I believe making some a/some thread(s) with a bunch of S-FMs classified as "noob-friendly" or other things would be interesting.
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Keep discussing ideas and ill lay something out based on tbe most popular ideas. Then people can discuss what rhey think and then we can clean it up further then implement it.
This is my take on things, and I cannot claim to know the goals of every person who has created an hosting system, of course. However, this is a good place to start.
What are the aims of every single hosting system, and more specifically, what did they want to be?
- A system that only brings quality games, and encourages improvement of the site's meta, with minimal encroachment on both host's and player's freedom.
- A system that organizes setups, which means that the setups need to be put in correct time (not two 20 players games at once if the playerbase is 25, this kind of stuff). It also means that setups need to be approved, and a contact must be made with moderation in order to have signups going.
- As a continuation of the first aim, a system that rewards good hosts, good plays, and involvement in the community.
In other words: a system that keeps games going (quantity), and that improves the game experience over time.
Welcome to the Kingdom of Utopia.
This is how setups are managed, in this great kingdom. From the creation of the setups to the completion of games.
- Someone posts a setup in the Setup Workshop. The thread is open, and since the description of the Workshop encourages people to give their input, saying how it is useful for the both hosts and players to have more input for fun games, people comment on the thread and give ideas.
- The setup is ready for review by FM Staff! On a sticky thread in the Workshop, the author of the setup posts a message, optionally with a mention to staff members, saying that the setup is ready for review, since the author feels it is fun and balanced: finished.
- An FM staff member reviews the setup, discussing the adjustments that need to be done, just like the current system. The thread is still open to discussion, and everyone can still contribute to the setup.
- The setup is approved, and the author of the setup contacts the staff to know when they may post signups.
- Signups are posted, fill, and the game starts.
- Once the game ends, if it has been successful (no major balance issue discovered while playing the game, or similar things), the setup will go in a subsection of the Workshop: the Approved S-FMs. They will they be free to be rehosted, and the only requirement is to contact staff to know when signups can be posted.
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There is a Ladder, that lasts for a determined amount of games (10-12). The point attribution system is strongly inspired by the recent talks about this matter, I just reworded ideas because I found them really good.
- Hosts will gain 2 points, without restriction on the number of times this can be applied.
- Losers will gain 1 point.
- Winners of each game will receive points equal to the amount of players divided by the amount of winners.
- At the end of the season (when the game slot of the season is filled, and that the game is played and over), each player will earn a bonus based on their win percentage. A 100% win rate will result in a 100% point bonus, a 50% win rate will result in a 50% point bonus, etc.
The Ladder is a way to encourage serious, competitive, and sports-like play. Hosts may opt out of the Ladder if they wish to have a more casual game; FM Staff may also choose to approve a game for non-ladder only if it is deemed playable for fun, but not suitable for ladder.
This goes in the mindset of the first aim.
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In the same mindset, awards are given to people who have accomplished something special. For example, very liked hosts, people who continously give good setup suggestions (not sure how that would work, those are just suggestions), or people who write approved game theory (outside of games, in the FM discussion). The award system already has a Recommend Award thing, and it already exists! It's a great way to motivate people to do things, whatever those things are.
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I hope that you appreciated your travel to the Kingdom of Utopia! Feel free to leave feedback on this.
@Marshmallow Marshall
I don't have a huge interest in the ladder personally because I don't think that you will get an accurate correlation between win rate and player skill until you have an extremely large number of FMs to sample from (larger then what would be realistic for a season) and I see it more of such a fun little side thing. As such, feel free to implement it however you think that the community will most enjoy it.
Having said that, this is not my first time seeing the proposed point attribution system (Slaol talked about it before his untimely departure) and I have the following issues with it...
1) There is a massive emphasis on games played, far more so then any performance-rating system that would ever be used for anything at all competitive. If player 1 and player 2 have identical records after 6 games, then player 1 stops playing and player 2 plays another 6 games with the exact same record, player 2 will end up with double the points of player 1. This is fine if you want the emphasis on games played being this large, but terrible from a competitive standpoint.
2) I understand the desire to heavily reward players who win as neutral killers where the odds are stacked against you. However, the proposed winner reward system being based off of the total number of winners is terrible. It can be assumed that for any given "normal" setup where the main scum faction is a single mafia, the mafia should have an expected win chance equal to that of the town (if this isn't the case, there is a high chance that the game was poorly balanced). Under the proposed system however, a mafia winner would get double to triple the points of a town winner. As such, players who roll mafia quite a lot will over time end up with a massive advantage in point potential, despite not having any disadvantage in theoretical win rate.
Issue 1 makes the system non-competitive, but is still fine if you want to heavily reward people for participating in every single FM. Issue 2 compromises the entire concept of a fair ladder.
Proposed alternate system
The formula for this is going to be a bit more complex, but it does fix the issues mentioned above.
(1-(C/(C+GP)))*(WR/ExpectedWR)
C = A constant. Raising it increases the emphasis on games played, lowering decreases. I'll suggest that the value is 2, but this can be modified.
GP = Number of games played/hosted
WR = Win rate
ExpectedWR = Average expected win rate for a player based off of all their roles. This would take a bit of work to standardize win rates. However, if for example it was determined that in a standard townVmafiaVneutralkilling, town and mafia should each have a 45% chance of winning and that neutral killing has a 10% chance of winning, if a player played three games, one as town one as mafia one as NK, their value for this would be (.45 + .45 + .1)/3 = 1/3.
Then also to illustrate the values for (1-(C/(C+GP))) if C = 2;
If GP = 1, this equals .33
If GP = 2, this equals .5
If GP = 4, this equals .67
If GP = 6, this equals .75
If GP = 8, this equals .8
etc.
This creates a middle ground where playing games is rewarded while also not making GP the centerpiece of earning points. If you do want GP to be a major centerpiece, you can make C = 1 and it will still be better then the previously proposed system.
I know that I put quite a lot of effort towards something that I just said I didn't care that much about. However, as I said, Slaol showed me the formula before this and it triggered me quite a bit that he, or anyone else, considered it competitive.
@Auckmid
It's indeed very difficult to have an accurate correlation without having things like 100 games per season, which is, obviously, impossible. However, having a Ladder does not hurt anyone, and some people (a good bunch of people) enjoy having a ladder. So, I think it's best to have one, and I think everyone will agree with me on that point, or at least just not care.
Now, onto the system: I'm definetly open to changes and suggestions on this, since the system is not perfect. It is, however, much better than the old system, which was only rewarding activity (+1 when you lose, +2 when you win with a team, +3 when you solo win, and +2 when you host, max 2x per season). But I'm not saying that this system was bad! It did have its effects, and those were positive. Activity was encouraged, and a bit of healthy competitivity (winning games is still better than losing them, obviously) is good for the site's health, too.
Your system: ExpectedWR is very hard to make. Setups have different expected winrates for each faction. The Mafiascum stats for each setup that was hosted, which I cannot find, illustrates this very well. I think it would lead to a lot of work and debate to try to attain something that's not attainable simply because it does not exist as a general factor for all setups. And forcing people to adopt a setup model would kill the diversity of the site (or at least, hurt it), and would not follow the first aim: ...with minimal encroachment on both host's and player's freedom.
There's also something that will make me look like an asshole... This system is complicated, lol. It's very understandable, logical, makes sense, but the Ladder's use is to encourage people to get points, in a direct way. If they have to try to understand the system too much, I feel like its effect is weaker. Not that it's not a good idea, don't get me wrong lol.
Yea, when I first put in the ladder the entire intention was to encourage players to play more games so we could get games to fill up faster lol people like the competitiveness. So, you're spot on with the basis of it lol.
It would be very nice to be able to have a ladder that was based more so on skill, but the creative meta on the site makes it near impossible to know what the win rate would be of any of these games. I would love to see a ladder that is based around setups that have a proven win rate. I really enjoy all the standard setups, but I notice people get tired of them really fast here.
We even have a Tournament/Ladder add-on in place on the site, but nothing really seemed to be able to work for FM. I should take another look, though.. While it might not work for a ladder, it probably would work for a small vanilla FM Tournament..
Happy New Year to all. Hope everyone is well.
I was lurking and saw this post. An idea flourished in my brain, and I felt like sharing. Perhaps one way to better manage the “queue” or set ups is to have thing nature of the beast changed.
The Idea:
Three to five hosts submit their set up to a section mod. The mod sets up a poll. Whichever set up is voted most popular will have sign ups open immediately.
The mod may then choose to either have 2nd and 3rd place set ups placed in the queue as the next on deck set ups. Or those two simply stay for the next round of voting and either the community votes between the two moving forward or you add 1 to 3 more set ups and the process begins again. Thus, only the setups the community is interested in playing are the options available.
Should the community grow, perhaps the poll could work differently if multiple games are able to be played at once.
The frequency of voting could be every other Friday or every X day of the week or something to always stay a head so there isn't a lull between games.
Back to my leave of absence now. Ciao.
As someone who likes to double check and cross reference peoples posts (especially since quotes disappear when quoting a post with a quote). The thousand post days are a turn off for me when its 50% spam. There are sites who do enforce a max posts per day so this limits how much spam a player can post if he wants to be able to contribute at a critical time.
As for setups - I find that the fm mod approval system is the main reason I'm not making any setups right now as anyone who would be evaluating my setups would automatically be banned from playing said setups due to new roles/hidden mechanics. And from what I can see, no mods are commenting on balance of setups, just the completeness of them. Can't tell you how many setups I see run on a huge risk of being 100% unwinnable for a faction based on a night 1 flip.
As for the queue system, I'm waiting for better games before I sign up for anything... might be a long wait.
I am 100% against a general post count limit or anything similar to it. Making games that restrict post count numbers, as an exercise? Sure. But restricting everything is, once again, going against the player's rights. It is up to the Host and its players to put a post count limit if they want to.
One of my setups? Or someone else's?
For my setups, it would take a change in average player skill - I'm not willing to waste a setup on people open wolfing using the "I'm too scummy to be scum" mentality and not be executed for it. And would need a competent cohost since I'm restricted on availability.
For someone else's setup - it would take the player base to sign up for more basic kind of games and not go afk.
So people with mod powers can post after the day is over by accident (due to ability to post in locked threads). This seems to happen at least once a game.
For some reason the standard response to this is that either that same mod or someone else swoops in and deletes the post. Why? Once it’s been posted, at least some of the players will have read it before you delete it and certainly all the mods can still see the post even after it’s deleted. Meanwhile, some of the players will never get to see it. To me, deleting these posts is like violating the no editing rule. Just leave them there!
The solution is to not post after day is locked
There is a reason the “someone has posted” message comes up before you send. Occasionally it happens where both posts are sent at the same time, but usually it is avoidable.