Sheep's the best lol
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Lobby's 13th Birthday Bash!
- Thread starter AtlasNeo
- Start date
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's time for our 2nd staff interview with our odyssey loving Room Moderator Gaussfield!
ATLAS VS GAUSSFIELD
How would you describe yourself in 3-5 sentences?
Gaussfield is Gaussfield. You are reading a haiku. Not much else to say.
$10 for you to keep the Haikus going... What is the history of your username? Was it even your first username?
This is, in fact, the first username I registered. It's been a while, so I don't remember why it's this in particular. After occasionally switching to other names, I eventually settled back on this one. I'm Gaussfield in other places, so I may as well keep things consistent.
Perhaps the German mathematician rubbed off on you... Unlike THAT Gauss, how did you come to found out about Pokemon Showdown?
Around the time of Gen 5, I saw a few videos featuring this site. Regardless of how realistic those videos actually are, they certainly made me interested in how Pokemon can be played beyond the minimum skill level required to beat the games.
Aye, it's certainly surprising how big the skill gap is, given the player base on PS! Would you say that's got anything to do with your favourite part about PS, if not, what's your favourite part?
It's a very accessible site for anyone with any level of interest in competitive battling. Putting together a team is hassle-free, and there also exist many Random Battle formats for those who don't have a team or simply wish for something different.
Maybe they should hire you to advertise Showdown... as a matter of fact, I only ever see you in Lobby excluding battles. Do you use rooms other than lobby? And how has Lobby tied in with your PS journey?
There are rooms besides Lobby? In all seriousness, though, it's nice to always have a live chatroom such as it to come back to. It's always been there when I felt like being there, and for that, I'm grateful. I'm still in disbelief that I've become a staff member of Lobby, but hopefully I'll be able to help make it a place worth coming back to for others.
Aw, that's a wholesome mindset to have. Anything in particular that you're proud of regarding PS?
I don't have much to be proud of. Perhaps putting together a truly horrid stall Kingambit set counts.
Yeah I've seen some of those stall sets from you before... do you play competitive at all? If so, what's your main format?
I don't particularly care about climbing the ladder, but I'll occasionally show up in Gen 9 Anything Goes. Personally, I'm more interested in helping newer players avoid making the same mistakes I would have when I was starting out.
That's awesome to hear! I love helping out newer players. As a matter of fact, the Help room is calling me right now, so I'm afraid we'll have to end this interview here! Anything you wanna add before we end this interview?
Instead of playing Pokemon, you should definitely play the cult classic dungeon-crawling JRPG series, Etr-
Ah, classic Gaussfield, trying to convince people to play Etrian Odyssey...
And there we have it! I hope you enjoyed our little exchange, I'll see you next time, with literally LE'BRON JAMES!
Wait, what's pokem-
Hello,
While our birthday bash event is still far on the horizon to being finished, the early design of the event is at a critical point where I think I should sit with you guys and have a good chat about it so far and how it's gone from a host perspective.
► 1/ Parameter Searches has been deprecated and will be featured in the last event. Initially this was added because this seemed like a cool idea on paper. I had seen the event run pretty well in other rooms, such as Scavengers. Our reasoning as to why this decision was made is for a few reasons.
First reason is due to a necessity of an understanding of how a command works to participate in the event. Other events strive to be pretty straight forward with how a user submits an answer and interacts with the event. Who's That Pokemon events are a visual event where a user submits an answer using the chat function. The same applies to audio related events (more on VGM Trivia later). Generally, the idea is easy to understand events as to allow as many users to play as possible.
Parameter searches is one of the most unfriendly events that was added to this roster, as users need to have a good understanding of a command that is rather deep and complex inside the chat function to be able to be effective at this event.
The second reason as to why is due to the lag this causes. While I'm unsure if the server itself struggles with what would be numerous users making a ton of dex searches, it's not particularly a risk that I would want to take - but also that many users being in chat already and this being a command that lags for about anyone results in a generally unfriendly experience.
Third is due to staff restrictions. Generally how this event normally works, is multiple goals are given to users to work towards. Due to needed spam filters, this affects staff members, meaning !randpoke natdex, fe, 2 (which is what's used to generate the user goal) can only be sent once unless you separate a message in between, which isn't good from a user standpoint. A workaround towards this would be to have pre-generated goals, however due to the culmination of these issues, as well as a trial event run that gave me more insight as to how the event would work, has resulted in the decision to remove it as a solo event.
This being said, it will be showcased in our final event briefly to account for any users who were looking forward to this event. This gives users a chance to participate in a larger scale event of this type without committing the time to have a larger scale event that will be a trudge.
► 2/ VGM Trivia was the second event that we hosted. Due to the nature and goals of these events, difficulty is a sensitive part of these events that need to be seriously considered while planning. While there is no inherent issue with creating difficult content, a large issue with how this event was planned initially was that the difficulty level was so incredibly high that a majority of the time, the large amount of users found the event displeasing, and it took each round a longer than expected time frame to complete. Furthermore, some rounds could not be completed without hints towards the actual game.
The goal was to achieve a difficulty level that, given the size of Lobby, a projection was made that a large amount of users with different video game experiences would be able to participate, and thus difficulty would scale down due to more players, and thus more experience. As experienced, this was not the case and not only were many of the games obscure, but even the songs chosen were very unforgiving.
As a result, the next two instances of this event will be reworked as to be more user friendly and accommodate to a larger audience. We will still look into creating difficult content, however we will not make difficulty the focal point of event planning, but rather the idea of 'easier to hear, easier to participate'. Part of the events is to race to be the first person to answer, so there shouldn't need to be an unnecessary amount of difficulty that results in an unfriendly experience.
This being said, any events in future that are planned to be more difficult than others will be marked with [hard], as seen with Pokemon Games Songs. Without spoiling too much, the event is designed to choose songs that are not ones you would typically see being shared, catering more so towards the nerds of Pokemon Music as this IS a pokemon simulator.
► 3/ Who's That Pokemon was easily one of the most well received events of last years Christmas event. Our first iteration of this went extremely well, and I'm excited to bring further iterations of this event to Lobby. Everything worked well and pretty much how it was expected.
Two things that, I learned hosting this event and thus will be changing in the next event, were that it felt way too quick and that some more curveballs may have been nice to have. The event was so well received that I had actually stolen 10 rounds of a future event to prolong the hype behind it. As such, Who's That Pokemon will now have 40 rounds as well as our final event having a whopping 50! This will give more room to add curveballs while also adding more easier to spot rounds.
That's it for this update!
I hope you enjoyed reading through my thought process and experiences as a host. More of these posts may be made in future to share ideas that I as a host have, so that not only can you guys get a little peek behind the curtains of what goes into this, but also for any aspiring event planners/hosters/participaters that want ideas on how to run things! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Atlas on Pokemon Showdown, or by starting a conversation with me on the forums!
While our birthday bash event is still far on the horizon to being finished, the early design of the event is at a critical point where I think I should sit with you guys and have a good chat about it so far and how it's gone from a host perspective.
► 1/ Parameter Searches has been deprecated and will be featured in the last event. Initially this was added because this seemed like a cool idea on paper. I had seen the event run pretty well in other rooms, such as Scavengers. Our reasoning as to why this decision was made is for a few reasons.
First reason is due to a necessity of an understanding of how a command works to participate in the event. Other events strive to be pretty straight forward with how a user submits an answer and interacts with the event. Who's That Pokemon events are a visual event where a user submits an answer using the chat function. The same applies to audio related events (more on VGM Trivia later). Generally, the idea is easy to understand events as to allow as many users to play as possible.
Parameter searches is one of the most unfriendly events that was added to this roster, as users need to have a good understanding of a command that is rather deep and complex inside the chat function to be able to be effective at this event.
The second reason as to why is due to the lag this causes. While I'm unsure if the server itself struggles with what would be numerous users making a ton of dex searches, it's not particularly a risk that I would want to take - but also that many users being in chat already and this being a command that lags for about anyone results in a generally unfriendly experience.
Third is due to staff restrictions. Generally how this event normally works, is multiple goals are given to users to work towards. Due to needed spam filters, this affects staff members, meaning !randpoke natdex, fe, 2 (which is what's used to generate the user goal) can only be sent once unless you separate a message in between, which isn't good from a user standpoint. A workaround towards this would be to have pre-generated goals, however due to the culmination of these issues, as well as a trial event run that gave me more insight as to how the event would work, has resulted in the decision to remove it as a solo event.
This being said, it will be showcased in our final event briefly to account for any users who were looking forward to this event. This gives users a chance to participate in a larger scale event of this type without committing the time to have a larger scale event that will be a trudge.
► 2/ VGM Trivia was the second event that we hosted. Due to the nature and goals of these events, difficulty is a sensitive part of these events that need to be seriously considered while planning. While there is no inherent issue with creating difficult content, a large issue with how this event was planned initially was that the difficulty level was so incredibly high that a majority of the time, the large amount of users found the event displeasing, and it took each round a longer than expected time frame to complete. Furthermore, some rounds could not be completed without hints towards the actual game.
The goal was to achieve a difficulty level that, given the size of Lobby, a projection was made that a large amount of users with different video game experiences would be able to participate, and thus difficulty would scale down due to more players, and thus more experience. As experienced, this was not the case and not only were many of the games obscure, but even the songs chosen were very unforgiving.
As a result, the next two instances of this event will be reworked as to be more user friendly and accommodate to a larger audience. We will still look into creating difficult content, however we will not make difficulty the focal point of event planning, but rather the idea of 'easier to hear, easier to participate'. Part of the events is to race to be the first person to answer, so there shouldn't need to be an unnecessary amount of difficulty that results in an unfriendly experience.
This being said, any events in future that are planned to be more difficult than others will be marked with [hard], as seen with Pokemon Games Songs. Without spoiling too much, the event is designed to choose songs that are not ones you would typically see being shared, catering more so towards the nerds of Pokemon Music as this IS a pokemon simulator.
► 3/ Who's That Pokemon was easily one of the most well received events of last years Christmas event. Our first iteration of this went extremely well, and I'm excited to bring further iterations of this event to Lobby. Everything worked well and pretty much how it was expected.
Two things that, I learned hosting this event and thus will be changing in the next event, were that it felt way too quick and that some more curveballs may have been nice to have. The event was so well received that I had actually stolen 10 rounds of a future event to prolong the hype behind it. As such, Who's That Pokemon will now have 40 rounds as well as our final event having a whopping 50! This will give more room to add curveballs while also adding more easier to spot rounds.
That's it for this update!
I hope you enjoyed reading through my thought process and experiences as a host. More of these posts may be made in future to share ideas that I as a host have, so that not only can you guys get a little peek behind the curtains of what goes into this, but also for any aspiring event planners/hosters/participaters that want ideas on how to run things! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Atlas on Pokemon Showdown, or by starting a conversation with me on the forums!
I was pretty fine with how vgm worked originally, but with how you're explaining the rework, it sounds way more fun! I'm glad you're making an effort to improve participants experience, and thank you all so much for holding this event, it's been a blast!
Happy Birthday to the best room ever 
It's time for our 3rd Staff Interview! Unfortunately, LeBron was unavailable so we had to settle for the store bought version, our Room Moderator Le'Depression!
ATLAS VS LE'DEPRESSION
Why do all the staff seem to love bullying each other? I mean, I'm not against it at all, just kinda funny. Now if only it were healthy to eat popcorn pretty much hourly.
Once again the interview fails to ask the important questions like "what are you weaknesses," "how much do you love shuckle," "what's your credit card information," and "when is the coup to overthrow archas taking place?"
because it's really funny
Well you're not wrong-
it's happening on halloween
Shit, I'm busy that day. Can you reschedule?
you dont need to be staff to bully sheep :P
Very bullyable
just dont be busy
sounds good
I'm weak to fighting.
do /back, it removes your busy status
As part of one of our events, Lobby ranked all Unova Pokemon, as part of our event schedule!
The ranking was based on whatever criteria they wanted to vote on! Thanks all for participating!
This took 4 and a half hours and it's 3:30 AM. Send help.
(Here's the stats, if you're interested :P https://pastebin.com/FLdD0EQY)
The ranking was based on whatever criteria they wanted to vote on! Thanks all for participating!
This took 4 and a half hours and it's 3:30 AM. Send help.
(Here's the stats, if you're interested :P https://pastebin.com/FLdD0EQY)
Last edited:
w galvantula
Big-ups to Atlas for nearly pulling an all-nighter for this thing