Decontention — when there are too many players, and none of them are demonstrably bad

For Immergleich, I set a hard limit of four players in any one session. I find that having five players makes the game noticeably lag compared to even the four player version. In contrast, I don’t notice much subjective slowdown when moving between three and four.

This raises a problem — if more than four want to play, who gets to? First-come-first-pleased is an obvious choice, but that’s too arbitrary. Instead, I propose a ranking system, where all the players in one rank get places before any in the rank below them. However, because I am a genius, even the ranking system has ranks. First:

1. People who had the opportunity to state their availability e.g. via a Doodle poll (and thus enabled me to arrange a session at all) and took it
2. People who did not have such an opportunity
3. People who had such an opportunity, and cast it to the four winds with a mocking laugh

And then, within each of the above:

1. Wanted to play in the last session, but were bumped (or willingly dropped out to let others play)
2. New players
3. Wanted to play in some previous session, but were bumped/dropped out, and haven’t played since
4. Didn’t play in the last session
5. Played in the last session

If we end up with an excess of players at the same rank (e.g. there are two at rank 5 for the last available slot) then tiebreak is first by total sessions played ever, and then random.