Pending Draw more attention to new ladders on PS

[Isaiah]

I was thinking it would be cool if we advertised the addition of new ladders (including temporary ones) to PS. Yes, it's true that any community pushing for a ladder's addition will inevitably talk amongst themselves to get each other to play it, but this misses out on a lot of more casual (and dare I say ignorant) playerbase that won't notice these things without explicit encouragement.

Some ways this could happen:
- A [NEW] tag (with color...? idk, this was Irpachuza's take on it) in the format selector dropdown
- My suggestion would be some kind of bulletin on the homepage that's synced with the addition of new ladders, maybe? Kind of like News, except to decrease workload for admins over time, maybe it's somehow synced to whenever the line(s) of code that "activate" a ladder are hotpatched into the server? And then the bulletin would be like "NEW LADDER ADDED IN OTHER METAGAMES: [Gen 35] Your Mom" or something. Or, pick some people to maintain a "new ladder advertisements" thread and whitelist them to update the bulletin on PS, surely you'd get volunteers (I'd be one of them). Plus, it's not like we add new ladders every day, so this probably wouldn't be awfully active.


I should point out that this is primarily intended to support stuff like when we got LGPE ladder, or BDSP ladder, Pet Mod of the Season, OMOTM/LCOTM, Randbats Spotlight, that [Gen 3] LC ladder that just got added but is unfortunately hidden away in the UM dropdown, etc. Obviously, we don't need a mini-announcement for gen crossover (although, it wouldn't hurt to add sometihng like "All ladders have been updated to the current generation: Apples and Oranges (or whatever they call the next game)!"

Anyway, maybe Someone That Knows How To Code can think of a better way to implement this than my theorycrafting, but I think anything that helps out our less front-facing ladders (not every ladder is randbats or OU, after all) is worth pursuing.

 

[Felucia]

A sticky field on the PS news with recently added formats would accomplish this in a relatively simple way

 

[Irpachuza]

- A [NEW] tag (with color...? idk, this was Irpachuza's take on it) in the format selector dropdown

Well, when you mentioned it I instantly imagined this:

 

[Isaiah]

Well, when you mentioned it I instantly imagined this:
View attachment 591341

This makes sense, although my concern would be the nature of dropdowns being de-selected by default means you often won't actually know there's a new ladder to look at unless you click around. I'd totally be down for your suggested implementation + some kind of open announcement feature like I suggested, though

 

[Felucia]

I don't think adding it to the formats dropdown would be a great idea for a few reasons. Most notably the UI there is already quite cluttered and as such it's also going to actually be hard to draw people's attention to it without impacting the user experience somehow. For long format names, this [new] field would get in the way of easy navigation, making it harder to quickly read those format names (red text being an issue for colourblind readability doesn't help). If it's listed in the formats dropdown at all, I would recommend a new group called "Recently Added" on the top of the list which contains exactly what it says it does. The only concern here would be that it might take up too much space, as new formats get added quite frequently, again making the feature potentially intrusive for the large portion of the playerbase that just wants to find and play OU and randbats.

tldr: I'd prefer it in PS news, which to be fair new OMOTM already get placed in, so even without technical changes maybe this one is solvable on the policy side of things.

Edit: I would even consider taking this a step further and splitting the PS news into sections (format news, tournament news, room news, other news) to give more visibility to each without impacting the others. I've been thinking about the news and its usage a lot lately, but haven't come to a conclusive enough idea to make a decision

 

[G-Luke]

I agree with the above take. Speaking primarily from the angle of Pet Mod of The Season, that toggle so for down even if the shiny [New] was there, most players would be disinterested in scrolling that far down for something, especially since smaller metas like that people aren't even lookin towarss for new additions to drop it down in the first place.

Something like a news bulletin for "Recently Added Formats" would achieve the goal in a much more efficient manner.

 

[grape tylenol]

[Gen 3] LC has had a ladder 3 times now, and the current ladder has been far more popular than the previous ladders despite only being up for 3 weeks so far versus a month for the previous ladders (the first ladder had 2840 games, the second ladder had around 2854 games, the current ladder had a little over 7113 games!) I think having the announcement really helped the ladder activity, but I wanted to chime in and point out another thing I think really helped was having a link to resources in the tier in the announcement. I think an announcement + a link to the tier resources in said announcement should be more than sufficient to make people aware of and get playing on new ladders!

 

[R8]

What about adding a "Only show temporary ladders" checkbox? Would that be something doable?