moving this discussion to the area it belongs in.

I agree with Razorborne. It sticks within a single thread, just like the Card Game Chain, and the current location is for things that are unrelated to direct Magic The Gathering play. Until CommanderJim sent a PM to me asking if I was still interested 6 months after they started, I had no idea WHERE 3CM took play or that it was even still going on. I just never frequented that forum because I always though "D&D and RPG stuff".

This is incorrect.

I admit that the description is vague and should be changed to reflect Magic as well, but all games do go in the PbP-area.

For instance, Magic forum text duels are in that area as well. Said duels are not as popular as they were 7 years ago (I'm pretty much the only one willing to host and/or play in them, but few people responded), but they can still be started.

My main point of response is pretty similar to the response to Razorborne's last issue regarding groups.
We try to prevent people from staying in the same area forever and want them to mingle.
This place is not as huge as the old boards. It takes all but 20 seconds to check almost all forums seeing how active threads, like 3cm, are pretty much always on the first page of the topic list.

And a setting in MG is also not a guaranteed recipe for succes. When I hosted it in the motherboard 3 years ago (when it was still relatively active there), the numbers very quickly dwindled to +-10 contestants a round.

In my PoV, the Magic section needs to start thinking of more possible Magic-related forum games to play. Give more incentive for people to play Magic-related stuff.
I remember waaay back in MPFG we had Chartreuse_Lotus who would host text-based Magic multiplayer games (and people where actually committed to them instead of saying stuff like 'this will take too long' before even trying them out). Several text-drafts, both Rochester and normal, ending with matches, etcetera.

It seems most of those people disappeared, but I would love to see more of that stuff back.

You may want people to "mingle" but I don't find the intent a very good medium for that sort of activity. I find people havea tendency to find precisely where they want to be and then set up shop there, so to speak. I pretty much only check play by post, card design, and magic general forums unless something specific (like razorborn saying he'd make this thread) comes up and refers me elsewhere. That wasn't the case when I arrived, because I was unsure of what each forum offered, but as time went on, and my participation and interest in these other forums decreased, I stopped checking them altogether.

Of course, I understand that you don't want things to get cluttered, but if you want to encourage mingling, then there needs to be an additional mechanic that aids in that action.

but that's not how actual people and actual communities function. imagine, for instance, that we went for the ultimate mingling and just got rid of forums and subforums altogether. just one area with custom magic designs, board issues, D&D games, sports discussion, posting games, and everything else. obviously, you can see how that would be an issue, right? it would be practically impossible to find what you wanted. there'd be no rhyme or reason. and when people can't find the things they want, you know what they do? they leave. you're competing for attention with the entire internet here, you get basically no leeway. so obviously some level of organization is important, keeping like with like so that people can quickly find things that match their interests. did you know I haven't even looked in the D&D forums? is that a failing of your system, or is it just the fact that I don't like D&D and making me dig through D&D stuff is pointless? YMtC is my primary interest, so theoretically you could have me going to all sorts of areas to mingle by putting the YMtC threads in arbitrary sections, but if you did that, I'd just leave and find a site that put all the YMtC stuff together in a sensible fashion. similarly, shoving a magic game in the middle of a bunch of D&D games doesn't suddenly make me want to engage with the D&D side, it just makes me care less about the site.

furthermore, the specific forum you put it in is one that doesn't want people just popping in to threads to participate. mafia games don't just randomly pick up new players, and for the most part neither do RPGs. yeah, it's nice to inform people that we have mafia, but you're not even doing that with this move, because people won't come here and go "huh, I wonder where 3cm is?" and start poking around, they'll just look in the places they're interested in, not see 3cm there, and not join that activity, giving them one less connection to the forum. they're not going to magically know to look in the labeled-as-non-magic areas for a specifically magic game. the only reason I even know we have it is because I happened to see it while looking at mafia games. hiding stuff where it doesn't belong doesn't encourage people to explore new areas, it encourages them to never see the stuff they might be interested in and come to the conclusion that the forum is lame.

While I do believe Razorborne has a point, I'm of the opposite opinion: I'm much more likely to visit the pbp/rpg forum than visiting the Magic General forum. The main reason I haven't been hanging around the pbp/rpg section is a lack of time to do much of anything around these forums.

Although the fact that this topic has been brought up has me wondering now about where the upcoming Conspiracy flavor game in AF&S belongs (either stay in the AF&S or to have it in the PBP area).

Well it's probably going to get moved for sure, now Gotta keep AF&S business tighter to your chest, man.

Also considering that voting games in F&S have literally always been conceived of as ways of drawing people to F&S, ways to raise the profile of the board, they kind of serve as basically the ultimate proof-of-concept counterexample to Scarlet's idea.

I mean at the very least individual boards should have the right to determine for themselves what's best for their community. If that means keeping particular things in-house despite them being a little off-topic, so be it. I mean the Wizards boards were decentralized purely due to the staggering incompetence of management, but that decentrilization did, ultimately, help boards like F&S to develop their own particular voice and tight-knit community, in part because we did things within the board that could, arguably, have been moved to Magic General. I know I wouldn't join a voting game if it was in Magic General then (because I mostly hated people from Magic General) and I probably wouldn't today (because why would I want to play with a bunch of people I don't know?).

Top-down prescriptivity has very, very few upsides that I can see.

Look, 3cm in particular has had everything tried and tested before.

It started in MPFG, it went to Magic General when the Group structure killed MPFG on the Wizards boards (though it had a small life on the MPFG-group but Group structure eventually killed MPFG) and I hosted the series myself 4 seperate times in these years. In MPFG (forum and group) and in Magic General twice .
It doesn't really matter that much where it is, every time a discussion like this happens people join in the new area because it's...well...new, and it goes back to the same 8-10 people after a month, sometimes 2 months.

I'm willing to try it in MG, but that doesn't change my views.
1) I want more Magic related games.
2) I wish for the description of the PbP-area to also mention that text-based Magic stuff is welcome there too.

As Lord's post and my posting structure implies, people that want to play games tend to flock in 3cm because it's in the PbP-area. People that play magic tend to flock in MG because it's in their area.
It's just my personal opinion that the step from MG -> PbP is less big than the step PbP -> MG.

AF&S is in my opinion a separate entity that has no actual place in PbP, pretty much like the community drafts in the Limited section. Those are fine too.
I'm more thinking along the lines of text-based Magic duels, like I sketched in my previous post. 3cm has more in common with that stuff, and those are in PbP.

The real problem, as I see it, is that people aren't willing to go outside of their own little area on the forum.


Seriously. What does it hurt you to go to pbp to play a game you enjoy? Advertise it to other people you think might be interested via pms. But do we really need to move a popular thread just because its in a forum a lot of people don't visit? I mean.... wouldn't it be better to try to get people to visit the subforum instead?

Magic General = General Discussion Of MtG

Play By Post = Games Played Via The Forum

3CM very much fits into the the later better than the former.

- - - - - - - - -

Now the argument could be made to have some sort of announcement of every new season or something go up in Magic General redirecting people to where the game is... or perhaps a sticky post in Magic General, like a FAQ or something, that included a "dont forget to check out the PBP area for on going games or to start your own". But Magic General should primarily be a 'discussion' board with all the random topics that dont end up fitting specifically into one of the other various MtG boards and PBP Magic games should be in the PBP area.

The D&D PBP games are RPG games... doesnt mean that they belong up in the Tabletop RPG General board.

in this situation, it's particularly irritating because 3cm rarely updates. any given time there's a new post in PbP it's really unlikely that it's gonna be an important one for 3cm, so checking every time I see one is a huge waste of time. but it does have important updates, so I need to always look in case a round just ended or a new one went up. so basically every day I have to go look somewhere I know won't have any new information I care about, just to confirm that I didn't happen to miss something important.

by any reasonable definition, the game threads in YMtC (like You Make The Alphabetical Card) are posting games. you quickly look at the former post, then make a new post that relates to it through some predetermined mechanism. sure there's a little more creativity and thought then there is in some posting games, but the ^>V game, for instance, takes creativity, as does the wishes one, and those are clearly posting games still. so why not move the YMtC games to the posting games forum? YMtC is supposed to be discussing making cards, there's practically no discussion in the game threads, so even though you're making cards, it's really not what the forum's supposed to be about, right?

you can't fight instinct. making your layout less intuitive is bad, even if you can technically justify it. and whether or not you wish there was a bunch of magic games in PbP so it'd be a reasonable place to look for those... there's not. right now, at this very moment, there's not. maybe it's because everyone thinks of that part as the D&D area, so magic players leave it alone. maybe it's because there's just way better ways to play magic games online than PbP, so no one bothers with things you can just do on Cockatrice. who knows? but right now 3cm is in a position where it is unlikely to pick up new players or regain old players who stopped for a bit, because it's in a place where people who are not currently engaging with it but might be interested aren't likely to see it. which makes it a bad place for basically the only non-YMtC Magic-related serial activity you have.

If clicking twice is too much work you could always subscribe to the thread.

Agreed, the YMTC game threads are games, but not only are they specific to that subforum but that subforums decription also includes those games. Just like Magic Generals decription mentions that its for discussion.

Now the arguement can be made that the PBP forums need updated descriptions as the number of games and the type of gsmes have grown since they were made...that one I can agree with. And as stated above some sort of redirect in Magic General to push traffic in the right direction wouldnt be a bad idea.

then I have to use the subscription function. I'm not arguing that it's an insurmountable issue. it's not a lot of work, but when you're trying to make your site as accessible as possible little difference matter. there are all sorts of work-arounds, but why make people use them when you could just do things in an intuitive way in the first place?

so if we added "and also 3cm" to the description of General you'd be fine with the move? can we do that then?

see, the redirect is what really confuses me here. acknowledging it means acknowledging that people will expect 3cm to be in General. it also means putting an updating thread about 3cm in general. so why not just put 3cm itself in general?

3cm isn't a posting game though...

You complain about the visibility, but managed to find it within a couple days of joining the forum. Seems plenty visible from that perspective.

~SE++

I only found it because I have an interest in mafia games. I looked in the setup forum to sign up for some of those, saw that there had been a Dethy game run, and went to check if it was still running, and happened to notice 3cm while I was there.

does that seem like a normal activity trajectory, one you can expect your average new poster to follow?

furthermore, findability and visibility aren't actually the same thing. being in an obvious place, surrounded by related topics, makes it much easier to follow, which means people actually know when new rounds go up, which is kind of important for the health of the game. being surrounded by things that are entirely unrelated and thus not likely to draw similarly-interested crowds doesn't accomplish that, making it much less visible even if everyone knows where it is.

I understand Razorborne's position because Three Card Magic was always in Magic General on the WotC boards. In addition to this, the description of the forums in which 3CM is currently in doesn't help people find it. On top of this, all Magic related content on the forum is in the Magic section. In Magic general we currently have the card association game thread but by definition of the forums, that should be in the forum posting games section, but isn't. The division of the forums coupled with the content of the area that 3CM is in can make it hard to find and I understand how it could be missed. The majority of that section is Mafia and Roleplaying threads, so I don't see it being a huge problem to potentially move 3CM into general as the RP side and the Magic side often don't overlap.

also, if blending communities is a goal, might it make sense to move the off-topic room up with the Metaboard? putting it higher makes it look more important so people might use it more. just a thought. might help, might not, who knows, but it's the only area where people who are only interested in one side have a reason to interact with people only interested in the other.

The goal of the Metaboard is to be about forum issues and problems that need to be fixed. Same with technical issues and such. The Goblin Underground section of the forum is for topics that wouldn't be relevant to any other section of the forum. The Metaboard isn't trying to create any type of community but rather just be about the forum itself and is more "serious" in nature. Having the two sections together doesn't make logical sense other than it's not Magic or RP related.

However, it is a goal to get people use other sections of the forum when applicable. For example, putting a "how was your day" thread into YMTC wouldn't make much sense and is just being inclusive for that community and something that could be shared with everybody in the Off Topic Room.

While I can see why 3CM should be where it is now, it could be that it being in that area is stifling it's growth and participation. It would be nice to have people from the Magic area go into the posting games section of the forum, but if they were looking for specific Magic content, I would see why they wouldn't. Perhaps we could have a redirect in Magic General to 3CM in the play by post section as a redirect to alleviate this problem.

Any suggestions are welcome.