Yeeeah, now I actively dislike Oroboropolis. With only a single five to seven player mission at a time, there will be a *lot* of inactivity. We've currently got slightly over fifty players, and though a lot of them are slow/semi inactive, they were all available when the mission started and would therefore be able to enter themselves into the random participation drawing.
Now, with fifty players it would take seven missions to cycle through most people, so the vast majority of players would just leave, because few people are gonna wait over a year just to get in a single mission. I imagine we'd end up with a core group of players, plus there'd always be some number of transitory drifters, so twenty sounds like a likely number. That's only three mission cycles to let everyone participate.
Still, that's pretty different from ER. Here, basically everyone gets to participate. At most, you might have to wait a single mission cycle if you missed a mission's signup. Even if not, you can participate in on-ship, which is handled very similarly to a mission, and has many options for you like Tinker--but Oro won't have that. The on-ship equivalent will be self-governed without PW being involved, so it's basically like us just RPing in a thread with little to no actual effect. Even if we used Corsair's idea, they'd probably only get a couple rolls in each mission cycle, rolling to see if they found anything over the last couple months.
I like ER in large part because of the community we've got. Oroboropolis would see a large portion of that community just disappear overnight--Pancaek's already said he would. A lot of our chronically disappeared (but still semi-active) people, like Cael, Irony, Grunhill--they'd all probably disappear permanently. And, on course, this game wouldn't be at all welcoming to newbies because once they found it they would be almost guaranteed to wait months before getting to play, due to the random drawing. I suppose that's a silver lining; more people would quit than join, so as the game went on dedicated individuals like myself would be all that remain, which due to our rarity would mean we'd play with some frequency, at least.
Still, I'd really prefer either of the other games. MMWW would, of course, let everyone be involved at once. Everyone would be able to play. I could see homunculus going either way, but at least it isn't guaranteed to have super strict limits on playercount like Oro.
Semi-related: Every time I check the poll "connection to ER" has exactly one more vote than "no connection to ER". The only time it was different was when I voted. I'd think that there wouldn't be such an absurdly clean split in the polls, and I'd think they wouldn't vote in such a clean, organized pattern. Can Radio see the voters' accounts/IPs and vote times, or are we just trusting the fairness of everyone who can access the poll?