Council of Elrond

Hey fellow CoE members,
as my main interest is analyzing the low turnout of the 2009-2011 championship events, I was thinking on doing an evalution at this years LURE. Here is an outline of what I am thinking of:

Every participant of Lure will be given an evaluation sheet with the kind request to return it to a box in the Rittersaal during the weekend. Generally, it should be possible to do this anonymously. Those players who are not at Lure will be informed over forum/mail and be offered additional means to send their evaluation sheets to me. I think this is the way of organizing it to get the most general view on the state of the community.

I will do the evaluation work splitted in "facts" and "interpretation". We can then exploit the second part to see what the community really wants to see done.

The sheet itself shall cover several areas.
1) What type of a player are you? (how many games last year - competitive/casual - online/offline - community links etc.)
2) Reasons for not being at Warsaw 2011/Rome 2010 - provisions that would change these reasons
3) ...

Many interesting areas could be added: Errata Process, Dream Cards, NetRep work, Prize Support, Online gaming, Scenario Games, National Council stuff, Product availability.
But I think the sheet should still be manageable within lets say 10 minutes and not steal people an hour of their precious luretime. Thats why I ask you now: What do you think are the most important things to learn about the community? What should be added and what should be the focus of the questions within these areas?

With your feedback I will try to make a draft version this month and discuss it here.

Best wishes for 2012 to all of you!
Dominic

Good idea!

Some kind of reply from the community would be quite valuable for us as CoE, as it could hopefully show us which ares are the main ones to spend efforts in.
I think the survey should give us some information what players hope or expect us to do.

I can imagine a long questionaire could deter players from answering, but we could stress that also incomplete forms will be taken into account.

Here're some spontaneous ideas on what items could be adressed:

- How often do you play ME?
- With whom do you play?
- Prefer playing with friends/others unknown players/also internationals?
- Online gaming important?
- Like regular tourney system (national/international)?
- Would you take part in official events (only regular basis/only home area/only if prizes etc...)our
- Would you be interested in scenario games?
- interested in dream cards games?

- Would you like official rules become easier?
- What about having both "full/difficult" and "short/easy" rules?
- Is a detailed errata list important for you?
- Would you accept an unofficial errata lists (that intends to make card play more balanced) to become part of regular rules?
- Are non-English rules/errata texts important?

- Interested in organising tournaments?
- Interested in supporting the CoE?

- What kind of help would you need to play more often/develop your ME ideas/support the community

- Anything else?

@Dominic: Thanks for offering a surely mathematically grounded analysis of all this

Yes a survey is a good idea.

Well, having a complete overview of meccg players' backgrounds and motives would be great, but perhaps a bridge too far. If the list is not too long you could ask such questions, but I would at least focus on issues important for the CoE. So mainly:
-what would people expect/want from a CoE?
-would they be open to minor changes in the game or in tourney formats, and tp experiments to test these? (example: play with MP max 10 for chars).
-ideas: what would they like to see change in the game/tourney formats, if anything?

These are open questions. Closed questions yield more data, but qualitatively less imput. A combo of both would be best, but the number of open questions must be small. Also there might be a language issue for open questions.

I understand the main interest/objective would be to counter the dwindling tournament attendance, but direct questions as to "why did you not attend" etc will probably yield nothing more than 'no time/money/interest/I've played a ton of worlds.' A better approach would be rather "what does the game/a tourney need to be appealing again to more people?"

Then there is the question of which respondents are of our concern? This is a central CoE issue: do we represent the game and any possible players, or the current active community?
Cause if we ask those who show up at Lure (the active players) then we only get answers of those who are happy with the state of things, and we do not reach those who dropped out for whatever reason, nor those who might potentially be new players. Joe with his letters and Ben with his meccg: the rewrite were concerned more with the latter. But more and more I feel we cannot serve this category of people as we are up against the odds of time (ageing player base) and low card availability (play online only?). So are the current players (those who are left), content and conservative, or open to change? The Virtuals experience would suggest the former, but perhaps more daring/drastic solutions could yield something. Every year there is less to lose.

So designing a survey that we can also leave on this board/CoE site to be filled out would be great, then we can perhaps reach those potentials/drop outs.