2014 Wrapup and Looking Ahead to CCLP4

[jblewis]

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">Chipsters,

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">What a year it’s been! We’ve seen the end of CCLP1 voting, the release of CCLP1, the integration of the remaining CC elements into Chuck’s Challenge, competitions left and right here on CCZone, and much more. As the CCLP1 staff coordinator, I just wanted to write one final announcement-style message to close out 2014 and look at what’s to come.

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">First, to everyone who voted on, downloaded, and played CCLP1, thank you! On behalf of the CCLP1 staff, I hope you’ve enjoyed the set and the story that accompanied it over the past several months. We certainly had a fun time voting alongside you, tabulating the results, and debating about what the final selection was going to look like.

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">Second, to everyone who’s looking ahead to CCLP4: although I’ve mentioned this in various messages here on CCZone, I just wanted to make it official for anyone who’s wondering - I do not intend to be the staff coordinator for CCLP4. I’d like to focus my efforts in the months ahead on grooming someone new for this position and passing the torch to whomever the community selects as their candidate to lead the CCLP4 project.

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">For now, I just want to use my past experience with CCLP3 and CCLP1 to work with the community to determine what the process of building CCLP4 will even look like so we have an idea of what the time commitment for the staff in turn might look like before moving forward. Hopefully, that additional definition will inspire some within our community to step forward and volunteer for the staff. Basically, I’d like to do as much as I can to make the process, particularly pre-voting, much simpler than it was for sets past so there won’t be a huge burden or time commitment on the staff and, by extension, voters. You can see some of the ideas we’ve been tossing around in the “For anyone who’s on the CCLP4 staff” thread, which is located here. Feel free to contribute and join the discussion!

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">Also, for those who may have missed it, Michael Warner posted a call for CCLP4 submissions on the newsgroup. I’d like to second that call and post about it here so hopefully it gains a bit more exposure. Although there is no CCLP4 staff, website, or official list of submitted levels in place yet, this is more for the benefit of designers, particularly those who aren’t active community members, who’d like to go ahead and enter their creations into the submission pool without having to wait even longer for that period to open. You can see a spreadsheet I’ve created with many of the submitted sets (particularly those from the CCLP1 process) listed here. In the months to come, as more sets are submitted, I hope we can all contribute as a community and playtest these levels for compatibility / bust issues to lighten the load on the future CCLP4 staff. This is arguably what’s held up the production of past sets the most, so if we can make this as easy on the staff as we can, that would be amazing.

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">I’ve also written a blog post about why I believe we’re in a good place to go forward with CCLP4 in the near future here. Be sure to give it a read and let me know what your thoughts are!

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">Here’s to another fine year of chipping. Happy 2015, everyone!

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">J.B. Lewis

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;">CCLP1 Staff Coordinator

[M11k4]

I want to second those thoughts: Thanks for CCLP1. It (and not just the set but the the whole event) was (and is) more fun than I anticipated. And let's get CCLP4 off the ground!

I also want to thank people for playing and making CCLXP2 last year! My time for CC has been shaved to a minimum in these past few months. In the next few months I'll strive to get the update to this set made so the levels can be locked for scoring purposes at least, no matter what my responsibilities in life are. I also am a bit sorry for not managing to run a competition or two this last December and allow for a final push for Chip Cup points. Congrats J.B. on winning the Chip Cup again!

I had a great time playing CC last year, and I want to thank you guys for being such great friends.

-Miika

[KeyboardWielder]

I was about to use the word "novelty" in my reply but thought I would look it up in the dictionary first. Interestingly, there are two seemingly contradictory definitions for it:-

1. Originality by virtue of being refreshingly novel / new and surprising

2. A small inexpensive mass-produced article

I think that if CCLPs are to remain the special novelties that they have been in the "refreshingly new and surprising" sense, then the gaps between them need to be long enough... Perhaps not as long as the gap between CCLP2 and 3, but definitely longer than that between CCLP3 and CCLP1. CCLP1 was more or less above this consideration because of its refreshing "retro" "back to basics" nature, but the same will not hold true for future CCLPs. From CCLP3 experience, I do understand the challenge that a large pool of submitted levels presents to both the staff and the voters, but then it wouldn't be nice for CCLPs to become "inexpensive mass-produced articles" either.

There has also been the somewhat disturbing (to me) trend in the last couple of years of designers creating levels almost entirely with the next CCLP in mind, thereby possibly curbing explorations into creative territory (good or bad, awesome or silly) because they might not appeal to the majority of potential voters, or avoiding random elements to keep optimizers happy, etc.

So I hope that CCLP4 is still some years away.



- Madhav.

[jblewis]

I'd agree a bit more if we were talking about a gap between CCLP4 and CCLP5, but I'd venture to say that the gap between CCLP1 and CCLP4 could be viewed as a gap between CCLP3 and CCLP4, precisely for the reason you mentioned - because CCLP1 was such an exception. We haven't had a community-produced set where people could offer up their levels into the submission pool without any real limitation other than ruleset compatibility (barring any changes to the call for submissions) since CCLP3. Sure, people could technically submit whatever they wanted for CCLP1, but the stated purpose of the set heavily played into the culling of levels prior to voting, what some designers submitted, and how the community voted. Many designers who produced a lot of difficult content in the wake of CCLP3 felt a bit left in the dust. I'd be the last person to ever suggest producing CCLPs like an assembly line process, but there comes a point where, at least in this specific case, we have to recognize that too much will make the set far more difficult to construct.

I've noticed the trend you've mentioned as well - I've even made levels with the next CCLP in mind too - but I think this past year has also just happened to bring about a huge wave of levels from some very active designers, including some who have either been far more interested in CCLP4 than CCLP1 or missed the CCLP1 cutoff point entirely. Even so, there are quite a few levels in the submission pool as it stands made pre- and post-CCLP1, and though many "play it safe," there's quite a breadth of expectation represented for what CCLP4 could be. Perhaps a more comfortable solution that would inspire some designers to avoid playing it so safe and inject novelty into official set releases would be to produce a different kind of set during the long waits between future CCLPs - something like what Miika listed in his "Future Community Sets" blog post, or something else that's not nearly as general-purpose as the CCLP series.

[Eric119]

There has also been the somewhat disturbing (to me) trend in the last couple of years of designers creating levels almost entirely with the next CCLP in mind, thereby possibly curbing explorations into creative territory (good or bad, awesome or silly) because they might not appeal to the majority of potential voters, or avoiding random elements to keep optimizers happy, etc.

I think this is a good point. One aspect of this is the current trend to require levels to be compatible with both rulesets. I think there can be good levels that only work in one ruleset. For instance, consider "Frost Rings" from CCLP2, which employs "illegal tile combinations" in an elegant way. There's probably a lot of interesting ruleset-specific stuff yet unexplored.

[Syzygy]

I would like to submit my levels from E_Trilogy_MS for CCLP4 consideration. You can find the MS version here.

I should add that the Decade Message levels can be omitted from the pool.

[KeyboardWielder]

@JB: Between CCLP2 and CCLP3, a lot of non-Lynx-compatible levels were made. It wasn't decided that CCLP3 would have to be Lynx-c until the call for submissions. This arguably left many designers and levels "in the dust" (except for a few like Tom Rowe and Eric Schmidt who actively created Lynx-c versions of their levelsets). Subsequently, there was a tacit assumption that CCLP4 (or even-numbered CCLPs in general) would allow MS-only levels, although that no longer seems to be set in stone. If CCLP4 would indeed be allowing MS-only levels, then given that we already had a submission pool larger than what qualified for CCLP3, we should have set about CCLP4 immediately after CCLP3 going by that yardstick.

So I think our problems of plenty should not be factors in pushing the frequency of CCLPs. As an indicator of urgency, perhaps a better metric than "number of eligible levels in the pool" would be "number of new designers since the last CCLP", otherwise we could have frequent CCLPs dominated by a few prolific designers.

(I am not entirely convinced by my own arguments above, but they're all I could verbalize about why I personally don't feel enthusiastic to see another CCLP so soon as a designer, as a voter and - most importantly - as a player.)



- Madhav.

[chipster1059]

I don't think there should be MS-only levels in CCLP4. These days, many people play in Lynx, and this would get annoying. Also, I don't see how it is possible to fill such a long set with MS-only levels. Yes, it is possible to make interesting levels with invalid tiles, like Frost Rings, but in many occasions this can be avoided, as seen in the CCLXP2 Beta. MS-only sets could be made, but I think they should be shorter (50 levels, maybe?)

I agree that CCLP4 should not be released for a few more years, but making a good set takes time. The making of CCLP2 seems to have been done very fast. The first custom levels were created around 1999, and the set was released in 2002. And I can't find when discussions for CCLP2 started happening, but the entire process would have taken a maximum of three years...

[Flareon350]

I agree with J.B. that CCLP4 should be constructed sooner than later. It's been pretty much agreed that a good portion of the community don't like the difficulty spike with CCLP3 and any future CCLP shouldn't have levels of difficulty similar or higher than that. CCLP4 should be well balanced when it comes to that, and there are a lot of good levels within that criteria that have been released, as well as neglected from CCLP1's voting. I don't really think it matters how many years there should be in between CCLPs.

I also disagree with MS-only levels being in another CCLP because that's a bit unfair towards Lynx players, and it would eventually lead to another Lynx conversion like CCLP2 did, though I could be wrong with the latter.

I'd be more than happy to be part of the CCLP4 staff as well!

[jblewis]

It wasn't decided that CCLP3 would have to be Lynx-c until the call for submissions. This arguably left many designers and levels "in the dust" (except for a few like Tom Rowe and Eric Schmidt who actively created Lynx-c versions of their levelsets). Subsequently, there was a tacit assumption that CCLP4 (or even-numbered CCLPs in general) would allow MS-only levels, although that no longer seems to be set in stone.

This is somewhat untrue. Prior to the 2006 call for submissions that Larry Jackson posted, Dale Bryan (who had coordinated CCLP2 production) posted a message or two on the newsgroup around 2003 stating that he was hoping to see odd-numbered CCLPs be compatible in both rulesets, whereas even-numbered CCLPs would alternate between rulesets. In other words, CCLP2 was MS-only, CCLP3 was supposed to be MS- and Lynx-compatible, and then CCLP4 could be a Lynx-only set, CCLP5 could work in both rulesets, and so on. So Lynx compatibility was on the table for a while. I think the reasons why we saw as many MS-only levels as we did prior to CCLP3 were [a] the last official set was an MS-only set and inspired designers to further explore MS-only behaviors, this curiosity further inspired players to dissect the game and create levels that exploited these behaviors, and [c] Lynx play was not nearly as commonplace as it has been since the release of CCLP3. As I recall, you were one of the first designers to encourage the rest of us to design for both rulesets.



I agree with Josh about the problem of MS-only levels being in another CCLP: we've reached the point where every official set can be played in both rulesets with the release of CCLXP2, and Lynx play is much more common now. I think your strongest point is that there have been many designers who have been gipped by the dual-compatibility requirement of the CCLP series. I still believe that a fair way to make sure that designers are free to make whatever they want and get some recognition for it while still respecting what's been done with CCLPs is to make special, shorter packs between CCLPs with a specific hook: all MS-only levels, all Lynx-only levels, all super-difficult levels, all CCZone competition levels, etc. Basically, anything that wouldn't fit within the CCLP series that's meant to be played by a general audience with whatever ruleset they want to use. And while it's impossible to please everyone, I can't really see too many other options that come this close. If we as a community want to encourage designers to play around without having to conform, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to go ahead and honor those who have worked hard over the past few years, go through with CCLP4, and then start fresh, exploring what kind of special pack could be made during the long wait for CCLP5.