survive to the end! Also I got to be an elim in an elim doc game! Yay!

Kinda ironic that the only game I didn't get exed or NKd I was elim...

[Quintessential]

23 minutes ago, Dannex said:

I recently came up with a solution that might kinda fix the entire inactivity problem, but it’s almost definitely too involved to actually happen. it’s a sorta “activity economy”.

Every player starts with an activity score of 10. (Or 20 or 100 or anything really. Really only matters that we all start at the same number.) The more active you are, the score goes up, and the less active you are, the score goes down. Every single game has the potential to alter your score by 1, up or down. The way it’s measured is that the GM sets a “post count par” for their games. The number is not shared with the players. If their final post count at the end of the game exceeds par, they get +1 point, if it’s less, -1. (Par would be adjusted by cycle too, to account for when a player is eliminated. Like, C1 might have a par of 5, and C2 might have a par of 10. Whenever you were killed is the par number you must match.) 
Then the way the system actually helps inactivity is that when GMs are putting up their signup threads, they could set a required Activity Score that you must have in order to sign up. So games that are designed to be more intense and more discussion heavy can be limited to the people we know are going to discuss more.

I don’t know if I really like this solution, it does kinda feel...dictatorial. And just kinda mean. But it is a solution. Not that it matters, it’s much too complicated of a system to actually be implemented. But it’s interesting to think about theoretically.

If we did that then my score would never stop increasing

I think a better way to do this is to just keep track of each player's average number of posts per cycle (using that post-count script that Illwei had in the AG), with maybe differentiations between QFs, MRs, and LGs (so each player has an average number of posts per cycle for each type of game). And then GMs can choose to set a minimum number of posts per cycle for a game if they want to, and only players with averages at or above that number for that type of game can play. That way, it wouldn't be up to the GM themself to keep track of the measurement (someone else could do it), and people's scores wouldn't be dependent on whether the GM had a good idea of where to set the par.

Edit: in this case, new players would probably be given a grace period of 3 or 4 games before the restrictions took effect. Also, since people's activity levels change over time, it might only be the last <insert number> games that person played that count for the average.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Quintessential

[Mat]

I’d personally rather do nothing and keep it as it is. We all know everyone’s average activity level, that part’s not a secret. Any other thing that limits players in any way feels too dictatorial, using the word Dannex used, to me.

[Bridge-Four]

Oop, I messed up. But at least I know I don't have to trust my gut reads. GGs everyone

5 hours ago, Archer said:

What was up with the grey text? 

Was it grey? I use the Dark Reader extension so it turn everything that is black to white, so I thought if it was displaying white to me then it has to be black for you guys. I will check it from the next time before posting.

Thanks for letting me play!

[Elandera]

Congratulations to the Elariel Eliminators! You all survived to destroy the Hastings and their hold on Luthadel! This was a wonderfully simple game from Ashbringer, helped by Lotus. Thanks to both for running the game. I know I look forward to seeing a rerun of the anonymous voting mechanics.

As always, if anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, please get ahold of Wilson, Devotary of Spontaneity, Elbereth, Araris Valerian, or myself, or post in the GM Signups & Discussion Thread. Not only will we get you added to the list, but we'd also be more than willing to help out in any way we can. 

You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone in our Art of Game Creation thread. With all the games that we've run so far, we have plenty of experienced GMs that can help you refine any game you're thinking about. If you would rather keep some detail secret, or are self-conscious about posting in thread (there's really no need to be; while we do slaughter each other, we are very polite about it), then I'm sure one of our fantastic committee members (Amanuensis, STINK, Sart, Fifth Scholar, Straw, Haelbarde, and Young Bard) would be more than willing to help you out in private.

Thanks again to everyone that played, and we look forward to killing seeing you in future games!