[Voting System] Bonus Streams for Long Games

[Marstead]

In this thread, I detailed some ideas for a system that would make it a little easier on people voting for longer games on their long slog to finally see the whole game played on stream.

Right now, these games suffer from two problems -- they take way too long to win the vote, and when they do win, they dominate the schedule for months, with little variety.

I'm going to go ahead and deploy the Bonus Stream system effective for this week, although it's unlikely I will be able to start playing these Bonus Stream games until the Substravaganza ends in March. I've spent the week tweaking the numbers and here is what I've come up with:

• Bonus Streams are available for games >25 Hours. 
• Games shorter than 25 hours shouldn't really need the help (and playing them in brief spurts over months is more damaging to the integrity of the full game playthrough). 
• Bonus Streams will run for 4 hours, and will reduce the vote cost for the affected game by 4 for each Bonus Stream played. 
• I'd like this to feel like both a significant effect and introduction to the game on the stream, and I think 4 hours is a solid and fair number. Even reaching just one of these targets will make voting for your game much cheaper. Bear in mind, as with all vote cost updates, the vote total is retroactively updated when a vote's cost is discounted.
• Bonus Streams unlock after a certain # of target SP have been spent on a game.
• This means you will unlock steady benefits for slowly plugging SP into a longer game over time. Each time you reach an SP Spent Target, a bonus stream will unlock and the game will be played for 4 hours on stream, which will further discount the game's vote cost and retroactively increase its vote total.
• The target SP value for each game will be variable depending on the game, and will increase over time.
• The target for the first bonus stream is equal to the amount of SP that would have been required for that game to win the vote when it was originally added to the voting spreadsheet. In other words, games that have been on the voting spreadsheet for a longer time but which haven't been removed for stagnation have an easier time unlocking bonus streams compared to games newer to the sheet, because the SP needed for a game to win the vote is steadily increasing over time.
• The target SP value for each bonus stream after the first increases with each subsequent bonus stream, approaching the current amount of SP needed to win the vote. We want to give a small running start to games that have been stuck on the spreadsheet for a long time, but we don't want to give them a totally unfair advantage. As these games get played more frequently, the playing field levels out.
• A maximum of 5 Bonus Streams will be played for any one game.
• Right now, reaching 5 Bonus Streams for any game will require a TON of SP, over three times the SP bank of the viewer with the most banked SP. 
• It's very likely a game will simply win the vote by the time it reaches its 5th Bonus Stream, but if for some reason it doesn't, by that point its vote cost will have been reduced by 20 SP, and its vote total retroactively updated to match the reduced cost. Winning should not be far off from there for a devoted voter.
• The games affected by Bonus Streams can be found in a new "Bonus Streams" tab on the voting spreadsheet, http://vote.marstead.com
  
• This tab is linked to the rest of the voting system and updates automatically when votes are cast and is sorted starting with the game that requires the least SP to trigger a bonus stream. 
• If you're not sure where to spend your SP but want to have an immediate effect on the schedule, this is a great place to check!
• The SP Spent Target will automatically scale up as each Bonus stream is unlocked on this tab.
• Vote Cost discounts won't be applied until after the game is actually played on stream
• This will just make it easier to track what we have and haven't played on stream
• Also note that vote cost discounts and retroactive total updating does not make it any easier to unlock bonus streams -- the system is based entirely on SP spent.

My current plan is to finish the following voting spreadsheet games during Substravaganza (Now through mid-March):

Driver: San Francisco

Uplink

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Once Substravaganza wraps up, we'll start clearing out the backlogged bonus streams for some of these long games. With nearly the full week available to focus them down, it shouldn't take more than a couple weeks to wrap them up.

With these new rules, games which already have pending bonus streams include:

Final Fantasy IV (4 hours)

Kingdom Hearts (4 hours)

Brigandine (4 hours)

Dragon Quest VII (8 hours)

Xenoblade Chronicles X (4 hours)

Dark Cloud 2 (12 hours)

Expect to see these scheduled sometime in mid-March. Once the backlog is cleared out, if bonus stream unlocks on a game, we'll fit it in during one of the normal stream weekdays. Depending on the two voting spreadsheet games we're focusing on, it might interrupt the longer game for a session to break things up (So we don't have 16 uninterrupted weeks of a Persona game, for example) if we don't have time elsewhere in the schedule.

*****

This system should make voting for longer games a little more rewarding in the short term, and once the schedule becomes more open, it should introduce some more variety from week to week. It will also reduce some of the uncertainty around the voting spreadsheet and every voter's influence on the schedule -- you're able to immediately push something onto the schedule in the form of a Bonus Stream if you have the SP to do so.

Thanks!

-Dylan ("Marstead")

[Marstead]

Hi everyone,

Previously, Bonus Streams were restricted to games 25 hours long or longer. Making an arbitrary margin like "25 hours" is unfairly disadvantaging games on the margin like The Talos Principle which run ~24 hours long.

• After the next voting deadline passes (Thursday 05/09/2019 06PM PDT), I will be removing the >25 hour restriction for bonus streams.
• All games will technically qualify for bonus streams.

• The SP needed to unlock a bonus stream is calculated based on the SP a 20-hour game would need to win the vote at the time it's added to the spreadsheet.
  
• As a result, most games which are shorter than ~20 hours long should simply win the vote long before unlocking a bonus stream.
  

I've been working to solve this problem for some time, and this seems to be the most elegant fix. The purpose of bonus streams is to (1) help out longer games to compete with shorter games and to (2) make it a little easier for games which have been on the sheet for a very long time to compete with newer games. I do not want shorter games to unlock bonus streams under normal circumstances, and they shouldn't even under this new rule system.

I may need to exercise executive discretion for shorter games that approach unlocking a bonus stream before they win, but we'll address that situation when it crops up.