I hope things continue as they are. Nothing about the game needs fixing as far as I can tell, except more of my picks need to die.
And I do agree that an announcement of a significant change to come in several months followed by"my way or the highway" doesn’t bode well.
Only it was more “I don’t like doing it that way, so I’m going to do it this way, a way I feel more comfortable with and I apologize to anyone who wishes it was the other way”. I’d think the host of it would/should have that right. You seem to have taken it as more of a “Well, tough, this is how it is whether you like it or not” when I meant it as more of “Eh, I hear your ideas and think they have merit, but I’m still going to do it this way…still, thanks for your input!”
It was a viable explanation of why I hadn’t replied for awhile.
Well, I apologize that it felt that way. I sincerely didn’t mean for that to happen.
As I said:
Chances are, I am going to keep everything as is, save for changing the scoring from a ranking system to just “this person has xxx points” “this person has xxx points”.
Okay…
So…
Someone just PMed me alerting me to THIS fact…the fact that how I want to score it, starting next year, is exactly how it really was done, originally.
That post by a35362 is exactly how I was trying to describe how my way of scoring would be. It would be done the same way as in that post.
I didn’t even know that before two minutes ago, everyone kept saying to me “No, no, the scoreboard was always written this way.” I mean, I was starting to feel a little bad for changing such a long time tradition, but I just couldn’t help but like my scoring method better… I feel much better knowing that’s how it was from the start, from the person who began the Death Pool.
Now, that way may still be the “wrong” way to do it, but I feel it should give me a bit more of a pass from people upset that I apparently want to change it at all. : p
Well, saying this is “how I’m going to do it if I’m running it”, even “if it bothers people to the point of not being able to play,” certainly is what I’d call ‘my way or the highway.’
Clearly this bothers A LOT of players, yet you’re set in your decision, and dragging up every argument you can find for sticking with it, when the main issue isn’t whether we did it before, sometime in the distant past, or which way is really the better way, but which way people LIKE.
That’s not good.
Each of the previous hosts has brought their own style to the scoreboard and we’ve never really expected to be included in deciding what that will be before now, to the best of my recollection. If Idle Thoughts goes back to the original style used by the first three hosts then I won’t really care, any more than I did when Baker switched to the current style several years into her run… Well, ok, I do remember being mildly indignant when that happened because it instantly dropped my ranking by quite a significant number 
It’s not really a big deal, it doesn’t affect the way the game is played, and if next year’s scores had been formatted that way without any prior notice, would anyone have even bothered to say anything?
In short, it’s really not too huge a deal. So if it IS that huge of a deal for you, then…I don’t know what to tell you.
FWIW, I took over from Little Nemo, who brought the game to the SDMB.
RTFirefly, what is your deal? 
And you are basically calling for a coup unless it stays the way you want. I think you should look around. The queue with the torches and pitchforks is not forming behind you. Some people prefer it the way it is being done right now. Most don’t care very much.
The only thing I really dislike is how those who are not close to any real definition of celebrity sneak in and usually are the difference in winning. I edit myself and never put in anyone without a decent level of fame. It’s not a matter of “You should have researched better.” Right now the only hope is that someone more anal than me will check everyone’s picks and bring up a challenge. And that person better not have anything better to do New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. It sort of takes the fun out of it when someone submits a list on NYE with the 3rd string lacrosse player from Podunk U who dies with 80 points. “Well you should have researched better or challenged it while you were spending time with your family during the holiday.” No one wants to be the one dick that checks everyone’s list. I know I don’t want to be. I don’t really know a solution.
OK – I’m going to suggest something that could or could not be possible and could or could not be fun but ------- how about a running list at the end of each year of posters who have never gotten any points? Has anyone gone 10 years without a pick actually taking the Big Dirt Nap? 5 Years? Get a point and you go off the list of Eternal Virgins. We get a lot of jokes about Swampbear but how does he actually compare up against others?
First time reading this thread. I could get behind this, with the caveat that one cannot nominate their own posts.
This is an old thread but for future versions.
I assume that the DM has a list in a database or spreadsheet of everyone’s picks. It would be easy to extract from that a list of all picks without duplicates. That could be posted in early January with a limited challenge period. That eliminates the problem of scanning pages of lists. Successful challenges could be filled from alternates. If you have more than three entries successfully challenged, you are out of luck. No points if an alternate has already died prior to the challenge.
FWIW, I am not playing this year and have never had more than one person on my list make the sacrifice for my points.
Searching for local celebrities and minor foreign officials is points-lucrative but not in the spirit of the game. Of course, my idea of the spirit of the game is not universal or binding.
Loach raised this same point earlier, and his solution is self-policing. My problem with his solution is that once in a game, it’s only natural to try to do as best as one can within the rules of the game.
Whatever solution is proposed to the “who is really a celebrity, for Death Pool purposes?” question, there has to be a reasonable way to operationalize it. Rather than the free-for-all challenge period you suggest, where no pick was unquestionably valid until the end of the challenge period, I think there has to be some way of being sure that most of one’s picks are good.
CAMJAY77 has suggested whether or not a person has a Wikipedia page as such a standard. If it was up to me, I’d start with that, but I’d make it more of a rebuttable-presumption sort of thing: if someone’s pick has a Wikipedia page, it would be up to another player to make a strong case that that pick really wasn’t a celebrity. And if someone had a pick that didn’t have a Wikipedia page, it would be up to them to make the case, at the time that the player submitted his/her list, that this person was indeed a celeb.
But within that context, I like the idea of a challenge period in early January.
Another couple of suggestions, both exclusions:
If someone is known only for being one of the last surviving members of some larger group that was well-known as a group, I think they should be ineligible as a pick. For instance, if you’ve picked the last of the Navajo code talkers, but this person wasn’t well-known on his own before his comrades mostly kicked the bucket, then that person isn’t a celebrity AFAIAC.
Assuming that in some future year the complete exclusion of persons of age 100 or greater is reversed, persons who are known primarily for their longevity should be excluded, just as we exclude persons who are famous primarily for being sick. (IOW, no more picking a batch of supercentenarians to win the ‘most unique picks’ category. Andrew 21 demonstrated that it was easily do-able, but it’s not exactly interesting; in fact, it wasn’t even interesting enough to him to use that approach a second time.)
The closing period needs to be extended, especially when the new year falls over a weekend. We’re so used to instantaneous news that we need to remember that some news isn’t. A week after New Year seems reasonable to me.
I would like to see some method of encouraging early participation. Otherwise it’s mostly just a bunch of people posting on New Year’s Eve. There could be an award for the most followed pick, or bonus points could be awarded based on the date of the posting of the list, or bonus points could be awarded on the number of people who jump on the bandwagon.
I’ve always thought that a day was a bit short. Sometimes deaths don’t get reported for a few days. I think anything less than three days isn’t realistic, and I could live with a longer closing period. It’s not like we couldn’t wait a week for the standings to be finalized.
Here’s an idea: excluding any picks from the previous year, the first person to include a celeb on their list gets one bonus point for each Death Pooler who hops on the bandwagon, IF the celeb dies that year.
For instance, assuming this rule was already in use, and nobody had Gord Downie on their 2016 lists: if Gord dies in March 2017 at the age of 53, then Happy Lendervedder, as the first person to put Gord on his list, would get 83 points - 47 points as usual, plus 36 points because 36 people besides Happy put Gord on their lists.
Might have to limit these bonus points to the first one or two eligible celebs on your list who die, to keep it from distorting things too much.