Couple of Small notices

[Kelsier 28]

1 minute ago, jhatty8 said:

I don't know how much this will really help with posting on game threads. I think that simply asking users for more activity there will push people to make comments on the forums (myself included). However, taking away the most popular medium for receiving games will deter users more than encourage them.

 

If this is a big priority for the league, sim attendance as a PT wouldn't be a terrible idea.

 

I think the solution is more likely close to this.  Members are used to the bot, they like the bot, and they won't want it to leave.

 

But asking people to engage in the forums won't get them to do it.  I think the biggest helps would be a sim attendance PT and some kind of... Engaging content.  The lack of a presentation like SBA or EFL makes it difficult, and the sheer number of games is just as bad.   

 

But, that doesn't mean there aren't ways we can present the sims, which is the product of the league, and get the community to engage willingly and meaningfully.  Its all a matter of figuring it out. I think this is a solid step to getting information needed to make some informed decisions.

[Beketov 8,642]

5 minutes ago, Cxsquared said:

I brought this up when the bot was first created. I think if we can't have it link to the forum we should just remove it and have GMs/AGMs stop being lazy and just link to the forum games themselves.

We can easily have it link to the games forum since that only changed once per season but we can't have it send individual game links.

[jhatty8 662]

1 minute ago, Beketov said:

1. Personally I've never liked sim attendance as a PT. There are things IMO that should not need TPE attached to them and posting in games is one of those. Any time we have done a variation on it we've just seem spam increase.

2. "The most popular" is potentially a bit of a stretch which is what I'm curious to see. People liking what they know does not automatically mean it's the best option.

 

If this turns into a complete shit show I'll eat my words and we can turn it back on but I want to give it a legitimate attempt before just saying "people like what they know so we shouldn't do anything else"

 

Well, I said it was popular but I did not say it was the best. I'll participate in the new system and see how it goes, then give feedback accordingly (which probably means yelling at Rory).

[jhatty8 662]

5 minutes ago, jhatty8 said:

 

Well, I said it was popular but I did not say it was the best. I'll participate in the new system and see how it goes, then give feedback accordingly (which probably means yelling at Rory).

 

My point was that the Bot (and discord in general) is so ingrained in our system that I think it will take more than this to make people want to post on game threads

Edited October 20, 2020 by jhatty8

[Beketov 8,642]

3 minutes ago, jhatty8 said:

 

My point was that the Bot (and discord in general) is so engrained in our system that I think it will take more than this to make people want to post on game threads

And maybe it will but we (well maybe not @chatfan036) want baby seps, not a giant leap. Discord is a useful tool but it cannot be the only thing the league exists on.

[DMaximus 1,045]

There's multiple ways to measure activity. A lack of posts in a forum thread does not mean there is no activity. I understand the league values forum activity, but the way to increase forum activity is to make it more appealing, not to make getting game results more difficult for everyone. I don't think making things less efficient is ever a good idea. People's time and attention is extremely valuable and now we're making it more difficult for them to access the most important thing that occurs; results from games. I don't think this is the right direction.

[Beketov 8,642]

14 minutes ago, DMaximus said:

There's multiple ways to measure activity. A lack of posts in a forum thread does not mean there is no activity. I understand the league values forum activity, but the way to increase forum activity is to make it more appealing, not to make getting game results more difficult for everyone. I don't think making things less efficient is ever a good idea. People's time and attention is extremely valuable and now we're making it more difficult for them to access the most important thing that occurs; results from games. I don't think this is the right direction.

We’ll see. I think you are vastly over judging how long it takes. We’re talking about a couple of extra clicks at most.

 

Realistically it’s 1 test in the playoffs. Like I said, if it fails miserably then so be it.

 

Also this isn’t about activity. I’m not saying Activity on discord doesn’t count as an active league, it most certainly does. I just think our activity has been pushed so far that direction that it has created smaller fragmented groups instead of a community.

[der meister 2,906]

1 hour ago, der meister said:

Death to Discord!

 

Agreed!

[DMaximus 1,045]

4 minutes ago, Beketov said:

I think you are vastly over judging how long it takes. We’re talking about a couple of extra clicks at most.

A couple of clicks for 2 games, everyday. UX/UI design is based around eliminating steps to access the most important information to a person, but we're adding steps. Another reason the bot is so popular is that it provides notification of when the game is posted. I think the notification aspect is huge and eliminating that is a big deal.

 

I understand the complexity of having team tags, but it would go a long way to have people notified when their games are posted and provide them with a direct link to that game in a notification.

The GMs could be responsible for maintaining members of their team tags. And if that's not doable because of security concerns, then the responsibility can be handled by someone in a role dedicated to that, like a discord mod job, or the commissioner, or a new job.

[Mr_Hatter 1,603]

@Beketov I don't know if I think this is a good or bad idea yet; but ill certainly give it the benefit of the doubt. One thing I do recommend, as you and others have mentioned, is having the bot post a link to the current season's forum section, as that is a quik and useful way of getting people to find the threads. 

 

I have another idea. If possible, we should create some sort of automated recap thread that posts after every day of sims, that holds the results of the day (if possible) or at least all the game threads. Ideally there would be some form of content other than the links, even a rendering of the new standings or something.

 

I think this would be a really useful way of generating cross team talk- when I was active on game threads, I hardly ever commented on other team's games; the fragmentation was just as real as if it were my team's LR. This serves the point of getting people to a centralized location where you might actually engage with people outside of your team; not everyone has been in the league long enough to establish connections outside of their immediate team, especially for first gens. 

[Beketov 8,642]

1 minute ago, DMaximus said:

A couple of clicks for 2 games, everyday. UX/UI design is based around eliminating steps to access the most important information to a person, but we're adding steps. Another reason the bot is so popular is that it provides notification of when the game is posted. I think the notification aspect is huge and eliminating that is a big deal.

 

I understand the complexity of having team tags, but it would go a long way to have people notified when their games are posted and provide them with a direct link to that game in a notification.

The GMs could be responsible for maintaining members of their team tags. And if that's not doable because of security concerns, then the responsibility can be handled by someone in a role dedicated to that, like a discord mod job, or the commissioner, or a new job.

GM’s would have access to editing every member of the site if we had them in charge of it so that’s out. The admin team is frankly busy enough that adding that to the list would get missed.

 

As I’ve said above the notification is not hard. The bot can easily say “game are posted” and link to the games forum. Why must notifications exist to the individual threads themselves? I guess that’s where my confusion lies. There’s ~15 games posted per day. Is it that difficult to skim through them and see which ones pertain to you? When doing so you may even see one that sounds interesting for another team and click on it. The whole idea is to actually interact with more than the bare minimum. I get that some people just want to see their games as quickly as possible and move on but my concern is that’s all ANYONE is doing not because three necessarily prefer it but because it’s all they know.

 

I’m not expecting universal love here, just trying something out.

[Mason 81]

as someone not in the vhl discord i'm a fan of this move

[JeffD 648]

33 minutes ago, Mr_Hatter said:

@Beketov I don't know if I think this is a good or bad idea yet; but ill certainly give it the benefit of the doubt. One thing I do recommend, as you and others have mentioned, is having the bot post a link to the current season's forum section, as that is a quik and useful way of getting people to find the threads. 

 

I have another idea. If possible, we should create some sort of automated recap thread that posts after every day of sims, that holds the results of the day (if possible) or at least all the game threads. Ideally there would be some form of content other than the links, even a rendering of the new standings or something.

 

I think this would be a really useful way of generating cross team talk- when I was active on game threads, I hardly ever commented on other team's games; the fragmentation was just as real as if it were my team's LR. This serves the point of getting people to a centralized location where you might actually engage with people outside of your team; not everyone has been in the league long enough to establish connections outside of their immediate team, especially for first gens. 

This is my biggest thing about it. No one is going to post in game threads not involving their team, it is how it will likely always work.

[Beketov 8,642]

1 minute ago, JeffD said:

This is my biggest thing about it. No one is going to post in game threads not involving their team, it is how it will likely always work.

Maybe they’ll at least talk about their own games.

 

I do think his idea is interesting though, bring everything together a bit and showcase things more as a whole as well as having individual ones. A bit of a way of showcasing games on a larger scale so that people may be interested in seeing other games since they are presented in a way that might make it clearer which ones are interesting. For example, obviously no one is going to really care to look at a game where a team that’s expected to win does so 3-1 or something but what about a game that goes to OT with an expansion team winning or something? ThTa got more excitement to it and could be more interesting to look at. Having them showcased in some manner so people can click through easier might be good.

[frescoelmo 1,218]

TLDR

 

Post on the forums more

 

[DMaximus 1,045]

21 minutes ago, Beketov said:

Why must notifications exist to the individual threads themselves? I guess that’s where my confusion lies. There’s ~15 games posted per day. Is it that difficult to skim through them and see which ones pertain to you?

The goal should be to get the most important information to the person as quickly as possible. Is it "difficult" to find your team in a list of games, no? Is it inefficient? Yes. 

 

22 minutes ago, Beketov said:

When doing so you may even see one that sounds interesting for another team and click on it. The whole idea is to actually interact with more than the bare minimum.

So if we do go down this path, I definitely think there can be improvements made to the game threads.

First, put the score in the title. Maybe that's a bad idea because of spoilers, if so then put it in the text of the post, instead of just a link to the summary.

Second, add the stats to the forum post. I know this may be more difficult, but seems like if you can automatically create a link in a post, you can add more to the post. If creating tables for the stats can't be done, at least put some summary of stats or the score or anything other than a link that just says SUMMARY.

 

[TheLastOlympian07 2,388]

i wish @Beaviss announced this so we can tell him how much he sucks still

[Beketov 8,642]

2 minutes ago, DMaximus said:

So if we do go down this path, I definitely think there can be improvements made to the game threads.

First, put the score in the title. Maybe that's a bad idea because of spoilers, if so then put it in the text of the post, instead of just a link to the summary.

Second, add the stats to the forum post. I know this may be more difficult, but seems like if you can automatically create a link in a post, you can add more to the post. If creating tables for the stats can't be done, at least put some summary of stats or the score or anything other than a link that just says SUMMARY.

I’d definitely think if the score is in the title everyone will complain about spoilers. The rest is not completely unreasonable in theory but I would need the dev team to comment on the feasibility of it because I don’t know how it all works. The game poster is much more simple than what you are asking because it just takes the game numbers we indicate and turns them into links. I’m not sure how much searching through the page it can do to generate more information.

[InstantRockstar 1,221]

I don't know if this has been mentioned, since I'm on my phone and don't feel like scrolling through 2 pages lol, but what if like the SBA, we implemented a sim attendance task? It can be a supplement to say a VHL.com article or a press conference, where you must post in 2 game threads/week and you claim them 1 TPE per post. (2 max/week, and they would obviously be capped). I feel like since SBA and I believe even EFL does this, it does bring a lot of traction to the game threads and would boost forum activity quite a bit. Since games are posted basically daily, it would give people ample opportunity to post in 2 game threads a week, a very small task for them but a huge boost in activity. 

 

Just a thought

[Beketov 8,642]

2 minutes ago, InstantRockstar said:

I don't know if this has been mentioned, since I'm on my phone and don't feel like scrolling through 2 pages lol, but what if like the SBA, we implemented a sim attendance task? It can be a supplement to say a VHL.com article or a press conference, where you must post in 2 game threads/week and you claim them 1 TPE per post. (2 max/week, and they would obviously be capped). I feel like since SBA and I believe even EFL does this, it does bring a lot of traction to the game threads and would boost forum activity quite a bit. Since games are posted basically daily, it would give people ample opportunity to post in 2 game threads a week, a very small task for them but a huge boost in activity. 

 

Just a thought

It’s been mentioned and it’s been done before. Every time we do anything of the sort it ends up just being spam. At least personally I’d take silence over spam.

[Spartan 3,997]

1 hour ago, Mr_Hatter said:

@Beketov I don't know if I think this is a good or bad idea yet; but ill certainly give it the benefit of the doubt. One thing I do recommend, as you and others have mentioned, is having the bot post a link to the current season's forum section, as that is a quik and useful way of getting people to find the threads. 

 

I have another idea. If possible, we should create some sort of automated recap thread that posts after every day of sims, that holds the results of the day (if possible) or at least all the game threads. Ideally there would be some form of content other than the links, even a rendering of the new standings or something.

 

I think this would be a really useful way of generating cross team talk- when I was active on game threads, I hardly ever commented on other team's games; the fragmentation was just as real as if it were my team's LR. This serves the point of getting people to a centralized location where you might actually engage with people outside of your team; not everyone has been in the league long enough to establish connections outside of their immediate team, especially for first gens. 

This! Perhaps the change should come in the game poster to forums, where instead of posting each game in its own thread, have the poster post all games for the day in one thread. Instead of each link saying "Summary," have it say the game number and the teams playing. We'd definitely see more interaction between teams and users which is more important, not just forcing users to check the forum for games and then head back to discord to talk about it.

[InstantRockstar 1,221]

1 minute ago, Beketov said:

It’s been mentioned and it’s been done before. Every time we do anything of the sort it ends up just being spam. At least personally I’d take silence over spam.

That's fair, I just feel like it may be a bit "forced" to want people to post on the forum when 99% of discussion does unfortunately occur on discord. It would at least give people incentive to post on the forums. 

[Beketov 8,642]

Just now, InstantRockstar said:

That's fair, I just feel like it may be a bit "forced" to want people to post on the forum when 99% of discussion does unfortunately occur on discord. It would at least give people incentive to post on the forums. 

Honestly I want to try and find incentives for things that aren’t just “have some TPE for it.”

[InstantRockstar 1,221]

Just now, Beketov said:

Honestly I want to try and find incentives for things that aren’t just “have some TPE for it.”

I respect that

[Hooperorama 126]

Fuck discord 

 

All my homies hate discord