Player scarcity musing

[breakinglight11]

After a pleasant Easter vacation spent at home with my family, I am now back in town and glad to be here.

This week is going to be full for me. I'm working longer hours to make up for the ones I missed to go home. And I've got to get my two games printed and packed in preparation for Festival. I'm pleased to say that even after several drops and

Comments

[lisefrac]

I think the timing is the issue - i.e. that game signups opened so late. I know natbudin made a promise to zrealm last year that game signups would be open by the end of the January, and that did not happen. As a result there are no Foam Brain folks, and very few RPIers, coming to Vestival.

Other factors:
- learnedax' wedding, which is sucking away people like laurion and dkapell
- Aleph, a larp-like strategy game, is running at RPI this weekend
- the proximity of PAX East and Anime Boston
- the proximity of Lifeboat

These are the things I discuss to death with Nat when he's around :)

[breakinglight11]

Interesting! I wonder if such scheduling (or most such) conflicts can be avoided by careful planning for the coming year.

[natbudin]

It's not quite as easy as it sounds, unfortunately, although it is definitely doable. To make game signups open earlier, there are a few things that also have to happen:

1. The push to get game bids in has to happen much earlier.
   
   1. Part of the issue with that this year was technical - it took me a lot longer than I expected to get the bid form running correctly, and a few brave users (thanks, darkoni42!) to be my guinea pigs. Now that it's working, that should be less of an issue.
2. Space has to get reserved early, with confirmation. This isn't entirely in Festival's control, or even BSCF's. It also doesn't necessarily have to happen before games go up on the schedule - it's fairly safe to assume that space of some sort will be available.
3. Concom has to get mobilizer earlier. This year we had a lot of volunteers but very few people actually doing anything until fairly late in the game. I don't think this was lack of will so much as lack of communication/organization.
4. Tiered signups? Maybe? If Festival asks real nice?

[dkapell]

Looking back at the Festevil website, you're not seeing the games that were pulled because they didn't hit minimum, I think. I know we pulled our game ("Sam and Max hit the Afterlife"), and "'Tis No Deceit..." was pulled for the same reason.

[breakinglight11]

Ah, that is true-- I am basing my comparisons only on the data I can readily see remaining on the Festevil website. You seem to have better recollections/info than I-- do you think that things are drastically different this year?

[dkapell]

Honestly, I haven't been paying as much attention to Vestival, as I've known I can't make it since before signups opened. Based on bronzite's comments below, I agree that the games being run this year are simply larger, probably as a side effect of being easier to re-run a old game than write a new game, and if you're re-running something, the size doesn't matter as much. If I was going to write something new, I might prefer to write a 12-15 person game, whereas If i was going run something old, I'd have fairly equal chances of running a 15, 20 or 30 person game.

Mathematics for the Win!

[bronzite]

A quick breakdown of Vestival as it stands:

Friday: 83 (10 open)
Saturday Morning: 69 (5 open)
Saturday Afternoon: 83 (13 open)
Saturday Evening: 78 (3 open)
Sunday: 57 (2 Waitlisted)

We can adjust this total to actual player counts of:

73 74 70 75 59

That's pretty tight clustering, right there, especially given special considerations that come into play on Sundays.

Compare last year:

Friday: 58 (2 open, 2 waitlisted)
Saturday Morning: 36 (5 open, 3 waitlisted)
Saturday Afternoon: 68 (6 open, 1 waitlisted)
Saturday Evening: 46 (3 waitlisted)
Sunday: 45 (4 open)

We can adjust these totals to:
58 34 63 49 41

All of these numbers are lower, and more scattered. I believe that any considerations that Vestival is somehow running shallower than Festevil did is simply hogwash. The con is growing, but this year there were simply larger games.

Re: Mathematics for the Win!

[bronzite]

For reference, the average Festevil game has 11.5 players/slot. This year the average Vestival game has 17.6 players/slot (i.e., Young Women counts as 2 games for the purposes of this calculation.) That's a 53% increase in average game size, so its no wonder that less games are filling -- there simply aren't enough player to fill the games out there.

[natbudin]

The number of signups for the con also makes it look like there is a greater need for games, but I imagine there are people signed up who aren't coming at all, but just signed up for the hell of it.

That's true, but the same was true at FestEvil. By my visual estimates, the false positive rates are about the same for both cons. I can probably give you real numbers if people are interested.

[breakinglight11]

I would be very interested. It could be useful for planning next year.

[natbudin]

I've added this feature to ProCon, so now you can see false positive rates for any con you're staff for. It seems like my estimates weren't correct - there are actually more false positives at Vestival than there were at FestEvil. Here are the numbers:

Vestival - apparent attendance 128, 16 false positives, real attendance 112
FestEvil '09 - apparent attendance 118, 7 false positives, real attendance 111
Festival 2008 - apparent attendance 107, 9 false positives, real attendance 98
Festival 2007 - apparent attendance 70, 7 false positives, real attendance 63

It looks like attendance is actually growing every year, but we've mostly leveled off. I think we actually have a lot of churn in our attendee pool, and a lot of the false positives this year are people who had been at FestEvil. If true, this lends some credibility to the theory that our numbers aren't as high as they might be because people don't want to replay games.

[in_water_writ]

On the subject of "repeat games