I propose that every point task should present the option of writing 200 or more words about your player character instead of the prompt. There are many reasons for this, chief among them the difficulty in meeting the prompts sometimes (particularly for newer members) and the fact that this league is and always has been, "dungeons and dragons, but football"
I could quite easily trot out the number of people I have spoken to who have admitted to struggling with this particular prompt as evidence -- for the record, its four people on ONE team alone; extrapolation isn't accurate but if we assume each team has twelve actives, and the proportions are the same on each team, that's 33% of the ACTIVE userbase struggling to complete point tasks. You don't need to be good at mathematics to know that this does not bode well for league-wide user retention -- but instead I want to point to how much this problem could equate to, across the average player career, either lost TPE, or time wasted on low quality writing.
If we say there are five point tasks per season, and the average player can make it to season eight, that's forty point tasks. Forty times three is 120 TPE potentially lost. That's not a small amount. If you were a casual earner, picking up activity checks and cheap training only every week, you'd lose roughly that much in your first year of regression.
Let's look at this in terms of time spent. 200 words is doable in about 15 minutes realistically for most people. The actual time taken will vary on the difficulty of finding something to fit the prompt, and how quickly you type of course, but 15 minutes is a reasonable estimate. Across forty point tasks, that's ten hours spent writing about shit you don't want to write about. I don't think we should be making people spent that amount of time doing things they clearly don't want to do. Instead, let them write freely about their player character. That's why a lot of us are here, after all. To develop and/or roleplay a character.
I could quite easily trot out the number of people I have spoken to who have admitted to struggling with this particular prompt as evidence -- for the record, its four people on ONE team alone; extrapolation isn't accurate but if we assume each team has twelve actives, and the proportions are the same on each team, that's 33% of the ACTIVE userbase struggling to complete point tasks. You don't need to be good at mathematics to know that this does not bode well for league-wide user retention -- but instead I want to point to how much this problem could equate to, across the average player career, either lost TPE, or time wasted on low quality writing.
If we say there are five point tasks per season, and the average player can make it to season eight, that's forty point tasks. Forty times three is 120 TPE potentially lost. That's not a small amount. If you were a casual earner, picking up activity checks and cheap training only every week, you'd lose roughly that much in your first year of regression.
Let's look at this in terms of time spent. 200 words is doable in about 15 minutes realistically for most people. The actual time taken will vary on the difficulty of finding something to fit the prompt, and how quickly you type of course, but 15 minutes is a reasonable estimate. Across forty point tasks, that's ten hours spent writing about shit you don't want to write about. I don't think we should be making people spent that amount of time doing things they clearly don't want to do. Instead, let them write freely about their player character. That's why a lot of us are here, after all. To develop and/or roleplay a character.
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