I personally have been more and more involved with my beer brewing hobby, so that kept me busy. Then I went on on vacation for a little over a week, and that kept me away completely. I meant to be more active, but I simply have not been. From the scoreboard, it seems I'm not the only one.
So I have some thoughts. They are only thoughts and
not criticisms. Here goes:
I'm okay with only having a single game per round. I actually would prefer that, despite the good reasons behind having multiple games per round.
One thing we need is a greater variety of very well-known games, at least at first. I'm talking about the blockbuster games like the original Pac-Man (or maybe Ms. Pac-Man since that was actually more popular). I'm all for discovering new games through this league, but if we honestly want to pull in the
retro crowd, then we need to have games that they remember. I do not remember Willow or Root Beer Tapper. Though they both looked like a lot of fun, it was not enough for me to say, "Oh, wow, I
have got to play that game competitively." This is mostly because of how busy I've been, but should the games have been something I was more familiar with, I may have forced myself to take the time to play. This is
retro, after all. I'm going to only really be strongly drawn to something I used to play way back when. That's not to say that I don't want to discover semi-obscure games, but in the beginning of this league I don't feel that this is the best method to drawing in new players.
I realize that those games were chosen by vote, but how were the candidates chosen? Shouldn't we vote on the candidates and then vote for the winner from those?
The nomination thread is sorely lacking I think. It's too quiet in there, and if we asked that each member suggest at least one game as a requirement to participate in the league, we would have not only more games to choose from, but also a greater variety of gaming tastes added to the pool. But I will say that MonkeyChops has done a very nice job of organizing that thread, I just think that perhaps it needs more input from more members, not necessarily more games.
I would like to see a different way of choosing games. The current method works, however I would rather see something like this:
If there are 10 total games up for vote, each member gets 10 votes and can spend them as they see fit (or X votes for X games). So if there is one particular game that they are adamant about playing, they can vote all 10 of their votes for that one game. If there are a couple that a particular member would like, they are free to split their votes as they see fit.
The reason I like this is because there have been a couple games that I've seen that I would
love to play (the Lotus game for example), so I would have cast all of my votes for that one game and not cared about the second. As it stood, I was the only one to vote for the Lotus game. This probably wouldn't have changed with me voting all 10 of my votes for that game if nobody else voted for it, but if even a couple of other votes were cast for it, then it would beat out some other games that might have only had one or two votes per member. Not everyone is going to vote all of their votes for a single game.
Perhaps the above method would work best for choosing the candidates and then we could still go with a single vote for the chosen games.
Just throwing all that out there. Feel free to discard or modify those suggestions to however would be best for the league.