#A month trial - .leave if you can't ST when at top of queue

116 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

sour isle
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So I think we can all admit the queue feels like there's some issues with it right now, rightly or wrongly the community and culture has shifted (expectedly) as time has gone on, and the server has expanded.

Rather than a big change to the queue, I'd like to make a small suggestion for a month trial.

Simple rule

  1. Join the queue whenever you want
  2. If you are unavailable to ST when at the top of the queue, you must .leave (you can .join immediately after if you wish)

I would like to see if this can help us process the queue with less complexity.

There is a downside to guessing when you can get in a game vs. when you join as ST, but I think the risk is low.
You could be in the queue a couple of hours then be in a game due to a spate of .leaves from others or multiple games spinning up.
I think this is a risk people should accept, and the chance of it being a regular occurence is probably statistically low but non-zero.

I just think trying a simple rule change for 1 month and get feedback to then decide if it's helped, or hindered.

teal nimbus
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So for this one month you’re proposing the following?

  • disallow use of .pass (maybe disable the command on the bot), asking people to .leave instead
  • enforce .nexting people (after they have a chance to .leave) after 5 minutes wait no matter if they’re afk or still playing in a concurrent game
sour isle
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if they are playing a game they have an opportunity obviously to .leave when they get pinged (and potentially .join straight after)

teal nimbus
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I think on long queue days, that might encourage subbing out of the game you’re playing when you’re pinged to ST

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encouraging subbing for non-emergency reasons is not good

sour isle
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that's certainly not a valid reason to sub though 🙂 I'd want to discourage that, you've committed to the game at that point.

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I also don't think it'll catch that many people out if the queue processes quickly

short elbow
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Then, should you not play games while in the top 4 or so if the queue?

teal nimbus
sour isle
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I think getting a month of data could be useful, worst case it's a car crash and a mod cancels it

teal nimbus
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I personally would love to Travel in some games while waiting for my queue spot so I can travel away when I’m pinged no problem, but that depends on the pickup playerbase’s appetite for Travelers and that’s a separate thing

short elbow
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Most prefer residents, I think, and lately there's seldom been a shortage of those

teal nimbus
short elbow
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Mhm but considering I've been pinged after like 3-4 connective pass/leaves I kinda have to assume it could happen at any time

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I dunno, not strongly opposed, just not sure

teal nimbus
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Yeah, I guess different people with different risk tolerances

crisp thicket
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This was how the queue used to work, .pass was added because people strongly complained about it, and people refusing to leave etc
It could be worth trying again but it'd need to actually be enforced, and I suspect it wouldn't be very popular

prime geyser
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I support this. The queue isn't fit for purpose now that we're running multiple games simultaneously. I think there are alternative solutions, including multiple queues - for example, a base queue and a pickup queue, which solves other issues - but I'd be curious to see if this works.

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The .pass command doesn't really do anything when the next person can and will just .pass back to you

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Or just not show up, then the top three or four people get ignored or .nexted anyway

teal nimbus
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.pass is great to have in a pinch when the queue is working well and that stuff doesn’t happen

winter bobcatBOT
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You are not currently at the top of the queue

teal nimbus
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oh hi dot

prime geyser
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lmao

sour isle
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@prime geyser do you have a view on how we'd go about anything like this?

Would it be best to let discussion go for a few days and then put a vote up or is the suggestions such a microcosm of the community therefore a vote isn't going to be accurate?

Or other options haha

prime geyser
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Yeah, Im happy to hear more opinions

verbal ocean
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i think a queue revamp would be great

crisp thicket
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I've mentioned that I'm willing to make a queue for each channel, it seems most of the problems the queue has are made worse by the multiple channels overlapping

short elbow
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Personally I think separate queues would cause its own issues.

gritty hill
short elbow
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I'm not sure we want to separate the server into what I fear would be a bunch of newer players and STs in beginner-friendly, and a bunch of more experienced (well, like at least one month) in pickup, never mixing.

gritty hill
crisp thicket
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I haven't been involved in the actual problem solving for atleast a year now

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I'm just asked whats possible with the current queue and being around to make changes

gritty hill
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sure, I just meant it in the sense of avoiding duplicating work

teal nimbus
crisp thicket
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It really wouldn't be that much work, if Bor would rather work that to work with the current queue's cooldowns and such then that also works for me

short elbow
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it would also make it hard to play a beginner-friendly game and then a custom after that, because you'd have to wait for the other group to finish up -- not the end of the world, ofc

abstract oar
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I like this in theory. But sometimes you just have a bad run of being stuck in a game with a ST taking forever, and a couple of 40minute games and .leaves that puts you at the top of the queue.

I say this as a witness because I never ST unless the queue is empty.

teal nimbus
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I worry that separate queues could cause problems in the transitions between the 2 concurrent games times of day and the 1 game at a time times of day, where someone’s maybe been waiting a while in the pickup queue but the pickup town square has dried up because there’s only enough players for one game

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Maybe store the time that each person joined so that you could toggle between viewing the queue as multiple queues and one combined queue that’s sorted by time joined? Ah that could get more complicated with .pass though

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But considering this suggestion is about temporarily getting rid of .pass..

errant osprey
sour isle
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I'd like to just suggest this idea to see if we can do a quick adaption and see if it helps improve, there is no guarantee it will solve everything, or anything, but it feels a quick change that could give us data (I love agile delivery vs. waterfall :D)

teal nimbus
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I don’t think it’s mean, sorry for getting off track!

sour isle
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queue was in a mess again today, we sorted most of it out but I ended up joining as an ST then ended up being the ST (as everyone else was either busy and had to leave) or unable to ST (in a game).

😦

Screenshot_2023-09-02_at_22.41.16.png
sour isle
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My game ended, was 50m ISH long so a quick one.

Still top two in queue in game, therefore hichigogaming is now running but I can't .next

If we had the rule to .leave then the queue would of been me, then I .next, then hichigogaming would be top of queues Freya is next.

I will say that Ryutosyudo did leave and join the queue a couple of times when they got to the perceived 'top' as they weren't available to ST and weren't in a game, so kudos to them!

teal nimbus
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woo!

hearty nebula
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So just a note that I think the .leave idea and .jump address the same problem in opposite ways.

.jump can be used by mods to move a user forward if the queue gets backed up.

.leave would force the user to rejoin at the bottom.

I'm not against .leave but I think that the likelihood of people being disrupted is not low but in fact quite high. Imo it would require a considerable mindset change. I don't think the change is a bad thing but it's definitely a thing to consider.

Using Nat's example from today, that's a lot of users that would have had to .leave and .join if that rule was being enforced without a mindset change with regards to playing while in the queue

teal nimbus
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A mindset change is needed either way, .jump will only get used to fix this situation when more people get more comfortable tagging mods to sort out the queue.

mystic sequoia
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you could have a short term solution by removing the restriction that you can only pass in first position. that way you could just pass x times to move down the queue

gritty hill
gritty hill
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Ah, I see, in that world the order of the queue would be substantially different after multiple had .passed multiple times. But it would remain the same length. So I prefer Nat's suggestion, which says you need to .leave and, if you rejoin then you'll be at the end of the queue

urban kindle
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I’m new and I won’t pretend to understand the ST queue/cooldown system, but there’s a lot of waiting in general so I could get behind a “don’t join a 2+ hour game while queued up for ST” policy.
As a player you’ve got to spectate a game that could end anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours from when you join. Then there’s the grim reveal and people talking about the game for 15-20 minutes. Then waiting for an st, then polling on TB SNV BMR CS, then polling on CS, then a lot of setup. It can be an hour between “game end” and “game start.”
I don’t mean this as a complaint; waiting is part of the program. But it feels bad when you’ve got a whole group ready to play next, a ST that is willing to ST again, and you have to wait to see if another ST will respond. You can’t simply rerack a game where the klutz loses on day 1.

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Can’t say how common the scenario is, but I’ve been in the server for 3 days and have already had that happen where we sat waiting for responses for queued ST’s right after a klutz loss and it went to like number 6 in the queue.

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Idk ST’s in queue not being ready just seems like a problem that compounds on itself a bit?

teal nimbus
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You actually can rerack a day 1 Klutz loss in most cases. As long as the game ends less than 40 minutes after your first getting pinged about it being your turn, you’re allowed to. As long as setup and night 1 was efficient, you should be able to get through 1 day before the 40 minute mark.

urban kindle
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Maybe that window should be extended further in custom script lobbies? It takes a good while for people to decide on the script and then the ST needs to adapt to the custom script.
But meh, ending the game on round one is probably rare enough.

terse heath
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So, just a few quick notes: if a game has gone over the 2 hour mark, we encourage it to go to a Fiddler, to end quickly from there.

From when the ST is alerted, to starting n1, should take no more than 10-15 minutes - the ST should be alerted once the previous game has ended (after grim reveal). So, unless 9 STs all in a row do not respond within the 5 min timer (this timer is part of that earlier 10-15 mins for getting the game started), or there are simply no STs available (a rarity these days), it should never be an hour between game end and game start.
I agree that STs being busy and in a game when they are next (or 2) in the queue, that they shouldn't be in a game and should make sure they are available to ST soon. If they really want to be in a game in that position, they should be a traveller. I'm curious as to community sentiment on if they want this to be enforced?

sour isle
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Personally I think the culture has become

  1. The queue is long therefore join ahead of being available and hope you're around when it is.
    Or
  2. I want to play as well, so join, knowing if I'm in a game people will skip over me in the queue

Multiple people recently have talked about going in the queue ahead of when they're available as they know the queue can be many hours long.

I think the saying is a tragedy of the commons, but the easier one is likening to people putting towels on sun loungers ahead of needing a sun lounger, or putting your chair on the beach when it opens then going back to bed, we have effectively created this problem by allowing it.

Hence last night there were like 6 in the queue and I joined as we were just speeding down the queue with people in games but reserved spots or people not available to ST.

There are also people unable to queue as the queue gets full, so we then make secondary queues.

I agree the negative impact of this idea is non zero however the impact of doing nothing is also non zero.

I think the mindset change has to come with the rule change.

sour isle
terse heath
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Definitely haha, on all counts

hearty nebula
# mystic sequoia you could have a short term solution by removing the restriction that you can on...

I looked into this change before I thought of .jump to the point I was writing it up in a message. But it got insanely messy

By default you'd pass the normal way, but then that person also passes, and then you both have to .pass further down the queue and it's really iterative without having a discussion ahead of time with half the queue involved so I thought .jump was better. I don't think a multi space .pass solves the problem as easily as it sounds because of the coordination involved

feral jacinth
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For me, the more annoying queue quirk is being unable to start a cooldown unless you are on top of the queue. If the player running the second game is able to leave the queue and start their own cooldown it would at least keep the queue cleaner. We have had days where the 5th person is queue is running the second game because the 3 ahead of them are in player 1’s game and then 4 hours later they are on top of the queue again. It is silly.

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Perhaps a .done removes the ST from the queue and starts their cd no matter where they are in the queue.

prime geyser
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The other issue with expanding .pass is that people would use it to just refuse to run certain scripts.

In my experience, there are generally more than twelve players per ST, but not enough to open another game, and generally people seem unwilling to play with fewer than twelve, which means that quite often someone who wants to play, can't. Having that be upcoming STs solves multiple problems.

terse heath
hazy totem
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It sounds like the community got into doing multiple games without substantial queue changes despite it not really being supported, which is great. But people are getting more and more frustrated with the hoops you need to jump through for it.

gritty hill
# hazy totem Deja vu for me on a lot of this. Having the guidelines say the second queued sto...

I think Nat's suggestion (original message in this thread) is better than introducing a rule that "second queued storyteller shouldn't be in a game". This is really tricky to enforce because people will still be able to join games when they're 3rd or lower in the queue, and as we've seen in other threads e.g. https://discord.com/channels/569683781800296501/1141080882640338954
the queue state can change dramatically in the space of an hour and people as low as 8th place will sometimes get pinged.

It's better to let people join games even if they're in the queue as Nat has proposed. If their game finishes before they're pinged, it's all good. If they're pinged and are in a game, then they have to leave the queue -- the same as someone who's pinged and is unresponsive or unavailable for whatever reason; after all, as multiple people have pointed out, that's how the queue was supposed to work originally.

candid inlet
real gorge
terse heath
real gorge
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is that suggestion posted anywhere? or is that just something that exists in the aether?

terse heath
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I believe it's one of those that are in the aether unfortunately

hearty nebula
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I would consider it a joint of these two things:
If players are unable to keep going after two hours, and there are multiple requests yada yada.

image.png image.png
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But this is off topic again

sudden plover
# terse heath So, just a few quick notes: if a game has gone over the 2 hour mark, we encourag...

I was chatting with Nat about this. What is the maximum position you can be in in the ST queue before you shouldn't be joining a game? For example, I generally do not join games if I am first or second in the queue and there is more than one game going, but I have also been fourth or fifth in the queue and started a game and then been pinged. It is not uncommon for me to join a queue at 1pm and then be ST'ing anywhere between 4pm and 10pm depending on how many people leave.
I am on board with trialling people who are not in game should .leave, but not so much for people in game. The problem with the ST queue is people not responding when they are pinged and therefore a game being delayed whilst the ST is sorted. People being in game is not adding to this problem imo, because I just scroll down and check if they are in a game. If they are I ping the next person and we lose no more than a minute.
As a person who would like to get more experienced as an ST, would this mean I would have to travel or sit out games for an entire evening to guarantee that I can get a turn to ST? I feel that is counterproductive and discouraging people from participating in the server (if this is the case).
I agree with the rest of what has being said, but I don't like that people who are not at (or near) the top of the ST queue might feel like they are being forced to not participate in the server by playing games with the threat of losing their chance to ST.
Could we not it just if you are next up to ST and you can't, then you have to .leave (even if you are in game), then it passes on to the next player not in game?

terse heath
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In my opinion, however many games are going, that many people in the queue is roughly how many should be sitting out of games, maybe +1. Would cover the majority of ST unavailability issues, and the +1 allows for games that run quicker than expected but don't rerack for one reason or another, or if someone in the queue is AFK for a different reason, etc.
If we were to set that as a standard/rule, AND fix the queue to be an actual queue rather than including STs that are currently running, I think that'd fix a lot of the current problems

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Especially with how busy live games are these days, I honestly don't have much sympathy for STs that are mid-game when their queue slot is close to coming up

sudden plover
terse heath
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By what I said above, if 2 games running, next 3 STs should be not playing. 3 games running? Next 4 STs not playing in current games.
Obviously not a current rule, just explaining what I said above

sour isle
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I honestly want to try a really simple rule, the more complexity we add, the more open to mistakes or inefficiency.

I think the problem of joining queues and having to wait ages is because we have lots of STs vs. games, not because the queue. However when people join the queue it's like reserving a spot, then they go in a game, then they can't play and others below have to pickup the slack (fine) and then suddenly it jumps back up to another person after.

I think it's a risk you take to join as a player when you're in the ST queue and a risk I think people just have to accept, note you don't get a cooldown if you .leave.

The queue has also got full recently even with a load of unavailable people, I wouldn't say that's fair on others either 🙂

So as I say, this is all about a simple 1 month trial changing the rule to be a .leave if you can't ST for whatever reason, really simple to implement, simple to explain, simple to see results.

terse heath
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Yeah, I'm also not opposed to that personally

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(Sorry that I keep specifying permanently - just being careful to speak on my own behalf, and not that of the mods)

abstract oar
terse heath
abstract oar
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Spend your mod capital to get it done Xail.

teal nimbus
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spend the monopoly money they pay you :)

abstract oar
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Your mod dollary doos.

terse heath
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Ah, yes, the oodles of financial power I have obtained via being a mod 🥲 I'm on it, spending it all! 😛

teal nimbus
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ah the svendetta version of how the server works sure sounds neato!

terse heath
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I'm definitely not complaining, and not asking to be paid, but man, if I was paid for this role to actually work on it full-time... oh the things I would be able to get done

abstract oar
teal nimbus
terse heath
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But funnily enough, my real job does involve work and not just twiddling my thumbs all day haha

teal nimbus
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@ xail’s boss

terse heath
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Ooft

gritty hill
# terse heath Yeah, I'm also not opposed to that personally

I think multiple queues would be a much better solution in the long run. That way, people wouldn't have to choose between playing and STing: you could join the ST queue for (say) beginner-friendly and also play at that same channel. But in the meantime we need a fix for current queue. Nat's proposal is quite reasonable.

terse heath
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I dont think multi queues fixes things outside of beginner friendly to be honest, and it doesn't inherently fix the problem of playing games in one section while another section is calling for you as the ST - but it would help with ST agency in some ways 👍

gloomy thicket
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That being said, there is one major problem with multi-queues, and that is the fact that we only usually have multiple games going on, we don't always have multiple games going on. And the transition period between two games to one would also require the two queues to be merged at some point (which prolly means the time people joined the queues would also need to be logged)

terse heath
gritty hill
sour isle
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@terse heath to make the funding cheaper. Would you accept someone (aka me most likely) writing a short announcement post text, and a rule page update modification text

Then I can raise that in a ticket or here as the text to use, saving you all.having to write something?

Perhaps we also ask people to post feedback in this channel with some data if they get caught out e.g:

  1. when did you join the queue
  2. when did you get called
  3. why did you have to .leave (in game, busy outside work, not wanting to run TB etc)

Then at least we collect impact data too (can you tell I like data haha)

abstract oar
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My excellent suggestion on storyteller leader boards could also incorporate a feedback mechanism via emojis based on whether an st was available within 5min of being at the top of the queue.

feral jacinth
abstract oar
hearty nebula
abstract oar