NARMA Nov 29 2023, Minutes
Members PRESENT
David
Edwin
Bichen
Aldwin
Members MISSING
Luke
Nima
Zac
Public Meeting
Harrison: will there be a set of touch points that we would get thoughts/feedback. Last time, meeting was already done.
Dave: Doing private first meant we had stuff to talk about, but we don’t know when it’d be. Doing public first loses that. This month has been tough. Next month is hopefully before Dec 18th. We don’t have a huge agenda this time; mostly maintenance-y stuff. This meeting is mostly to validate NAO date. Their ERMC has not been scheduled yet, so we should just go ahead and schedule NAO. That hopefully gets proposals.
Harrison: Will the agenda be posted before the meeting?
Dave: Agenda is on the website. If that’s hard to find, we can broadcast that. What we want to do about minimum participants.
Harrison: 3 non-NAO tournaments
Dave: If the minimum is 16 or 24, we can lop off whole columns on the chart. You don’t want like an 8-person private qualifier. You do want to make it so that it’s not 100+ players only. What’s a good balance? You’re not encouraged to run tiny private qualifiers.
Harrison: 32 seems like a fine size. Basically ran it with 4 players. Actual staffing was just 3-4 people. A local club could run 40 people. Your event has to be able to hold at least X people. You could host a max-32 person tournament but if 24 people show up, then it could still count.
Dave: 32 person tournament needs more staff? Is there a min somewhere?
A bunch of people: 1 per 8 tables
Dave: maybe 32 isn’t that large anymore. Very tiny qualifiers a bad idea. People are fine with some kind of minimum. It’s not a punitive action for small clubs; it’s not really a problem to have players show up to tournaments nowadays. Your survey has been doing pretty good. Do you have a target close date and a target release date?
Harrison: Technically don’t ever need to close it. About 2 weeks. End of next weekend. Explore different ways to look at it. Sending out the raw sheet and a step-by-step analysis. One question that slipped through the cracks which is “What is the ideal number of hanchans played per cut?”. Most common answer is 6. Oops. language is bad on that question. Maybe add FAQ. As for the analysis, might take an extra week. Can give a quick informal rundown. Could grab images during next NARMA meeting.
Dave: Might be cool to get a proper graph. Might be a valuable thing to do on a regular basis (like annually). Maybe people start hating 15/5 over 30/10 etc.
Harrison: Maybe you do a thing and then people like it. Then people do it more. 82 responses so far. Aiming for ~150 or so. It is being shared.
Dave: Maybe some time to review it and come chat about it. Any other stuff?
Harrison: Expedite or strategize the timeliness of minutes? Or things afterwards. Last time, the official minutes took a while. The Proposal guidelines took 4 days. Or will it take a week or is there a plan to put it out quicker?
Dave: Planning on documents and document preparedness. And how we can push documents out faster. And what better estimation. In terms of minutes, we have a review period, etc. It might be nice to recruit a secretary. Finding someone would be awesome. No desire that minutes to be slow. I don’t know someone off the cuff to fulfill that role.
Bichen: What about releasing raw notes
Dave: Certain circumstances that cannot be generally known. Like WRC dates that cannot be revealed or a partner. We could just release raw notes. Was traveling (comic con or something). Should be able to do better in the future.
Jai joined
Dave: Still opened for questions
Harrison: Talks on expanding the board. How that was envisioned. Is there a separation between like a secretarial role or would they attend the meeting? Would it be another board member? Are you looking for more grunt work people. But maybe not long-term. Help out do grunt work / coding / updating website. How do you kind of see that?
Dave: Right now a little broad. Hey, do you want to be on the board? Should make decisions on that by the holidays. Hard to say in which people work with NARMA. That secretary role - I am a profession stenographer. Come to the board meeting and take minutes. In terms of participation as a member of the board, in terms of what they want to do, it’s hard. I’m here and what I really want to do is write code / do web development. Friend of mine wants to help out with discord. With everyone’s approval, we can have a specific role for that. Board membership is a bit of a responsibility. Involved in doing the core stuff we do. Building the structures we do; decent amount of commitment. If someone can only do it short-term, we would love to work with them, but wouldn’t be a great fit to be on the board. Some people would have a little time, some people would have a lot of time. We need to figure out how to engage back and get people involved. Throwing a bunch of people on the board isn’t the greatest idea. Everyone argues and nothing gets done. If we have a working group do a project, that would be great. At some point, the project is done, and then that’s that. It depends on who’s volunteering and what level of time and that determines how we can engage with people.
Dave: Any more stuff? If everybody’s happy, we can close this public meeting. Thank you for attending. Harrison, thank you for making the survey.
Closed Meeting Agenda Listing
Quick cross-chat re: Discord moderation
Ratification of NAO Dates
Minimum participants for WRC Qualifiers and approving text revisions to Qualification document
Quick cross-chat re: Discord moderation
Dave: Friend wanted to work on/improve NARMA discord. Is everyone cool with that?
Aldwin/Edwin/Bichen: No objections
Ratification of NAO Dates
Dave: NAO dates: Labor day. EMA has not picked dates for ERMC. So let’s go for Labor Day. No reason to hold back to it.
Aldwin: I say that’s the best day.
Dave: Plans are for Labor Day 2024.
Minimum participants for WRC Qualifiers and approving text revisions to Qualification document
Bichen: Why not use Harrison’s suggestion? min 32, but if 24 show up, that’s fine.
Dave: I have to say it’s 32+ event. If 64 people show up, great. If only 24 show up, that’s okay. In the past, is 32 too difficult and pretty easy now?
Edwin: Last tournament was much harder. I think now, especially for east coast, 32 should be fairly easy. Even if the south hosts 32, it should be able to hit it. Or some midwest club. Even lpy’s Cincy tournament had quite a few people show up. 32 should be achievable. If it weren’t for the fact that Seattle already has a bunch of people, we would be scared.
Bichen: Seattle attendees?
Edwin: 70 sign ups, 48 people paid.
Bichen: 32 seems trivially achievable at this point
Dave: Plan for at least 32, if you’re 24+, then you’re fine. Language to add: 3 qualifiers and the NAO to make their score.
Edwin: more tournaments on the east coast. Oh, the east coast is actually pretty close to each other.
Dave: Balance here is that you want to encourage people to go to tournaments. Trying to cap the numbers has two problems. One is punitive. They’re careful which tournament to go to. My opinion to err on the side to encourage people to go to more tournaments.
Aldwin: Share spreadsheet about 2023 tournaments
Dave: If you win a qualifier, you’re good. This does mean that a lot of people have a shot. Even if you cannot go to 8-10 tournaments, you still have a good shot. I feel like this give me some confidence. Do we make it so that NAO is effectively required?
Bichen: Not really; you have to basically get top 8 in some tournament. And you should be good
Aldwin: Big selling point is that 1st gets direct entry
Dave: We are going to lop off the last 2 columns. The smallest tournament is no less than 32 and 24 people show up. We can add language their total qualifying points is NAO points plus top 3 they earn at qualifying tournaments.
Aldwin: Tournament sign up form. Two signed up. One is Seattle. The other is philly.
Dave: We can ratify Seattle.
Aldwin: Philly - 8 hanchan straight up no cut. Both clubs we should have full confidence.
Dave: What’s philly’s cap?
Aldwin: Can see responses in discord. Looking to get 50-99 people for Philly.
Dave: I’d like to get them listed as events on the NARMA website. Could get that set up soon. Could make a channel so multiple people.
Edwin: When is Philly?
Bichen: If it’s restricted by one geo region, then how does 2 NY clubs host?
Dave: We keep it and that’s just the reality of it. Clubs get one, we can review it on a case by case basis for more. Could target multiple memberships? We don’t want a situation where a 500-person club hosts a 64-person club every week. Another important thing is that if we want to move a “qualifying year” to a structure where all tournaments count, we can’t have that rule. If we have 3 year qualifying, we obviously cannot do just 1 tournament per club. We still have the ability to not ratify a tournament. Would be okay dropping that language.
Edwin: In theory, since we have final say, we do get a little fuzzy if we have to make that ruling since it’s our discretion. At the same time, do understand.
Dave: Hard to come up with rules that clearly covers it. We then come into that player rankings. Other games don’t have this problem. I don’t think this will be a problem.
Edwin: Now thinking of next iteration where we’re looking at multiple years. Tournaments that are older get counted less. I don’t want a convoluted formula. Something that people actually understand (if we do that). People having an ELO rating.
Dave: Danish had ELO system.
Edwin: Could use that perhaps. Start at 1200 or something and move from there.
Dave: the core thing the trying to limit this doesn’t make sense. We have veto power anyway.
Bichen: what if we have 4 ‘clubs’ in the bay area and Berkeley wants to host their open and PML wants to host their open in San Jose, is that okay?
Dave: 4 of us here are okay with this; we should bring it up to other people and see what they think. Make sure to ask people about tournament limitation change. Update website with approved language changes. Be quicker about posting minutes.