I still say that for the SIT you should make it double CFs, plus the crescents for the top five. Make it worth people's time to participate. :)

As for the rest, every day a gaming day, I like it. ^^

It'll completely devalue the CF's more then they already are. Not to mention it'll defeat the purpose of gaming nights. Time to vote!

Well you've just answered your own question, Q. CFs are already devalued.

Now we're in an irritating position where we have to carry on handing them out like candy, with platform multipliers as an extra bribe, because we've been doing it so long now we have members with stupidly high counts of CFs. If we make it any harder to get them then members will moan that it's unfair for that reason.

I think we're taking the wrong approach anyway. We're still treating all gaming platforms the same.

Gaming Nights are perfect for games like JA/JO, or even XvT/XWA if you love the lag, because if we had them as all day gaming people would get bored, the pool of players would be diluted over each night, and some people will play so much that their CF count will be a mockery and their lives probably destroyed in the process.

But what about EaW? It takes forever to play and it's so hard to find a game. This should be all day gaming. Hell, if you even find someone who wants to play you deserve a big, shiny medal.

SW:BFII. I've been fighting for this to be semi-removed from gaming nights, have a server that tracks results, and award CFs for the top killer, and crescents for players with high aggregated scores over a week or two. This is the kind of game that is a pain to organise teams for on a gaming night.

I'm indifferent either way myself, like Lucius said, there are good arguments for, good arguments against.

That said, 24/7 gaming doesn't automatically equate to 24/7 CFs. If the reason we don't encourage 24/7 gaming is "it'd devalue CFs" then that's the wrong reason, as the question isn't "do we want CFs awarded 24/7?" just "do we want 24/7 gaming?" The answer to "do we want people to game more?" should be a resounding "yes", how we go about that is still in question, but we should never just throw an idea out without analysing all the possible approaches- usually though everyone always just seems to think "all there is are CFs" and don't bother to think a bit more outside the box after that- yes, there are only CFs (and to an extent the GMRG) now but that doesn't mean we can't build on what is already in place.

What could we do instead of CFs to encourage 24/7 gaming? Vice-versa what could we do to encourage specified night gaming even if CFs were 24/7? Lots of things. That's the next question down the list.

My point is though that it's wrong to just be throwing out the idea because of CFs as it doesn't necessarily have to translate to awarding more CFs. Whether that means awarding half CFs during non-peak hours, awarding higher Crescent incentives during gaming nights, creating a special gaming night medal akin to the TIE Corps Distinguished Flying Cross, awarding GMRG Loyalty rating for 24/7 gaming but not actual CFs or vice-versa doing the opposite, etc, there are lots of ways it could be done without directly compromising the position of CFs or strong attendence records at specified gaming "nights".

I've always been partial to the Distinguished Flying Cross solution, something that provides a bigger incentive to attend a specified gaming night, to ensure 24/7 gaming didn't detract from the appeal of playing at certain set times, while still allowing some humbler form of recognition for 24/7 matches.

If the GMRG (or something similar, be it the GMRG or not) had a dynamic point system I always felt the best thing to do would just credit 24/7 matches with "ladder points" but not actually give them medals. That'd allow people to improve their standing, up their GMRG rank or whatever form of rating system might be attached, and, maybe at the end of every month or "season" (it could be monthly, quarterly, whatever) award a few Crescents. The main incentive would still be the CF (and the DFC-style medal if implemented), meaning you'd still be dumb not to attend gaming nights when most people will be playing and the big medals and ladder points (or GMRG Loyalty, make it what you will) would be on offer, but you wouldn't be wasting your time completely for playing at more irregular hours if for whatever reason you just wanted to play a few casual games, had trouble attending on the specified days, etc.

So.... long essay short, while I've voted for option 1 and to extend gaming to all days, I do so not because I favor going all the way and throwing out CFs like candy 24/7 and totally scrapping gaming nights, but because I do think there is definately a need to think outside the box and see what we can do to expand our current practices. Like I said, how we go about that is still in question, there are lots and lots of ways we could do it, but I do believe in principle providing some form of acknowledgement for matches people play at irregular hours is a step forward, but what that acknowledgement is still needs to be thought through and discussed by the Dark Summit or whomever. Maybe it should be CFs, maybe not, but it's definately something that deserves a full debate.

Why should any gaming platform be removed from gaming nights? BFII is a game that is fun, and I don't usually have a problem finding people to play it on any given day, and that includes lots of team games. EaW is time consuming, but it's an enjoyable challenge and recently I've found a lot more people playing it.

I think Werdna's point was actually that the way BFII is played means it'd be an ideal kind of game for more of a biweekly league table than an intensive evening of quick matches. I would agree that there's no sense removing it if people want to have a few quick skirmishes of their own, but that to have a sort of league thingymajig that encouraged people setting up big games with maybe 10-20 people would be a good idea, as arranging those kind of large team games isn't something you can always coordinate to coincide with a specific gaming night.

"SW:BFII. I've been fighting for this to be semi-removed from gaming nights, have a server that tracks results, and award CFs for the top killer, and crescents for players with high aggregated scores over a week or two. This is the kind of game that is a pain to organise teams for on a gaming night."

I think the server does that already actually. IIRC Jac getes emailed weekly reports about the servers traffic or something. I can't remember exactly what information it includes but I believe it's pretty much the sort of stuff we'd need to set up something like that. It was something we were talking about doing a few months ago but it was one of those ideas that just sort of fizzled out as nobody was quite sure how to go about installing the necessary gizmos to do it properly. I know more than one person suggested it to me in the past though, so something like that does seem to have support.

The distinction between the way JO/JA and BF/EAW play though is a good one to make, must admit I've never actually thought of it like that myself before. As I said, its this kind of re-evaluation of our gaming habits that I think needs looking at, as it need not necessarily be as simple as just having on one hand "just gaming nights" or on the other "just 24/7 gaming". There are lots of more dynamic things we could do if we happened to want to.

Anouther option, change the Criteria for awarding the CF, award it instead for a certain # of games played, this would reduce the # of CF's awarded while rewarding gamers.

I did say "semi-removed". If you want to play it in gaming night too ...then yey! To be honest we would need a way to organise proper team games, make sure people group up at the same time for fabulous team prizes, as well as the drop-in server.

I did actually send a detailed proposal on how to use the server to track statistics. It said how it would be done. The server manager server prints out players results per game. I even explained I wrote a program that read the log file to convert it into a result table.

I agree with the bigger medals for ladders and special competitions. The problem that I got stuck with is that this would only be a draw for the people who WIN the ladders and competitions. We could have league tiers but then you limit the people you can play. However, I have just thought that if we use ladders we can probably track the most improved players...but that would be more subjective than 1st, 2nd, 3rd.