more than 4 people argued to move it. I stopped playing 3cm because it's not fun with a small player base. I still want it, and I still care about it, but since the mods decided they'd rather run it into the ground for the sake of pedantry, I bailed on an activity that was not going to get the support it needed to be enjoyable. I would guess that others did the same, even if they didn't do it as explicitly. people want 3cm, it's just that we've ruined it to the point where people who want it are better off just playing on Salvation.

anyway, all of this is irrelevant. what matters is that my model accurately predicted the inevitable outcome of both those threads and yours didn't, which lends credence to my arguments. in fact, while one can argue that 3cm's demise was inevitable (I'm sure Scarlet would love to drag that out again) the Card Chain Game's move was an unintentional experiment testing hypotheses, and mine won. you (along with BH, Scarlet, and a couple others) killed what may be the largest thread on the entire forums just so you could prove you didn't understand how people worked. good job.

Here's the thing.

3cmc was doing fine, as far as I know.

It wasn't growing. That is a fair statement. But it was doing fine. And then you guys stopped playing it, because "it's not fun with a small player base". What? The amount of people you had wasn't enough...... You guys stopped playing the game. That's why it is in its current state. Apparently, you can go sign up right now and then they will have 5 members. If you want to teach Jack how to play, they can have 6 and we can have fun.

And as far as I know, the game doesn't need any support other than to have people playing it. It doesn't have to be a 100 man tourney governed by a moderator that gets automatically shut down if it's not in Magic General. Everyone plays their deck versus everyone else's and then you see who won the most right?

The card chain game wasn't moved because it was some experiment.

It was moved because you threw a giant stink about it being in the wrong subforum. "It isn't fair that that is in Magic General but my thread isn't." Well that's right. You were right. And because you wanted it to be fair, they made it fair. We all knew exactly what was going to happen too . And that is that people actually do not care about the card chain game enough to post in it if it's not in the wrong subforum. But we have to be fair.

no, it was dying. it was just doing it slowly, because no one knew it existed. the issue is acquisition. over any given period of time, some players will stop playing. if things are working, you can get in new players at a rate that serves to replace them. when you bury it somewhere that actively discourages anyone who might be interested from checking there, you a) never get new players to see it, and b) never remind old players that it exists, so all you have to support you is your retention rate, so unless that's literally 100%, the game will die given time.

and yes, I can go play, but five-player games aren't fun. there's not enough variety in the meta for analysis to be rewarded, so it becomes a crapshoot.

right. but if there's not a diverse enough meta then it becomes dumb luck who happens to win. in a game where one joke deck represents a full 25% of the available points, you can't argue it's a game of skill. a broad meta filters out flukes and rewards effort and skill. a round with 20 people is not just quantitatively different from one with 4, it's qualitatively different.

and 4cm modern wasn't launched as one, but they both served as them and they both confirmed my predictions.

that is not what happened, most importantly because I have not once concerned myself with what's "fair". you argued that it wasn't fair to put something somewhere it "didn't belong", I pointed out that we had numerous examples of that happening to the benefit of the activity in question as well as the entire forum, and you and your cohorts insisted on moving it for purity. and then the most popular thread on the forums died because it's not easily accessible and usability **** matters. interfaces matter. things being where people expect and want them matters. your insistence that somehow killing off the Card Chain Game was a good thing is mindboggling.

here, I'll make this nice and simple: is NGA better off without the card chain game? if not, why did we take a course of action we knew would kill it?

i'd say so

I'll answer your question with a question.

Why can't we just go play it right now?

that's deflecting. the fact is, observably, we don't. is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Neither. It simply is.

I go to Magic General all the time and the Card Chain Game was a nice diversion to participate in if there wasn't much other posted content. I really enjoyed playing it, but I'm not going to a dedicated subforum just to play it. You can whine and say "it's only three clicks, blah, blah, blah" but those three clicks are a very real impediment to people actually participating. I have certain forums that I visit and certain that I don't, and I'm not going to add a new forum to my list just because someone says I have to. I just won't play. I don't understand why this is so hard to compute for some people.

Anyway, for the health of the forum overall it makes sense to put the card chain game and 3cm back in Magic General. The only reason not to put it there is just to be pedantic and being pedantic just for the sake of it is a pretty stupid reason, IMO.

Re: 3cm dying: see also: the Coalition Wargame.

(Point being that the location had nothing to do with it dying.)

It seems to me like moving 3cm and card chain game have really hurt their activity levels.

The Coalition Wargame died because of technical issues and waning player interest. The players simply weren't invested enough to put up with the sudden flood of advertisements, extra clicks, and frustration needed to view the battlefield map. In other words, it died because there was a new barrier to entry that discouraged players from continuing.

There are several issues at work here.
1) Players do not keep playing when they are already in the game.
When I was active there were 10 regulars. Now there are 4. Why? Time issues most likely and you can't really do much against that, which brings us to #2

2) Attraction of new players.
There are multiple factors at work here but the location is not the drawback.
Even back at Wizards 3cm threads started dying by the time they reached round 25. And the reason for that is really basic psychology.
How bigger a thread is, how smaller the chance new players will open that thread.
Sure, we know that you only need to read the latest host posts to find out what to do. But if a thread has over 20 pages it is really very, very unlikely the thread will even be opened. Let alone that a player will know which post to look at.

There is nothing wrong with making a new thread and defining a season as 25-ish rounds.

this was a theoretically plausible case before Rush tried to launch 4cm modern. but then that happened and like four people showed up. given that it was, at the time, a single-page thread, it succinctly rejects this hypothesis as the sole or even primary motivating factor. I brought this up at the time (and several times since) so I really don't know why you're ignoring that data point, but until you do I don't really see what place your opinions have in this discussion.

looked it up: it was 7 people the first round, then 4 the second, then Rush replaced it with the ICC version which seems somewhat active but a quick look reveals basically no NGA folk involved. so it looks like the secret to successful 3cm is to run it on Salvation?

3cm and 4cm are different beasts.

But yeah, it does seem like the magic section has a lack of forum gamers nowadays with DotP and stuff.

I know that I personally lost track of 3CM, and part of that was I never built a habit of checking a forum that only had one thread I cares about regularly. When I see new activity in Magic General or YMtC I always investigate. When I see it in structured PbP post games I have much less interest. Now I am participating in a second game in the area that requires more activity, this might change, but I feel like the problem stands. [3CM] is a pretty low activity game, which makes it a poor attraction and a good diversion.

are you seriously arguing that the number of cards one starts with fundamentally affects the psychology of prospective players? people are scared of 3cm because the thread is long, but thread length is somehow irrelevant if you get a fourth card?

well, yes, the Magic section is lacking in forum gamers because you've personally removed all the forum games from the Magic section. funny how that works, isn't it?

They do not belong there.

There is no more justification for putting the 3cm thread in Magic General then there is putting the "Jack Reviews Anime" thread in Magic General. Magic General is still the wrong subforum, it's still currently in the right subforum, and the reason it's not getting moved to the wrong subforum so far is so that other people can't spam the metaboard with the "move the X game to Magic General" threads and then say that that is only fair because 3cm got to be in there. Because once you move one thread from the pbp forum to some place they don't belong, there literally is no argument for not moving any other thread to anywhere else, as specifically demonstrated by Razorborne who made this his central argument for a large part of this thread until he got them to "fix" the problem. All someone would have to say is "but you did this for 3cm and I think I would get more traffic that way". It's not mindless pedantry. It's consistency. You can't make an exception for one thing and then expect to be taken seriously for everything else. As shown by the 5 or so pages spent earlier in this thread where that was the central argument for moving 3cm.

Rules should be guidelines, not hardlines. Doing something "because rules" is failing to think about whether the rule is actually useful or not and whether it needs to be amended.