Oh yeah. That debacle.

Actually I think it is fine this way.

But it would be somewhat misleading, so how about "Choose Your Game".

After seeing another site, I believe a lottery is a better mechanism than a queue. It stimulates people to keep following and only present games that are ready or nearly ready.

Just a suggestion.

yeah a lottery sounds better

paint mafia 2 is not very finished

The problem with a lottery is that people who have been waiting a long time might never get to host and people who just hosted might host again immediately.

This is pretty much the reason we queue. On the mothership, however, we did alternate the queue with player's choice game for awhile. These games could be games on the queue, hoping to skip some wait time, but more often games were drafted separately from the queue for weird side projects or games that broke molds like Spider-Bros, a Mafia. Rather than having to just get lucky, you actually had to pitch and sell your games to a majority of the player base to win a popularity contest in order to run, so it was probably even more biased than a lottery.

I inherently believe in the queue system because, while slow, it guarantees you'll eventually get to run your game.

That being said, the wait time is horrendously long.

I liked what we did on the mothership, where we had a basic queue but then once in a while there would be the Player's Choice game, which bypassed the cue with a game picked by players.

It would be cool if we implemented something like that here. It'd sure be nice if I didn't have to wait 2 years before getting to run Spider-Man 3.

That is easily solved by removing that person from the lottery in the next, let's say 2 games. Also it is possible to apply a weight to games that are for a long time in the lottery to maximize the chances of them being drawn.

on average you won't wait longer with a lottery system than with a queue system, and you'd only really get anomalies like someone never being able to host if you had a lot of mafia games and not much players, and we have a decent ratio i think.

and yeah, you could skew the odds so eventually a game that hasn't been picked for long enough will be a guaranteed pick if people are concerned about the off chance that something like that happens.

That is my opinion. No drawback and some advantages.

Really difficult to argue against that.

it doesn't have the same sense of justice that the queue does

True, but it compensates with a different sense of justice.

If you have to rig a lottery you're kinda defeating the point in having a lottery. Just sayin.

Rigging, yes, but changing the odds, no, not really, almost all lottery have that mechanism in place (for money).

league of legends has a modified crit formula where the longer you go without getting a crit the more likely you are to crit and the more consecutive crits you get the less likely you are to get a crit.

hearthstone increases the chances of you pulling a legendary in each pack until it reaches 100%

it is no secret in game design that people prefer slightly random even distributions more than completely random distributions or completely even distributions. There are reasons to go with a pseudo-random system.

Lottery systems are bad because any sort of randomness is bad.

Find me a game of mafia that isn't random.

That doesn't mean it's a good thing. Randomness is sandpaper underwear.

Randomness appeals to a lot of inherent qualities in the human psyche.