Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed the 10/14 edition of character rankings! The people who helped out – Junebugkiller, Leugensmiff, HawkeyeSucks, Budge Player Cadet, and locked – put a lot of time and thought into their contributions, so if you liked the rankings, please do tell them how much you appreciated their work as the rankings would not have been the same without them.
Unfortunately, at this point it’s become pretty clear that the current format of rankings (full writeups for every character every 3 months) is unsustainable, even with help – the 6/14 edition of rankings almost burned me out on the game completely, so I decided to put less pressure on myself to get this edition out, and it took nearly a month, with lots of people agitating about it in the meantime. Moving forward, this will only get worse, since the number of characters (and therefore the number of character interactions) will only be growing.
The commonly proposed solution is to get more help. This edition taught me that even when I have high-quality writers helping out, it doesn’t actually reduce the time taken by that much! That probably makes no sense, so I’ll explain:
- Communication isn’t free. The more people helping out, the more you need to coordinate to make sure all the characters are covered, that there’s not disproportionately more being said about one character than another, and that everyone’s contributions are being used. Someone has to spend time making sure people are working on the right things, and because my collaborators are awesome people, sometimes this just turns into us chatting about the game, which is a lot of fun but not exactly conducive to getting rankings out.
- Editing is expensive. As nice as it was to have different perspectives, sometimes I disagreed with what other people wrote, and I often wanted to change up some wording or ordering to make the writeups have a consistent voice. Reading through everything they wrote (which was a lot!), processing what they were getting at, deciding whether I agree, and then taking their words and fitting them into a consistent narrative all takes a lot more time than I had thought.
NERD ALERT: if you’re at all interested in why adding more people to a knowledge-based project doesn’t make it go any faster, I highly recommend The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr., the classic work on the subject.
Making the problem worse is that it’s getting harder and harder to write new and interesting things about each character, and I get the sense that while people enjoy the rankings, by the time everything is published there are new characters we haven’t covered and potentially changes in the game that make things obsolete. I think most people would prefer these to be more frequent, and ideally would get updated whenever a major change happens or a new character is introduced.
How do we reconcile the problem of the rankings taking so long and yet wanting to do them even more frequently? I have a few ideas:
-
I can stop editing. Basically, I’ll do the data collection and contribute a little here and there, but essentially I’ll just publish the rankings in a private google doc and give access to anyone who wants to write something. Once we have something for everyone, I’ll publish what they wrote verbatim.
This will take way less time and effort on my part, but there may be a wide disparity of opinions, potential factual errors, and possibly contradictions between writers in the same piece. Also, there’s no guarantee that writeups will actually get done – people are busy, after all, and most of us would rather write 2 pages on Sentry than a paragraph on 2* Wolverine.
-
We can publish rankings with no commentary. This is really easy – we could do this easily every month and probably even more often as long as people don’t get tired of voting. Would it be interesting, though?
-
I can publish my personal rankings, and only comment on new characters and characters with significant change. This eliminates the work/wait of voting and data collection, and is probably a manageable amount of work for me to do once every six weeks, but there’s no protection against my personal biases, since we’ll lose the diversity of perspectives we would get with more people contributing.
Any other ideas? Post them here and I’ll put up a poll after a couple of days.
