exactly what chloe said.

If you say worked just fine, you forget about the hundreds of players that we probably lost because they were disgusted by the heavy pga/otf play on the higher tables back in the "good old days"

Most of the people that read this forum are generally players that play (and like) the higher tables. The people that ask for more strict table limits are also the people that play the higher tables. So we're not getting the full picture here imo and we also have to look at it from the casual player's point of view.

I agree that we need the players from the lower tables to ease into the higher tables but I don't think forcing them is the way to go. We need more productive incentives like good risk/reward (the 200/500 kill bonus was a good idea for example). Players from the top tables can also contribute by being friendly towards new players or try and recruit people at the lower tables.

I just checked the top100 from last month. At first glance, I don't see many players that medalled by only playing 100/500. So honestly, I don't see why we should force people to give up their way of having fun.

"At first glance, I don't see many" is a pretty weak way to admit that it happens. It shouldn't happen at all. And from the new player perspective, seeing a team of experienced folks descend upon you if you dare to play a 0 table after 15.00 CET isn't going to make the game attractive.

yet, in the "horrible old days" when everyone PGA'd/OTF'd the higher tables and all those poor casual players "left in disgust", there were about 10 times more people playing the game. Multiple 2k/5k tables running as well as tons of 500, 100, 0s at the same time. People actually had to get assimilated with the giver table, because friends with people there and became better players because of it. Most of us didn't start in 07, we starting playing higher tables and became good, got to know people. This way they just sit at their 0s, not making the site any money, btw, since no of them are members. While 90% of the "disgusting", "cheating" top players have left, and we can't start a 2k for five hours. Huge improvement, of course.

There's no data presented on what tables people are playing, so we have to make some guesses and assumptions about what would make someone likely to have medaled by playing lower tables. 1st place on a 500 is 625+dom+100 per kill. A 100 table is +250 for first. 86 of last month's top 100 earned 250 PPG or fewer. Gorbat Jovi, for example, earned 51% of their points at tables. Those 129 tables led to a PPG of 95. All of these could easily be 100s, 500s, or both. 19 of the top 100 earned most (more than half) of their points at tables. Of those, 8 had PPGs below 250. Any or all of those people could have earned their points at lower tables.

"I don't see why we should force people to give up their way of having fun."
If you're playing for fun but are actually SO GOOD that you're INCAPABLE of staying below table limits you can make an alt. It's literally that simple. You're not taking away any fun at all.

I don't think throwing people on lower tables with very experienced players is at all welcoming. I'd be really interested to see this site's retention numbers, with cohorts based on number of games played, points, average point balance of players on the table. You want to grow this site? Throwing people to the wolves the way this system allows and encourages is not the way to do it.

And yeah, I'm not saying the old system didn't have problems- it sure did. But people were playing higher level tables, and you still had to sit 7 at a table then. The problems that existed weren't caused by table limits. they were caused by this site's poorly structured rules and loose modding.

If you remember the table limits of old, they were pretty generous. No one's gonna force you to play a 100 as soon as you have 150 points or some shit. iirc the limit for 0s was 1000. the limit for 100s was 5000. I think? the limit for 500s was something like 20k. You've got to play a lot of 0 tables to get to 1000 points when you're learning.

Cool G: you are right that at the peak of Kdice, there were probably 10 times more players compared to now. There were also 10 times more 2k/5k being played. So we still have the same pyramid in the system. No harsh table limits are needed for it.

Chloe: I'm pretty sure that the players who are actually really good don't stay at the 500 tables and go to the 2k tables on their own initiative. What is the problem with the few that prefer to stay on the 500s?

I partly see where the people that demand more strict table limits are coming from but no one has given me a good argument why it makes sense to force people to play the higher stakes if they don't want to.

Again, I do agree that we need more 2ks and 5ks to start but not at the expense of the other tables. We just need more players everywhere.

Here's something to think about: if you look at the current player pool and the average amount of points you need to win gold and compare that to the peak of KDice, something strange is going on if you want to argue that more 5ks happened back then. There is indeed some extra point inflation because of the kill bonus and there are more freerolls now but you clearly see that these points still find their way to the top players since the average to win gold in the last 6 months is still above 200k. A few years back, 200k was a high score too.

this thread was started on sep 7th, so very early in the month. You can claim that there were more 2ks a few years back but nobody is going to convince me that 2ks happened all day long in the first 10 days of a month. I recall 2ks picking up around the 10th and 5ks becoming the norm roughly after the 20th.

Well it's late and I should have reread my post before posting. After writing my last paragraphs, I'm actually not so sure any more that back in the good old days we had 10 times more 5ks than we do now.

Too bad we don't have actual data on this to discus this with the right data, but my gut tells me that maybe the difference in 2k/5k games isn't as big as I originally thought.

So, Jurgen, if I'm reading this right, you're supposing that players who are very good will naturally play higher tables. You're also supposing that players WANT to play lower tables because they're just playing for fun. These two things, for any single player, are mutually exclusive. With reasonable table limits implemented, those playing just for fun should be able to play whatever tables they want. Those playing competitively are pushed to play at higher tables once they break certain thresholds.

It also appears I need to repeat myself: I don't think throwing people on lower tables with very experienced players is at all welcoming. I'd be really interested to see this site's retention numbers, with cohorts based on number of games played, points, average point balance of players on the table. You want to grow this site? Throwing people to the wolves the way this system allows and encourages is not the way to do it. As a new player, I never wanted to sit a 0 table with anyone with more than 1-2,000 points. I have no actual numbers to back this up, but my impression is that the proportion of 0 tables where no one playing has more than 1k points is pretty small. Previously, that proportion was almost 100% because of table limits (there were some exceptions made for members.).

Here's some numbers, comparing August 2015 to August 2013 to August 2010. In August 2015, 19 of the top 100 players earned more than half their points on tables. In August 2013, 39 of the top 100 did that. In 2010, it was 72. Aug 2015 saw 21 players who had a negative PPG and earned their points instead from tournaments, membership, and point boosts. Aug 2013 saw only 13 of those players. August 2010 saw 2. In 2015, the top 100 played a total of 14,769 games. In 2013, they played 23,668 games. In 2010, it was 24,777. So I'd definitely say that when table limits were in place, a lot more games were played at a higher level. Most of those games would have been played at higher level tables.

I'm too lazy to do the math, but Chloe since you're being so awesome in this thread....

Looking at the tourney history pages, estimate the total number of points injected into the system each month, and check the difference between August 2015 and some month from a couple years back. My wager is that, while the top 100 are approximately maintaining their monthly scores (or even inflating them, as jurgs has pointed out), this is totally due to extra tourney juicing. My guess is points due to regular table juicing (0 tables) has gone wayyyy down, and even with the addition of kill bonuses, I bet it has still decreased.

Anyways, I think Ryan is, for some reason, trying to maintain the idea that the site is same today as several years ago, as far as player numbers... by continually adding methods to inject free points to make up for the shrinking player pool.

Sorry if this is offbase/tangential.

August 2015: 2,927,184 points from tournaments/membership/boosts among the top 100
August 2013: 1,518,310 (basically half of the 2015 number)
August 2010: 1,166,925 (approximately 3/8ths of the 2015 number)