basically, when someone hosts an xhb, have a button for "i'm interested". this would be anonymous, but there would be an indicator under the countdown on the main screen showing how many people are interested in participating in the battle

i think this could be useful, mostly for hosts who can determine how many people want to enter their battle, in particular battles which take place a few days after they are created

yeees i really like this idea its small and its efficient

As I see it, the most important reason you'd want to know how many people are interested in an XHB is to decide when/if you should schedule it, so I'm not sure why it would be useful to have this information after it's already been scheduled.

well, it could be useful to gauge interest and help hosts know if they need to reschedule or something.

You could also create a poll on Discord before scheduling to gauge interest.

see that’s the funny thing…

i use irc for the most part

Yeah, but "for the most part" doesn't means "only" ; )

lol, fair

it does mean "only" for me

I think on the flipside, this could be used similar to a button for "joining" an ohb before it starts. That creates a bit of peer pressure to support an ohb if you want to participate in it and to make a song if you expressed your support for it. What I like about Botb is that there is no expectation towards anybody to join, leaving you complete freedom over where to participate in what.

replying to Tex

I think the issue with the Discord poll thing is that it'd just be flooded away by chat and also cause more reliance on Discord, I assume people would prefer a good mix of Discord IRC and communications on the site itself.
I still think the Discord poll idea is good though, maybe having a seperate channel only for putting polls of interest in or maybe making a thread in the main channel.

honestly thinking on it more, yeah, i actually really like the idea behind this. just a simple "interested" button on the homepage under pending battles. if someone's hosting a battle that's a few days away it can feel a little nebulous as to whether people are interested, especially relying on discord. not everyone's looking at the server all the time, and having something on the site itself would definitely be an improvement over relying on discord polls imo.

i have reservations about the particular suggestion that it could "help hosts know if they need to reschedule" - i feel that's taking too much liberty with the schedule as a whole. i don't like imagining the scenario where somebody sees only 1 interested attendee and asks to move it, then it only gets 1 interested attendee and they ask to move it, ad nauseam. this is, perhaps, over-careful - xhbs are small transient events by nature. traditionally we've asked people to assess interest before they host, esp if they are worried about saving their boons

adjusting the start time of a battle, especially close to when it's gonna start, can mean that somebody who planned their day around having that hour of spare time will find their plan totally shot (regardless of whether they pressed this hypothetical button), which is a bummer & might turn them away needlessly. we mostly only shuffle things around now to avoid scheduling conflicts or hostist unexpected unavailability (and i remember when only puke could adjust start times; admins doing this is a relatively new feature). the schedule isn't rigid and unchangeable, but we should still strive for as much consistency as possible, to produce consistently good experiences with our events.

if attendance is the main goal here, i think it'd be more worthwhile to revive the old conversation around discord roles for different formats + being pinged for specific format xhbs if you have the role for it (or something similar). and yes that's another discord-specific feature, but the site-side alternative would be a mess to code i'd think, and we only have one puke7

i guess what i'm trying to say here is - as a host, an xhb is a commitment... a small one, but still one you should be confident you can make when you host it. if maximizing attendance is important to you then gather your team prior; otherwise just show up at the scheduled time and hope for the best!

that begs another question though, specifically around discord.

many people have expressed their recent disdain towards the platform and there's a chance that maybe this place gets relocated or linked to another chat room site. who knows? maybe flash forward a year or two and botb's chats will be located elsewhere. so reliance on discord features is a bit of a sticky situation, and once again causes trouble. for instance, what if the platform goes down like it does every once in a while? how would we make it fairer for irc users who want to use said feature? how would they be added to ping roles? i could go on but I think my point is made clear.

i could see a couple of solutions made to this:
1. create a thread of some type to specifically discuss ohbs and what formats people would be interested in. maybe even a new thread category. this wouldn't be super taxing on the site itself.
2. create a separate irc channel specifically for xhb hosting related chatter and link it to the discord. this has already been done with the recent #botb_bot_dojo channel in order to prevent clutter in the main #botb chat, and is a possibility. the only major problem I could see here is that irc does not have a poll feature, and the discord bridge most likely would not be able to properly "translate" discord poll messages into irc (not to mention reactions aren't visible on irc anyways, so you wouldn't be able to see this)

digressing a bit, I think the reason this would be important is that this site particularly needs a way to gauge interest, preferably on-site or in some way easily accessible between all the chats without creating specific reliance on discord features which could hamper users based on their situations. the reason I feel this would be important is due to the lack of participation and coordination with minor battle hosting, which I've become more aware of since I've started participating in and hosting xhbs of my own of late. if anyone has any other suggestions i'd be happy to hear and discuss them here, but this is a topic which I think deserves further discussion and thinking.

| ...this site particularly needs a way to gauge interest...

this is what the chat is for. you log on to the chat and say "hello my friends would anyone like to do a (format) at (time)" and when 2 people say "yeah" you schedule it. This has worked for 20 years.

| the lack of participation and coordination with minor battle hosting

Where

i think i remember when I was hosting my road to mt-32 stuff, i just made a thread on here gauging interest for the batols and that could be another way if you refuse to use discord (understandably)

every once in a while there is a thread like this one, suggesting ways to improve battle organization etc.
I'm not against new ideas for site features, don't get me wrong, but when it comes to this topic, I always wonder why we need it. did we get a recent drop in battle activity? I would say it is the opposite. since I joined, we got dozens of battles more per day, we have hundreds of entries more per month and therefore the amount of successful battles is a lot higher than it used to be.

with more activity, there will be more activity.
people will check the website a lot more regularly if they already know that there will be 10 new battles scheduled. people will also hang out more in the chats if there is chatting already going on.

most of these requested features would make more sense if we would have a lack of participation. when noone checks the site in a day and there are no chat participants around to ask.

as others said before, the way to go is: ask for interest before hosting the battle (chat, thread, on botbr profiles. via email - it all happened before) and if you're sure that you have a decent amount of interested people, host your event.
or make it a series where you host it at a regular time. no matter if it saves its boons or not - eventually, people get used to the schedule and plan ahead (happens for damis remix battles for example)

never change a running system - the way battles are handled did not change a lot in the past 20 years and there has been an ongoing growth in activity anyway.

regarding this specific request: I don't know if I like it. even if there was a need to boost battle planning and participation, a button like this would cause similar issues to simply asking in a thread or a chat.
what if I see the battle. click the button and then log out and forget about it?
what if I don't click it, but still want to participate, but the host reschedules it because no one rememberd to click the button?
does it matter?
a battle with low participation sucks. I know that myself. but hey it's just an XHB. ask someone for more boons and host ur next one.

>proposes idea
>idea immediately gets shot down because of tradition

forget i asked lol

i know it can be frustrating, but try not to let it get you down - this website is 20 years old, and while it makes all sorts of progress, growth and development as it goes, it overall moves at a snail's pace, and it's developed by one person. it's super normal to join up, spend some time here and have some of your own ideas about what could improve the site. i had them, you have them, whoever's reading this has probably had them. heck, some of my earliest feature requests only got implemented within the last year or so and i've been here almost five years. if this idea ends up having staying power, it'll be revisited at some point; if it doesn't, it won't. i know that responses opposing your suggestion can make you feel bad, but there really was (and is) no harm in making the suggestion, and conversations like this are good in general.

I concede that I worded my comment harshly but we didn't shoot you down, we just asked you questions... and if you can't answer fundamental questions about your idea like "why do we need that," it's not a very good idea, is it - which isn't an insult - I come up with bad ideas every day

For what it's worth, I think the idea of an "I'm interested" button SOMEWHERE could be useful if you tie it to a sort of "boon insurance". My thought is, if you would bonloss, you instead get a portion (or maybe even all, if there's enough people) of your deposit back, pulled from the boon balances of the people who clicked the button and thus, insured you and your XHB.

It's definitely not a huge issue that needs fixing, and I'm not gonna pretend it is, but I will say that fear of a bonloss is something I've felt ever since I hosted BossBattles #6. I found a group of about 4 other people who said they were interested, but when the compo time came nobody other than me showed up and one of those same people ended up paying me back the bonloss in full.

Now this idea isn't REALLY compatible with an "I'm interested" button on a battle that's already scheduled, seeing as the boons are already spent and overhauling all that is DEFINITELY way too big a change to be realistic. I also get that yeah, boonlossing is part of hosting, but it's just a liiiiiiiittle too much on the honor system sometimes for my liking.

So yeah, maybe some sort of seperate button on the Beghast XHB page that (instead of hosting) sends the XHB to a seperate page where people can mark their interest in potential battles-- maybe it costs boons to do so even still, but much less than hosting cost. Maybe it's free, but there's a time-based cooldown to prevent spamming of the page, maybe it's just free and the Mighty requirement for hosting is good enough to prevent abuse. Just some thoughts ig.

i like this version of the idea cause it makes it actually a little bit of a commitment by serving some "function" in "the game of botb". maybe it ought to pay you a small share of boons too if the battle is successful and you entered it yourself

ah, good idea, matt. well hey, at least i got the ball rolling for some discussion a little bit. and to the rest of you, no hard feelings! i don't feel offended by my idea not being super well received in the slightest - it wasn't like a demand or anything, just a brainstorm

i think in general though, a sort of insurance (whether boonitary or normal) would be nice. it can be extremely disappointing, especially for say a first time hostist, to put a lot of effort into an idea for a battle and then it gets shot down.

that being said, battle idea propositions might not be the best idea, because then what if someone prepares an xhb entry for, say, an allgear ahead of time because the concept for it was proposed already? i think that would probably lend itself to some cheating. best solution i can think of is it'd just be the bitpack, so the actual battle title would remain private and you wouldn't know WHEN the bitpack would appear, therefore giving a bit more secrecy.

either way, some way to gauge ideas for battles and see if they would be relevant is certainly something that would be cool to see.


or heck, why not just keep it the same as before? i'm half kidding, but maybe the preexisting "element of surprise" aspect is alright too.

The real killer feature here would be if I could click an "i'm interested" button on an upcoming xhb and the site would send me a reminder (alert/email/whatever) when it gets close to battle time.

To be fair, I have noticed that asking in chat to gauge interest is not a super reliable method. Sometimes nobody answers but you get a bunch of participants anyway, or vice versa. Theoretically an RSVP button might help if people are using the site but not reading chat...but in practice it would probably be just as unreliable.

As kleeder notes, lack of activity is not currently a problem anyway... I think it's fine to just host when it's convenient for you and not sweat the boonlosses as botbrs are always happy to help cover those.

to be honest with my very limited free time i basically just pop on the site, if there's any ongoing battle that i'm interested in i'll try and enter it, otherwise i won't :)