JacobZu7zu7, on Wed Jul 7, 2010 3:14 PM, said:
When two to four 'rare' games are choosen back to back that I either don't own or not interested in playing (on emulator). I often forget to come back to HSC's and loose interest in them.
Yeah, I try to avoid that as much as possible. One of the things I've always liked to emphasize in all this is playing obscure or uncommon games that people don't normally think about... but this often leads to playing games that really are quite bad. I do what I can to try to use a good game before and after any game that I know is going to be bad. I also try not to use too many rare games, prototypes or homebrews, as I know this can turn some people off (Luckily, with flash carts becoming more and more common, this is becoming less of an issue).
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A game library of Atari 2600, which has probably over 500 games... only playing 24 games? (for a years time) would leave out some 400+ games! For instance, of all the HSC time of Atari 2600... a very common classic game like 'Pac-man' has only been played twice in 7 seasons here.
I'm assuming you're saying that like you'd rather see Pac-Man played more often... but frankly, I don't like to repeat games. As you said, there are hundreds of them, and when at all possible, I want to introduce new games rather than ones that have shown up time and time again.
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Game requests, may be gone! or it will take much longer for a game to be picked that you have choosen. With only 20 games a year, there's not much room for people to get their game request filled.
Actually, I've been using requests less and less anyways. This season (more than any other), I've taken to introducing my own choices much more often, and the last few weeks I haven't even attributed to anyone (though some of them were requests). Quite honestly, I get a lot of requests that I know won't turn out well... either because the game is not fun, or is incredibly rare, or has wonky scoring, or has been played four times already. I used to do games in the order they were requested with no exceptions... then I started mixing up some of the requests to get some balance (heck, I think earlier this season, I choose three of roadrunners selections in a row!)... then I started adding my own games in to break things up a bit.
I've actually already put together a list of the first 10 games I plan to use for next season, in a specific order that I feel will work without bunching up "difficult" games. All 10 are well known games, only one of which is rare (a 6), and only 3 of which have been previously played (and even those three are from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th seasons).
This doesn't mean that requests are closed, of course. In fact, some of the ones in my list are from requests, and I still have all the requests in a list, though some have been waiting a long time while I try to find just the right time for then (like Elevators Amiss, which I've probably shuffled to the bottom a dozen times now... sorry toymailman!) I just want to point out some of the difficulties involved in scheduling things. I feel this will work better, as this will actually be the first time I've thought it out this far ahead of time. I usually just pull a game out of my ass every Wednesday and hope for the best
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If it ain't broke don't fix it
This is one reason this 2600 HSC is my favorite, it's fast and a new game experience is never far off.
Well, the problem is that it IS broken. If you look at the standings, the top 4 or 5 people are pretty much cemented in place, and I think toymailman probably clinched the number 1 spot several months ago. Not that I want to take anything away from the excellent players that post consistently impressive scores, but I'd like to somehow get a bit more competition out of things. I'm sure a lot of newcomers see 200+ scores and think "Oh forget this!" Fifty weeks is simply far too long to keep things close. Honestly, the 2-weeks thing was mostly to keep the length of each season the same.
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I have an Idea... how about two games announced for two weeks time, that way... you still have the options to play several (rare and common) games each season, in a shorter time, without making ZERO do once a week game announces all the time.
I've thought of stuff like that too... like having 4 or 5 games for a two-week bonus round and combining scores from all games for the rankings or something... Sort of like what the NWC cartridge does, but without the time limit. I like the idea of doing weird stuff now and then, but I'm not sure yet how to fit it in. We'll see.
roadrunner said:
With a shorter seasons we might end up playing some of the same games over and over.
If things were to drop down to 25 games a season, all it would mean is resetting the scores more often. It wouldn't really affect the way I choose games.
toymailman said:
what if scoring was dependant upon participation? Currently, 1st place for the week receives 11 points and successive placements are reduced by 1 point until the remaining participants each receive 1 point. My suggested change (as food for thought) would be to have 1st place receive an amount of points equal to the number of participants to a maximum of 11. Therefore, if a week only has 7 participants than 1st place would get 7 points, 11 participants would be 11 points, and 15 participants still only 11 points. With 11 or more participants scoring would essentially be identical to what it is now.
Earlier this season, when we played Strategy X, only four people submitted scores. With this kind of a system, if someone else posted even an amazing score, they'd only be able to get 5 points, and everyone else would get the same amounts of points regardless. In fact, I like to think that there was some inspiration in that week because someone could have come along, played the game for the first time, posted a score of just 1000 points, and got 7 points that week... that's certainly a nice jump-start for a newcomer!
I've thought about changing the scoring format several times, but I can never seem to come up with anything that's really any better than what I'm currently using.
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similar to how bonus points are awarded for the Activision patches, what if we had bonus points awarded for beating the TG scores (if any)? Topping 3rd place would yield +1 point, second would give +2 points, and getting a new World Record would give +3 points.
Unfortunately, any score-based bonuses that I introduce are naturally awarded to the top players, and extend the scoring gap between players. Patch scores are fun because most of them can be attained by casual players if they make the effort, but it's only going to be the absolute top performers that beat Todd Rogers scores. There's also the problem that TG simply doesn't have scores for some of the games we play, or we're playing a different mode than the default. I'll have to try to think up some creative bonus challenges that don't necessarily relate to scoring.
I'd like to encourage more casual players, but of course, this whole thing is a scoring contest which favours the more consistent players... it's pretty much impossible to strike a balance that works both ways.
--Zero
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