After 6 rounds of The Great Debates, I'd love to get some feedback from you guys. What I'm looking for is what you like and what you don't. Every round has been a little different as I try to tweak things to make them more interesting.
So any feedback you have would be most welcome. What aspects or rounds did you especially like? Would you like to see more of a particular kind of question? What sort of format did you like the best? And so on.
Thanks for your help, everyone. I'll do my best to accommodate every (reasonable) suggestion herein.
Well, all of our strengths as debaters was put to the test. However I do believe some of the 6 debates were a bit imbalanced during this round. But of course this is natural when attempting to let as many people as possible debate their first choice of question.
Also, while I am in favor of setting a deadline and keeping it, this time the timeframe was too short. Maybe 3 or 4 weeks would have been better, also extending the time available to respond (with everyone working, going to school, college and the like, it was a bit rough keeping up!. I only managed to respond generally quickly because I happened to be slightly ill the first week, but I saw some justified late responses from many debaters).
Anyway, aside from that, I loved them. They had a good mix of fun and serious questions, scientific matters and a lot of great arguments. So, I think it was great
Of course, all of this is my opinion! It worked out as best as it could with the parameters placed!
As promised to you, some feedback if you ever got this thread going on.
On the contrary, I fell like two weeks was a bit too long, especially since you have to read through everyone's arguments. It's also too long since users are given aren't given a limit to how many times they can post. I would be okay with having a longer time, but there should be a limit to how many times you are allowed to post. Why? So that there is a fair amount of times users can argue against each other, maybe limiting to ten posts each?
I much liked the turn based debating system better, the one used in the round before this one, though the two post limit wasn't that great.
As a suggestion, perhaps maybe teams? Randomly selected debaters. Two teams, one topic. Everyone's insight on a single topic will really heat things up, which is how some really good debates are done. Though communication may be a problem, to organize and help teammates out, but I think it still makes things more challenging, so perhaps assigning subtopics from the main topic at hand to each user in a team is a good idea. For example, the main topic would be "AG should have a chat". The sub-topics would be like "The hypothetical chat would encourage spam", "The hypothetical chat would be hard to moderate", "the hypothetical chat should just be a thread and not a facebook styled chat, or public chat", OR "With the chat, comments section will more intended for it's purpose to avoid game comments section chats that aren't related to the game at all." With 4 sub-topics like these, that's already 8 users in all. One user for one sub topic, and one user against it. In the end, the team that has the best arguments all in all wins the round.
Also, perhaps adding in more controversial topics, to really bring up the mood and intensity, a topic that is "great" for the great debates. Not just requiring logical thinking, but also research, sources and true understanding of what is being talked about. Perhaps topics like knighthood, now that brings in some real controversy, as seen in the "What is a Knight Thread". But that's just an example.
