I really don't see how having someone go twice (or even more times) invalidates the meaning of having achieved a lot for the community and getting that reward.
This goes to the nature of "achievement". Is the achievement the mere fact that overextended PRE are continuously run, or is the achievement the amount of them that are run? Does spending more effort on something make it more significant? (Are you the kind of person who only thinks something is art if he himself could not have made it?)
I'm saying that even if you never lift a finger, but all you've ever done is coin a phrase, invent a concept, or be visible, as long as it has significantly impacted the community you should be considered as seriously as someone who has slaved away at something every week that only happened to benefit 20 ppl. The former is very hard to achieve even once, and the latter is by its very nature something that you will keep doing.
In other words, I am not so much opposed to repeat invites, but repeat invites for the exact same 'achievement'.
Gathion invented Survivor Magic and even if someone else runs another one, it will forever be what HE is associated with. Can you seriously say you would be okay with someone else being invited on the basis of running a Survivor Magic event? Doesn't that feel wrong to you?
What you propose is to turn this into an employee of the month type deal: he who works the hardest is more entitled, not he who is more visible. It turns an invite from something special into wages.
Bollocks. We're all part of the community, and all aspects of it need someone visible who represents it.
It is not just a tag, it is an actual reward with some real value attachment (not just monetary, but that too). In fact I find quite the opposite: having no repeat invites pretty much invalidates the meaning to some extent, as any of the contributions of members that have already been invited are essentially not being recognized any longer.
A colleague of mine received a medal on Queen's day because he had been doing volunteer work for over 20 years. Do you seriously think that the year after he felt less happy about what he did because he knew he would never get another medal for it? That's not how it works. That token of recognition does not suddenly replace all other motivation you had.
And if you insist on treating this like a performance review from your employer, almost every company I know of uses the same principle: the achievements that were worthy of praise in my first year are now routinely expected of me. I need to do more to get praise again.
At that stage the member that has already been would be equally recognized as having stopped contributing towards the community right after returning from the Community Cup.
Not at all. You don't do these contribution to the community in order to get something back for it. If you did, that would in my eyes immediately disqualify you for getting it. It is the antithesis to community spirit because it is a disguised act of selfishness.
To return to my earlier example, Gathion did not run Survivor Magic because he wanted to get invited or profit from it (the notion of invites didn't even exist). He ran it because he felt the community was worth it, and because he liked to do it. Say he got invited to the community cup and then said, "oh, mission accomplished, now I can stop doing them". Up until that point you would have probably thought "what a great guy, to do this completely selflessly out of love for the community". But now you'd think "oh, so he didn't do it out of love for us, he was only after the invite all along".
Conversely, if you were doing something for the community, get invited and then continue to do that thing, not being invited again does not invalidate your recognition. One, you are not entitled to any recognition in the first place (since being part of a community implies contributing in some way), and two, your motivation to begin doing it wasn't to get recognised for it eventually, it was to simply do that thing (so continued recognition is not a factor).
We are gamers here and even the Hall of Fame ballots get gamed around - having no repeat invites is obviously incorrect from a game theory perspective as it encourages an outcome that is undesirable. We should encourage the greatest contributors (those that get an invite) to continue contributing, even though I doubt many (if any) are contributing just to reap the invite to the Community Cup.
I'm not sure which undesirable outcome you think is encouraged. I seriously don't follow you. I'm also at a loss how game theory comes into something that is not about 'winning'. You acknowledge yourself that we're essentially discussing charity here, ie. activities that are motivated by entirely different things than gain. Game theory completely fails to apply to acts of altruism.
The goal here is to encourage any and all contributions, not to channel them into specific activities to the exclusion of all else, which is what you would achieve. Some achievements are not the kind that you keep doing. No second invite for the same thing encourages diversity, reinvention and, most of all, it says "even though that guy over there is doing much more than you, go ahead and put something back into the community, because it won't automatically be eclipsed by him."
At some point you'll have 7 guys running weekly events and 3 fan sites that are heavily visited. No one else has a hope in hell of ever getting invited over them. Every other year one half of the group gets invited on the basis of just continuing to do what they were doing all along. Awesome.
Not being encouraged does not mean you'll stop, since we have plenty of examples of ppl who contributed significantly to the community before there was any kind of affirmative action. Do you think the ones who stopped did so because they never got rewarded for it in any way? Are you that cynical?
Seeing the same ppl rewarded repeatedly, however, will definitely raise a 'barrier to entry' for potential new contributors.
In any case none of your remarks addressed how it would be fair to not invite community members that continue to contribute more than someone else that does get invited, simply because they have already been there.
More? Some kinds of contributions don't scale and others don't even compare to each other. How can you expect there to be an objective measure of who deserves an invite? The very act of making it predictable creates the negative feedback you are so concerned about. Whenever you predictably encourage one thing, you, by definition, discourage everything else. the message should not be "do precisely this, and do it to a greater extent than the rest", but "a wide spectrum of things are considered significant, and we prove it by recognizing all of them equally".
I think this is a major issue that needs to be addressed if we really are not to have repeat invites. As Sharp correctly identifies, this is affirmative action and I'm also typically not one for it - particularly when it is so blatantly unfair.
What is blatantly unfair? That creating a fan-site that helps you sell your cards, or winning ten tournaments, or writing articles about magic for a living, are all considered "community contributions" but not just being well known/liked on the forums, or doing something creative, or just coming up with a few great ideas that others run with?
Or maybe that just the fact that someone made their contributions before the existence of the CC, even though it had a lasting effect on the community, means they won't get invited? Or that living in australia means "don't count on an invite"?
... but all you've ever done is coin a phrase, invent a concept, or be visible, as long as it has significantly impacted the community you should be considered as seriously as someone who has ...
I'm still surprised that "Hammy" didn't "take off" as a diminutive for the Community Cup Challenge Erik "Hamtastic" Friborg Memorial Trophy! Like "Oscar" did as a diminutive for an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award. Maybe next year.
PS - I like pineapples.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Raoul Duke
1. This goes to the nature of "achievement". Is the achievement the mere fact that overextended PRE are continuously run, or is the achievement the amount of them that are run? Does spending more effort on something make it more significant? (Are you the kind of person who only thinks something is art if he himself could not have made it?)
Gavin's achievement, in my opinion was increasing the likelihood of us getting a new eternal format for us, and having made WotC decide on it quicker. He also achieved the highest attended PREs in MTGO. And he continued to achieve whatever he did before for the community. I don't even understand the "art" thing so I can not reply.
2. I'm saying that even if you never lift a finger, but all you've ever done is coin a phrase, invent a concept, or be visible, as long as it has significantly impacted the community you should be considered as seriously as someone who has slaved away at something every week that only happened to benefit 20 ppl. The former is very hard to achieve even once, and the latter is by its very nature something that you will keep doing.
In other words, I am not so much opposed to repeat invites, but repeat invites for the exact same 'achievement'.
Let's just get this out of the way: Gavin's previous invite was NOT about Overextended and the new eternal format.
In response to the rest I don't think I agree with you (no surprise). I remember for example MasterOGA was sort of a meme here in the boards for his "kids" (do you remember that? It was years ago and I do). Even if that was widely known throughout MTGO I wouldn't consider that impact a contribution that should be recognized in the same way as others.
3. Gathion invented Survivor Magic and even if someone else runs another one, it will forever be what HE is associated with. Can you seriously say you would be okay with someone else being invited on the basis of running a Survivor Magic event? Doesn't that feel wrong to you?
We will get to more on this later but I can seriously say that if someone runs a Survivor Magic event this year (or next) and gets invited over it it would not feel wrong to me.
4. What you propose is to turn this into an employee of the month type deal: he who works the hardest is more entitled, not he who is more visible. It turns an invite from something special into wages.
Bollocks. We're all part of the community, and all aspects of it need someone visible who represents it.
What I defend is the tautology that is someone deserves it more, then he deserves it more. Instead what you seem to defend is that even if someone deserves it more, if he already has been invited one, then he no longer deserves it. That is how I would summarise it.
If a person is visible even if he is negatively contributing to the community, you appear to think he should get invited just because of visibility? This is vaguely comparable to the Mike Long issue and the Hall of Fame... Imagine that Ted Knutson's speculation really drives up the prices of duals and screws up Legacy. That would be pretty visible. Should he be invited over that? I don't think so.
5. A colleague of mine received a medal on Queen's day because he had been doing volunteer work for over 20 years. Do you seriously think that the year after he felt less happy about what he did because he knew he would never get another medal for it? That's not how it works. That token of recognition does not suddenly replace all other motivation you had.
Medals are a bit different but I would put it this way. He got a medal for 20 years work. He continues doing volunteer work for 20 more years - not because he does if for the medals. After 40 years work, there is another person that gets a same "value" medal but for just 5 years work, when they could have given the now 40 years contribution that slightly different medal of similar "value" instead (not in addition to the one of the 5 years one, instead of - not enough metal to go around). How do you think the 40 years contributor would feel about the 5 years work getting recognized in those circumstances? I totally think this devalues his 40 years contribution. Some people are just that nice and would not mind at all. Would you?
6. And if you insist on treating this like a performance review from your employer, almost every company I know of uses the same principle: the achievements that were worthy of praise in my first year are now routinely expected of me. I need to do more to get praise again.
Which is frankly bullshit. If you deserved X for working Y, you still deserve X for working Y in the following year. It is not surprising that companies operate this way as most companies tend to want to exploit you and get you to work more for less if they can get away with it, let's face it. You seem to be defending that a person that does good work every single year, but always the same amount should be getting a lower salary each year. I would be against that!
7. Not at all. You don't do these contribution to the community in order to get something back for it. If you did, that would in my eyes immediately disqualify you for getting it. It is the antithesis to community spirit because it is a disguised act of selfishness.
This is a bit besides the point. You can not know motivations. In any case, regardless of motivation (which we can not know) if the end result is the same for the community, I don't see why it should be valid to not reward the selfish person. We are mostly selfish individuals - even the really charitable persons feel good about doing it so it is not as pure altruism as you may initially think.
Should we also not induct pro players to the Hall of Fame if they openly said they were trying to get in (by pushing their game forward and so on)?
8. To return to my earlier example, Gathion did not run Survivor Magic because he wanted to get invited or profit from it (the notion of invites didn't even exist). He ran it because he felt the community was worth it, and because he liked to do it. Say he got invited to the community cup and then said, "oh, mission accomplished, now I can stop doing them". Up until that point you would have probably thought "what a great guy, to do this completely selflessly out of love for the community". But now you'd think "oh, so he didn't do it out of love for us, he was only after the invite all along".
To be honest I don't think Gathion did it because he felt the community was worth it, but because he liked to do it (not "and because he liked to do it"). If he were to be invited (which it is a pity if he isn't, but on the other hand it is unlikely if he doesn't return) and were to say mission accomplished, I personally would not think what you would.
9. Conversely, if you were doing something for the community, get invited and then continue to do that thing, not being invited again does not invalidate your recognition. One, you are not entitled to any recognition in the first place (since being part of a community implies contributing in some way), and two, your motivation to begin doing it wasn't to get recognised for it eventually, it was to simply do that thing (so continued recognition is not a factor).
I personally think it invalidates your recognition if you are still doing the same, and someone else gets invited instead of you for doing much less. That it is extremely hard to quantify the contributions is a different issue, for now I am assuming it could be done (and I believe it can in very directly comparable contributions).
10. I'm not sure which undesirable outcome you think is encouraged. I seriously don't follow you. I'm also at a loss how game theory comes into something that is not about 'winning'. You acknowledge yourself that we're essentially discussing charity here, ie. activities that are motivated by entirely different things than gain. Game theory completely fails to apply to acts of altruism.
As far as I'm concerned you deserve or "win" the invite. There are only a set number of invites per year. Even though most (if not all) people that get invited are doing it because they want to and would do the same even if there was no community cup, the lack of repeat invites certainly pushes people to stop contributing after they get invited once. It really says "your contributions are no longer counted the same as everyone else's".
11. The goal here is to encourage any and all contributions, not to channel them into specific activities to the exclusion of all else, which is what you would achieve. Some achievements are not the kind that you keep doing. No second invite for the same thing encourages diversity, reinvention and, most of all, it says "even though that guy over there is doing much more than you, go ahead and put something back into the community, because it won't automatically be eclipsed by him."
If that is the goal, then you should encourage also the contributions of people that were already invited, and to do that you need to have repeat invites.
As for your second part, you are basically confirming that you are supporting affirmative action - this is probably the crucial part of our disagreement. Once again in terms of game theory, this encourages people to not put in as much effort as they could, and instead hope and wait that everyone else that does more get invited once and then make a comparably mediocre effort would get them in anyway. I don't think it would get to that but in your system it is a real possibility.
12. At some point you'll have 7 guys running weekly events and 3 fan sites that are heavily visited. No one else has a hope in hell of ever getting invited over them. Every other year one half of the group gets invited on the basis of just continuing to do what they were doing all along. Awesome.
I don't think it would ever get to that but if it does it is not that bad is it? 7 really well attended PREs? Amazing. 3 heavily visited fan sites? Amazing.
13. Not being encouraged does not mean you'll stop, since we have plenty of examples of ppl who contributed significantly to the community before there was any kind of affirmative action. Do you think the ones who stopped did so because they never got rewarded for it in any way? Are you that cynical?
Seeing the same ppl rewarded repeatedly, however, will definitely raise a 'barrier to entry' for potential new contributors.
I'm not that cynical (I think) but there are few exceptions of people that haven't burned out. Joe is still putting in immense hours beta testing. If he keeps up I think he should get invited again. In contrast, we had one beta tester that got hired by WotC for a while but no longer, and as far as I know he is not playing. Gathion contributed Survivor but no longer plays. So who knows.
Seeing the same people rewarded shows that if you put in REAL effort you would also be rewarded. That is similar to the PT - it demonstrates that MTG is not random. Does that discourage people because they will never be as good as LSV? No! It motivates people to try harder.
14. More? Some kinds of contributions don't scale and others don't even compare to each other. How can you expect there to be an objective measure of who deserves an invite? The very act of making it predictable creates the negative feedback you are so concerned about. Whenever you predictably encourage one thing, you, by definition, discourage everything else. the message should not be "do precisely this, and do it to a greater extent than the rest", but "a wide spectrum of things are considered significant, and we prove it by recognizing all of them equally".
It is hard to quantify these things, but it becomes easy when you compare directly. If you want to reward a trader for his community contributions, it is actually not that hard to know which of them deserves it more if you have the full information. If you want to reward a PRE host, likewise. What is hard is comparing the PRE host to the trader, for example. I'm not suggesting that there are only traders or only PRE hosts invited to the Community Cup, I'm just suggesting that there are repeat invites.
15. What is blatantly unfair? That creating a fan-site that helps you sell your cards, or winning ten tournaments, or writing articles about magic for a living, are all considered "community contributions" but not just being well known/liked on the forums, or doing something creative, or just coming up with a few great ideas that others run with?
This is a separate issue and I'm not getting into that evaluation of what is worth more to the community. I'm just saying: given that we know a contributor is doing more than another, invite the one doing more even if he has already been invited. Is it tricky to know which does more? Yes. But that doesn't stop WotC from having repeat invites so I don't see why we necessarily have to go in depth over the trickiness.
16. Or maybe that just the fact that someone made their contributions before the existence of the CC, even though it had a lasting effect on the community, means they won't get invited? Or that living in australia means "don't count on an invite"?
What exactly is blatantly unfair?
Many of those things are unfair but have actually good reasons for WotC not to invite people. If they were to invite Gathion for Survivor Magic, the new players would be "Who? What?". Even at the time I think you overestimate the popularity of it.
If we are to compare with Gavin's overextended push, even those players that know nothing about it benefitted greatly from it if I am correctly guessing that it mattered a lot for us to get Modern sooner - not to mention that the total "prize pool" Gavin sponsored was around 1000 tix. So yes I totally think Gavin deserves a repeat invite much more than Gathion. I would like to have Gathion return, contribute a bit and get recognized for his new contributions AND for Surivor. I would like to see Tobold and Vitalogy come back to MTGO. I'm glad you and Algona are still around and I miss Sax (Sax, are you out there?). I saw MasterOGA online the other day and I private messaged him with a smile on my face.
You know who I REALLY want to see invited? Chris Green, previously from Leaping Lizards (now at Valve). If not for him I believe we would have MTGO by now, but we would NEVER have gotten it back in 2002/2003.
WotC is (like everyone else) selfish and although it is pretty nice of them to be charitably running the Community Cup they also have some goals with it - and a limited budget. If bringing people from Australia means not bringing 2 or 3 from somewhere else - that is blatantly unfair but understandable, particularly if the contributions of the 2 or 3 combined outmatch the single Australian contribution. Not bringing someone that did more instead of someone that did less is blatantly unfair and makes far less sense.
I hope this long post clarifies some of my positions. Like you I also love the boards and think they should get more recognition for their past contributions. Without the boards, would we have received sanctioned Momir basic? Sanctioned Pauper? Perhaps, but would it have been later? Most importantly for me, would we have received the 2-player queues when we did if not for the boards? In my view we would still have gotten all those and Modern, but the boards and Gavin respectively got them faster.
During that time, I was also "written up" on numerous occasions, most notably for "simulating an earthquake". The day after the Loma Prieta earthquake (1989), me and another tech calculated the "sweet spot" in the seismically designed building we worked in, and started jumping up and down in unison at that spot. 5 seconds later people were diving out of cubicles and screaming was heard. That write-up means so much more to me than any EoM award.
/me claps at the resonance frequency of Blippy's computer case
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Ivo, I briefly considered writing up a point by point response but my heart's just not in it. And that's not the point either is it?
You mention your tautology, but I don't think it's a tautology at all, because I question your reasons for saying someone deserves it more. That's what my art remark was about - that you see a significant cost (in terms of effort or money) as a built-in criterion for "significant" here. It's the same thing that pops up in art discussions, where ppl will consider a laborious painting as art but not a revolutionary but 'effortless' one; I've heard ppl say about Composition of Two Lines "that's not art, I could do it!" In your case, you simply don't consider something a significant contribution unless it already involves labor. That is where we disagree: I feel that even if your contribution was entirely serendipitous, you can still be on par with hard workers.
In another way I am more restrictive than you: As much as I agree that Chris Greene made a significant contribution to the amount of fun I have in my free time, I don't think you can seriously consider his work a contribution to the community. He got paid to do a job that just happened to involve creating a piece of entertainment I like. He did it well. Good for him. What the hell has that got to do with the community. There wouldn't have been an online community without mtgo, well duh. Why then not invite some microsoft ppl for providing us with windows?
So many interesting posts about and around the idea of inviting and reinviting and which of our heroes deserves recognition more etc.
Here are my 2.5 cents (+.5 for inflation.):
I really think many of the people mentioned deserve recognition for their various contributions and I see no need to argue about whether someone should or should not be invited (again). Though I suppose it could be a form of entertainment for some.
I think it is safe to say for most players getting a trip to WOTC HQ is a dream come true. Even those who do not play actively anymore might get a thrill out of that. So I am loath to think of this as a reward system based on popularity, visibility, or any other odd metric. I prefer to think of it as a perk of being lucky to have a game/hobby/lifestyle etc to love that inspires people do great things in our community. Some people who happen to win the popularity contest or are most visible heroes of the community get chosen each year. Some get invites because they are insanely good players and WOTC wants to be challenged. Some are invited because while they quietly play their part in community building someone notices.
I think we (the community) really brought it home this year in challenging the employees and I am predicting an uphill battle for any future teams to match that effort. I, for one, was really impressed. Of course having some real talent in the building process gave the team a pretty nice advantage but it was also the team spirit that helped carry it along. I felt like Hamtastic was watching over them (and us) and perhaps smiling. I really enjoyed participating in the peripheral stuff like helping test and rooting for the CC Team and also chatting with various online employees while kidding them about their inevitable defeat.
What this IS about is community building and learning. I really believe Hamtastic took this idea to heart and made it his own. His death is/was a tragedy for us all but his contributions while he lived gave us a lasting model to build upon. We do honor to him and his memory by being more cohesive.
I don't think it is an easy job for WOTC to narrow down the field to 8-9 invitees each year. It may be they will see fit to reinvite some past invitees. Personally, I'd love to see AJ, Heath, and JClaytor get another shot at it because they are clearly deserving and also did not get to go for various reasons. (Mainly because IRL = a really pain sometimes.) Lots of forums contributors, article posters, high level players and even just personalities well known in the chats could be eligible. And why not just some "joe schmoe" who joined recently and is still learning the game? The point is to build community spirit and that means being inclusive. Not necessarily being best buds with everyone online but just maybe accepting our differences while embracing what glues us together (the game.)
I wrote the lengthy one to better explain myself. I often find myself being extremely misunderstood and that is one big reason that my posts get big - to see if I leave as little room for misinterpretation (although sometimes I wonder if that is really helping me get across).
Despite my tautology of who deserves more deserves more, I don't actually extend this to only mean effort and money. I have no trouble imagining a significant contribution having been effortless - although I just do not consider some "memes" as being significant contributions and I think you do. As I tried to be clear about, it is extremely difficult to compare a contribution of one type to one of another, but for those that are directly comparable you can and THERE you can very reasonably arguable that time and money put in are valid metrics - although really in the end what should count is the effect generated and not the resources put in.
Chris Green continued to contribute after Leaping Lizards were no longer hired by WotC. He was paid and when LL left further rewarded with 4x collection (which was further worth a significant chunk of change) but even though it is a bit of a stretch considering him "community" in the strictest sense I think he should be invited. If you want a justification, well html_removed he was certainly part of the MTG players community when he pitched the idea of MTGO to WotC and convinced them to go for it, and for that huge contribution alone he would deserve to be invited.
Should we (for example) disregard Lee Sharpe's previous contributions just because he is *now* hired by WotC? What about Alexis? If they ever leave WotC for other employment opportunities I think it would be worth it to invite them for not only their contributions before being hired but also for some of the things they did "while inside". That is just my point of view though.
