Irc Sux, we need to use the forums more for decisions

Ok im kinda not liking how you use irc as the main source to debate and decide on rules to the leagues, not everyone want's to use irc (like me), then theres those who don't know how-to, then theres people who can't attend the long ass meetings since it is too late at night for them and they have work/school/uni etc in the morning or they are at work/school/uni etc when the meetings take place and so on.

So to hear stuff critical to gameplay being announced in the forums after a long irc chat with more than 60% the community not included in the decision, is kinda pisstaking.

If anything Irc should just be used to throw ideas about, when you have come to say 6-8 options for a certain rule, create a poll in the forums and leave it open for a week before deciding on any solid rules etc.

Not only that but in irc its easy to overlook a persons suggestion among all the chat, it is not really a democratic way of doing things, so like i say use irc as the ideas grounds, once you have narrowed down the ideas, weeded out the dumb stuff etc, post in the forums where all the community can have thier say in thier own time (then if someone disagrees with a decision tough look, since it was open to debate for a week, unlike now there was no debate outside irc, then you come to the conclusions such as a 35 block limit is the new league rule etc, i know for a fact more than half the community will be ticked off at such a decision, since it means you will only be able to build limited forts, and won't be long before everyone is making the same forts in clan matches since its the only real effective fort design you can use on such a low block count, will make the league boring).

Now these are serious issues for the league, if you limit the decisions to irc sessions, then there will be a lot more people who are not pleased with that, if anything your going to make these people less likely to want to participate in a league, to which they had no say in the rules.

Discuss (no flaming pls).

[Stieffers]

Get over it. We had over 20 people attending the meeting today. Read the log if you like.

[DJ_Monkey_Pilot]

I would argue about how IRC is a lot more efficient for having discussions than forums, but it seems pretty obvious and I can't be arsed. (Most of the SF clanners use IRC anyway)

[.narf]

Irc is much more efficient, and people that have a vested interest in the future of the sf-league attended. .

The meeting lasted two hours and was very productive. I certainly prefer that over 3-weeks of forum debating, flaming, and "zomgs we cant make teh uberfrotz in teh leegue?! TEH WTF!"-ing

The rules are not entirely set in stone, as far as i know, and are subject to change if they hinder any fundamental gameplay aspects.

Ok yeah, theres 1052 registered users on the forums, theres about 200-300 active guys on the forums, and about 200 active players, to say an irc meeting which had around 30 people max in it is the best way to debate rules is just excluding those who were not present.

No most clanners don't use irc, maybe digis and some of aka with a few members of the other clans using it, but that is not most clan members.

And i don't need to get over it, maybe you lot need to get over the fact irc is not the best way, the forums are everyone can us them no problem and with no restrictions on time.

How would you feel if the devs decided they will hold a meeting via msn messenger, then they come up with a decision you hated, but since you were not present to have your say they told you to get over it, would you not feel the need to speak out?

[SwiftSpear]

Every active NS clan had an IRC channel last season... One Cal's info boxes is for a clan's IRC channel, also scrims are organized almost exclusively through the findscrim channels. It's about the same popularity in CS.

[jlf]

Originally Posted by Gto

it is not really a democratic way of doing things

... and this isn't a true democracy. If we have 1000 users, then 99% of the community are not involved in 99% of the decisions we make. Thankfully, we don't use polls to make important decisions like the league rules - we simply don't have time to fully explain all the options, and their consequences, to 1000 people. This is not a community mod. The community has an extremely large voice through both the forums and the IRC channel, but at the end of the day, we are the ones who make the decisions - and take responsibility for them. If you don't like our decisions, vote with your player minutes (I think you might find that this is similar to the way governments work - your government does not take a poll on every decision it wants to make, it takes them for you, and if you don't like it, you don't vote for them).

With the 20+ people in the IRC channel, we may not have had every forum member particpating in the discussions, but we had a damn good representation of the target demographic: keen SourceForts players looking for competitive play. The purpose of the discussion was not to get each and every player's personal input and ideas, but to see how a group of players as a whole would react to the proposals. The opinion polls you read in the papers every day haven't been taken by every single citizen of your country, they've been taken by a small, generally randomised, group. This is no different. We had a good cross-section of gaming skill levels, technical competence and competitive experience in that channel this evening - the only common factor was that everybody wanted a league to go ahead.


IRC is an extremely accessible technology, but, if anything (and don't bother calling me up on this statement because it should be common knowledge that I say things like this already) it allows us to filter out the large group of forum users who have a lot of ideas, none of which have been properly thought through (or, in a lot of cases, properly typed), and concentrate on the ideas of the few who could take the time to install a piece of software, and set aside the time (which was about the most convenient cross-timezone time possible) to come and talk to us. We made more progress in two hours than three weeks of forum topics could have accomplished. If you were really concerned about the rules, then you should have done one of two things:
1) Turned up for the meeting (you've posted since the meeting, so no early bedtime for you)
2) Instead of making a post complaining about the use of an extremely common technology in our design process, made a post detailing your concerns about the league rules (you haven't actually voiced any) and your suggestions for resolving them.

At the end of the day, the rules will evolve into their best possible form. I very much doubt that you could have contributed anything unique to this evenings' meeting. Hell, I missed 95% of it, and I only had one minor disagreement with the final document which was quickly resolved.
If you had any good ideas, chances are they were suggested. If you had any objections, chances are they were raised.

[entRo]

ya

[Lego]

Originally Posted by jlf

.....lots of words

qft. qed.

If you can't be bothered to load up an irc client which takes all of 5 minutes to get installed and connected, than your opinion and participation in the league is probably not going to be that helpful.

[entRo]

Hell, we had 3-4 people connecting through the site using Java.