AGS Awards 2015: SOON

[Snarky]

Sorry to hear that.

At this point, I'm inclined to think it would be better to give up on the client and just post the winners here, or at most do an announcement over IRC (or whatever modern group-chat option there is).

I'm afraid that with the scheduled dates having been broken so many times already, more and more people are going to be fed up or not think it worth the hassle if and when it finally comes around. We should keep in mind that many attendees have to arrange specially to be available, and all the uncertainty is almost guaranteed to mean lowered attendance. Reliability in scheduling is more important than the fanciness of the platform, I think. If Jack has prepared something exciting in the ceremony, how about releasing it as single-player game (as SSH did in the past), or even better: recording the "show" and putting it on YouTube?

The longer you wait, the less relevant it's going to seem: it becomes, quite literally, yesteryear's news. A successful AGS Awards to my mind requires a certain momentum, so that you get people excited about revisiting the best games of the year, naming them in the For Your Consideration thread, nominating, voting, and then participating in the ceremony without too much time passing in between.

I disagree that there's any reason why in the future we should need to wait until June for the ceremony. I don't know what Jack has been doing, but the client update is as big or a small a job as you want to make it: major bugs have been ironed out over the years, so it's basically working fine as-is. The only thing that needs to be done each year is replace the list of nominees, and that shouldn't be a huge job. In fact, it should be possible to do it while the voting is ongoing, so that the client is ready before it even closes (last year, even with a major client update, voting closed sometime around 16 March, and the ceremony was held on 22 March). Oh, and AFAIK, the coding of the client has been almost entirely a one-person job since 2011. (Though certainly a number of people have helped out with graphics, music and other resources.)

Things got a bit messed up this year with the switch to new people in each role. So let's just cut our losses, get it over with, and try to make sure things are on track for next year. If Jack has been working on major improvements, that should give him a chance to get it done properly, and not rush something untested to release.

But maybe I'm alone in this view? What do others think?

[Jack]

Hey, glad to see Mods reconsidered and decided to push the date again.

If the ceremony is tomorrow, there won't be a client, sorry. This is my fault, because I've underestimated the volume of work multiple times. It's taking so long because I rewrote the whole client from scratch (getting to do this is basically the only reason I volunteered for the job). I most likely would've made tomorrow's deadline if I didn't get an upper airway infection on thursday. I was hoping I caught it and it would only last a day, but since I still feel like dogshit today, I won't be able to pull it out of the fire for tomorrow.

Only Mods and Snarky have noted their opinions thus far, so please let us know what you prefer. Based on the interest in the awards this year, I don't think we'll see much attendance either way.

[selmiak]

Is there something spectacularly new added to the client? Then it's probably worth the wait.
If not, I wouldn't mind having the ceremony this sunday as there is a holday on monday.
I'm with snarky on the whole it gets boring and loses momentum thing, but in the end it's up to the host(s).

For the future, after the awards is before the awards, if the team likes it and feels up for doing it again next year why not slowly start working on stuff already over the course of a year (or a little less maybe )

[cat]

I'm with Snarky here. I absolutely prefer to have just an IRC chat ceremony or last year's client with updated nominees over moving it again just for having a new (untested) client.

[Dualnames]

For your information, and to keep things transparent.

1) I love you m0ds, and i think it's hard to do this on your own. But I have to make this post, cause I'm mad.
2) Every time I made the client (twice actually, it was just me working a month or so before the ceremony, and it was literally just me and #clubgalen. Wyz was always busy with the exams, and everyone know how much i value his work and ethic, but this was Wyz setting up the things, and me taking over. To begin with, the community cared initially about this, like absolute zero. And only when we had it out, and after the ceremony did it enjoy a small warm response. The fist time I had the chance to test with about 20 people, mostly AGS friends, and gladly that went more or less well. The second time, and the last one, people focused on the lesbian joke more than they cared about this year's ceremony (and that year's ceremony), which says an awful lot about this community. There's still the chat log of people commenting on boobs in vulgar ways and then making a post on that topic shaming me, so heaven forbid, I walked out. But there was a somewhat proper transition, I open-sourced the files, and I had some back and forth pms with Snarky and then some, and suddenly the lesbian jokes, that also existed on that version, offended no one, rofl. It was on the back-end, yeah, that makes sense.

3) I did this twice, on my own more or less. AGS Friends, like m0ds, bici, nemo, peder and countless others did their part, but the client part was more or less on me.
As far as i know the client situation is pretty stable after Snarky's reign, so.

If you really think about it, each year, it's just one person doing all the work.
This year it's m0ds, last year it was Snarky, and so on.

[LimpingFish]

Holding it purely within IRC never hurt the awards before.

Since the job of hosting the awards usually falls to one person, perhaps limiting the amount of extra work that needs to be done would be the way to go. The client is a nice novelty, but it shouldn't take precedence over the ceremony itself. If the client isn't ready, then the client isn't ready. We move on.

Postponing the awards twice, and still leaving people without a concrete date, is just going frustrate.

[Stupot]

Despite the good initiative of Mods and Jack, I think we can safely call this year's Awards a 'slight hiccup'. Might be best to just get it over and done with and try to make sure there's some kind of structure in place so that this kind of lapse in momentum doesn't happen again next year. Personally, I see little reason that the 'nomination' phase shouldn't begin in early January in time for voting and Awardsing in Late Feb or March, while people can still remember some of the games.

It's easy for me to say. I've got no real ability to help out much beyond adding my two-cents to the pot, but every little helps, as they they. That said, if there is some way I can help out that doesn't involve any coding, I would of course be happy to see what I can do

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

What happened to our IRC? Couldn't get club Galen to work.. Are we doing this today over there?

[Snarky]

Mods postponed it indefinitely yesterday.

[[delete}]

No, please not just an IRC ceremony. I
'm so looking forward to the new client! Hooray, Jack and Mark, for so much dedication

[Cassiebsg]

Are you posting this an hour after the event should start? Or you forgot to add GMT to it?

[m0ds]

Thanks Jim, there's no question you and others were dedicated. Honestly, that work now falls on Jack Lucy (not me, haha). I thought it would be as simple as > download old client > replace some sounds > do ceremony. But Jack, whom I am giving the benefit of the doubt, is saying it's being rebuilt or such. So I don't know, and I'm beyond pushing it to know now. I had no intention of getting involved with the technical side really, just pushing forward the other necessaries. Not a stab at you Jack but I don't know the guy, I don't know if he's a "deliverer" or not. I'm happy to wait a little bit longer but I do agree with Snarky and others that the 2015 results need to be announced this side of armageddon. So there is simply no way that this will go much beyond the end of the month. That gives Jack ample time and it's not a huge stretch for the rest of us to wait 12 days and see if it transpires or not. But fingers crossed that it can cos it would be pretty fun! (as line, ___, once known as Amelie, says).

[cat]

Can we maybe decide on a date and time, announce it in the top bar of the forum (instead of the Mittens announcement) and if the client is ready by then, use the client, otherwise just do it in IRC chat?

[Snarky]

Can we maybe decide on a date and time, announce it in the top bar of the forum (instead of the Mittens announcement) and if the client is ready by then, use the client, otherwise just do it in IRC chat?

Seconded!

Meanwhile, while we're waiting for this year's ceremony, why not revisit the very first AGS live show?

[embed=640,480]http://youtu.be/8s7B1a9BYDk[/embed]

It's come quite a way, eh? (Though ALREADY AWESOME in its initial outing!) I see we lost the spotlights somewhere along the way; maybe we could bring them back at some point, at least for when the hall is darkened?

[Chicky]

I agree with cat, if we could nail down a date and update the forum header that would be great, the forum header announcement is kinda essential and needs to be done asap once a date is decided. The client is a lovely novelty but I've been to enough AGS awards to know that it can be just as much fun when held in the IRC room.

Thank you to Mark and Jack and everyone else who is working to get this sorted, let's hope we can rock this before I have to return my suit

[Jack]

Okay, I'm back to dev tonight. Not going to push the pace I did before though, where I came home from work and did 4 or 5 hours on client dev, that's insane.

Cat's idea suits me, as would a date at the end of the month.

[LimpingFish]

Can we maybe decide on a date and time...?

Seconded!

I agree with cat...

Me too! A definite date and time will help a lot.

[Ponch]

A definite date and time will help a lot.

I'm not taking off this tux until we have a ceremony!

[selmiak]

yeah, I can smell it to over here.

or is it the rotting corpse of the awards

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

I still don't know how to find the chat anymore
Is this still public knowledge?
Good to hear things are progressing Jack
Also good to now that tux still fits Ponch! Now is that a custom cummerbund covering your udder?