Here is an updated scenario attendance chart I created with data from the logs on AH events. Congratulations, we surpassed Rabaul's average attendance with Kuban. I don't know if that is due to a better design, more preferable scenario setting+combatants, or just due to a generally increasing AH population, but well done!
It also occurred to me that the 12 hour scenario attendance may appear inflated. With a frame-based design the attendance accurately shows players who were there and played probably most of the frame. But with 12-hour designs, which have unlimited lives and openings to fly every hour - the logs show every player who flew. But it can't be true, for example, that we had over 300 players flying around in "Target for Today" for the entire event. So comparing attendance between these types of designs may be an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I'm curious to know more about people's (players, CMs, designers) impressions of the design of the Kuban scenario. I left some of my thoughts with my rating in the other thread, but almost no one else did. I've heard or read somewhere that balance issues have been addressed with the designer, but I would like to know more. What balance issues? Did that refer to the plane set? Or the asymmetric target locations? Did the scoring seem fair?
One problem I heard about involved sides timing their bomb attacks to the end-of-hostilities clock, so that bombers could drop their load and then shortly after be protected from attack by the expiration of hostilities. Personally I enjoyed fighting right up to the bell, but I wonder if the issue could be dealt with by having a separate, somewhat earlier (5-10 minutes) expiration of hostilities time limit which applies only to bomber attacks. That way, bombers cannot game the clock and must remain as fair game for a reasonable amount of time after their bomb runs.
A question about frame formats: are we going to experiment with more formats? What about, in lieu of a 12-hr single frame format, we had 2 6-hour frames, with each of the frames covering a different 6 hour period, to account for people in different worldwide time zones? Or, have we ever tried a 3 frame format rather than 4? Sometimes I wonder if a 4 frame commitment keeps people from signing up. I know it has caused me to skip signing up and plan to walk-on instead, but without the commitment of being signed up, I think its somewhat less likely that I will make it to a frame.
Finally, a thought about scoring. I'll use another game as an example: Scrabble. One of the things that makes Scrabble a great game is how it is scored. As the game progresses and the word layout builds out from the center of the board, players get access to more and more double/triple letter or word bonus squares. Many times this means even if a player gets off to a bad start, with the right letters and board position he can actually swing the game in his favor right up to the very end. This can add great tension to a game. In AH scenarios the scoring can be pretty complex, but its fixed for all frames. I wonder if a scenario has ever been scored with a variable score rate, so that the later frames become more important than the earlier frames. So even a side that is down could conceivably come back and win in the last frame? In Kuban, going into the last frame the VVS was down 2 frames to 1, so we could only play for a loss or tie. And although Kuban's last frame attendance was strong, in some cases this isn't so. I wonder if having the possibility of a come from behind win would help motivate people to keep attendance high through the last frame of a scenario.
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