Is the wait time for your favorite game getting you down just a little bit? Getting a little sick of sending in your orders, then not hearing back for a while? Sick of the same old kingdom? Think you want more challenge?
The credit for the idea that led up to this goes to Mic Duggan and Joe Naftali, who did something similar to get HW580 started. It had its problems, but it was challenging, and we got set up fast! I thought: why not automate it, and put it up for all to use?
The game Organizer is intended to be a way for readers of this page to get into challenging games faster, by quickly bringing together interested people and sending them as a single group, already organized, to RSI. This has the bonus effect of eliminating the lag time RSI usually requires to set up these games, and they're willing to cut us a 10% discount for this as well.
There are, of course, a few strings attached. For the privledge of that discount, RSI requires that you stay in the game at least 10 turns. If you drop before turn 10, you cost everyone the extra $$$. That would be bad, especially if they knew where you lived. For his time and effort, Crom demands a minimum donation of $5 to the Cimmerian Libation Society. The last is simple: the kingdom assignments are completely random, so you could get ANY KINGDOM!!! There are a bunch of reasons for doing this, but the two biggest are the challenge of a potentially poor starting position, and the fact that it can be done with no human interference in the selection process. You could get Argos...or you could get Darfar. This also has the effect of getting some of the less-played kingdoms into more playing time. Who knows? You might find that you're actually GOOD at playing these kingdoms! To make things more interesting for repeat players, you can never get the same kingdom twice until you've played all 36 positions. Even our resident addict, Steve Smith, has been in only a dozen or so games, so there's little danger of a repeat anytime soon. Oh, and by the way, the Organizer is for regular-speed games only. Sorry, the slow ones just didn't work out.
Here's how it works.
There have now been many Organized games started, and most folks are enjoying the new challenge immensely. There have, however, been a few problems come up that could potentially spoil further games. Specifically, a few people have joined the games and committed themselves to the process, then pulled out halfway through when they received an "undesirable" kingdom, or one that they didn't like. Part of the fun of these games is trying to win with a kingdom that you normally wouldn't play, or wouldn't consider winnable; pulling out is also desperately unfair to the vast majority of players who DO play by the rules. So a very simple rule has been enacted for this eventuality: if you sign up for a game, go through the confimation process, receive a kingdom, and THEN drop, you will NEVER BE ALLOWED TO USE THE ORGANIZER AGAIN. This is more than sufficient punishment in my mind, as most folks who've played this way don't want to go back to the boring fights against computer-controlled PK's.
A bit on the privacy games: HW009 was kind of an experiment to see how well an all-privacy game would do. In that case we had the ROKs as a sounding board for it, and it was a moderate success. Because of this, every once in a while we'll run another privacy game of some type.
Attention AOL'ers and folks with older or non-standard browsers: If you have a problem with the button above, just send an email to Crom with 'Organizer Start' in the subject line, and your name, email address, and customer number in the body of the message.
Organized games currently running:
Past Organized games: