Hi everyone,

I am sad to announce that ThronesTimes ( http://cardgamedb.com/index.php/thrones-times.html/_/thrones-times-v1/ ) is at an end, unless someone else steps in to lead the publication. I had originally hoped to lead the project for 2 years, with other contributors taking up the slack as we went along and slowly passing this off to a team.

As it turns out, work has been much busier lately, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. The good news is that a "job" is slowly evolving into a "career," but the bad news is that I'm not forced to choose to pick 2 of 3 things: family, playing AGOT, writing about AGOT. It will come as no surprise to most people here that I'm going to opt to continue investing time in the first two at the expense of the third.

All this is to say that I am more than happy to support the efforts of a regular newsletter as a contributing author, and possibly also play some minor role in collecting/analyzing data. To facilitate the continued publication, I can also pass off my design/template files, artwork, and instructions to anyone who is willing to continue to lead the effort. The software I use to design and lay this out is free (Scribus + Gimp). I will not, however, be compiling the mass amounts of data and reaching out to people to coordinate the full effort. (For reference, each of these newsletters takes me 15-25 hours in total to put together, excluding all the time I spend obsessively contemplating what will be going in there while my wife is trying to talk with my at the dinner table, etc.)

If anyone is interested in leading this effort, send me a message on CardGameDB, AgotCards.org, or this FFG site and we can connect. Keep in mind that although rewarding in its own way, this is a very time-intensive project. Even when guest authors volunteer to write, it typically takes significant time to edit and format. If you don't have a lot of experience laying out articles, it will also take a few hours (probably 3-4) of playing around with Scribus to figure out how to adjust columns, spacing, etc. I have found this to be fun, but again it's a time investment.

Going forward, I will try to spend the remaining time that I have writing for CardGameDB, offering guest articles to the FFG site here (if they take them), and fine-tuning Targaryen deck lists which I will post if they do well. (If not, I tend to disown them rather quickly.)

Best,

Dan

I just wanted to say this is my favorite 'addition' to the aGoT community, and thanks for all your time investment! I truly hope someone who is good at this sort of thing takes over. Sorry, I probably cannot be much of a help - the few guest writing things that FFG give me are plenty...~unless of course there is an article about how aGoT and banking are tied (not at all, unluckily...). Thanks again!

They aren't connected?! You play Lannister for heaven's sake!

Bummer! Thank you, sincerely. It's been a good run! I really hope someone continues this quarterly "editorial."

Kennon said:

BWHAHAAHAH

@Rings and others...thanks for the kind words guys. I enjoyed putting this together (don't want to make it sound like it was all "work"), but it's just not quite as enjoyable as actually playing

Taking a step back, I originally created this newsletter to (1) provide a more analytical perspective on the game that was lacking, and (2) help build the Game of Thrones community more generally. I think that many aspects of #1 are coming together well. There are more analytical posts on CardGameDB, AgotCards.org (their new Talkboard), and FFG's newsite (guest articles). I also see many users responding and participating in these forums much more frequently now than a year ago. On #2, the community seems to be building up, as indicated by increased participation in competitive play as well as a lot of new names on these forums. In short, while I think Thrones Times packaged everything in a convenient package, it seems increasingly superfluous...following a similar fate as all print news.

I will try to contribute to CardGameDB a bit more going forward, and will try to get a couple FFG interviews in there similar to what I had in Thrones Times. I think those are interesting and fun.

The one GLARING hole the absence of Thrones Times will create, is that no other publication collects and synthesizes raw data. I think it would be relatively easy for CardGameDB and AgotCards.org to add isa robust form of tourney reporting. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, and I know it could take hours of work, but it quite frankly shocks me that these are lacking with such a huge potential payoff in terms of website traffic. A system that allowed users to input tourney results on their own and then combined those into graphs/charts - for example, of all the tourney reports submitted how is house X performing - would draw TONS of new traffic. Both of these sites already have the graphic software necessary to display the information...they use it already in deckbuilding. What they lack is a system where users can upload their data as tourney results that are tagged by date/location. How cool would it be if you could search for a card like Meraxes and then see a list of all the top 5 recent decks that played this in their deck, what their competitors were playing, and what the legality of the cardpool was (time of event will tell you). If all of these results could then be tracked by timeframe, so that you could sort out particular periods of time - for example, pre- vs. post-FAQ - this data would be incredibly helpful. The site that implemented this well would easily become the default site for all competitive players.

To ensure accuracy, this data could be regulated by a peer review system, whereby someone can "add tourney results," and then those must be "confirmed" by 3-5 other users before the results were actually integrated into the other results. Like Wikipedia, uploaded content that was incorrect could be flagged by users, so that the website owner had to do virtually nothing to regulate or update the system.

In short, I realize this would take some development, but the lack of a truly robust tourney results system is a gaping hole in the current competitive landscape of this game. Thrones Times sought to fill in some of this with its "By the Numbers" section, but a real-time system would be infinitely more useful and attract TONS of new visitors. Such a system would easily become the preferred system for competitive players.

Thanks for all the work you put into creating the first few issues. The raw data analysis of tournament results was my favorite part of Thrones Times. I would love to see this added to one of the websites.

In the short term I do have some extra time on my hands. If you let me know what you used for analyzing the data I can try to create a final mini-issue analyzing recent tournaments.

Twn2dn said:

Thanks for all your work man. Much appreciated.

Thanks Guys.

@HoyaLawya: All of this was done in Excel + GIMP (free PhotoShop-like program). For each issue, I would try to track down a unique statistic such as Agendas ran, restricted cards used, etc. Then I just charted them graphically within Excel and added 3-D, which Office 2007 can do automatically, though you have to change around colors as the default is all data is the same color (I think). After I had created the chart, I copied/pasted it into a photo editor (GIMP, but anything could work...even paint would be doable though incredibly annoying to use). I added icons or other photos during this step. The post-GenCon issue of the agenda breakdown is a good example...a line graph created with Excel and then copied into GIMP, with pictures added for each agenda instead of writing out the name.

As far as data collection goes, it was a combination of (1) look on the forums for "tourney results" (which alone can be a time suck considering how crappy the search function is on these forums); (2) ask tourney organizers after an event. In some cases, I knew what I'd be looking for in advance, so I would email the tourney organizer. That's what I did for the FFG events...just email their Organized Play coordinator, say what you're going to be creating, and ask if they can forward the official data results after. They track all this stuff anyway (I think), so asking before just makes sure they save/send it to you rather than deleting it an hour after the event.

Tracking down the regionals results were easily the most complicated part of this. Six or seven of last year's 10 events posted results on these FFG forums, but the remaining people did not, so tracking that info down took some emailing and follow-up.

For the commentary I added, I usually just let the data come together and then make a few observations that might not have been immediately apparent. For example, Bara might win only one of 20 regionals, but that might be because it only made up 5% of all decks (so statistically it won about what you'd expect...but that isn't always immediately clear when all you're hearing is "Bara is terrible and never wins"). Alternatively, Martell might make up 40% of decks but win only 20% of the time.

Thanks. I'll start tracking down data from recent tournaments. I know we had ours in DC. Then there are 3 or so others that happened recently including the moonboy classic.

If any organizers of recent tournaments see this, feel free to post house, agenda, and restricted card for the decks represented with top 2 or top 4 depending on size of the tourney.