Battle for Dream Island (Pilot) questions/discussion

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Marvin D.
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Post by Marvin D. »

Well, I'm moving this week and I don't know how much internet access I'll have, so I really don't have any interest in staying in.

Besides, people should be allowed to leave if they have reasons. One can't simply be 'forced' into playing.

Plus some of the people who're in the game aren't even around much >.>
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Post by bookworm »

They can’t be forced to participate, no, but they can be forbidden to leave. I’m the GM so I can do what I want. The way this is set up it needs 20 people, for now. If you’re so extremely opposed as to refuse to do anything, that’s fine. You would have eventually been dropped anyway. I don’t get why in the meantime you would find it so strenuous to occasionally roll a die, but everyone can do what they want. The game will move on one way or another. This is important to at least one person (me) so it doesn’t really matter if every other participant shares that feeling, I will continue it for those who do. That was who it was designed for in the first place; you other grouches (no offense meant, that’s just what you’re being) are only here as temporary fillers because, again, there is a set number of needed names in the game, if not actual participants.

Edit:

Preemptive follow-up so no one takes that the wrong way, it sounded meaner than it should have. :anxious:
I totally understand if people get sick of this in the coming months (or already have) I said it wouldn’t be for everyone. However by nature of the game I am unable to remove people at this point. You may stop playing if you really can’t bring yourself to continue along until you are eliminated, and I won’t be mad at all, but your place will not be removed from the game because it can’t right now.
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Marvin D.
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Post by Marvin D. »

bookworm wrote:I don’t get why in the meantime you would find it so strenuous to occasionally roll a die,
If that's all we're going to be doing this whole game, clicking a button to get a number from one to six, then I don't see why you can't do that yourself or what the point of this is >.>

If it's so important, one of the newbies can take my place.
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Post by bookworm »

Marvin D. wrote:I don't see why you can't do that yourself
I can! And that was originally how it was going to be. But think about it for a second. If you're this detached from the game when you do it, then me doing it would leave you absolutely nothing! I wanted to give some way to stay involved, even a small one, for the people who care about this event, who once again are the people it was all designed for.
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Marvin D.
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Post by Marvin D. »

Well, I don't care :p So. .
Marvin D. wrote:If it's so important, one of the newbies can take my place.
"I still see Marvin as a newbie that is just as cool as an oldie." --snubs

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Post by bookworm »

Important Announcement:

Things are getting changed up here. Although the current lull was in majority caused by inactive players meaning I am not really at fault, I am willing to take the blame if anyone needs a singular entity to focus their frustration or boredom at. As the GM I could, and perhaps should, have intervened with some sort of workaround to keep things moving. And in actuality I have had it in my mind to do so for the past several weeks, I didn’t forget about this, but my activities of late have been predominantly focused more on issues surrounding preparations for the next phase of my life, including graduation and job hunting.

I am in the process of going over my notes for the coming contests and completely revamping them. Part of the reason this event was planned to take so long, apart from waiting on players actually participating, is that when they did participate is was much more complicated on the back end than it may seem from the front. It may appear you’re just rolling dice, but you are likely unaware of what the dice are actually doing. This isn’t anything nearly so simple as roll X to do Y, the die results, both individual and team cumulative, are run through iterative formulas to determine progress which takes place on a scale broken down into several parts for each contest.

It was set up this way for several reasons. First, because for many of the contests the only gauge of progress is these die rolls, I wanted to ensure there was more to what they did than just an across the board exchange. That would be too simplistic to do the various contests justice. Also, as die rolls are completely random, it would be unfair to the contestants for each contest to be decided on one instance of what way the dice roll. If these contests were related to comparable real life tasks, there would be various factors that affected each player’s progress, as well as ways for the teams to build advantages or gather disadvantages. I wanted to keep some semblance of that intact, which is why progress was to be built through those result iterations gradually, instead of everything being decided more instantaneously.

However, it appears that’s not really what is desired here. Apparently speed is wanted more over fairness and progress over thoroughness. I wouldn’t have thought it would be that way, but the player’s wishes are more important than my own, so so be it. The criterion for progress in the various stages of future contests will be significantly reworked. Not to the point of stripping them down entirely to an X to Y reward table, there will still be some iterations necessary for each, but the conditions will be much less complex than they originally were. No one but me will likely notice a change in the procedure, since I’m the only one that can see the workings behind the scenes, but hopefully everyone will notice a positive change in pace.

I do apologize for this latest lull, and all the others up to this point. I really do want this to be fun, or at least somewhat enjoyable, for as many people as possible. In the end, even with these modifications, this event still won’t be for everyone, but hopefully now it will be for more. And if you still aren’t one of them, just please try to at least fake a decent attitude, or at the very least refrain from displaying a negative one, so as to not ruin it for those who are having fun with this homage to a silly internet show.

Thank you; carry on.
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Post by Woody »

*posts for bookworm and is hopeful that bookworm's request for a bump means a reboot of the game*
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Post by bookworm »

I’m very sorry to disappoint you Woody, but no, this is an announcement that this event is sadly being discontinued.

It seems I just made the contests way, way too complex. If you only knew all the criteria I was scoring from. (You would have known, I was going to post the rubrics for each contest after they were completed, but that won't happen now.) It was so intense I confused myself with it at times, and I wrote it!

As I said before, the complexity was because I wanted to be really sure the events were fair, so I built in multiple redundancies and balances. I always kept in mind what I would want if I were a participant, and I would have wanted the events fair, or as fair as they could be when primarily based on random numbers. But clearly, complete fairness isn't as important as expediency, especially in an event of this ambitious scale. The redundancy was a good idea, it was just the wrong way to implement it in something like this.

I put too much work into the production of this event to abandon it entirely though, and I earnestly believe it’s a good idea in itself and this was just a bad implementation of it, so I am going to completely rework the entire thing into something that will be quicker and more engaging to run and hopefully give it another try some day.

This first attempt will be considered a pilot to test the concept. (BFDI is a show, after all.) As such, though the event itself was a failure, the process was a great success because I now know what works and what doesn't for the next time around.

So, keep an eye out for a new and better Battle For Dream Island hopefully coming in the future!
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Marvin D.
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Post by Marvin D. »

Yaaaaayyyyy. I completely forgot this thing existed in the first place :p

*probably has never been in a good mood because of something being cancelled*
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