And *poof*, a whole new pile of stupid awards appears

[jducoeur]

*Sigh*. I suppose I knew that the East would eventually follow so many other Kingdoms in adding Yet Another Freaking Layer of Awards. But man, I so don't approve -- with every passing year, the award system becomes simply an enormous list of merit badges. Their Majesties are good people, and well-intentioned, but IMO this is a significant mistake, that will do more harm than good.

OTOH, I suppose it's self-correcting: we're pretty much getting to the point where nobody has any ideas what the awards mean any more, so they're becoming irrelevant. (I mean, *I* can't remember a lot of them any more, and I'm a court junkie.) More and more people, far as I can tell, are coming to regard the award system as Just Plain Stupid, which does leave room to convince them to ignore the whole idiotic morass and concentrate on the game instead.

(Yes, I know -- I've lost this particular battle, and I have better things to do than beat the dead horse. But I'm going to allow myself one good grouse first...)

Comments

[dreda.livejournal.com]

The thing I note with interest is how many people at the lower "rungs" are really excited about this. People who are currently in the gap between pure AoA and an OHM.

So if the people at whom the awards are targeted and who will be *directly* affected are excited and enthusiastic, I find it a good thing.

[jducoeur]

On the one hand, I'm not astonished. Thing is, I think this is the wrong solution to a systemic problem. The East (and I suspect the SCA in general) is ungoing a continuous, *horrible* case of ever-rising bars.

I was chatting with Aaron about this the other day. He took the data from the OP and did a bit of quick statistical analysis on it. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the amount of time it takes between AoA and Peerage has been steadily rising, at a roughly linear rate, for the 15 years he analyzed.

So to me, this is basically a hack. It's dealing with a real problem, to be sure, that it has gotten *much* harder to get the mid-level awards. But the appropriate fix isn't over-complicating the system even more (and making it harder to get the higher-level awards as a result), it's to *fix our freaking standards*. I am *so* fed up with people whose standards for the Manche are higher than the standards were for a Laurel when I joined. *That* is the problem we should be fixing instead.

(Yes, yes -- shoulders of giants and all that. I hear that argument all the time, and it's largely misplaced. That says that the overall *results* should be rising over time. But the amount of *time and effort* it takes to achieve the awards should not be rising so dramatically, and that's the problem we're mostly ignoring here.)

And honestly -- I think most of the folks who are cheering for this don't really understand the side-effects it's going to have. I would bet that most of them would be less happy if they knew this will increase time-to-peerage even further, and most will claim to the high heavens that it won't do so. But fifty years of history says that it's near-certain to: when you add more levels, you exacerbate the step-ladder effect, and everything takes longer.

As I said at the top, I know I've lost this argument, and I don't plan to spend much time worrying about it. But I *am* exasperated at our inability to step back, actually look at our deeper problems and grapple with them seriously. Instead, we just keep applying surface patch after patch, creating an ever-more-baroque monstrosity while not actually making the Society any *healthier*...

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Chacun à son goût - I was in for a decade before my AoA, and more than two decades before my peerage, so any conversation about "now it takes too long to get awards" kind of slides right by me. A number of people I know got AoAs after more than fifteen years, and a number of other people I know got Laurels after about five - I am unconvinced that there aren't a lot of fluky factors in play.

I also think that conceiving of the metric as "time-to-peerage" is not particularly useful - not everyone gets to peerage, not everyone wants to get to peerage, not everyone is well-suited to getting to peerage. (I fully expected to wait a lot longer than I did, actually, and quite possibly not get there, and was totally fine with that.) Just because there is a *possible* endpoint doesn't mean it's where everyone wants or needs to go. I think a lot of the happy people that I have directly spoken to are looking at the middle, not the end, and I believe their happiness is valid and appropriate.

[jducoeur]

I am unconvinced that there aren't a lot of fluky factors in play.

Oh, there's no question that the system is *very* arbitrary and whimsical, often in unpleasant ways -- that's the way it's set up, for better and worse. But that's why I find actual statistics much more interesting than anecdote: the trend lines tell us a lot more than individual stories. And those statistics are pretty compelling: we are making the system ever-harder, setting the brass rings ever further away. (The temptation to make jokes about Doppler shift here are strong, but thoroughly OOP.)

IMO, that's incredibly *dumb* of us, as a small-s society, and it undermines the entire point of the award system, which was to encourage people. Instead, my observation is that the system tends to do more to discourage them at this point. It really needs a serious overhaul instead of these patches, and I find it deeply depressing that there is essentially no way for that to ever happen, for a variety of reasons...

Wanna trade?

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

Could I please, please, please have a copy of Aaron's notes??? Last year I did a statistical analysis of the award history of AEthelmearc going back over 30 years (including pre-principality) and I'll trade him. My analysis showed that prior to AEthelmearc, it took an average 4.5 years to get a peerage, with an upper bound at 10. It now takes a minimum of 14 years with an average of 17. E-mail me at dagonell@hotmail.com

Re: Wanna trade?

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

Aaron was kind enough to send me his data. The slope of the East's linear progression was 120. The slope of AEthelmearc's linear progression was 132. (Translation: the average time it takes to go from AoA to Peerage is rising at a linear rate in both kingdoms, but in AE, it's rising slightly faster.)