Should We Move Rot To The Official Pandora Boards?

[MonkeyChops]

The idea is that we would have more exposure and a better chance at having forum based rewards for ROT champions. I've not approached ED about it yet but forum supporter icons are in the works there already. Please share you thoughts on this.

Whether or not we move, I _will_ get this toury operational soon! It was way to much fun to let it just die.

 

[Dunny]

I voted no - because of the simple fact that the ROT is open to more consoles than just the Pandora. I'm not a fan of GPH's machines, as anyone will tell you - but games developed for the Canoe have made their way to the Pandora after the compo finishes. The more consoles you target, the more entries you'll get... And I'm not really confident that there's enough Pandora devs to make it worth while.

That said, advertise the hell out of it on the Pandora forum, or even move just the Pandora section to the official boards. Keep the other machines though, no matter how bad they are.

D.

 

[Christoph.Krn]

I voted no - because of the simple fact that the ROT is open to more consoles than just the Pandora.

Moving the RoT to boards.openpandora.org wouldn't imply a restriction to games for the Pandora (as you suggested, such a restriction is not desirable for various reasons).

 

[Iorgy77]

Would non pandora owners join Craigx's personal funhouse for a competition though? Not likely.

 

[levi]

I voted no because I'm sort of boycotting that forum at the moment (although it's fair to note, I did fall off the wagon today). Are there really more people with OP board logins than gp32x logins?

 

[bagmouse7]

It doesn't seem to make sense to move a multi-platform competition to a single platform forum...

 

[skeezix]

OPBoard does seem to have more traffic, but not sure if its an illusion or not .. ie: it does funnel more action in the pandora forums, buit if you add up all the forum activity at gp32x across all subboards, is it the same? hard to say.

Everyone above nailed it .. when I built ROT, I had intended to keep it cross device, since we're mostly doing retro games. Its part of the charter, and if we made it one device specific, we'd lose half our membership.

Now, theres nothign saying it has to be Pandora specific on the OP boards, but it stands to reason.

The real question ius.. whats the problem ROT has now? how do we address _that_ issue ..

Its hard to guess for sure, but I've assumed the problem ROT ahs is momentum: we do have a certain number of interested folks, but evidently its a small %age of board population. I had tried a few times to drum up support in a few other boards I frequent (Atari boards and such), but I think its hard pressed to get people to jump from one board to another. Starting at a high population board might be the way to go (with _us_ migrating to _that_ since we're fewer and thus easier (?) to migrate?)

Making a new board crosdsded my mind -- its own forum, and try to pull over _other_ lueages; thwereds an Atari Age league an a 16bit Atari ST (very small) league, and a few others; could try to make a general 'league home base' where multiple leagues coudl hang out, even offer some league-spedific tools/features in the website. But that sounds like some work, and be hard to pull over well established groups.. theyr'e already at 'home'.

So I suspect theres multiple issues .. we need more population, and probably not from existing leagues; where do we get them bodies from?

If we had exposure on a Big Site like slashdot or somethign it coudl work; or maybe iCP coudl be a shot in the arm if it takes off (ie: ocne there are thousands of them out in the field), or something we can affiliate with.

--

FYI, my upcoming twins (which are the reaso _I_ got derailed so hard out of ROT right after starting it.. sorry , are due in less than two weeks, so I'm totally going to be a mess for awhile, but maybe in6 weeks or so will start to be useful again, who knows; I'll still be reading the forums and trying to help retro and homebrew coders and such. I've stopped most of my projects, though still maintinag parts of the Pandora firmware, and still hoping to get back to a couple of my games, but we'll see.

--

So yeah, love to see ROT keep going (and I do like the title , but not sure where to go. I can get a domain hosted pretty easily, or other stuff down the road if we need, just .. tied up a bit

jeff

So I did not answer Yes or No; not sure

 

[mihcael]

As to the Poll question, i have no idea. I dont visit either forum or own either machine. Im only here for the comp.

I followed john4p over from the Lemon vs EAB Amiga Comp.

Its an Amiga comp jointly run by the Lemon Amiga Forum and The English Amiga Board.
Its a year long competition and is in its 4 season in the current format.
Through the course of a year we generally attract around 50 competitors with most rounds averaging about 15 people.

We have tried Multi format comps and people loose interest fairly quickly which seems to also be the problem with ROT.
skeezix has hit the nail on the head.. Momentum. This comp has none, ive been back a few times in the last months and i had assumed the comp to be dead.

In the mean time, we are playing Indy Heat. Which also featured on Arcade, Atari St and C64 that i know off, which almost makes it a multiplatform comp?

Come join us!

 

[levi]

The real question is.. whats the problem ROT has now? how do we address _that_ issue ..

Its hard to guess for sure, but I've assumed the problem ROT ahs is momentum: we do have a certain number of interested folks, but evidently its a small %age of board population. I had tried a few times to drum up support in a few other boards I frequent (Atari boards and such), but I think its hard pressed to get people to jump from one board to another. Starting at a high population board might be the way to go (with _us_ migrating to _that_ since we're fewer and thus easier (?) to migrate?)

Making a new board crossed my mind -- its own forum, and try to pull over _other_ leagues; thwereds an Atari Age league an a 16bit Atari ST (very small) league, and a few others; could try to make a general 'league home base' where multiple leagues could hang out, even offer some league-specific tools/features in the website. But that sounds like some work, and be hard to pull over well established groups.. they're already at 'home'.

For myself, I lost momentum because real life and geek life issues got in the way. I don't own a system designed for emulation, and sound and joystick issues have always stopped me getting many systems working under Linux on my main machine, so I could always only play a subset of the games suggested anyway, and reimaging the system half-way through the compo probably wasn't the greatest idea in retrospect. Also, losing Internet access didn't help, but hey, stuff happens.

A board dedicated to this stuff could be cool, since you could enable more freeform competition, with the system profile collating how many challenges (i.e. rounds) you'd entered, and your position (out of the number of entries) for each. You could filter challenges by the systems you own, or can run. And you can still do tournaments like ROT, as the ultimate way to win kudos.

Just idle musing though. Board software is a PITA to write, and bugfixing it when people break it is a thankless task.

 

[Caine]

Though it would be more convenient for me (I don't frequent these boards as often as I should), I do think that the ROT really belongs here and not on the Pandora boards due to its cross platform nature.

However, there certainly should be a clear advertisement on the Pandora boards as they seem way more active these days. I'm not sure if having boards of its own is the solution at this stage. For now, the ROT it too small to warrant such a move. It's a bit like solving the problem of having too many standards by introducing one of your own

Maybe a ROT oriented RSS feed could eventually be embedded on the Pandora boards (below the latest files section or something) which could announce round results, new game titles and call for votes. This way the ROT would get the visibility it deserves within the Pandora community without leaving out all the other open handhelds.

I'm also lacking in time right now, many things happening in "real-life". I would still participate but with less fanaticism as last time

 

[Chaser]

I voted yes but just posted (it failed to) exactly Caines sentiments. Advertise it on the OP board as its more active but ROT does belong here due to the cross platform. Just needs more attention/recruitment hence the yes vote.

 

[skeezix]

OP boards don't have a front page, just the board index; gp32x does have a front page, but less viewership. We really need some 'front page' display for awhile, or running score totals on front pages at gp32x, OPboards, dc-emu, that sort .. keep people fighting, that'd work. Needs a lot of buyin from the board ops, and someone to script in an update system for each board :/

jeff

 

[foxblock]

Hey there,

I was a fan of the concept from the very beginning, but never got into it due to lack of free time or rather too many active projects which fill up my free time.
I have read about it and followed the first season a bit and have come to the same conclusion as most people over here: ROT is not targeted at the Pandora alone, moving it over will make it look like that and a lot of people won't like having to join a Craig-controlled forum, so no please don't do that.
On the other hand that forum at least seems more active judging from the amount of new posts (almost all sections get a post every day - can't say the same about this place), so the Pandora community seems very active and probably would also be interested in this.

What I propose to you is this:
A regular (weekly/monthly/...) or sporadic article on PandoraPress highlighting the start of a new season/round, announcement of winners, games, etc. - whatever you wish and whatever is appropriate.
PP is a blog mostly aimed at the Pandora, but as that device originates from here and PP is a community blog I would be more than happy to give this a spotlight.
It does not have that many views, but it seems like a good chunk of the Pandora community visits the blog at least once a week, so this should get (and keep) their attention.

As I wrote above I don't have time to participate myself (sadly), so I won't have time to write an article every now and then either, but I certainly could add some kind of ambassador (prefferbly one of the ROT core team) to the PP team and grant him rights to write and publish articles on his own.

PP did an article on ROT way back when it was launched, but I guess many people forgot about it since then and having a more or less regular "reminder" would certainly help.

What do you guys think?

 

[MonkeyChops]

OK, the vote is in. I guess we'll just remain here and try to advertise more for this next season and then maybe do something different for season 3 if we feel it is needed at that time.

I like foxblock's offer, we should take him up on it for sure.

Any thoughts on who to talk to about getting some rot badges here on gp32x or should we just forget about that whole idea for now?

Who's going to be scorekeep? Pickle doesn't have time right now.