OOC Out of Bounds (The ELL OOC Thread)

Well, looks like SAL scores will be Monday Night Meshgeroya.

 

Question for the commissioner would this be a penalty? (Watch number 11 and how his team mate pushes him into the path of the defender tracking the goal scorer.)

 

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This is an excellent question! Without thinking too deeply, I'd say yes. #11's action is intentional and starts a chain reaction that interferes with the ability of a member of the opposing team. While you could claim that #11 didn't intend for his actions to interfere with the opposing team, nobody in the NHL intends for their high stick to hit another player in the face but they still call the penalty.

 

Back-to-back posts, but oh well! Thank you to everyone who's provided thoughts about ways to rejuvenate the game! I appreciate the time you took to provide them. Here's where we'll go next:

Decisions by me

• We will not have the Draft, SAL, or GCAA scores in 304.
• We will not start a new thread for the 304 season.
• We will drop the requirement to create a team sheet when joining the game.
• We will develop a better recruitment/opening post template to make it easier to understand the game.
• We will create a more traditional introductory roleplaying experience for a player's first season to help them find their sea legs.
• We will not allow multiple players to contribute to one team (for now).

My suggestion that we start a new thread each season was motivated by a desire to make it easier for new players to know when there's an opening in the game. It sounds like there may not be the foot traffic to see much benefit from doing that. Let's think about other ways to get people interested in the game and what will make it easier for others to join.

I will start a couple Google Docs for us to work on collaboratively where we work on the last two items. I'd especially appreciate help with the last one. I have a pretty easy job as GM and could use some help from others coming up with how we can engage new players in the framework of the existing game. My initial vision is a bank of prompts that can be selected from for a given week that get tailored to the situation at hand. I'd also like to think about the structure. Are headlines enough? Should we have more traditional "NPC walks up to you and says something and now you react" GM posts?

To that last point, I think we could blend some previous approaches and have a set of NPC "starter teams" each season that we can drop new players into if they join mid-season. They immediately get into the flow of the game and have the ability to interact with others rather than sit on an island in the PLL. They can then either adopt that team for the future or move to another team. It'd a scenario of "oh hey, this team called up/hired this new face--wow, galaxy take note, they're hot stuff and get their pick of teams now."

Once we've gotten our ducks in a row about what the new player experience is like, we can think about where we do the outreach. Let's make sure that we have a good home to drive people to before we go looking for them.

Apologies if this is scattered--I kind of wrote this between other things! I'll come up with action items and share them out to help us make progress on these things.

 

Sounds great! Unless there are objections, then given my current situation with finishing school, I'm going to make an executive decision and stop posting SAL scores immediately, meaning the scores planned for this evening won't be rolled or posted. A disclaimer will be put in the library thread post for future reference that scores ceased being posted mid-season. IC, though, we'll assume the season finished normally, just without the weekly spotlight on it. Whether the SAL exists at all in 304 is an open question.

I think a blend of those last two questions would be great. We eventually want players to get comfortable running their own storylines, they just need a small bit of hand-holding at the beginning while they adjust to our style. So some weeks, give them headlines or magazine articles to react to, especially ones that seem controversial or negative about their team that will provoke a response. And some weeks, the prompt might come in the form of a letter from the League office asking them to complete some paperwork or take care of an issue. As they get more comfortable responding directly to scores and developing their own stories, the prompts can be reduced.

Yes, I think it makes sense to have 3-4 NPC teams in the League for a new player to take over. The only thing to be careful of (if we think it is an issue) is a new player taking over a playoff-position team late in the season, effectively gaining an advantage by ability to select a winning team. So I might suggest having a rule that after a certain point in the season, NPC teams ranked higher than a certain place are ineligible to be selected by a new player until they are eliminated. Or maybe require some kind of story-based justification. But then again, do we think that is an issue to be concerned about? I'm not convinced it is.

 

Incorrect. We will assume the Sky Captains crashed and burned in the second half of the season.

Oh wait, that's normal, so you covered it.

I think is the core--we give people good engagement to start and then taper off over time to ease them into the flow.

I see the concern! It's a lot like how newly-joined teams got the first overall draft pick by default. Personally, I'm not worried about that. I'd trade that temporary "advantage" for getting people into and excited about the game in a heartbeat.

Spoiler

He says that now, but just wait until the Miners run into one of these newly-christened player teams in the playoffs.

 

Let me know how I can contribute. Fully on board with these changes....

 

I think I found the new manager for the Pirates....

 

Oh yes.

 

Sharing part of my writing style with fellow writers: as much as possible I try to write portions of posts that deal with action from before games before I see the scores for them. That lets me capture the natural optimism or pessimism of my characters before those games, depending on where they're coming from. I usually have plans for when I want to hit certain story beats, which helps me write posts in advance.

While reacting to scores allows you to do all your writing in one go, I find I want to tell a before-during-and-after arc in a post when it comes to a specific game.

 

I know that I'm not an active player anymore, but I agree that reducing the barriers to entry for the game would potentially entice new players to at least take an introductory look at what is being offered here as an RP experience. Anything that can be marketed as "Hey, you don't need to enjoy RL sports to enjoy this game because it's more about the characters, stories, etc)" is a positive, especially since we've heard feedback over the years that there is a general hesitancy to join because of the "But I don't like Sportsball" angle.

I think this would be more of a change in mindset rather than the game mechanics itself. Focus the intro post and general Library pieces on the experience rather than just the game itself. Even an event-type setting where new players can have an "Open House" environment to try it out for themselves and ask questions of the current players might be in order, especially since there is such a steep learning curve to this game because our game effectively "leaves" general Star Wars lore and focuses mostly on a parallel storyline away from anything that has ever really been touched upon in the media (save for droid football from AotC, but why mess with perfection?). Maybe this would require a complete rebrand of the product in a new thread and the "dumping" of the old history into an old thread (because I doubt new players will be all that interested in what happened 20 seasons prior unless they are truly industrious). Besides, there have been so many changes in the game since @Trieste , @Vehn and I started back in 2010 that anyone trying to figure out how it's played now in 2021 would get very lost in the mountain of posts that have been made since. Starting fresh with a new mindset away from only catering to the existing sports fan and catering towards the typical RPer on the boards here might prove fruitful in the long run, perhaps if more collaboration opportunities could be cultivated in the process. I honestly think that the 271 All-Star Game back on the Temp Boards (yes, those) is a perfect example of how this game could operate with multiple players contributing to a single plot thread without shouting into the vacuum as we normally do in our own team-centric stories. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to pilot one of my characters through a series of interactions at the team hotel that were truly collaborative and innovative for this game, but which haven't really been explored since 2013-2014.

So these are my $.02 on the subject. And if you're wondering if the Senators will ever return to the League, I wouldn't say "Never". I'm just focusing my writing efforts on other projects these days.

 

Good to see you around these parts again @Jedi Gunny ! Even better to have your thoughts as part of the conversation.

 

I keep thinking of @Jedi Gunny 's great thoughts! There's lots in there. One idea is to do an open house to make ease people into the game. Does anyone know if this has been tried by other games as a recruitment tool?

 

That would be a great question for the RPF mods! I'm sure they might have some more ideas as well. I'd suggest contacting the RPF mods and seeing what advice they might have to offer. They would certainly understand the community better than we would.

 

Logan's not wrong.

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@Trieste Are you missing something here?

 

What? You don't enjoy intuiting scores from a few headlines or using the library thread?

 

Wishing everyone early Thanksgiving day wishes!! Eat lots, drink lots, and spend good time with family . Thankful for all of you who have helped make ELL the great game that it is!

 

That's right. Jane Levy, who I use to represent Kass, actually did a Drunk History episode. When I saw it, I thought, "How can I not use this?" And I might have asked some of my bar trivia team to provide some of the details of ANH one night a while back. And it may have come up that Luke was "whiny" in said conversation.

 

Why do I think the Pit is going to claim the GCAA and ELL changed the balls for last week's games?

 

I knew I was going to pay mightily for making fun of Mandalorians earlier this week. Truth be told, it worked out well. Those of you who've watched Ted Lasso could definitely see what I was doing.

Spoiler: Season 2 spoilers

Given that AFC Richmond lost the FA Cup semifinal, it's appropriate that Atalanta also went out in a semifinal!

To everyone who's still around: I've received no confirmations of anyone returning next season, as required for 304. If I don't get any, I'm not going to go recruiting for new players, nor will I run the game for next season. I'll take it as a sign that the game has run its course for now. It's OK if this is the game's time. An end here will lead to new, good things elsewhere. Heck, I might actually get to be a regular player in an RPG for a change. And there's a 78% chance any character I write will care about limmie.

 

I have not jumped in for 304 because the timing is poor with the major transition I'm currently going through (graduating from college this coming Saturday, moving December 28, starting a new career January 3), but I was intending to get back in on 305 once I've had a couple of months to settle into a new routine (and perhaps even rejoin mid-304 if I adapt quickly).

 

That's exciting! Congrats!

 

I looked and looked and looked, but the emoji or gif does not exist for all the emotions I have over that Smugglers post, @Vehn.

 

Thank you good sir. It was a swirl of emotions for me to write.