Hi, guys. Got something I'm thinking about doing.

[Harris]

I don't think Neo was presenting this idea as the be all end all solution to this community's current woes, but instead as a way to improve the quality of life which is always a positive. There's no real need to shoot down a potential improvement merely because it's not going to bring in droves of new duelists. This is no different than the implementation of the calling tool way back when that eased the burden of manual calling. Having the calling tool is clearly better than not having the calling tool even though it has problems, like never having been updated for foci. But a workaround was created and the tool is still very useful.

The option of automation will be an improvement, even if it's only deployed if/when a caller can't make their shift. Maybe a caller just wants to play host and interact, so they deploy the bot to field duels while they play off the crowd. Point being I can come up with multiple scenarios where this tool is beneficial. There's nothing demanding we make a wholesale change immediately from live callers to bots. Having a bot can simply be an additional tool to make calling easier rather than a replacement for callers.

That said I'm in support of the idea, regardless of if it's Neo or Kal working toward it.

[Andrea Anderson]

If people don't want to duel, they won't duel. If people want to duel, they will duel. We're already in a dueling slump and have been for a while and that is with callers participating in rooms. It's actually pretty nice to be able to come into the discord at any hour of the night with someone and be able to challenge them to a duel. There's a lot of freedom in this. What if you're in east coast and the shift is already over? With a calling bot, you can still duel -- with or without it being regulation. Automated dueling is basically like current dueling now, except without flavor-text from callers.. and even flavor-text can be programmed into a bot to cycle through I believe - though it seems a little pointless outside of someone wanting to make it feel more life-like.

What if you have an impromptu fight in the inn? You now, with the calling bot, have the option to settle it in the Annex during off-hours, or in any other of the dueling rooms if the Annex is in use, and play it off as another location / a way of fighting.

I don't believe regulation should be a 24 hour thing. There should be set times, but having the option to practice duel whenever has been pretty fun thanks to Kalamere's dueling bot on discord. If Neo's played by the same rules, except being in pro chat, I know I'd personally pop in at times to play around with it.

Callers are great, don't get me wrong. I'm a caller and I appreciate what all callers do. There isn't a need to phase them out either, as other suggestions have been made. They can be seen as hosts in a room and watch out for problematic behavior and report possible cheating if they believe it may be happening -- and as they are no longer bogged down with calling multi-duels, they have more options to play with the chat and / or simply watch and make sure things are okay.

[Eden Parker]

Thanks for that perspective, Apple. That was really helpful. I'm still concerned that without some time/shift parameters it could fragment the community further. But keeping the status quo isn't helpful either and I'm not interested in standing in the way of trying something out.

[Kalamere]

Thanks for that perspective, Apple. That was really helpful. I'm still concerned that without some time/shift parameters it could fragment the community further. But keeping the status quo isn't helpful either and I'm not interested in standing in the way of trying something out.

If we were to go with an automated system, we could easily add a little code that made it such that only duels between 8pm and 2am counted towards standings, leaving it open otherwise for practice dueling.. or something like that.

Continuing to funnel people into the same time slots is probably wise.

[Kalamere]

So... Discord.

As has been mentioned I started toying around with this a couple months ago and wrote a duel bot and some other things that seem to work relatively well. I want to state that my goal was not to replace the new ProChat rooms. It was to be prepared in the event they didn't work out, given that the company seems to be gone. So, while this is fun to tinker with and get practice duels in on, please don't take it as anything official.

There is a bit of a learning curve, both with using Discord itself and with the duel bot. The adjustment is pretty quick, but there are definitely pros and cons. One pretty glaring con is that you do not have an IM overlay (which is especially pertinent, because you interact with the bot via IM). One very nice pro, is that there is a Discord client for practically every known OS, including phones and tablets. Also it has a very solid web based client. I've used this pro as a means to get around the stated con. Rather than flipping between IMs and chat channel in one client, I run 2. The stand alone and then a browser version, with one in the chat and the other dealing with IMs. Works for me anyway, but to each their own.

If you are interested in checking it out, I have a google doc full of documentation on how to use the bots. There is a TL;DR version at the very bottom that you can skip to if you just want to get in and start talking to people. Also, you can always send ?help to either of the bots to get information on their command sets.

This is not the full extent of what Neo was talking about, but since this got mentioned in the preceding pages, I wanted to give everyone the opportunity to take a look.

~Kal

[Neo Eternity]

If we were to go with an automated system, we could easily add a little code that made it such that only duels between 8pm and 2am counted towards standings, leaving it open otherwise for practice dueling.. or something like that.

Continuing to funnel people into the same time slots is probably wise.

I also think this is the best way to go on that.

(Discord stuff!)

So I joined the discord and tried it out. Works pretty well, IMO. I did an RP-less DoM duel of 8 rounds in less than 15 minutes. I'm going to time a duel with RP later today and see how long it takes.

Bot duels or no bot duels, I don't really have any attachment on that. Making a new web Arbiter and getting standings automated, that's my jam. I know some people have already made new tools, and that's great! I'm still gonna make my own thing. Less to be contrary and more to see what I can do, see what ideas I can take from the tools we have had, and see if I can make it all work under one codebase that spits out the various moving parts.

[Anubis Karos]

This is just my personal philosophy, but whenever I called, I always pared my RP to the bone; my philosophy was that in those hours, I was there to accommodate the duelists and nothing else; the spotlight was theirs, not mine. So as far as killing RP from the callers, that potential dimension of automated calling has never bothered me.

On the other hand, I can see where individual personalities on the calling couch are an endearing facet of the game to a lot of people. So, my idea: Volunteers that come in, entirely on their own time, and comment on the duels. Rather like sports and pro wrestling announcers.

[Neo Eternity]

I tested a DoS duel on Discord with full RP, Ellie vs. Kruger, because both of those chars tend toward verbose RP, and we both made sure to go as hard as we reasonably could in that particular paint. We completed a 12 round duel in 30 minutes! I feel like that's a great improvement. I've always been a fan of flowery writing like that offered by the gentleman posted above me, but it negatively impacts duel time. 30 minutes for some nice reading while you play seems downright agreeable to me.

So, my idea: Volunteers that come in, entirely on their own time, and comment on the duels. Rather like sports and pro wrestling announcers.

Yessss. This is the sentiment I was trying to express when it comes to the role of callers with a bot around. I'm glad you could put it in other words.

[JewellRavenlock]

I like/support the idea of the bots to some degree (I think most ideas are worth looking into/trying out honestly), but I'm a little confused about the focus on length of duels.

I think we have a lot of problems around here, but I don't know that I've considered length of duels one of them? I guess shorter duels means you can squeeze more in each night. That's pretty nice. Is there some other appeal I'm missing?

[DemiBob]

Some people don't like dueling because it takes way too long.

[Neo Eternity]

I think we have a lot of problems around here, but I don't know that I've considered length of duels one of them? I guess shorter duels means you can squeeze more in each night. That's pretty nice. Is there some other appeal I'm missing?

What you said, and what Bob said.

Also, tournaments often go too long. Well, they did back when I officiated them. If we can shorten duels, we can get tournaments done faster. When tournaments drag on, the mind dulls from exhaustion. And this is all about being able to make decisions, so we've got to give the mind every advantage it can to stay sharp.

In addition, it will be necessary to make duels shorter to draw in new players, if that's something we're gonna go for. I'm sure we're not going to be looking for players that don't already RP, and when you do RP, you're already operating with the expectation that you're gonna be spending some time doing any particular thing, but even people who already RP may not be used to how much time dueling can take and it could turn them off from it.

[Andrea Anderson]

It's not fun to have a duel dragged out for an hour or more. Even more in a tournament setting where there's more people than just you two waiting for the night to continue. If it's someone who is new, then it's a non-issue. If it's someone who has been around here for years, a player who is cross-playing on RDI and not paying full attention to the duel, going well past 15 minutes per round, etc, it gets annoying. Bots making things a little faster would be nice but not a cure-all, but it's at least something.

[PrlUnicorn]

I'm all for making things easier on callers, but I don't like the idea of leaving out the human element completely. Like Bob, maybe I'm just old, but I'm also one of the people that purposefully seeks out a human cashier at a store register as opposed to using the unmanned ones.

As for the length of duels, Neo, is there a way to set up that bot with a time reminder? For instance, if someone if someone takes more than 5 minutes to choose their next move, have a signal of some kind go off to prod them a little bit.

[Kalamere]

The bots I have on discord have a timer feature, though it is up to the players to engage it. Here's the exert from the doc on how it works.
--

?timer - You set a timer on your opponent.

• You get 15 minutes max between moves, but the bot doesn’t do anything about this unless you get called on it. Issuing ?timer in under 5 minutes will be ignored. After 5 minutes it will flag someone. Issue it again once someone has been flagged and if 15 minutes since their last move has passed, the duel will be ended.
• Flagging is only done 1 time per duel. Once a flag is set it will not be needed later in the duel, so a ?timer after 15 minutes will end things immediately without having to issue the command a second time.
• When duels end via timer the duel will be declared a win if you are up 1+ points AND it is not a DoF duel. In all other cases it will be a tie.

--

If a timer is set on you, the bot does pop off an IM to let you know.

[SantiagoM]

That system makes a lot of sense, Kalamere. Do people generally like it? 15 minutes even seems on the longer side to me, but I guess it's fine.