#Livetext Recruiting Visibility

53 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

gilded oak
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(Threw on both Live and Text tags because Livetext doesnt exist as a tag option over Livevoice and Longtext)

So.
Livevoice has the VCs to see when people are standing by, available, hoping for a game.
Longtext has the liberty of a recruiting period, ⭐s in the channel name and a once per 24hr ping in #text-game-recruiting
Livetext has a single LFGLivetext ping capped to 1 an hour at most to avoid ping spam (understandable)

To say that Livetext has visibility issues is an understatement and for that segment of the community to grow, people gotta know it exists. (Which is a secondary reason why I'm posting in this otherwise mostly-utilised-by-Livevoice forum)

Opening a Post to better collate suggestions rather than one-off conversations we usually have in #livetext-game.

Current Suggestions:

  1. Adopting the ⭐ in the channel name while a Livetext ST is looking to recruit people. It isn't a solution, but it'd be a minor aid (maybe.)
  2. Kamekura suggested adding a VC to the Livetext category, purely for people hoping for a game to sit in there and standby. Not necessary to unmute and speak, but the presence of people in the sidebar as opposed to just an unread channel would help. Again, a solution or just an aid? I think it leans to the latter but a better one than the first.

Any further thoughts and/or suggestions will be much appreciated.
Have a good day/afternoon/night ^u^

fossil bone
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why not both? the star ⭐ is familiar to longtext gamers, whereas the people hangin out in a vc is familiar to the livevoicers.
the star ⭐ could mayb be linked into someone grabbing the stlivetext role.
another advantage to the vc thing is that it would show up in people’s friends/activity feed.

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gilded oak
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Good point about the activity feed. Never noticed because I never look at my friends list ever

wise ravine
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I think fundamentally the issue is that lfglivetext has very low utilisation

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I think the star would be unhelpful because livetext recruiting is in a weird permanent-low-level state so I think a likely outcome is the channel just has a star 24/7 and it gets banner blindness

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My radical solution is "if livetext is going to be treated as a subset of longtext in other ways it should get to ping lfgtext"

fossil bone
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since the role pings are time-limited, and storytellers in livetext tend to set a timeout on a game to fire, the star could be similarly time-limited to alleviate that concern somewhat

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pinging lfgtext is based though

sonic escarp
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I'm not sure if the lfgtext suggestion is fully serious but I would just offer the idea of polling lfgtext if they want it to be used for that before having it be used for it 👍

gilded oak
languid coral
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In live voice we have a rule of “don’t ping more than once per hour per game”, that might not be right for live text but I’m sure a similar thing could be found. Another thing voice uses is “*wait” which will ping players when a game is ready. Livetext could get its own queue bot where people can use a command to show they are waiting for a game and then when there are 7 people who are waiting it pings them all.

wise ravine
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Like a lot of things in livetext it is a case of "a single person played defect in the prisoner's dilemma and there is a rule for them specifically"

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If you are not exactly that one person you should ping whenever

gilded oak
gilded oak
gilded oak
gilded oak
# languid coral In live voice we have a rule of “don’t ping more than once per hour per game”, t...

Livetext queue and *wait would be nice although not a solution to the (in)visibility, sadly.

I mean a factor to this Visibility issue is just the fact that the Livetext community isn't large, certainly not comparable to Livevoice and not enough for a queue system to be anything but collecting dust.

So it's, to an extent, Visibility primarily in the sense of getting pickup games and in a broader sense of "yo Livetext exists! We're active now!"

Perhaps I should have been clearer oops

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But to give *wait it's fair shot, it's still be relatively invisible and hard to tell. Because those people are waiting for a game to start to get pinged (which they will with lfglivetext anyway)

(And for that matter if we consider *lfg, with no VC the [LFG] tag wont be seen.)

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Maybe we just need better marketing to grow Livetext bigger 😔

wise ravine
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One thing about livetext popularity is that it's less that it's unpopular and more that it's a medium-sized fish in the largest of all ponds

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Compared to the other two formats having constant games, it seems slow

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I think what livetext wants is to be in a community that thinks of itself as having three formats rather than two, which is why I conceptualize it that way

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A tricky element is some prior attempts to evangelize livetext succeeded a little too well, so to speak, and drew an audience of people who didn't totally understand why there weren't constant games like the other two formats, so some people are a bit hesitant to advertise it to specifically new players too broadly

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I think your work with regular scheduleds is really good and somewhat filling the void of the axogames which we've struggled to fill the void of

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My ideal livetext probably has multiple recurring weekly scheduleds

neon ruin
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Extremely anecdotal case study from someone who's played in ~3 livetexts but likes the format so far.

I think I'd personally find it most useful if I could pick up the "LFGlivetext" role (or equivalent) for 30 mins at a time and get a ping should 6+ others also have that role?

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Scheduled games help as well! My work is screwy enough that I can't commit to any scheduled time, but it's nice getting a heads-up for games likely to reach critical mass.

gilded oak
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time for another bot

languid coral
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Have a bot that allows yourself to register as "available to play" for a set amount of time

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Then if there are more than a set number of players, they are all pinged

buoyant urchin
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I don't really see an implementation of a standby role that will actually help for the visibility. Even if it automatically pings livetext when X people have it (and make that when you take the role, you can only take it for 15, 30 or 60 minutes), it won't do that much imo

radiant compass
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The bot would ping the people who reacted, probably

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Like with *wait

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Have the bot have a pinned message. it updates who is in the message by people pinging it or smth and If it has 7+ people it pings them all. And you can ask the bot to add or remove yourself. idk, just spitballing

languid coral
neon ruin
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I agree with Lepa that it probably wouldn't boost livetext visibility overall -- it just might help games rack more often

buoyant urchin
gilded oak
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Yeah, I do agree with Huff and Cedric on the suggestions, but also Lepa on what the suggestion would actually help with.
They are useful suggestion, for racking games, not so much for visibility/marketing.

That said, since the creation of this post, Livetext has been slowly but surely growing in numbers and word around town will probably just naturally spread.

And tbh from what I do see in Livevoice when I pop my head in, *wait and *lfg dont seem to be used nearly enough anyway? xd

Pinned Message showing who's the ST, who's currently on standby/willing to play, does sound like a good idea (wrt to racking, not visibility) and something I've kinda been doing manually, whenever I'm opening signups for a game ^-^
I'd like to think it's helpful but also I can't tell if people really notice the message when considering to join a game lol

radiant compass
buoyant urchin
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If every people who gave ideas here were to play livetext once or twice per week, it would also help racking livetext games

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/lh

languid coral
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I think that was an attempt at humour but unfortunately it didn't land well. I was trying to join in the convo to make the server better and was going to offer to make a prototype bot to help out. But this has really put me off contributing towards helping with this issue.

gilded oak
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I can't speak for Lepa so I won't, but I do wanna thank you and Cedric for the suggestions and the kindness of even considering to make such an offer in the first place, even when not involved with Livetext at all.

Thankfully, the issue of visibility/not racking has gotten better in general lately, and we'll just see where Livetext further grows from here, whether we'll need/be able to emulate aspects of Livevoice logistics there, if and should we need a whole 'nother bot for specifically Livetext, I'm sure we (Livetext community) can figure something out then ^u^

buoyant urchin
# languid coral I think that was an attempt at humour but unfortunately it didn't land well. I w...

Yeah sorry i realised only after sending that it could be read that way. Imo the best thing that can happen to livetext to rack more games is to get more players, and i don't really see how having another system can rack more games than the current system of "ping lfglivetext when you see ~2 people nearby after saying hello" (+ scheduleds)
The -wait command probably works for live games (idk i'm not playing live), but for livetext i'm ready to bet that you will basically never see two people using that command within the same hour. Right now, if you are nearby and you want to try racking a game, say hello and see if other people are nearby then ping lfglivetext if you see people. Trying to replace that with a bot that waits to have ~5 people with a role before pinging them clearly won't work, because this system is meant for when you have enough people to have this command used idk 100 times/day (again idk i'm not playing live)
There might be other ways to help racking more games without increasing livetext's visibility, but imo it's pretty clear that the only big problem right now is its visibility (and the fact that you have people who ends up accidentally saying "f- you for not playing livetext" to anyone trying to help you 🤦‍♂️)

past trail
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Like I said semi-jokingly on #livetext-game-general this is a version of a concurrent programming problem

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And while I'm not against people trying a version of livevoice's star-wait, that has the same issues star-wait has in livevoice when the server is dead

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Namely, even if like 6 people run wait, other people don't see that; they see a VC with not enough people to start a game, and then don't join it

gilded oak
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yeah *wait isn't very visible. handy tool for those on standby, but not so handy in other people considering who are considering being on standby.

that and my previously mentioned point where *wait doesn't seem to get used nearly enough (anywhere from 1 to 3 people actually waiting and getting pinged, with the rare 5 or 6 waits)
-# (Yes, Cedric asked me to check #game-recruiting and yes, I had already seen it when I made this comment before - I lurk in Livevoice sometimes and have played a handful when I've felt like it)

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I'm of the opinion atp where I'm fine with the visibility issue.
With a sizeable community, a @lfglivetext ping is enough to gather a pickup immediately anyway. I'd wager that maybe @lfglive would easily gather people too given that Livevoice is literally the largest format on server. The convenience of being able to visibily see how many are on standby at any given minute, is bonus.

languid coral