Data The Fallout of the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny - Rewards

[Texas Cloverleaf]

I killed it. I posted regarding such in the proper thread, but this had run its course, and the patience of everyone involved out of town long ago.

I am making the decision to reward everyone involved with the match 3 CC and 6 MC for their participation, a token amount but a reasonable one for sticking with the match for so long. If your entered Pokemon is maxed you may claim 10 CC to account for the base CC cost plus the boosted MC gain.

This thread will remain stickied for 1 week to allow for visibility, and then lost to the annals of history.


Now. The fallout.

I think its safe to say that concepts like this, while magnificent in conception, are incredibly difficult to pull off. Time and time again we see concepts fail not because they were poorly crafted but because of a lack of organization or fall back to the rest of the forum. So we have to ask ourselves, what did we learn from this experience?

- Have a fall back plan. Things go wrong. Commitments are broken. Have a contingency plan in case you can't manage what you thought you were able to manage.

- Get assistance. For these major projects the biggest theme that I see is that you cannot do it alone. Its a nice and noble goal but in execution you will overwhelm yourself with the responsibilities of the task you've taken on. Getting people to help you and delegating tasks is only beneficial.

In my opinion The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny should be viewed as a learning experience and so I'd like to open the field to ASB for the following two questions:

What did you learn from the USUD?

Where should we go from here in relation to large projects?



Thanks to Glacier Knight for trying, to zt for trying to pick up the slack, to the participants for their patience and to everyone for being willing to try new things.

 

[ZhengTann]

Speaking as the second reason for the fallout, perhaps I could offer some insight:

1. Reffing complexity exponentially detracts referees from having fun. Sure, after you've done calculations for some 50 actions for a single round, you feel like a god. But as Lou puts it:

   It's not like reffing is hard, yet I dread it like a chore.

   This gets particularly nasty, real fast, as the number of Pokemons involved, and the complexity of the arena, increases.
   Personal Experiences that may detract from logical reasoning

   Reffing USUD had been a mainly passive "full output, zero input" work. Which sucks a lot to me. When I go about reffing matches, I'd do my calcs diligently, attempt to write good prose, and generally enjoy the process because I actually learn from how to battle reffing. The way dogfish focus fires in Doubles, how Texas makes his gambles - those stratagems are the kind a referee is made privy to when he study the battlers' mind through their moves. Call this an excuse from lazy me, but reffing USUD is like reffing Halls - where referees do work for nothing but ingame currency.
2. Time factor in relation to complexity. Right now, ASB's community as a whole is pretty liquid. We have a lot of people doing touch-and-go's, with a small fraction of members able to actually stay for extended periods of time. I'm not here to discuss what causes this phenomena - I'm merely thinking that such a phenomena is not conducive towards a long-term project. Maybe we can have really complex, in-depth participation for the masses, but it has to be done within a short time period. On the other hand, simpler, long-termed participation will have to be limited to the few who is actually willing to stay in ASB regardless (peeps like IAR and EMma). USUD originally had some 40 participants, IIRC, but the amount of people being DQ'ed due to fallout was close to a range of 60 to 70% - in other words, we could have more than twenty people being DQ'ed simply because they dropped out of ASB in general or didn't keep up with USUD.
3. Backup plans, as Texas stated, is a must. Before the transition to XenForo, USUD did have a referees' group, but the data was all lost during the transition and I basically started re-planning mechanics all over again. I'd say it would be prudent to have multiple data backups. But not just that - HR is major failure for USUD too. When Glacier asked for participants in the opening of USUD, we had a lot of people expressing interest in becoming a brawl champion, but only one guy (yours truly) wanting to be the taskforce behind crowning the said champion. Also, we faced a major quandary in workload distribution, where its simply "If Glacier can't reff, ask Zt. If Zt can't reff, USUD dies." Ashamed to say, it is not even a decent way for maintenance.

Conclusion: In future projects, the organizers/proponents have to be very specific about their time frame, target participants, and complexity, in accordance with the current condition of the ASB community. Either:

• We have a short-term, simple project implementation suitable for beginners while still offer a challenge curve to veterans (eg. Battle Hall)
• We have a short-term, intensely complex project implementation for more experienced ASB-ers (eg. Battle Pike, a single Raid)
• We have a long-term, intense project implementation reserved only for the most committed ASB veterans (eg. The entire TLRs and Raids)

I apologise if this seemed elitist, but the cold hard fact is that people come and go. A long-term project for the masses is not feasible - participation dies out fast. Aside from that, I'd also suggest that the referee-battler ratio must be as close to even as possible to ensure smooth maintenance of such projects. Raids might be an oddity, given that the referee is Zar, but in most other projects it is not uncommon to see them stalling due to lack of good referees.

tl;dr
For those of you who once had a dream within the USUD, I can do naught but apologise for wringing it out and turning it grey. I can only hope that there are some who really learned from it, because I barely did.

 

[Pallas Athena]

As someone who hosted the second and third largest attempted projects, I can safely echo everything Texas said. Another problem with large projects, ranging from ASM to tournaments to the US, is time. Given enough time, participants leave, refs can no longer work, and interest wanes. While an elite and invested group of players with multiple refs can mitigate the problem, it will still rear its head as it did in Late ASM when Terrador, Kaxtar, and SoS quit (and I ran into time barriers). Ultimately, I believe that if these projects are to succeed they must have multiple refs, a good system to allow players and refs to leave, and take relatively little time (3- months) to complete. If they must take it longer, find a way to break it up into several smaller games.

I would discourage a new megaproject in the near future. Once Gen VI is in full effect, perhaps a council can get together to reassess the viability of such a project. But for now, they are mere distractions for capable refs that are doomed from the start.