Upcoming Changes to Movie Nights and the Lottery
Hello everyone! Val here with some information for you regarding potential changes to our Movie Night routine. The Bronystate team has been working behind the scenes to make Movie Nights more fun for everyone. So without further ado, we at Bronystate are excited to announce a whole overhaul of the lotto system: Monthly Themes! Rather than a lottery system, viewers will rank movies from a list generated by a central theme every month. Each movie will receive "points" based on their ranking, and the movies with the highest points will be shown that month. To preface: nothing discussed here is set in stone. It's important to us that we hear your feedback regarding these changes and if they improve the overall experience. So please, take the opportunity to let us know your thoughts.
The Specifics Every month, a new list of 20 movies will be provided by the mods based around a central theme. This theme can be literally anything, Action, Comedy, Foreign Films, Japanese Lesbian Dance Theory; anything! At the start of the month, you'll receive a survey where you rank the top 8 films. Your rank 1 film will receive 8 points, your rank 2 will receive 7 and so on and so on. Each week, we will show two of the top 8 films, starting with numbers 7 and 8. Tune in each week to see if your choices won! We're hoping that the surprise of which films are revealed each night will add some fun to the system.Why the Change? We've had a lot of discussions on how to improve Movie Night for some time now. We really like the variety of movies that have come out of movie night, but we've also run into some complications:
1- Some movies are really….REALLY hard to find. Like super hard to find. It's nice when we get a link that can help us find a movie, but a lot of the time they're still unavailable for a variety of reasons. We've had a lot of really scary Thursday nights where we're scrambling to find either the user who won or their movie because we're just not able to get it. I'd like to take a moment for pointing out how much of a trooper Sumica is, because he really puts in 300% to making Bronystate work and he's given a lot of sweat and blood to make sure movie night is awesome for everyone.
2- We're getting WMC's…a lot. The worst movie clause was created to be a super rare, exceptional event where something is just so irredeemably awful the night is just miserable for everyone involved. When Babes in Toyland was first streamed, EVERYONE was suffering. No one was having fun, and a lot of people who normally watch both nights wanted to skip the next day because they just didn't want to go through it again. Unfortunately, this has created the "Imitator Serial Killer" connundrum. A lot of people are probably familiar with this, movie picks were being thrown out there just so they could get WMC'd. This really wasn't our intention with the clause, we just wanted to make sure the nights are a pleasant experience where we can all hang out and not have to put up with bullshit. Our hope is that with the Monthly Themes, we'll be able to find a balance between letting you, the viewers, determine what we watch every week, but also guarantee that movies will be available and watchable.
What Happens to My Movies? This is a topic that is still being very closely discussed among the team, and we'd like to hear your thoughts on it. Ultimately, the point of the change is to avoid the problems mentioned above, so having unscreened movie suggestions is going to see shit crack through no matter how diligent we are. With that being said, a few of us thought we might include an option for a movie recommendation to go into the survey for the next month's theme. What it bottles down to is we would have to prescreen choices before the results every month…which is pretty much exactly the problem we're having now. We'll keep looking into this, and we will give you more information as things unfold.
What about the current lotto winners? These changes wont take effect until AFTER next movie night. So don't worry, we're not getting rid of the winners.
What happens now? We're going to start with a trial month. Since we're still showing this week's winners, it will only be for the last three weeks, which means there will only be 15 choices to pick from this time. Our theme for this month is going to be "Bronystate Classics," which will be a selection of movies that have a strong connection to our history (including movies originally locked in the vault!)
What about those ponies? This is another topic we've talked about. We feel that a lot of people were disappointed to find they only won a pony ep pick. Kind of like winning the $2 powerball in the real lottery. We want Bronystate to be fun for everyone, so "winning" a lackluster reward didn't seem too great. Because of this, we're just going to cycle through the pony eps on regular rotation, adding every new season accordingly.
Moving forward We're really excited to bring this change to everyone. After all, did you know it's [Current Year] and we need to move forward? Joke's aside, we all love Movie Night, and we're hoping to make it an event we can all enjoy. So let us know what you think. Tell us your thoughts. Have any questions? Feel free to ask us, we're all interested to hear what you have to say. Be sure to tell us what worked and what didn't during the trial period. Cheers folks!