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This Week’s Explorable Games
This round of Explorable Favorites is from BoardGaming.com member Ayden. The games selected from their Favorites shelf were:
- Adventure Time Card Wars
Cryptozoic Entertainment | Published: 2014 - Adventure Time Card Wars: Finn vs. Jake
Cryptozoic Entertainment | Published: 2014
These games will be explorable until next Monday, July 25th
Ha – the asterisk fest is for the dark version of Scully’s partner… no idea why that would be censored…
So from here I can honestly do whatever you all want.
I can ignore my minimum-review limit of 2, and select games that have no content. We have had users complain about this in the past, but at the least it would keep ************* and @1HuNox busy!
I can select already-explored games. We have had users complain about this in the past, and obviously XP farmers aren’t going to like it.
I can select already-explored users. I don’t think anybody will have a problem with this now, and I’ve already started it (@The Schaef was picked for a second time a few weeks ago – I didn’t check to see that he/she hadn’t logged in for over 2 years, probably should have passed on that one).
I can ignore users all-together and just pick games that haven’t been explored. This is the only way to get back to the days where every game chosen for exploration has 10+ reviews and 5+ tips.
I’m open to suggestions.
I started volunteering with Jim in November 2014, adding games to the site and reviewing them. We hit it off quickly and became close friends, and in January or February of 2015 he asked if I would take over as Content Manager. I was thrilled and had a bunch of ideas that I thought would be great for the site, starting with unboxing videos and featured publishers. But also at that time I was promoted at my day job – a long-planned promotion that took an eternity to get finalized, but happened to kick in January 2015.
I thought I could do both forever – my day job, which I’d mastered at keeping to 40 hours a week, and a content producer and overseer for the only website I love which needed 30 hours minimum weekly and 40 hours to do well. And for a while I could – 70 hour work weeks have been a way of life for me since my mid-20s as a public accounting auditor.
Well, it turned out that my shiny new role at the day job had a much more cumbersome job description than I was expecting, and after a kind of probationary period ended in August 2015 it became clear they needed 60 to 80 hours a week of my time… permanently. Broken-heartedly I turned the lights off on Featured Publisher and unboxing videos, but I committed to Jim to keep the staples of the site – explorables, WAYPTW, Kickstarter, and – hopefully – game additions going on my own. The trick was that I needed to do all of these things in under 5 hours a week, lest I get fired from the job that pays me or have my doctor finally make good on those threats to put me on hardcore blood pressure and anxiety treatment.
I got a reprieve from @Jeff W having his time free up to add more games (and recently @Chris has joined the game adding team – be sure to show him some love), but explorables were taking longer and longer. To find a user with 2 usable games by my old ruleset was taking up to 3 hours – I would end up getting that done by noon PST but having to stay in the office until 10pm or 11pm to compensate. I didn’t love that, so I switched to my current system… which is “select the first account I see that has 2 unexplored games on their favorites shelf”.
Starting with explorables:
I commented some time around August or September of 2015 that finding users to feature each week was getting harder and harder, and laid out my process for selection at that time. @Hai’s pretty much hit it on the head with her “Grand Ritual of Explorables” paragraph. My focus was always active users – until maybe 2 months ago all users featured had logged in some time over the weekend prior to being selected. Like you all, I want the selected users to feel rewarded and lead a discussion on what makes these games special to them.
However, many of these users – who had just logged in hours before being selected – never said a word. It disappoints me every week, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve even seen active users like you all mislabel some of these users as “dead accounts” or “ghosts” the week they’re featured, without realizing they logged in daily to log plays – but just chose not to comment. I felt weird publicly outing them by replying in the comments that they’re on and logging plays, so I just said nothing.
In any event, around 2 months ago I had to change my selection criteria anyway. Now might be the appropriate time for a background on how I came to be Content Manager here and why things may seem neglected…
Oof… I kicked a hornet’s nest this week!
OK, I’m going to try to address these, and give some transparent behind-the-scenes insight, in chunks rather than spending the next hour typing out a 3,000 word response that few will have the patience to make it through…
(and I agree with everything you all are saying – it’s constructive criticism from some of our most loyal users, which is why I feel you deserve transparency)
I’ve also been noticing random games becoming explorable, for instance Machi Koro is explorable this week and Splendor was explorable last week. Is there a reason for that?
I think that focusing on explorables from active members even if it means repeats is a good idea. Or maybe just using different selection criteria altogether. It should help newer games get more spotlight, and whether we like it or not, this hobby is very much “cult of the new/future”. I imagine it would be easier to find games to feature also.
And this week’s Spotlight goes to a Level 0 Trolalala…
Honestly, with week after week without any acknowledgement and the increased population of ghosties in this here place, perhaps it is time to cut the cord on Explorables and Membership.
According to the Grand Ritual of Explorables as I understand it – two increasingly esoteric games must be chosen from a dwindling mystery checklist of what hasn’t been ‘Explorable’ since inception and then crosschecked with someone who decided to by happenstance fave them.
Seems like a lot of rigamarole – when one can cut out the middleman since they are pretty much a silent partner these days.
For the majority it is only about flying by to slap some buttons and grab XP anyway.