Hello! Several Clans prior to worlds polled the online player community in Discord or Facebook or elsewhere to try to get a good picture of what players thought would be the best Keeper or Seeker for their community.

However, there was a problem in the way most groups polled.

Most places polled giving a list of all the keeper and seeker roles like this:

• Keeper of Fire
• Seeker of Fire
• Keeper of Earth
• Seeker of Earth
• Keeper of Air
• Seeker of Air
• Keeper of Water
• Seeker of Water
• Keeper of Void
• Seeker of Void

They then asked players to rank their favorites. The favorites were then listed in order of number of votes.

Polling this way causes a problem, because there are two axes being combined here. The first, Keeper vs Seeker, has a very large effect on gameplay and is split only two ways. The second, element, has a smaller effect and is split five ways. In addition, depending on playstyle, for most elements, there are definite advantages and disadvantages to each element, so the voters can easily be split among all the choices. However, with Seeker Roles, because of the nature of clan-specific provinces, one specific element is more advantageous than the others.

The problem comes with combining them.

So, in a given community of, say, 100 people, let's say 75% of a player base wants the Keeper role, and it is split evenly between all 5 elements. That means that for any one keeper card, each Keeper of the X element gets 15 votes, Meanwhile, 25% of the voters might want the Seeker role, but 4/5ths of them want the Seeker role that is optimized for their clan province, while the rest are situated randomly between the other elements. In addition, many casual voters, if asked to pick a favorite two, will pick their favorite individual keeper and seeker just to make clear their spread, but that doesn't weigh the difference between the preference for a keeper and seeker.

in this scenario, even though most players want a Keeper role, and don't even care what element it is, the highest count of votes will go to the Seeker role with a breakdown like this (assuming the favored seeker element is void):

• Keeper of Fire 15 votes
• Seeker of Fire 2 votes
• Keeper of Earth 15 votes
• Seeker of Earth `1 vote
• Keeper of Air 15 votes
• Seeker of Air 1 Votes
• Keeper of Water 15 votes
• Seeker of Water 1 vote
• Keeper of Void 15 votes
• Seeker of Void 20 votes.

By polling alone, the Seeker of the Void would seem to be the most popular, when the great majority of voters want a Keeper role. Even without such a strong effect locking the seeker votes to an element, it still ends up skewing the results.

This effect is just an example, but I think it is worth realizing it's happening when we poll for what element is wanted next.

I wanted to open to the community to find out others' thoughts about different ways to poll to get an idea of what is favored without causing this issue so that next time the community is polled, we have a better picture of what is actually sought.

Kaori

I wouldn't discount the role of the elements as we are now seeing a number of provinces that are dependent on element role as well as Keeper/Seeker. Certain ring types actually play more favorably to certain play styles (as Lion I am really missing that Earth Keeper as the extra advantage was generally better for my overall board state than constantly going after fire for a small boost to one guy).

The main change I would make is that since you can't take the role that is currently held by your clan that option is off the pole for each clan.

You could separate it as two votes, Keeper/Seeker and than Element Role but again that may skew results as one role is always cut out for each clan who may really want an elemental role more than worrying about keeper or seeker (see Phoenix with the Water Shugenja who really want the water ring as a priority claim so might as well try and drive as many advantages with it as they can)

First off, you need to get rid of first-past-the-post voting and use something like Instant Runoff or Ranked Choice voting instead. What you're describing is pretty much exactly the same third-party-spoiler and strategic voting problems that political elections in the U.S. and elsewhere suffer from all the time.

Secondly, there needs to be a concentrated effort to actually "get out the vote". I didn't even know there WAS a facebook or discord group for L5R where this kind of question was being asked until last week. I guarantee a ton of casual community members still have no idea there was any opportunity at all for them to participate in the choice.

If we're going to have votes or even just comprehensive community discussion, then there ought to be ONE place where it happens (or at worst, one per clan), and the existence of that place and the fact that it's used for voting needs to be loudly advertised on Facebook, Reddit, Discord, the FFG forums, CardGameDb, FiveRingsDb, Jigoku, Mahoisfun, and any other L5R related site or channel we can find.

3 hours ago, EdgeOfDreams said:

First off, you need to get rid of first-past-the-post voting and use something like Instant Runoff or Ranked Choice voting instead. What you're describing is pretty much exactly the same third-party-spoiler and strategic voting problems that political elections in the U.S. and elsewhere suffer from all the time.

Secondly, there needs to be a concentrated effort to actually "get out the vote". I didn't even know there WAS a facebook or discord group for L5R where this kind of question was being asked until last week. I guarantee a ton of casual community members still have no idea there was any opportunity at all for them to participate in the choice.

If we're going to have votes or even just comprehensive community discussion, then there ought to be ONE place where it happens (or at worst, one per clan), and the existence of that place and the fact that it's used for voting needs to be loudly advertised on Facebook, Reddit, Discord, the FFG forums, CardGameDb, FiveRingsDb, Jigoku, Mahoisfun, and any other L5R related site or channel we can find.

The main issue is the vote has no actual power as it is just a suggestion of what that sampling of players want and is in no way binding on the actual winners decision (see Scorpion fall out).

I think a person should consider these three options for deciding which role to pick.........

Option A: Go with your gut

Option B: Sell your role selection on Ebay

Option C: Role a d10 and let fate decide (eenie-meenie-miney-mo is also acceptable)

3 hours ago, Schmoozies said:

The main issue is the vote has no actual power as it is just a suggestion of what that sampling of players want and is in no way binding on the actual winners decision (see Scorpion fall out).

That is definitely a big issue, but I think that's something to discuss in a separate thread. I have no idea how to get FFG to totally change how roles are chosen. I do have ideas about how to help the community self-organize to better deal with the problems FFG has created. At least in this thread, I'd like to focus on the latter.

Not just for the roles, but also for story choices, I think FFG should invest in an online platform (for L5R, but also other games would benefit too).

• Player registration with unique code assignment, to be used for every official tournament
• Clan selection with certain limitations in the changes (like, you can change when you want, but you cannot vote for 1 month after change)
• Tournament swiss and bracket management (so we can dump Tome once and for all), with result tracking like TLP
• Easy to find documentation, updates and erratas (could be merged with cardgame db)
• Possibility to vote, opening up also to intra-clan polls only (like the one at Worlds, should have been a Lion-only vote imho)

Now that they have FFG Interactive, I don't think it's something that hard to create...

I would do it with a two-round System.

You have a first round where people make two votes: preferred Keeper of X and preferred Seeker of X.

Then you make a second round where people has to choose between the most popular option from each role.

So, for example, first round I vote for Keeper of Fire and Seeker of Water. Round ends and the most voted are Keeper of Water and Seeker of Void.

Ok, so n othing like what I wanted, but now it goes to the second round having to choose between those two options. That way, I still have a saying without my voting being totally useless.

So as someone who did make a role choice: First off there was a ton of chatter in discord besides the poll that was placed. Secondly, at worlds itself there was fairly involved discussion between the people playing X clan, the hatamotos, etc, once it became clear who per clan was going to be making the choice. Everyone was also pretty much able to walk away from Worlds happy with their clan choice from a competitive stand point I feel seeing how the results went.