[Eldritch] Sphere Caps & Waiting Lists
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@Creepy said:
@Ganymede said:
Your equilibrium will be reached when certain players get fed up with their +requests being neglected. I'm not sure if that's a good policy to stick to.
My point exactly!
No. This sounds nice, but it doesn't actually happen or work this way in practice. Long-term players might leave with frustration, even while 3 new people are stepping up to the plate. Not having a limit and then letting requests go...does not make people leave, it just makes them unhappy and causes them to bitch. A lot. Impacting a great deal of your game and the morale. The cascade of 'just let the jobs go hee hee' consequences is pretty significant.
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Much like XP systems, this is another area where I think there is probably not a âperfectâ answer that satisfies everyone, and weâre choosing between sides to err on more than anything else. Weâve been talking about this for a while, and I think there are obvious pros and cons to everything we came up with, hence our opening it up to the community for comments and suggestions. Obviously, all this is predicated on there being a huge demand to play any particular thing, or on our MU* at all, which is not a given. But for the sake of worst case scenarios, Iâmma go with it here.
The âProsâ of the waiting list model are that most people have an inherent sense that âfirst come, first servedâ is fair, as a lot of things operate like this. The biggest Con for me with this, though, is itâs the complaints about a non-flat XP system taken to an even greater extreme â If you werenât there at the start, then boo hoo too bad for you. Only in this case, you donât even get to play at all. And while it sucks to have people jump the queue, this sucks too. Conversely, of course... it sucks to have people jump the queue. Which is the argument against the lottery.
@Thenomain was the one in our discussions who came up with what I thought was a good hybrid. At the risk of making it overly complex, I think after reading everyoneâs thoughts I might refine it even a bit further. So @Coin had proposed keeping a waiting list of 5 people and filling spots from that as they open up. We could do it so that, when the queue is empty and itâs time to refresh the list, Slot 1 goes to the person whoâs been waiting longest, straight up. Slot 2 is a random pull among the 25% of the people whoâve been waiting longest, 3 the 50% of the people whoâve waited longest, 4/75% and the last one among the entire pool. I think this still preserves the chance for new people to get involved, but also shows deference to the people whoâve been there the longest, as people the top 25% are in every draw and the newcomers only one. Then if we email or @mail or whatever you and donât respond within X days, weâll redraw I suppose.
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Define then hardcode an activity requirement.
So, this will be illustrative of my staffing philosophy probably, but Iâm skeptical of MU* rules solving problems like this. Rules that clearly convey expectations and consequences on things where thereâs no room for situational ambiguity are great, but my experience is that they do more to impose on good players than they do to curtail bad ones. I also think they can sometimes unnecessarily constrain staff and force them to behave in a matter contrary to their own judgment because ârules are rulesâ. To pluck an example out of the sky, letâs say we did this and imposed a âyou must be active an hour a weekâ rule or every two weeks or whatever. Players who know this, who are deliberately sitting on a spot because they might want it later, will easily get around this by standing in a room with their friend and going :grins âHiâ and the like every 15 minutes. Meanwhile, letâs say @Ganymede was also playing a demon and had a big legal hoosits at work and her parents were in town and various other things and she was going to be scarce for the next couple weeks. The player thumbing his nose at the intention of the rule is fine, but all of a sudden Iâm constrained in making a judgment call about @Ganymede, who is a great player and has contributed to the sphere before and will doubtless again, because we have 'rules' and the person next on the waiting list is now pointing out that, according to the rules, she should be unapproved.
Beyond that, Iâm highly skeptical of rules that attempt to resolve problems that havenât even happened yet.â @Coin and I will both be involved in the Demon sphere, which, I agree, is where I am anticipating wait lists being the biggest issue, and I think weâll have a good handle on what the players are doing and, honestly, Iâd rather just talk to people if they donât seem to be RPing and find out why.
Open the flood gates, set no caps, and watch folks leave when they can't get an ST to run something specific to them. Eventually some equilibrium will be reached.
I feel pretty strongly against this, honestly. While ideally I would like to be able to help everyone have a good time, I recognize that we (staff) only have so much time and mental energy to devote to this, and I would rather help some people have a good time than everyone have a disappointing and frustrating time. For me itâs like having people over, and there is an unspoken social contract involved in this that you are going to go to some effort to make them comfortable and help them have fun while theyâre visiting. If I invited fifty people over to my house and had a six pack of Pabst and a half a bag of corn chips, yes, a lot of them would eventually leave... but I would also be a super shitty host and I would feel bad, and probably should feel bad. Also a lot of the players who leave are probably great players who Iâd like to play with, and having had a bad experience at the outset, they will probably now never come back, even when there is no waiting list, because most MU*ers, I have noted, are not really big on second chances. This is also bad for the game and for everyone who plays on it, players and staff, because we will miss out on their contributions because we deliberately didn't support them when they were willing to make them.
(Also, open Geist
)Make them write a GMC version and we can talk about it! Iâm pretty insistent about adding Changeling whenever it comes out. If this game is still a thing then and/or any of us are still alive.
â - Because this post isn't long enough already, I will add as an aside that I have this theory from when I staffed on HM as (I think) the very last staff storyteller there before they went 100% PRP: I think that it is natural for staff to want to make contributions to the game. I think that the fewer people on staff directly involved in RP/storytelling/plot, the more this tends to express itself as people anticipating problems and then making up rules to try and solve problems that haven't happened yet, which I think has lots of bad unintended consequences. My ideal goal would be to have at least 50% of the staff on the game involved in some way, even a little way, in stories and plots so that the staff focus stays on 'what can we do to make fun!?' rather than 'what can we do to prevent jerky behavior', because I think that last one is a far less productive timesink.
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Remind me when you open up to sign up on this list? So I don't forget and get in the dreaded line.
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Unless you're throwing in fresh corned beef, I'm allergic to queues.
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@Eerie said:
So @Coin had proposed keeping a waiting list of 5 people and filling spots from that as they open up. We could do it so that, when the queue is empty and itâs time to refresh the list, Slot 1 goes to the person whoâs been waiting longest, straight up. Slot 2 is a random pull among the 25% of the people whoâve been waiting longest, 3 the 50% of the people whoâve waited longest, 4/75% and the last one among the entire pool. I think this still preserves the chance for new people to get involved, but also shows deference to the people whoâve been there the longest, as people the top 25% are in every draw and the newcomers only one. Then if we email or @mail or whatever you and donât respond within X days, weâll redraw I suppose.
This is like a solution in search of a problem. Who is unsatisfied with a first come, first served queue for entry into a sphere? Other policies are going to make this more or less appealing, such as giving priority to people with non-supers, etc, but it seems like an overly complex response to something that has yet to be proven an issue.
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@Eerie said:
Define then hardcode an activity requirement.
Firan did this. It was extremely easy to get around, and in the end it was relatively meaningless too. It was, however, a good way for asshole staffers to pluck characters from people for no goddamn reason, like the one who booted my RL friend off his character two days after our last scene, with no warning @mail nor anything, for "weeks of inactivity."
Not that I think @Coin and @Eerie are asshole staffers, mind you. Maybe I'm just bitter, but I saw a lot of people camp on characters for years (no, not just staffers or staff friends) with no contribution to the game whatsoever, because hardcoded activity requirements are very easy to get around.
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@Glitch said:
This is like a solution in search of a problem. Who is unsatisfied with a first come, first served queue for entry into a sphere? Other policies are going to make this more or less appealing, such as giving priority to people with non-supers, etc, but it seems like an overly complex response to something that has yet to be proven an issue.
This is entirely possible, and is probably a reflection that I find all the answers to this unsatisfying in one way or another. But, I still really hate the idea of a 45 person, two-year old waiting list... so if we do end up going with simply 'first come, first served' I'd be inclined to only keep a 5-10 person waiting list and then we'll announce when we're ready to take more names in the future.
Any strong arguments for some other system of managing sphere caps?
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@Eerie said:
@Glitch said:
so if we do end up going with simply 'first come, first served' I'd be inclined to only keep a 5-10 person waiting list and then we'll announce when we're ready to take more names in the future.
Given the alt limit, someone would likely have a character they're playing when you finally contacted them once their number came up. At that point they'd have to retire their current character and switch to whatever sphere they were waiting for. I think you'd prob move down that list pretty quickly as some folks will have left the server and others decide to stick with their current characters. So its likely to not be as big a problem as some might think.
ETA: Are you going to allow Becoming to circumvent this?
âIt takes many sheep to satisfy one wolf.â
â Nenia Campbell, Horrorscape -
I'm of two minds of activity monitors. One is: No no no no no no no no no no no no!
The other is: It can be done. Haunted Memories did it, but HM's application had nothing to do with estimating the activity of the sphere and the weight of that on staff. (They instead counted jobs, which was just as bad.) What HM did was use it to force you out and about more often. "Force" was, IMO, the wrong way to do it, but I can't say that it didn't work. They also kept the trains running on time.
Activity monitors can provide useful information, but the idea is a sledge-hammer where a social contract is needed.
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@Creepy said:
ETA: Are you going to allow Becoming to circumvent this?
Since I haven't seen GMC werewolf yet, and this wouldn't apply to Demons, its a vampire specific thing. And no, not to circumvent this, though IC becomings with staff approval should be fine. Also we'd talked about a 'if you are murdered gruesomely, you can re-app into your old sphere' clause if, and only if, you didn't plan your own death just because you wanted to re-app.
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@Eerie said:
@Creepy said:
ETA: Are you going to allow Becoming to circumvent this?
Since I haven't seen GMC werewolf yet, and this wouldn't apply to Demons, its a vampire specific thing. And no, not to circumvent this, though IC becomings with staff approval should be fine. Also we'd talked about a 'if you are murdered gruesomely, you can re-app into your old sphere' clause if, and only if, you didn't plan your own death just because you wanted to re-app.
What about inactive folks coming back and wanting to unfreeze into a Capped sphere?
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First come first serve. And also maybe some wiggle room on the caps, so, say, if you have a group who wants to come in at once of 5 people, and you have 11/15 slots filled, wiggle it. Just a little bit. Come on and wiggle it.
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Other concepts in deliberation:
- Announce one week before opening the sphere, allow apps for 2 days, lotto.
- Outright 'first come, first served'. The cgen system can have you done and waiting for that fateful day without staff intervention, so you just hit the "Accept Me!" when staff is ready.
My current opinion about becomings is that they have to wait the same as anyone else. I personally lament that a relatively simple IC action (turning someone into a vampire) has to wait for an OOC condition (staff feeling they can handle it), but this is a natural consequence of sphere caps.
I've been campaigning for these two riders, as well (which I mention because I think we're agreeing at the moment.) First is that deaths through role-play get to re-app immediately, as a thank-you for being cool about playing to the bitter end. The second is that unfreezing also requires space in the sphere. No special treatment, just like how "becoming" wouldn't, and "character death" would.
Exceptions are always allowed, and that's one of the (many) things I like about working with this group. If the exception seems reasonable, such as group-apps stretching the cap and vacation-flags not getting you frozen, they will probably be okay. If we have to spell this out, I will be disappointed.
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Lottery is good, so is first come first serve. The main problem I can foresee is people squatting on slots they don't actively play, but that's a problem with any cap system. It's a bridge to cross when you get there.
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@Darinelle said:
@Eerie said:
Define then hardcode an activity requirement.
Firan did this. It was extremely easy to get around, and in the end it was relatively meaningless too. It was, however, a good way for asshole staffers to pluck characters from people for no goddamn reason, like the one who booted my RL friend off his character two days after our last scene, with no warning @mail nor anything, for "weeks of inactivity."
I believe I explicitly stated that for a system like this to work it needs to be fair and it has to be applied universally - that means automatically. You don't play, you get frozen. It's not meant to solve the issue of asshole staffers because that is not solvable through code.
However since it's stated that's not an option for Eldritch, that's that.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel - Well, you did - but that was also a system that was theoretically "automatically applied" with fairness to all. It just - wasn't.
ETA: I don't mean this as a bitch about Firan so much as listening to all the problems we had with the system when it wasn't being circumvented by asshole staffers? I can't imagine willingly doing something like that without a very limited application - for example, activity requirements if you play a character in a position of power/responsibility. Other than that? I would be very leery of instituting anything of the sort.
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@Eerie said:
Meanwhile, letâs say @Ganymede was also playing a demon and had a big legal hoosits at work and her parents were in town and various other things and she was going to be scarce for the next couple weeks. The player thumbing his nose at the intention of the rule is fine, but all of a sudden Iâm constrained in making a judgment call about @Ganymede, who is a great player and has contributed to the sphere before and will doubtless again, because we have 'rules' and the person next on the waiting list is now pointing out that, according to the rules, she should be unapproved.
There are plenty of fixes for this, but you're right: adhering to a particular rule strictly is stupid.
I have long since espoused the fact that all good games are run like a benevolent dictatorship. The game operators create and enforce the rules, but you really don't need rules. When they act fairly, people are happy; when they act capriciously, less so.
Rules set the expectations of staff. Sure, it's nice to know for sure what staff will and won't do, but it's patently unreasonable to expect staff to not consider every case individually, and measure "justice" against an ephemeral, shifting concept of "fairness."
I have been asked to step aside, as a player, based on my activity. As I've gotten older, I've been more comfortable doing so. I've been staff too many times to not appreciate staff doing what staff thinks is best, and trusting in that judgment. It's nice to know that I'm valued, but I don't want to be (ever again) the reason why a game is losing players or not growing.
âIt is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.â -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Darinelle said:
@Arkandel - Well, you did - but that was also a system that was theoretically "automatically applied" with fairness to all. It just - wasn't.
Once you can't trust the people running a game, run. There's absolutely nothing that systems or code can do to fix that - if @the folks running Eldritch (for example!) were jerkfaces then no sphere cap implementation would help a player they decide to screw with.
Anything we discuss has to be under the assumption of staff sanity.
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@Ganymede said:
Rules set the expectations of staff. Sure, it's nice to know for sure what staff will and won't do, but it's patently unreasonable to expect staff to not consider every case individually, and measure "justice" against an ephemeral, shifting concept of "fairness."
I agree, but at the same time Iâve been on staff channels with staffers who were convinced they âcouldnâtâ do anything about this or that thing because technically it wasnât against the rules. Most of us are pretty conditioned to follow ârulesâ as normative concepts.
@Arkandel said:
@the folks running Eldritch (for example!) were jerkfaces then no sphere cap implementation would help a player they decide to screw with.
Happily, @Coin is mainly a jerkface to small children, adorable puppies and old people trying to enjoy a park bench on a sunny day. Usually he's so tired from abusing all these people IRL that he doesn't have much energy left to abuse people online, so that's a relief for all of us. Also he can be bribed with licorice.
