Community event discussion

[Flintlock]

I realised we didn't have a general thread for discussing community events. I did maintain a "status of all projects"-type thread for the first half of last year, but it felt like a lot of work for something that nobody was probably paying attention to anyway, so I stopped.

This thread can be used to pitch and discuss ideas and organise events. Those events should still get their own threads, of course.

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I'll get us started. For the last couple of Januaries, we've had a community playthrough. I deliberately held off with organising it this year because we just had the music ranking event and the TLS awards, with quite a bit of overlap, which felt pretty heavy. Lex also pointed out that we'll be busy with updating the site, but after some thought, I decided I don't want to put everything else on hold in the interim, since we don't know how long updating the site will take (and it shouldn't be rushed).

Rather than dive straight into nominations, though, I figured it would be a good idea to gauge interest. I also thought I'd float the idea of only running one community playthrough a year, and replacing the other one with a community relay, since that was so much fun last time, and since it's a lot lighter.

So, who wants to do a community playthrough, and who would rather do another relay? If you don't know what that those things are, you can read more about them here: playthrough, relay. In short, in a community playthrough, everyone plays the chosen from start to finish, while in a relay, each player plays only a small chunk of the game before passing it on to another player. If we do a playthrough now we can still do a relay in a few months' time.

[Jason Tandro]

I rather like the idea of a community playthrough. If we get to it quick enough we might be able to elect a game and coincide with the TLS Final Fantasy Retrospective Vader, Ryu and I are doing (maybe we can ALL play Final Fantasy V finally).

Relay sounds interesting too.

Site games are always a fun diversion too. While the round robin story kind of flopped, maybe I can get off my ass and try to revive Hang-Man. And hopefully we'll see another genius game from you, even if it is a revival of Mythril Mines. I also wanted to talk to you about possibly collabing on a "Chocobo Racing" betting game in a similar vein to Mythril Mines.

And it's about time for another fanworks contest... that'll be my territory though.

[Minato]

I guess my preference goes out to a relay before community playthrough. But I'm fine either way, but let's agree to pick something other then FFVII this time.

[Lex]

I vote playthrough.

I had an idea for a (kind of) community event where we nominate random people from TLS to write a one-off piece for us (non-staff members, can be anything from "what I like about this game" to a factual analysis/review/dissertation).

This accomplishes many things. It may bring us more interested writers from people we already have, it's interesting to read what people are thinking when they take the time to write solo, it shows that really anyone can write for us, it gives people a chance to flesh out (or discover) their writing skills, and it keeps our front page from stagnating. I only see benefits, but maybe I'm biased since it's my idea.

[Jason Tandro]

^ That's actually a pretty cool idea Lex. It'll also let us scout out new potential writing talent and showcase that we value our community's input. We could maybe do one a month and call it a "Community Article" or "Guest Article" or something like that.

Edit: Perhaps you could make a sign-up article and we can take it in turns like the Member Spotlight.

[Channy]

A relay sounds pretty fun but as evidenced by that thread, you run into the problem of drop outs. But I think we have more interested, committed people who might partake.

I wanted to throw something out into the void at one point but wasn't sure when would be an appropriate time but I guess this is the thread for it. Ami and I met on another forum years ago (after I initially left TLS/before she came here). There was a yearly event, usually in the summer if people were in school called Survivor.

Survivor was basically just like the TV show. People are split into tribes, must compete challenges to try and earn immunity for their team otherwise after a week or two they then must vote someone off 'the island'. Challenges usually had a time limit, depending on the challenge, of about 5-7 days for people to get it together, and mini challenges were interspersed to keep people entertained that lasted about 24-48 hours.

How it works (forum technicalities) A whole sub forum was made for this. Inside that, 2-4 sub-sub forums for each tribe. Depending on number of applications, tribes consisted of about 5-7 people. Tribe members can only view their own tribe sub forum and the main subforum for Survivor. They can't view the rest of the forum at all (unless logged out). You can't PM other people outside of Survivor.

Mods usually didn't participate or if one really wanted to, stripped of momentary mod powers so they couldn't view the other huts, etc.. Usually the whole thing was run by two or so mods to keep things organized, tally points up, oversee that people were behaving (usually rules were cut loose on trolling for Survivor to stir up competition but it all depends on the community) but I'd be happy to assist on the first go if it's explored.


Why it's fun It really gets people's competitive spirits up but in a fun way. Usually members were split evenly according to time zones so you'd get 2/3 from UK, 2 from US/EST and then one from US/PST if available... that way no one is all in at the same time and your "huts" were usually attended to in case a Challenge was released at an odd time or mini challenges made an appearance. Which, again, stirred competition because all of a sudden a mini challenge worth 50 pts might have gone up and the most of another team slept through it while their other person didn't know the answer/had no camera atm...

This made challenges like Photo Relay (wherein there are 5 items listed and everyone has to post a pick but in a certain order... ball, stuffed animal, FF game, etc... one posts one item, next person posts that item and the next item, next person posts those two items and the next, and so on...) hilariously aggravating as you could have your whole team organized in their private forum discussing what items they have and what order they can go, but one person who might be in another timezone asleep and unaware....

Challenges included Chubby Bunny videos, post coordination threads, photo relay threads, a dare scavenger hunt with photos (in which I stood next to a highway with a sign saying "Honk if I'm Cute" (spoiler alert: nobody honked ) and then mini challenges including Emoticon Selfie threads, Most View Count Thread, and other embarrassing videos and pictures.

And then the final challenge usually involved some elaborate scheme of a dozen riddles that all somehow interconnected with coding riddles to make a final answer.

Other pertinents to try and convince you
Oh look, Kate Upton's boobies... how did those get here....


I think... I think that's about the jist of it? Ami and I discussed pitching this to you guys at some point, waiting until the other events were currently done. This could be done at any time, as years have gone by since and not too many people are in school anymore, usually working or not. Waiting until the forum upgrade/move with forums restablished is perfectly fine too, again, just sorta whenever. Activity has been getting up lately with the news and we've been getting newer and newer members so thought soonish would be a good time for it.

edit: I spent about half hr typing all that up... I also agree to Lex's idea and Jason's revival of Hang-Man

[Lex]

^I really like that idea, but given the culture of TLS I think we'd need to go with a more relaxed version of it, namely not restricting access to the rest of the forum (just ensuring said tribes can't see other tribes' subforums) and also not requiring things like videos etc. to be posted because you'd get more participation if said stuff wasn't required. So I'm on board if people can come up with interesting challenges that relate to TLS (maybe timed video game/ entertainment quizzes and other less boring things) that don't require people to post pictures or videos of themselves.

[Flintlock]

That sounds like it would be a lot of work, but fun. Kind of a shame that people can get voted out and then won't be able to take part any more, though. Did it eventually come down to just two people competing for victory?

[Fangu]

Lucy wrote:

A relay sounds pretty fun but as evidenced by that thread, you run into the problem of drop outs. But I think we have more interested, committed people who might partake.

Yeah. I was sure I was going to drop out on some of my parts, but I ended up playing all of them in the intended order. Streaming them was a lot of fun too.

Anyway if we were to do another relay, we need to up the pranking, like this

I always tend to drop out of the community playthroughs, simply because I don't have time to keep up. The relay isn't as demanding. So I'd probably partake in the latter, not the first.

[Channy]

The restricting of access to general forum was part of the atmosphere. And some mini challenges included "who's that member" taking previous member usernames and describing a person. So to compete in that obviously you could t look at people's profiles to try and see who it was. It more or less enlisted participation rather than relying on the honour system.

Picture and video challenges weren't too bad though because done early enough there's enough members in the tribes that if someone doesn't want to participate there's still others to do the challenge. The scavenger hunt was usually just a large list of pictures either finding something or doing something and keeping a little tag with your team or initials in to show you didn't pull it off google. And then usually just at least one person had to take a pic of it to get the points, not everyone. Something like that could be voted on if people were wary about it though.

Yeah by the end, it was usually top 3 competing for the final riddle and depending on how team wins went, could be 2 from 1 team working together and tying to outsmart the lonely third...

Again, if interested I'd offer to assist with organizing since I'm familiar with it (participated twice) notwithstanding mod powers off course

Also I typed all this on my phone so please forgive typos.

[Flintlock]

Fangu wrote:

Anyway if we were to do another relay, we need to up the pranking, like this

I'd like to remind everyone that Lex was also the author of this post:

Lex wrote:

I'm more likely to be the opposite and make someone a really easy save file to continue from

So now we know he's a filthy, filthy liar.

But I agree, those pranks were the best part of the experience for me.

[Flare]

Channy, I love the Survivor TLS game idea! I enjoy watching that series on tv, so it would be fun to play such a variation of it.

So curious, but it seems like you guys never ended up 'merging' the tribes and then having individual immunity challenges, and rather that you stuck with two teams the entire game? As the tv series goes, the teams eventually merge and then everyone shares the same camp but competes individually in challenges. Though I see where that might get hard for an online one, so teams probably work best for TLS.
Also, they sometimes have 3 teams instead of just two, but maybe two, again, works best. You would know since you've done it before.
Anyway, I'd definitely be up for a game like that, it would be a blast!

[Channy]

I don't recall terms eventually merging. It was also at least 3 tribes when I did it to try and stir up competition and revenge across all fronts. But again depends on how many interested parties there are too. Less so and two teams would work just fine.

[Ami]

Ah, good old Survivor. I'm glad you've mentioned this, I need to go on a nostalgia trip now.

I'd up for a playthrough/relay, as I'm back to playing games a lot more these days rather than back when we did the playthroughs and I just got left behind on my own fault. Would also be up for helping organise/participating in Survivor, too!

[Claymore]

No real input apart from loving all the ideas.