Closing time?

[Scar]

More on my idea;

We could open up voting twice or four times a year, possibly (if doing the four times idea) one tournament every season. Smack the camps with crowns, have each lower division champ face the champ that reigns above them just for shits and giggles, or potential write ups, what have you. We could even keep that champ in the seat of power (ala RPGP style) and see if the next season brings someone that can de throne then.

Or something to that effect.

~

I have had the itch to write, but write ups have always been something of a obstruction in my mechanics. I dunno, I just never get any more good ideas between two fighters or haven't put any effort into sitting down and thinking up of something interesting for readers. it could be many possibilities.


BUT REGARDLESS

I was thinking why don't we do a behind the scenes RP which would mean just more crazy antics of all these rpgs characters beyond fights. I think I could actually get attached to something like that. I could even write about past weeks in the books about what certain characters were doing during the eventual title runs or almost title runs or even just spectators. I think this idea has been floating around for a long time, it has just never been addressed or followed through with.

[Tide]

Edit: I wonder.  If we were to actually shut down, would that motivate people to put real work into whatever ideas they have for a successor?

I wouldn't count on it. It sounds good in theory, except there are a couple of problems. One is that if you don't set deadlines, people can take as long as they want to work on something. Never really a good thing because things can get delayed over and over. An example? I've been meaning to work on the ACF run but still haven't gotten off my ass to produce the next segment in like 2 months >_>. The other problem is, if you DO set deadlines, people eventually run into the problem of the thing being a chore, because sometimes commitments aren't necessary easy to make. So what you have is a pretty lose-lose situation. The only caveat to this is if there is running interest amongst people who keep the project alive, such as the DL back in its glory days or the new IAQ now. Interest amongst people is what keeps things alive. The creator being interested in the idea itself isn't good enough for a project to last its way through for a long term period.

I'm not sure if I agree personally that no content is worse than a dumb downed content. A dumb downed content to me is basically a "Why bother?" question. You might well scrap it since its clear that people just don't care anymore. To be fair, I rarely read the write ups anyway, so I guess to me, a dumb down content version of the site wouldn't make much difference.

Trying to find group interest in something sounds like the next best thing to me in all honesty. I'm also not sure if putting longer delay periods are really going to help rejuvinate interest. We already tried that with the various breaks to address burn out, and as far as I know, it's not doing a very good job.

[Lance]

I think it's about time to take Old Yeller back behind the shed.

[SageAcrin]

I'm not sure if I agree personally that no content is worse than a dumb downed content. A dumb downed content to me is basically a "Why bother?" question. You might well scrap it since its clear that people just don't care anymore. To be fair, I rarely read the write ups anyway, so I guess to me, a dumb down content version of the site wouldn't make much difference.

The thing is, I think that's *most* people now.

You still get people who are interested in RPGs, in the concept of the characters in statistical duels, etc.

You just have a core group now whose average RPGs played is exceeding 50 and a stat topic haul of over 200 and a season topic that actually gives people the opinions we *have* and not an attempt to be fair and unbiased(Arena writeups).

I don't think people actually read them much, and it tends to be a "Oh, forgot that." effect at best, something that season topics do better for me than something someone was forced to hash out in ten minutes.

Maybe we should just start linking to season topics and put our effort into actual debate-which people like more and do in their own time-than attempts to be colorful. And try to think of something else to fill out that part of the site with.

(It occurs to me that full body art would work but realistically that's making work to make less work. I'm sure a fair deal of it is on hand but that's a lot of damn art to fix to site standards.)

[DjinnAndTonic]

Re: People won't do work for new content

It's hard to redesign a site when your webmaster doesn't give you access. Straight up, the DL is stagnating because it's not -possible- to change it and Hal is too busy to do it himself or even set up a new person to do it in his place.

Trust me, I tried.

Also notice that we -did- come to decisions to change the update schedule and fix rerankings into something else. We just ended up choosing the change that made the most work for Hal.

Re: zOMG No Writeups Tournament would be the worst thing EVAR!

No. You're wrong. Low-content is better than No Content. Also... STANDARDIZED WRITEUPS.

I want to hear from people who actually do writeups if they like the idea of doing one Standardized Writeup for each Duelist. We can even do it as we go. No more work than before. Same aesthetic appeal. Eventually we have a tournament that runs itself and we just get to do the fun parts like nomming things and debating.

We should link directly to the Discussion Topic each week. More Forum Integration is a GOOD idea, especially if some of the main people are ready to give up on the site entirely.

Re: Refocus the Site

Stat Topics and Wikis. Seriously, keep the Tournament with Standardized Writeups, link all profiles to their respective Stat Topics (preferably the wiki page if it exists, we've got something like 35% of the stat topics on the Wiki now), and then work on finishing porting all the Stat Topics to the Wiki. The Wiki is NOT the mess it used to be. It's still somewhat plain, but a banner and a color change is all it needs to be as good as the DL, honestly.

I'd still like to push for more User-Created Content stuff, and I have a bunch of things linked, and Tide has a lot of things uploaded to the Wiki already, so it just needs some organizing. Oh, and access to the main site whenever Hal or Super have time or whatever.


Personally not in favor of closing the site at all, obviously. And I would prefer if we could go the Standardized Writeups way over time.

[SageAcrin]

Also... STANDARDIZED WRITEUPS.

I think those are a very good answer. You still have some writing crunches for a few seasons but it kills the generally more problematic later week problems(as you get a fair deal of ahead of time warning for the first two weeks, which is all you'd effectively have to write.), and later of course you'd eventually be able to reuse them of course. I can't speak for the Arena writers(I have done one Arena writeup in the past three seasons? Two?), but it sounds good to me...

Theoretically, you'd want standard writeups and the ability to mention something obscure in a pinch if it comes up as a strong point in a writeup. The issues are that it's hard to format it, and...realistically, we phrase writeups in an attempt to be fair, and do so with such extremes that only the most ridiculously one-sided matches tend to actually show up as obviously one-sided at a glance if you don't recall the characters decently well.

Basically, even as it is, we don't write "Oh yeah this guy gets totally curbstomped because of X move." "Yeah sorry this guy really does." as writeups. In retrospect this possibly limits how informative they are, but never mind that; The point is that the very act of adding in such exceptions would infer to people that "Oh yeah this move completely screws over the other person." anyways, better than anything we do in writeups now. Which is a mixed bag.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Holy Crap. Write-ups being informative! This is a terrible idea, I take it all back.

[SageAcrin]

Like I said, it's kinda been a weird catch 22 for me in some ways, the writeup system.

On the one hand, you need to be fair, but on the other hand you need to make sure people have the info. And people have different opinions on who wins what, and always have...but internally it tends to lean the same way. There are some people that can't buy a good writeup for them, because the views required for them to win would be so non-standard that they'd offend people.

It might actually just be better to go with something standard just because, optimally and done well, it would just be a statement of skillset abilities and cast-relative statistics, very reasonable base assumptions. High damage is objective(ish, some people have at least in the past not taken to higher in damage average=higher damage very well but it's usually close enough.), status attacks are objective, etc., but it keeps you from having any *ability* to comment on how well X person matches up against Y person, allowing people to at a glance decide the bleeding obvious, that say a character that relies mostly on healspam and that doesn't have status blocking will die to good status.

People don't have to bullshit, in other words.

Well, except for people like Jogurt. But people enjoy bullshitting for him. That's different.

[Dhyerwolf]

Forgot standardized writeups, let's just list stats!

[Taishyr]

I've not got the energy right now to go into this indepth, so I'm going to keep this very brief:

If you want the tourney to stay up, if you like the tourney, do the work. I'm terribly uninclined to say that the editors and whippers should be doing 80% of the work. And no, "you're overreacting the shit got done at 10:30 that's not late" is hella not acceptable because it got done at that time due to me and Snow doing a bit under a half of the damn writeups. And frankly forcing me/whatever other editors are around to conform to your schedule in getting them up is simply bullshit.

Regardless of tourney staying up/going down/whatever the hell, I support dropping it but if we do standardized I'll help edit and probably write a few, why the hell not, I support retooling the site/setting up a Wordpress/beginning to focus on other specialties our group has talent and ability in, whateverthehell that might be that we go with. Working away from RPG duels may happen, oh noes. There are places for this to continue on the forums, and there's more stuff we can do, if we decide to and can get momentum going. About the one thing that doesn't fucking help is naysaying something before it's even tried, though, which is why I won't object to trying the standardized writeups if we do go for it. But what we're doing now really isn't working in a fair manner.

[Luther Lansfeld]

And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's closing time

[VySaika]

Mostly with Djinn on this. And more then willing to chip in with the standardized writeups whenever I'm not doing BtS instead~

[superaielman]

Standarizied writeups fix part of the work problem, but it also does nothing for the general burnout and apathy most of the community has towards the DL. We had 47 votes the week before last, and I probably prodded a third of those people into voting. Even if we can keep the site going indefinitely, what is the point if we have a very large part of the voterbase that is only voting out of habit? The lack of interest in everything from noms to missing comments to season topics to general chat talk about the site is down, and nothing I've seen suggested about keeping the main DL league going is going to reverse that trend.

[Sierra]

I can't remember the last time I voted out of anything but habit. I was okay with the tourney closing down the last time this topic came up and still am. I hang around here to be amused by fellow misanthropes.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Standarizied writeups fix part of the work problem, but it also does nothing for the general burnout and apathy most of the community has towards the DL. We had 47 votes the week before last, and I probably prodded a third of those people into voting. Even if we can keep the site going indefinitely, what is the point if we have a very large part of the voterbase that is only voting out of habit? The lack of interest in everything from noms to missing comments to season topics to general chat talk about the site is down, and nothing I've seen suggested about keeping the main DL league going is going to reverse that trend.

*shrugs* People who aren't interested don't need to participate anymore if it all becomes standardized. It's not ideal that people don't want to do it anymore, but the framework is already there and it seems a shame to just scrap it when there are still some people who want to use it.

I personally would agree that the Tournament as the main feature of the site is outdated, the whole site needs an overhaul into being a Community-Created Content site, since there are a lot of us who have contributed to the gaming community over the years and it's the kind of thing that this group is actually still interested in.

Only problem is getting someone who is interested in this to the point where they are able to actually access to the site/layout and make those changes, since dumping all that on Hal isn't fair.

[SnowFire]

Brief comment: I'm personally in favor of the "one final season" idea to finish on a high note.  Finish this season, then throw out all normal rules about who's eligible (aka "characters just in last season can maybe return").  Furthermore, this season should be selected by hand - no "top X ranked characters" thing, but rather pick characters designed to be from
A) High-drawing, loved games
B) A broad selection - no swarms of suikoscrubs
C) Who are interesting duelists without being headaches.
D) Won't be assuredly blown out by everyone else (okay except for Jogurt)
E) And perhaps a few with well-known DL quirks, like a weird history or BtS hype.

Since things like "broad selection of games" are holistic, this really needs to be coordinated.  Perhaps have one person select a sample list, and then others comment / suggest if they missed anything?  Try to be fair, though.  I'd be fine with rando-selecting the matchups afterward, though we can rig a few matches up if there are any DL-grudges that need to be settled.

[Dhyerwolf]

As I mentioned earlier, I'd rather go out with say...3 final seasons that than 1. But my logic there is that there are still a horde of people I'd like to see in and 1 season feels like too few (Well...I'm also not bored of the DL). I do think that picking a portion based off number of nominations would go the way to go if we set a final season date.

[SnowFire]

Ninja'd by Dhyer: Sure, three final seasons would also work, if there's interest.  Certainly there'd be a much more solid guarantee of everyone of any plot / DL relevance getting in for one last shot.

On a philosophical note, what killed the RPGDL tourney wasn't the RPGDL at all, I think.  It was that console RPGs that translate well came too slow to the next-gen systems and were too spread out.  If any one system had clearly "won" the RPG market, then games from it could have been ranked like back in the PS1 / PS2 days...  but that didn't happen.

On the one final season idea, I'd nominate superaielman to be that one person who has the final say and all.  That said because it's the kind of thing I'd enjoy doing, here's my idea for a final season, should we decide to go down that route.  (And also, to be clear, after the "final season" there can still be board tournies, natch.)

Godlike:
Xorn
Sephiroth (? Just in this season but FF7 rep for Heavy.)
Ghaleon (? Strong for the field, but a long history and wasn't in recently)
Kefka
Melfice
Yuri
Souji
Indalecio
Mewtwo
Empyrea (or Jessica, some DQ8 rep)
Ryu (BoF4)
Orlandu
Rika (or Profound Darkness?  On the other hand PCs are fun)
Terra (FF6 can support two reps in Godlike.)
Tir
S61 Heavy Upgrade / Champ?  (If Emelious champs, though, just ignore him in favor of Xorn.)

Heavy
Hugo (or Geddoe, but Hugo's more interesting in the DL)
Jack van Burace
Billy Lee Black (Fei is a more obvious choice, but Billy's more interesting in the DL?)
Artea
Ike (or Lyn, or Ephraim, but more Ike is the most interesting / is also in Smash?)
Sync
Rose (? Or Lloyd?)
Sofia (DQ4)
Crono
Odin (BtS excuse)
Alex (Lunar)
Cecil (FF4)
Auron
Momo (BoF3) (In just this season.  Uh, something else then, and maybe stick a BoF3 representative somewhere else.  Red for super hype?)
Cloud
Room for more champs?
(Heavy is as usual way too crowded.  Plenty of other solid picks here - Red, Lyn, Margulis, Scias, Vayne...  hell, even Lezard for the lulz)

Middle
Laharl
Lyon (FE8)
Brad (WA2)
Jr.  (or SHION??)
Karsh
Mia (FE9) (? Entirely on "include some swordmaster in the DL hype but Ike is the best pick in Heavy where most of them are and Vantage is cool" logic)
Nina (BoF2)
Ryudo
Alice (SH1)
Yulie Ahtredie
Ramza
SEIFER (? Headache in the DL but it's Seifer so maybe he gets in anyway?)
Natalia (or Jade, or Guy, or someone from TotA)
Aika
Rena (Bad for the division, but less so than Claude in Godlike, and one of the two SO2 PCs with plot)
Some potential upgrade, maybe, if they're cool enough

WA3 PCs get left out, but it translates kinda meh to the DL.  I'd have stuck Virginia in but she was just in *this* season so maybe not.  (Though there's also Jet for Middle I guess.  Though he'll lose horribly.)  Could make an argument for MK Jessica as well, unsure of MK's popularity but seems like it should have at least one representative.  Chisato would easily qualify for Light based on BtS hype but I think she'd just outright lose to everyone in Highish Middle which is meh.

Light
Mullen (or Evil Gaia for FRUE G1 boss hype?  Mullen's still way worse than his ranking would indicate)
Black Wizard
Miranda
Nanami (S2)
Kain
Yukari
Bernadette
Collete Brunel
Jin Uzuki
Snowe (or Katarina ?)
Quistis
Emma Hetfield
Labyrinthia
Algus (will lose, and there will be much rejoicing.  Or Mustadio.)
Rufus Shinra (will lose, but style, and Light is short on bosses)
Jogurt (will lose, but it's Jogurt.)

Tried to have a wide spread of games on this.  Weirdly enough WA4 lost out

[superaielman]

Your shameful lack of Justin vs Rune hype has been noted, Snowfire.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Looking through Snowfire's list and thinking "Man, there's so many other interesting duelists he could have picked" was really nice. There's clearly more than a single season's worth of interesting duelists, which makes me not want to give up on the tournament completely.

If people want to have a 'final' handpicked season, that's not a bad idea, but I would still like to keep the voting system open. Personally, I wish I could make a site like the main DL tournament page that recorded votes and matches so efficiently.

If the rest of you give up on making the tournament work, then I would like to request the use of the voting/records system to start a followup tournament of a similar format.

[SageAcrin]

Last week will be kinda a weird outlier thanks to DLCon, probably not best to base much on it.

Having said that, yeah, votes are 50-60 range right now, I think? I never quite mathed it out(Well no I did once and it was 55 or so. >_>) but yeah.

That's still well over double any forum tournaments though. The issue is, right now, it also takes a disproportionate effort compared to those. We're talking something that takes more writing than Nyarly's Dungeon(which is the most text heavy one). Toss in BtS and it also takes more creative writing than that too.

I don't think the issue is so much that *no one* cares-a decent chunk of internal cares, just, not enough to squeal fangirlishly over the concept anymore(Dhyer is an exception. >_> <_<). It's hard to care enough to write for it after you've wrote for it so many times and fundamentally just wrote the same things over and over.

Also, to be clear, the only real reason I've heard to stop the main tournament completely is A: It looks like we don't care much anymore if we don't put up arena writeups, and B: It will get less votes.

The problem with A is that we're, in fact, questioning if we care much anymore and have issues getting outside votes, and with B it will still get more than a forum tournament. Now, if B stops being true then tossing it makes sense, but it's kinda ridiculous to punt something that is essentially the best forum tournament setup and one with an enjoyable rolling night and everything. I have no real problem with ending the site as such with a nice final season or whatever, and just kinda making a DL Lite or whatever and making sure people know it's not the same, but stopping it completely is a waste of good code and good ideas.

[superaielman]

No. I chose the week before DLC for that reason. 40-50 is more the norm, now.  Not trying to go wholesale with the quote and respond bit, but doing it to clarify my thoughts a little.

A: It looks like we don't care much anymore if we don't put up arena writeups

The less effort you put into something, the less people who wander in/are regular voters are going to care. One of the big reasons that we lost casuals is general results page burnout, lack of cool bonuses, etc. Lack of arena writeups made that final season of NR pretty pitiful; and I don't think the DL would fare any better.

I don't think the issue is so much that *no one* cares-a decent chunk of internal cares, just, not enough to squeal fangirlishly over the concept anymore(Dhyer is an exception. >_> <_<).

It's a definitely a minority for people who actually vote and give a damn about the DL. Look at how many people are actively talking in this topic versus how many are in chat or even went to DLC.  The general apathy I get from the community is staggering, and that is far worse than low totals. The Cids and VSMs and Grefters of the DL (The people who hang around but aren't super into the entire thing) have long since stopped caring. Elfboy had a quote way back from when we split with RC that's still true: those people are the ones who really shape the DL, both in what we rank and where we go as a community.

[Sierra]

Just gonna say that Snowfire's list looks pretty good if we do go the "one final season" route.

[Magic Fanatic]

Doing "One Final Season" will make me sad, as I always thought the greatest pleasure of any week was watching people debate on who could actually come out on top in any given match-up, and trying to figure out my own opinions on each matter as they came about.

Granted, if this many people think it's enough, then...  Well, the point?  Nothing, I suppose.

[Talaysen]

I pretty much agree with Sage here.  I like the standardized writeups idea.  Once it gets done, we have to do very little work and the people who still want to vote can do it.

For the record, I am still interested in the tournament.  Sure, I prefer the board tournaments because they have more variety in games/characters used (which I think is the main problem with the DL proper), but it's the same format anyway.  I usually forget to vote because... well, I'm a very forgetful person.  I forgot to update my own board tourney (the music tourney) on multiple occasions.  Forgetting is what I do.

SnowFire's got a point, I think.   Part of the lack of interest in the DL is probably due to the videogame market right now.  People are refusing to buy the current gen systems at the moment, so they can't play the newer RPGs, so newer RPGs can't get ranked, so the DL just repeats itself.  If we had more people playing newer games, it's probable that we could get new voters to join as well.

I'm not saying that's the only issue at hand, but it seems to be a notable one at least.