It’s been determined that we won’t change the hall names or rearrange their order for any reason because:
- The hall names are unique to anything else in our server, so they are immediately identifiable as the place where playtesting tables live. i.e. There’s no partners forum thread or anything else that has the same name.
- Having names that are unrelated to gaming avoids giving the impression the Halls are anything more than a label for finding your seat more quickly.
- Making any hall specific for any type of game or game group isn’t a good option because it's not reasonable to ask mods to keep track of sending certain types of games to certain halls. The LFG mod has plenty to keep track of already.
- Balancing tables evenly between halls makes for the best user experience. If we used game type to determine which hall you used, some halls would be empty while others were overcrowded.
- The mountain-themed Hall names can be arranged in one consistent, alphabetical order attendees and mods can get used to as they attend repeat events.
- Upon review in Feb 2024, some name adjustments were made because the "Mt X" vs "X Peak" inconsistency was making the alphabetical pattern hard to grok.
- The 3 that had the "Mt. X" form were changed to Capitol Peak, Humboldt Peak, and Quandary Peak and placed in their new spots alphabetically.
- The moderator handbook calls out Torrey's Peak by name as the Hall people can use soundboards in. While we could remove the need to update the handbook each time we changed hall names by making the callout "the hall at the bottom," it's much clearer and easier to remember when the hall has a consistent name mods and attendees can key into.
- We don't want to make adding or removing halls a regular practice because each one needs to be configured with the Auto Voice Channels bot and our custom open/close halls bot (both of which have already been troublesome to keep working for different reasons). The high number of settings and the inability to duplicate existing categories or channels in Discord means it's easy to make setup mistakes that lead to a bad experience for attendees and stressful emergency fixes during convention go-live for our team.
Sponsored Halls Setup:
Name Channel Categories for Sponsors? (no)
See above.
Name "Create New Table" Channel Statuses for Sponsors? (no)
Voice Channel Status appears to only be editable by someone who is actively using the channel. Since the Create New Table voice channels immediately disconnect the person who clicks them and put them in a new voice channel, the Create New Table channels can't have a status applied.
Name "Create New Table" Channels for Sponsors? (no)
Having a consistent name that describes what these voice channels do makes the table creation instructions easier to explain and follow. We don't want to mess with that flow.
Add a New Channel to Each Hall and Name it for Sponsors (yes)
Because the #current-table-chat channels have been showing up inconsistently for attendees, we’ve turned off the auto-creation of these channels. The chat in the table voice channels will now be the only place to share game join links.
With #current-table-chat gone, a new sponsored forum channel added to each Hall would be the only non-voice channel in each Hall. Non-voice channels automatically show above voice channels, which works well for visibility.
Adding these channels as empty places with no useful purpose feels like it would take up space without providing value, which wouldn't show the sponsors in a good light. To address that, we’ve assigned an activity to each of these channels. We may adjust the lineup of activities over time, but we’ve identified functional bots or come up with a very simple directive for the following set of activities we’ll launch with: