little wilson

Thursdays after 8/8:30 are usually always free for me.

Actually, I meant this. But yes, I wish you'd stayed too.

Sooooo. We gonna plan this more? @RippleGylf @Taliax any preferences on when we meet next?

Ya know, that still grates after all this time. And I still want to hurl something at your head when you say it. How'd you like your time out, by the way? It was rather....permanent. D'aw. Thanks, Kas. It's a shame we can't try that relationship again. Maybe we could actually make it work this time.

Nah, that's Claincy and he hasn't signed up yet. I'm just remembering Bort calling me Mother a bunch as I was getting him lynched. Fun times, that.

Yes, I remember your Cultist Princeling very well.

Kainae’s hand flew across the canvas, painting broad strokes. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was painting, but that wasn’t anything new. Palette in her right hand, brush in the left, she let her mind take over and fell into a trance she was becoming all too familiar with. Only this time, the end-result didn’t take nearly as long as some had. In less than five minutes, she stepped back from the canvas to view her work. “Huh.” She tilted her head, staring at the abstract piece of work. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but that didn’t really matter at the moment. She could feel something coming, though she wasn’t sure what. She looked around the room, at her other paintings. Most of them were abstract, like this newest piece, though some were clearer. A figure in the distance. Flames all around. The deep blue of the sea swallowing specks spread out in its depths. And others. Each had provided guidance at critical junctures in her life. Warnings of disaster or difficult choices she would have to make. She studied the piece in front of her. White, bursting from somewhere, spreading its influence. Or perhaps it was the other way around: the white being smothered and reaching its tendrils out in a last dying breath. She shrugged. It would become clear to her, in time. Of that she was certain. It always did. For now, she would remain calm, eyes open, ready to face whatever came. EDIT: In case it wasn't obvious, this is me signing up.

If I'm there, one of the pizzas would have to be the deep dish or thin crust. The hand tossed crust will kill me. I assume we're still doing Saturdays. What I said earlier hasn't changed, though on the 14th, I'll be opening, so won't be available until after 6-7.

You can always try the Shard Discord server. I'd say the introduction forum as well, to catch new users, but I don't want to promote spamming those threads. They get enough of that with cookie offers.

Okay I know my schedule better for Saturday's. I generally work at 5, so if we do something, it would have to be a good bit before 5.

While that's a fine opinion to hold, not everyone is going to hold to that, and just because the elim makeup doesn't reflect the village doesn't inherently mean the game is unbalanced. I mean, you mention past AG's. Last year's anniversary game had 3 Mistborn on the eliminator team, while the village had 0. However, it was also the AG most in favor of the village, despite the 3 Mistborn. I think you're not looking close enough at the whole 5 eliminators thing. I know some people hold to the square root rule, but honestly, that rule is worthless when you get under 16 players or over 25. Think about it. 9 player game with 3 eliminators? Elims are going to win 75% of the time, if not more. No question. 36 player game with 6 elims? Elims are going to lose 75% of the time. That's not balanced. But it's square root. This is why looking at percentages is more accurate and balanced regardless of game size. Respect Meta all you want, but in my mind, he was dead wrong about the square root rule and had a habit of giving the elims an edge because of his belief in it. Not a huge edge, mind, but still an edge and it was enough to make a significant difference in the games he GMed. So, percentages. In most other mafia forums, 30-35% is standard. I personally feel that 30% is too high and makes things far too easy for the elims, though you could do 30% if you nerfed the team considerably. You can likewise do 15% if you amp up the team a bit. 5 elims in a 30 player game is 16.7%. When the average is generally 20-25%, 16.7% is rather low (for comparison, LG1 was 25%, AG1 was about 18%, AG2 was 18.5% and AG3 was 17.6%). Now, the average number of elims in LG's is 5.3, or 20.98%. Care to guess what the win rate is for elims in LG's? 38.1%. If you're looking at that number and thinking "wow, that's kind of low," you're right. It is. But guess what's lower? 29.7%, which is the win rate for elims in LG's when we don't count Meta's games (shocker, right?). So basically, if you have an average size team (20.98%), they have a 30% chance of winning an average game. Counting through every LG not GMed by Meta that has a team with less than 23% elims on it, only 6 teams won out of 26 games. That's a 23% win rate. That's terrible. Objectively so. You want to talk about problems with balance, let's start with that. This team had a disadvantage due to their starting size, and things could've easily played out far differently this game than they did. Additionally, they couldn't even really count on inactivity to help them out much either, with villagers going inactive and becoming dead weight for the village. Because let's be honest here, many an elim team has won a game purely because there weren't enough active players left to stop them, even if there were only 2 elims left with 8 villagers alive. But the pinch-hitters could've easily turned this game around for the village, and actually Rae very nearly did. The first cycle in which multiple people voted on elims, every single voter on an elim out of the five doing so was a pinch hitter. There were a good 10-12+ villagers alive and active at the time. So a smaller than normal team against a revolving, always active (theoretically) village. I'd say Orlok did a fine job with the balance here. Sure, the village didn't stand much of a chance until the very end, but that's not necessarily the fault of the distribution. You're seeing the way the game played out and trying to blame the outcome on the distribution, but it's literally impossible to say that it was the distribution's fault when the village played such a huge role in their loss. I mean, I'm not about to say that Meta messed up AG1 just because I trusted Claincy. That's on my head. Not Meta's. The same applies here. It's not on Orlok's head just because a couple villagers trusted a few elims implicitly. It's amazing how much misplaced trust can change the course of a game and that's exactly what happened here.

Curious. Not exactly true, but interesting. As for the idea, I like it. Though this talk of QF22, I think, is not what you meant. Plus, account sharing isn't going to be an option even with the anonymous accounts. But a mentor had some interesting possibilities. Are you meaning a game built around this as a mechanic, or more just in general? Like new player signs up, we toss a number of the R&R players named in a hat and choose one, and that person kind of leads that new player through the game. Answering questions, giving pointers, etc. If this, I think it has serious potential.

I believe I was referring to you. Can't be entirely certain since that was a while ago I'd said that, but I'm pretty sure it was you.

I'm not sure. I don't know my schedule for the next week until Tuesday of the current week (and at my job, the week begins on Friday). So I won't know what my work schedule is on the 10 until the 6th.

Not to derail this thread into defining the term shipping, but that definition, @insert_anagram_here, is very outdated. The best current definition for it that I've found is this one, on Know Your Meme: It covers both fanfic and canon. It's derived from the word "relationship," and most people who use it are using it in that sense. Any fictional relationship discussion would fall under this definition of shipping. Now, it's fine for people to have differing definitions for slang terms, but you should understand that most people don't hold to that dictionary.com definition posted, so please do not take offense when people call some of the discussion that happened in ASK shipping. It's merely a descriptor rather than insulting/dismissive (but if you think someone is being dismissive or insulting in their use of the term, let us know). I'm a shipper. I will gladly own up to that. It's not a dirty word and we shouldn't be avoiding it.

Eric already covered a lot of what I was going to say, but I’ll provide my thoughts about some of this as well, so you have another mod’s perspective. I don’t often post outside the community board—particularly the Sanderson Elimination games—and the reason is because a lot of what goes on elsewhere is realmatics theorizing. There was a time when this was interesting to me: about 10 years ago when I joined TWG. But that time is long past, and now, I’m far more fascinated by character discussion. Arcs, development, romance, you name it. I love it. Unfortunately, it’s historically been something looked down upon here. When the ASK thread first popped up, my first impression upon seeing the thread title was “OH YES SOMEPLACE I CAN POST!!!” (without so much caps and exclamation points, but I was excited at the time, so there you have it). And then I read the OP and it seemed less like a discussion about Adolin-Shallan-Kaladin, and it became clear to me that this was not the haven of casual character discussion I’d thought it would be. I think it’s entirely possible to carry on a conversation/discussion with someone of an opposing view without needing to cite every single point you make, and I don’t really have the time or motivation to do that. So I never posted in that thread, even though I followed along with it a bit and there were times when I desperately wanted to say something. Additionally, it saddened me to see members directing other, newer members to that thread as the “the place to talk about characters,” because….it shouldn’t be the only place to do that. We’re the Brandon Sanderson fansite. We should welcome all things Brandon. Including character discussion. It’s not inherently lesser than realmatic theorycrafting and it shouldn’t be treated as lesser. It’s funny, because this isn’t the first time I’ve come across the view that a fan-related thing that isn’t theorycrafting is somehow lesser. Back when we were having initial discussions about reputation issues with the negative rep, some people suggested removing rep entirely from the community boards, including the roleplaying section and fanworks. I was a very strong proponent of keeping the rep on those forums because they are related to Brandon and shouldn’t be relegated to a lesser section of the site simply because they’re not realmatics. I’ve seen RP that took just as much time to write as a well-sourced and well-written theory. We have people who run Sanderson-based games, dedicating hours per day for weeks at a time (sometimes months). That is not lesser. It’s just different. Character discussion is similar. It’s not lesser. It’s merely a different kind of theorycrafting than realmatics. And because it’s technically theorizing, it belongs with the other theories. The two shouldn’t be separated just because some people enjoy realmatics and others enjoy characters. If we make the thread titles obvious, you can avoid what you don’t like. Easy peasy. But moving on from character discussion and onto moderator opinions. I get the point there, that what we say may seem to carry more weight because of our moderator tag. But like Eric said, that’s not something we can toggle on and off for any given post. One potential solution is prefacing our posts with “Taking the modhat off” so it’s clear this should not be taken as from a mod, but I don’t think that would solve the issue, because I think you’d still have people wary to engage in discussion opposing a moderator for fear of being mod-queued even though the moderator has said they are not a moderator for that post. Another solution is making staff create an alternate account when they’re promoted. But not only is this somewhat impractical for the staff, as it necessitates that we log out of one account to log in to another to do specific things (which would get really tedious after a while), but there are a lot of other issues with it too. One, it distances the staff/admins from the regular users on the site. We’re no longer people. We become Big Brother (I don’t want to be Big Brother, and you shouldn’t want us to be Big Brother either). And two, forcing us to create new identities means we’re required to give up our current identities—identities that have very likely garnered respect in some parts of the forum, hence the promotion in the first place. A lot of us have been on the Shard for many years. These accounts are who we are. They are what we, as people, are known by on this site. And, this may seem overly sentimental, but I’m fairly attached to my account/username. It’s the same name I used on TWG ten years ago. Giving it up so it becomes a purely authoritative figure and creating something new would feel like giving up a large part of who I am on this forum. That really doesn’t feel like the right solution, but again: maybe I’m being overly sentimental. I don't know what the right solution is, outside of us just mingling more. But we should absolutely be allowed to post as ourselves. You don't a moderator who doesn't care about the community in a position of power. That would lead to neglect at best and abuse at worst. And moderators who care about the community get involved with said community.

Between the two, Saturday would definitely be better, but that's not saying that I'd even be able to come, because I don't know my work schedule. I might be working a midshift on Saturday that would probably be 12-8, or I might work a night shift. No idea. I do know that if I get out of work on Friday at a reasonable hour, I have somewhere to be, hence the "Saturday would definitely be better" comment.

The general tone/atmosphere of the current anonymous game has had the mod team thinking that slightly increasing the number of anonymous games per year from 4 to 6 might be a good idea. However, if we were to do that, there would be a cap on how many anonymous games can be LG's (hard cap at 4, preferred at 3).

I believe it takes a member of the faculty supporting it or something. I'm not 100% sure. I'm also not a student and not all the people who come are students (though most generally are). Zas looked into that at one point a couple years ago and decided against it. Edit: and after just looking at it myself, yeah. It would fall under the Chartered club category and those require all members be students at BYU and they also require a full time faculty/staff advisor. While we could undoubtedly get the advisor, those of us who are not BYU students would no longer be able to participate.

We could get lunch, yeah. I don't have any preferences about, though I'm bringing sugary for everyone so there's that.

My car will be able to fit everyone, so we don't need to worry about that. And it's 4-wheel drive in case the roads are bad.

@Sunbird @Taliax How about 2pm tomorrow? And let's meet at the Cougareat, but do something else somewhere else after meeting up. Because it's a Saturday afternoon. There are so many options. Even with snow.

We're down to Friday or Saturday this week, if we want to meet this week (and technically tonight, but I don't like late notice meetings like that, even though I'm free). @Sunbird @Taliax what are your Saturdays like? It's an odd day to meet, I know, but Sunbird can't meet Friday's and @RippleGylf can only meet Friday or Saturday. If Saturday (preferably afternoon, though mornings are okay for me too) doesn't work, whatever day we choose will be missing one of Ripple or Sunbird. Edit: also, I'm an idiot. I'm busy next Friday night.

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I'm free basically any day. @Slowswift, what do you think the odds are that you'd have a free night next week? Should we wait to see what day you can come if you can, or just pick a day?