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recallings2017-08-25 08:02 pm
recollecters) wrote in recallings2017-08-25 08:02 pm
Entry tags:
AUGUST FEEDBACK POST
Hello everyone! 🦄 As promised, we're here with a feedback post for this month's event and we'd like to chat with the player base about how everything went down, see what worked and what didn't.
There were several things the mod team themselves realized shortly after the event began and things we should have considered from the get-go. These are things we will keep in mind for next time as well.
In the future, we would probably do the following:
Those are the main things we noticed ourselves and we'd like to open comments to you guys to discuss what you liked, what you didn't like, what worked, what didn't work! We will try to address everything individually but please forgive us if we don't. We are planning to read everything and take the feedback into account for when we plan out our next major event like this.
We probably won't be doing this again until at least February of next year! But we will definitely do this in the future.
In addition, we will have a comment in general for plot feedback as a whole for past events and etc! In this comment, you can leave us your opinion on past events and what sort of events you'd like to see in the future. Our goal is to make this game fun and dynamic for you guys and the only way we can only do that is by taking feedback.
We appreciate you guys and for coming along on this wild adventure with us. Thank you so much for your time and attention!
There were several things the mod team themselves realized shortly after the event began and things we should have considered from the get-go. These are things we will keep in mind for next time as well.
💠 Timezones. This is our big one and what we should have thought about at sign-ups. We apologize for not fully considering timezones when sorting the teams and realize that may have made team-planning more difficult than necessary. In the future, we will include a space for timezones for players so that we can adjust accordingly.
💠 Objectives. While it was notated that primary objectives were needed in order to pass from week to week and the secondary would net additional rewards, we realize in hindsight that we should have made it more clear specifically what these rewards were instead of leaving them as a surprise for the players. In the future, we will be outlining objectives and rewards and consequences so that players may plot accordingly. This also includes clarifying information that is received by players! We want to ensure there is no miscommunication between us and the player base. IC miscommunication is fun, but if there's OOC miscommunication that's a thing we'd like to fix.
💠 Length. Three weeks is a very, very long time for one singular event, but at the same time it's also a short amount of time to get things done when broken down into three objectives.
In the future, we would probably do the following:
⏩ One week of very intensive threading.
⏩ Two weeks of threading for one objective.
⏩ Four weeks of threading for one-two objectives with break weeks in between. (Action/break/action/break.)
💠 Action. Initially our thought was that with Group Two they would be primarily focused on their teams since they were out of the city and that Groups One + Three would be able to work together and still thread other things. Again, we realize that three weeks for three objectives is pushing it and while we tried to incorporate things for Group Three we realize that we need further objectives or actions for those who opt out of the action groups.
In the future, we will balance better to ensure that the game doesn't come to a grinding halt for those players who have opted out.
💠 ICA = ICC. In the future, we will make it much more clear what the ICA may spawn in the way of ICC (IC action, IC consequences.) Group One found themselves interacting directly with NPCs while Group Two spent more time interacting directly with the environment. We would like to clear prior to start if there are sensitive subjects to avoid ICly or OOCly so that we can appropriately warn parties.
💠 Team Communication. We did notice in a few cases that there seemed to be some miscommunications among team members and conversations with us. In the future, we would like to find a more efficient way for teams to communicate together and with us.
Those are the main things we noticed ourselves and we'd like to open comments to you guys to discuss what you liked, what you didn't like, what worked, what didn't work! We will try to address everything individually but please forgive us if we don't. We are planning to read everything and take the feedback into account for when we plan out our next major event like this.
We probably won't be doing this again until at least February of next year! But we will definitely do this in the future.
In addition, we will have a comment in general for plot feedback as a whole for past events and etc! In this comment, you can leave us your opinion on past events and what sort of events you'd like to see in the future. Our goal is to make this game fun and dynamic for you guys and the only way we can only do that is by taking feedback.
We appreciate you guys and for coming along on this wild adventure with us. Thank you so much for your time and attention!
OVERALL PLOT FEEDBACK
Re: OVERALL PLOT FEEDBACK
The main problem I had with the event was simply time constraints- I had a few nine-hour shifts at work, so one week to accomplish an objective was incredibly difficult, especially given the secondary objectives. I think the best example is the first week's secondary objective for Team Absinthe- ten monster threads, with different combinations of people each time, after the main objective was complete was way too much. Work and life makes it hard to do too much sometimes, and we were prepared for intensive threading, but there simply wasn't enough time to do everything, I felt.
That's really all I have to say. Aside from that, I adored this event, and again, thank you so much for running it!
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I loved how we could complete some objectives in different ways, or that we could take, for example, a monster image, and then run the battle or puzzle ourselves without bothering you guys constantly. Anything that helps take the work off of you is always a plus.
I had critique about the event, but it was all stuff you've already noticed yourselves.
Overall, you put a hell of a lot of work into this, and it showed, and I had a blast.
Re: OVERALL PLOT FEEDBACK
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The ugly
Let's start with time constraints - time is personally an OCD for me. But being pressured to do xyz in x-amount of time with COMPLETED threads of 10+ comments (no exceptions), really pushed alot of pressure on me and probably alot of others, to where I couldn't take a one-to-two-day break without someone going, "I need you over here so we can finish this thread asap." It left very little breathing room, a sense of urgency that wasn't necessary, and frankly, felt way more like scrambling rather than something meaningful.
For this reason, I had a hard time holding onto plot rather than "just do it and try to understand later." And because what felt like a demanding plot, between hours of work and trying to live a life, and trying to meet expectations, I actually had to put my other three character slots on hiatus for this event. There was times when I was having back to back panic attacks with everything else going on in my life, and this event made it really difficult not to just solidly break down and quit. I don't know if I'm the only one this was that triggering too. But anxiety for this event was a very real thing for me.
I can't even appreciate the AC from the event, because I personally could have done better on my own to reach AC plus alot more bonus points on my own. I felt like it was difficult to fully participate and pay attention to the actual event with the pressure involved here. So, I personally recommend one to two goals to be completed throughout the month instead of shove everyone into a week with x-amount of completed threads. Maybe focus on an overall objective instead of forcing a map, and let people scramble around the city to find information as they please.
Working toward "By the 25th-30th for the whole event" would probably be alot easier for people to enjoy participation and actually absorb the story, and restrict urgency events to much smaller doses. Perhaps like having one urgency week and then leaving the rest of the month for casual play or something similar. I really felt robbed of the story on this one, ngl. I'm still pretty not sure of why the things that went down did, except monsters because I was struggling to just stay on top of back-to-back tags.
The great!
Mod interaction was helpful, I felt it helped move everything along very smoothly. NPC interaction is an effective tool. And I applaud you guys for being able to keep up with everyone who requested it frequently. I know I personally requested it in every thread I had with the objective. Your abilities to keep up with players is impressive. (Though, I can't be certain how stressed you were trying to keep up with everyone.) I am thoroughly impressed by this.
Having goals that encouraged us strongly to work together was great, too. Puzzles that involved several people to solve was great. Though I feel we were less focused on actual CR than just reach the goal. Without as severe a time constraint, I feel this is a fantastic way to get people to help together and form some actual, steady CR while they solve them. Divvying into groups was good, too. It encourages alot to happen. Motivators existed in some places (such as no one being able to find group two). I feel like this can be curved into something more effective. Such as a scavenger-hunt-style objective.
I.E. - something like "Here's the overall objective by the end of the month. You can find pieces to the puzzle if you do things like, battle five monsters; get intel from computer systems; go play with dogs in the park until you find one with something in it's collar; etc." This way it provides a lax setting and allows people to pair up more predictably for objectives they know they can work toward. That's just my expanded opinion on it and is purely suggestion for how I think this can be made better.
Overall
I know this is long and I'm sorry if this seems a bit complainy, I really want to look forward to the next event we have like this. I think there's alot of ways it can grow and still reduce the anxiety of players. I look forward to a chance to enjoy the story, and urgency can be definitely be great if it's well-timed and purposeful.
You guys seemed to have noticed some really important parts to the structure of such an event already. This is just where I had the hardest time getting along with it, despite wanting to be a bigger part than I actually managed to dish myself out for. And I certainly can't say I speak for everyone with my personal experiences.
You guys still managed to do an impressive job with everything getting thrown down in those three weeks. So thank you for running it. And I certainly do look forward to what's in store for the next one. Keep being great, guys!
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For example, I think my best experience of all aspects of the plot occurred in Week 1 on Team Yzma, when we ended up completing the objective so quickly that we actually just got to hang out and CR-build as we saw fit until the next objective arrived. It reminded me a lot of the way that murdergames tend to work, where you have a given period of time designated specifically for freeform CR-building during the week, before everything ends up going straight to shit on the weekends with more plot-heavy, participation-oriented stuff.
I think that one of the difficult things about objective-heavy plots, particularly ones with time constraints attached, is that at some point it stops being about playing a character in a scenario and more about putting out the tags necessary to reach completion of the objective. With some of the objectives, it sometimes felt as though significant portions of the thread had already been scripted/dictated by the objective itself (for example, "go in this room and find these three things"), and so as other people have observed, doing threads to complete those objectives sometimes started to feel more like a check-box to tick than anything else. I know for me personally, that contributed on a given level to some of the burnout that I started to feel with the plot as it went on, because I ended up feeling like I was threading for the sake of pulling my weight on the team, moreso than for the enjoyment of roleplaying.
I think that setting teams to objectives does have a lot of benefits in encouraging people to make new CR and to get to show off their individual character skills in different and unique ways, so I'd definitely like to see that concept again in future plots! But I also think that future plots might benefit from having more of a balance between the objectives set and leaving space for freeform character interactions, so that you don't end up with either extreme of having no mod direction whatsoever or having the content of all of your threads essentially dictated by the demands of time constraints and plot requirements.
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It's true that the point of an opt-out group is not to have to deal with the intensive action, and it makes sense that by opting out you miss out on rewards etc. Being in Group Three wound up being a huge dismotivator (to me, I can't speak for anyone else) because of how much the game ground to a halt outside of 1/2's objectives though. Some kind of optional plot hooks or sidequests for Group Three characters to explore would have been nice.
tl;dr you addressed everything I was going to say already so I'm not sure why I had to get so wordy about it anyway ;) Thank you so much for doing all this! As far as I've seen, people had a blast, and I've got nothing but mad respect for the amount of effort that went into making this event happen.
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which isn't to say that I didn't still have a lot of fun in group 1!! I wasn't disappointed with it at all and the threads/npc interaction were all great, I'm glad I participated with at least one character, but I would have picked differently at the start if we knew more. just something like knowing for sure that group 2 would be totally out of the city would probably have tipped it tbh.
and then while I was typing I remembered-- having more info about what it'd involve would have been good for things like knowing there'd be a lot of monster/boss fights too, doing that many of them got pretty intensive since fight threads can take longer to do. just mechanics stuff like that would have been helpful for deciding where to sign up with what character without giving away too many plot specifics!
please go rest though idk how y'all ran this many groups with all those mod tags
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i do understand the motivation to want to keep some aspects of a plot in the dark. it builds suspense, especially in events that involve metaplot where you don't want to show all your modly cards anyway. but in this case i do feel that the ooc info skewed towards showing too little information, at least for me.
as well, for the future, i want to specifically +1 which events/groups will handle monster/boss fights for the reason mentioned above.
thank you guys as always for your hard work! <3
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You guys noticed a lot of the same things I did! I really do appreciate that. Thanks a bunch.
Some things I would add:
Load Balancing - I think, if you had teams again, instead of making them delineated by location, maybe have them delineated by role? I know a lot of the frustration with cognac is that we were Tired of Monster Fights. We did some 35 monster fights by the time the plot was over, and I know that even as someone who loved it, I was tired of fighting by the end. However, those of us who did the brunt of monster fighting seriously got left out of the exploring.
So when we got out week 3 objectives, it was noticed really early and really obviously that we were getting very little in the way of exploring, which would have been a nice break. I think, and others may disagree with me, if we had had our objectives framed more explicitly with monster fighting, and if we'd been encouraged to find puzzle-y ways to solve our monster problems, it probably would have been nice to those of us who did nothing but monster fight the whole time.
NPC information upfront - Related to the previous point, while I appreciate the NPC-ing that happened... Maybe more information all up front? Like, the entire first part of a room. If we'd gotten everything for our rooms up front, and only had to come back with questions our characters would have noticed, perhaps that would have given you guys a little bit more breathing room to create things that rewarded player and character inquisitiveness. With all the essential information out of the way, you'd have less back and forth.
I get the style of handing off information as characters think to look for it, but I don't think that works at all with the style of NPCing we received. So, unless there is a mod babysitting our threads, just go ahead and give us all room details immediately? I think, in general, the players are not going to abuse that.
NPC Interaction - I felt kind of cheated here, tbh. I wanted to ask NPCs questions, and get more plot out of them, but it felt if we were not lucky enough to get RNG'd into explicit NPC conversations, we kind of lost out. And no offense to my team at all! Especially since after I discovered I was not picked for RNG, I went to bed... But characters that had a really bad reaction to NPCs were picked, while characters that were not predisposed to that never got picked ever... I dunno, it was really hard?
I had a lot of questions, and were my character afforded the chance to talk in an open NPC setting, he might have pursued those avenues. But the conversations were always explicitly cordoned off, and I don't think it's fair to ask other players to follow my character's line of thought.
Get rid of comment count requirements for objectives - You already had a comment count requirement for the memories. I think that was enough, and I spent an inordinate amount of time timing out a thread by the number of comments in it to make sure we met the objective. I think it was overkill to have two separate comment count requirements.
I have more, but I think this is a good start, and I'll be back soon to talk more re: team balancing.
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I really like the ideas you've already put forward about pacing and transparency with information. As others have said, a lot of the things I noticed are things that you picked up on, too! With groups the size we had, the ability to plan around more objective information would be really helpful. I personally love the spontaneity that not knowing provides, but given the size of the game and the plot-importance of completing objectives in the event, I think more information is better than less in this type of scenario (a small, more contained thing, on the other hand? I'd still love having some element of surprise, just IMO). In particular, I kind of like the one week/break/one week/break format, as it would give ample time for people who opted out to play with everyone. I was lucky enough to be on my last few weeks of vacation during the event, and even I was sweating with the heavy time limit, so I agree with your observations there.
WRT transparency, one thing I sort of found myself wishing for as the event went on was information during the sign-up period about the nature of the scenarios and what would be expected of the characters. For example, if I'd have known that a lot of the groups would be doing a lot of combat-heavy missions, I might have spent more time in July gunning for more bingo rewards or points for regains! Others who don't play combat-oriented or adventurous characters might have decided to go with group 3 instead, too.
A final idea that is really not fully formed yet and that I'm not sure about: What about NPC mods for future events featuring NPCs? It could also allow you to have even heavier NPC-player interaction without killing any one particular mod with a heavy tagload. I'm not sure how you'd feel about bringing others in for this, but it could help if you feel particularly overwhelmed...plus, more NPC harassment!
Thanks again!
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Essentially week one and two were clear a room and get the thing inside. No big deal, we did that easily. Week three was having to clear sometimes 6-7 objectives just to clear the primary objective which led to us not being able to finish. This left our group immensely discouraged and it almost felt like we were given an impossible task that would keep us from getting super cool reward stuffs. Like we saw what our line in the log was versus the other lines and it seemed like we were just given a cold shoulder after all the hard work we put in.
To make things clear this is a basic outline of what Jirou had to do during the three weeks so you can see what I mean about balance:
Week One: Fight sword monsters and get the plans in the desk
Week Two: Fight the boss monster and find the library door
Week Three: Get approval of all hangars, get cheese from yellow, draw a picture of a flower, do charades, do a group dance, describe a spaceship they don't have, take cheese back to red, go to blue and get the key, finally get teleported to the lock to unlock the lock.
This was a lot crazy. I know I personally happen to work a full time job and I have another game that I play in on top of this one. This made all week three burn me out super hard to the point where, as much as I loved the event and look forward to the next, I just wanted this event to finally be done with.
With that said, this event was a lot of fun. There are some definite balance issues that should be looked at but otherwise I think that you did great work and I'm excited to join the next one after a much needed break.
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This really was a really fun event! But doing all this stuff in a short space of time, especially coming after another month of event stuff, has left me just sort of tired in general.
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Furthermore, the first week's objectives for our group was incredibly vague and confusing. We had a red or blue path to follow in the jungle, as well as an option to go off path. Our secondary objective was to kill monsters. My assumption was that the red and blue paths were the only primary objectives, while the off path adventures were solely for the secondary objective. What was actually the primary objective was four different options: taking each path, then having people go off of each path as well.
A lot of the pacing could be solved if we had a better understanding of what to do even if it's only 24-48 hours in advance. It doesn't have to be insanely detailed in terms of content, but in terms of tagging/threading expectations I'd appreciate having more information in the future. It would have been nice to know the reactive vs proactive dichotomy regarding the groups (group two reacted to being in unreality vs group one went out to solve unreality) as well. Knowing one group would have NPC interaction also wasn't really enough to know the discrepancy in exploration versus explanation of the plot, and honestly until the last day (the 23rd)'s information went up, I was under the impression that we wouldn't receive any plot information at all.
Please don't isolate the game for this long of a time: this is sort of addressed in the three weeks is long category, but I feel like that's touching upon the issue of giving us a lot to do over a long period of time, and not over the fact that a large portion of the game couldn't tag anything outside of the event. Everything outside of groups 1/2 more or less slowed to a halt. It is fun to do massive things like this, but not being able to interact with the game at all for three weeks was a lot more deflating than doing heavy action for three weeks.
And then this isn't... necessarily tied into the plot, but my own personal thing I feel deserves voicing: communication in mod plurks. People ask a lot of questions in mod plurks, and I'm no exception, but it means that a lot of information or questions I'd think to ask end up getting lost in plurks with hundreds of comments, which is both difficult to navigate as a player and is probably overwhelming for a mod team. I might be the only one here, but I think I'd appreciate a stricter adherence to asking questions/responding to feedback posts being kept to ooc posts instead of on plurk, if that makes sense? This might also curb some of the unintentional dogpiling that tends to happen on plurk regarding questions as well.
Overall though I had a god damn blast with this event: I was on vacation at god damn disney world and this still managed to be a highlight for me for the past three weeks. The amount of work that went into all the different settings and how efficiently it came together was incredible. Despite my veritable pile of words over here I did have a fantastic time with this! Thanks for putting this event together.
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some more notes
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However, I find the pacing led me to burn out pretty hard, especially considering that the event was essentially book ended with monster attacks. Not only that, but at least in the case of my team for Group 2, we had our final boss battle THEN came back to the city for more monster fights and THEN the retrospec post went up. While texting is typically more low pressure, it felt like too much happened too quickly. This is also coming the month after the bingo event, which also demanded a lot more coordination and pre-planning, and then the con which... almost felt like it was looked over, despite being a kick-off for the event.
If another major event like this were to happen, I'd suggest it doesn't come after another month-long event. I'm all for encouraging tagging new people and more opportunities at cr, but after a point it was tiring. Even with the nature of bingo and this event being totally different at their core, they still required a higher level of pre-planning while operating under time constraints, vs. the convention which could have been a nice break to loosen up and have fun prior to the next event, but once it again, it almost felt looked over since it was only really up for what, three days? before launching into monster attacks and then the event.
I do want to reiterate that I like the concept, and I loved where this event took us! And while the events and posts and such seem to want to reflect a more 'real-world' timescale, I think some extra time to breathe would be appreciated.
ETA:
Another point I thought of, going off of pacing, was that the mandatory 10 consecutive comment rule seemed to limit and sort of inter-group mingling while also dictating the pace and direction of the thread. Instead of it happening "organically" more or less, the focus was trying to hit the objective while also hitting the comment count, and that seemed to also put on unnecessary pressure.
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I played in both groups 1 and 2, so I'll talk about my thoughts for each individually, but while I loved every second of my time in both groups, I would have chosen just one group if I had known how intensive/time sensitive the event was going to be, which I didn't realize because the description I was banking on was "group 1 is easy mode because they have access to retrospec" so I thought I'd be able to swing both characters being involved. I get that not a lot of info was given at the signups in order to keep things secret (and I was completely blown away at the reveals, so KUDOS, I WAS YELLING TO MYSELF A LOT), and after going through this plot once, it might be an idea for the next time to be upfront with how much time commitment we now know players will need, and maybe cap participation at one character per player instead of multiple characters as long as they're in separate groups- also for the mods' sakes, since I imagine the game will continue to grow come next year, and I don't want you guys to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers and not have the time or energy to keep everything running. This time, it was just two mods running things, but backup event mods might be helpful for the future, especially for puzzles that aren't tied into the plot, like riddles and such, which might keep things running smoothly without you guys getting bogged down with so many questions that might end up just being "do whatever you want and have fun with it, there's no wrong way to solve this puzzle!"
Group 1 with Mafuyu was one of the most amazing rp experiences I've ever had, so I want to thank you for facilitating this and making this happen!! For both groups, this event was so great for creating and deepening cr, but her team really gelled and worked together so well. I think this is largely because most of us got together on discord and whenever I online, I basically camped out there and lived there for the three weeks of the event haha. That made it easy to coordinate and all our members were wonderful to each other, and we were able to work out things like timezones and threading with who was online to boomerang, etc. Cognac really came together and I appreciate this so much. There were, however, some concerns with how the event played out for our team, which we've already brought up in the Cognac log previously. It feels a bit, in comparison to the other group 1 teams, Cognac's objectives were somewhat limited/changed from what was supposed to happen/a bit repetitive. Week 1 was great because it threw together both monster fighting and puzzle solving in one comprehensive objective that everyone had to work together to solve, which was great! Week 2 is where we struggled a bit, because the team was split in half and we didn't account for timezones and time management and the events for our team were changed. I'm a bit fuzzy on why the team had to be split in half when it felt like the subway worlds were the largest part of what Cognac would be able to experience that's not simply the city streets itself, which is what the other half of the team were stuck with to fight monsters. The sigil monster battles were fun, but felt repetitive when week 1 was also monster battle heavy, and then week 3 came and the objectives involved even more monster battles. Week 3 had puzzles, but they felt like standalone puzzles that felt more random than cohesive, and there was a lack of finality at the end of the event. Mafuyu would basically sum up her month's experiences as "Week 1: we passed the subway entrance test and fought monsters. Week 2: we collected sigils and fought monsters. Week 3: we collected coins and fought monsters. I have no idea why any of this is important, but we had pizza and bbq and now we're all going to chill at Taco Bell so all is good." MAURICE WAS GREAT THOUGH, I WILL FOREVER LOVE MAURICE.
Ryoji's experiences in Group 2 was so, so immersive, I absolutely love the worlds that were built around group 2 teams. I admittedly spent more time prioritizing Mafuyu's threads in group 1 simply because the vast majority of her team was always online at the same time and could boomerang and blast through objectives, so I don't have as much to say about group 2. I loved the world building and how we were able to go at the week 1 objective from all different angles to see what worked, and was so excited to see how the different elements from week 2's swamp carried over to week 3's mansion. THE MANSION WAS WILD, IT WAS AMAZING and I want to laugh/cry every time I think about Family Feud. Ty, I appreciate you working with me re. the finale boss battle to create a reason for Ryoji's death, but even without that, having a finale like this wraps everything up so nicely and is what I felt was missing from my group 1 experience, which felt somewhat inconsistent/incomplete in comparison.
Overall, I had a great time and I don't remember the last time I was so excited for RP every day for three weeks straight. It was insanely fast and immersive and for the first week, I was one of those lucky people who could get home and tag for seven hours straight before bed every day, but then my schedule became inconsistent, as many people's are, and I really felt the strain of having to be there for my team and not hold everyone back. I think what would have worked best for me would have been to split the event into two parts of 10 days each instead of three parts of 7 days, which is more or less the same length of time for the entire event, but relaxes the pace a little. For group 1, Cognac's experiences could very easily have been rearranged to fit two parts, but for group 2, Snow White's narrative fit three, so this might be hard. Even with breaks in between, though, I don't think I'd have the energy to keep up something so intensive for over 4 weeks, and I'm honestly surprised that everyone on both my teams were able to keep up and get their participation in. We all went 1000% but you guys went 100000000000000000000000000% and it really shows just how much you put into this event, so thank you for the incredible experience♥
Pain pong, though. Thank you for making this possible, I cried literal tears at some of my texts.
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I think the two biggest snags with the event were ones you identified: timezone mismatches & the length of the event. For the first, you've already seemed to come up with a solution. (As a fairly minor point, I personally found the midweek schedule difficult for this reason, as it meant that deadlines were in the middle of my workday if I wasn't on vacation. But if more people have availability on weekdays vs weekends, that's understandable!)
As for my thoughts on the second... I agree that keeping it to two weeks max (whether consecutively or alternating one on/one off with true breaks in-between) for an event would probably be better pacing and lead to less burnout & exclusion. Three weeks felt a little too long. Plus, since it seemed like the game came to a halt outside of the group logs during this event, that'd give two weeks of normal tagging if something like that were to happen again.
But again, it was well done for a first attempt at such a large plot, so these are relatively small points compared to how well the majority of the event went! Thank you again for all your work, and I hope you're all able to get some well-deserved rest after this!
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i liked the opportunity for new cr that i got! most of my team was people i'd never tagged with before, and there's no better way to build bonds than by going under duress together. i'm glad for all of my team and the new connections we've formed - god bless these problem children for somehow not dying all over the place. we got to branch out and discover new people we got along with. i also liked being able to explore new places - the subway contained so much more than i would have expected from it, and i liked being able to really dig into that. and as a plot lover, i'm so glad for all the info that's going to come up and be talked over after this event. there's a lot that's going to be revealed, and it's going to propel some great discussions. subway plans, the idea of other worlds, the knowledge that things are happening "somewhere else", knowing some of our npc team by name and personality now? that's really awesome to have come out of this event.
now, you guys have addressed some of my concerns in your post, but there are others that came up during the weeks that i'd like to speak about, which is unfortunately the longer part of my comment.
in general, when it came to exploring things and asking for flavor text, a lot of time the text was lacking in ways that required us to go back and ask for additional clarification. if the group is going to be facing a room with a closed door, we shouldn't have to go back and ask if the door is locked or unlocked. to take a specific example from my own team, cognac's reality twist in the subway had three divisions - but we only discovered what those divisions might include once we specifically went and asked after each separate one. a fountain, a sandbox, and a playground sounds fine on paper, but when we learn that the last one requires people to cross monkey bars across a endless abyss only after asking for clarifying, then we began to wish that we had sent more athletically inclined characters to that location instead of confining them to something else. our mako player has put it better than i could, but frankly this felt like i was waiting for a tabletop dm to tell me things over a dwrp mod.
this is a group 1 specific note, but given the scale of the event itself and not really having a break at all, it was really really hard to talk to my cr who weren't in my specific team - because icly people were away, or oocly we felt burnt out. the size of the event wrapped up nearly the whole game, but it feels like i am going to be sorting through the aftermath to actually catch up with my cr who didn't happen to be in my team, even though we were all in the city together. however, this sort of ties into the length of the event itself and how people were scrambling to get things done - and it also ties into something else, which is that this event was incredibly intensive to have happen directly after the month long bingo event. i get that no event is required, but allowing us to have just a few days to breathe between events would have helped the sensation of burnout that i was seriously feeling by the end of this.
you guys have touched on objectives, but i'd like to address the specific example that team cognac had to deal with, after our team was split up for week 2. more than halfway through week 2 we suddenly were keyed into that we had a gigantic primary objective with five more components ahead of us, and where we had been stuck with our characters was the "easy" zone. with only half the team on our side, this was going to be next to impossible to do consecutively unless a few of us shouldered the majority of the tagging load, so the idea of attacking stations concurrently was brought up. the mod response was to remove the entire plotline and event which is not what we as a group wanted, but that we accepted given that we knew you were coordinating a lot at the same time. it was very much that we were discussing things late at night and woke up to that section of things being cancelled, leaving that half of our team lost as to how to fill the rest of the week given that the first half was practically done with their objective. we could have benefited greatly from more objective transparency and been able to divide up our efforts so that we could have maintained that plot to the end, rather than getting severely stressed halfway through with realizations. i would have liked another option to continue with the ronnie plot instead of simply shuffling him away, and it left me deeply frustrated ending week 2.
it honestly feels like combat was used as an easy way to give our characters things to do. the tradeoff is that really ended up feeling repetitive. before the event we had to fight monsters. for cognac, in week 1 we had to get 10 fights for our secondary, and most if not all the rooms we explored had enemies which was fights. week 2 had half our team solely relegated to monster fights. week 3 still had more fights as the primary attraction, though there was some exploration that in all honesty felt sort of lacking but that we saw as the tradeoff for the reshuffling back in week 2. and then there was the end log, which was more combat. i'm not sure if some teams were designated for combat primarily, but none of us expected that much fighting. as mentioned earlier, there was a solid thirty five monster threads submitted for objectives from cognac. if we had known at the start that we'd be doing a lot of battles, we would have been able to better coordinate for the noncombatant members of our teams or perhaps put in for regains that could have helped. i firmly believed i'd be able to participate in an exploration heavy context, but given the results, i'm left feeling like i should have signed up for group 2 instead since that was my aim.
please don't view any of this as me trying to berate you or drag you down - you've done incredible things, and it's just the two of you. overall, i'm glad for what came from this event, but i think september being a chill month is sorely needed, and i hope that all this feedback helps you guys as mods when you plan something like this again.
+1
I do also want to emphasise giving us a little more information upfront, which I think I mentioned before but not here specifically. No doubt we'll have questions anyway, but I think giving us as much as you can give without spoiling things initially alleviates timezone issues.
I know it's been mentioned up in the post that you'd try to sort people by timezone -- that's a good idea! But when the timezone lag is between the mods themselves and players, even if you're super quick when you're online (which you were!) there's still the initial lag waiting for everyone to wake up and be around. Trying to do it in a more live-spam GM style is admirable but very tricky with a wide spread of timezones. I tried to stay up as much as I could (I was around until 3am my time mostly!) but it's difficult to maintain. I think giving us a bunch of info to work with upfront helps with that!
+1
+1
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Groupwork: One of the things I would like to see in the future if we tackle another event of this length (and people, including your write up, have talked about pros/cons of different lengths) is to have groups shift over time. While I had a lot of fun with both of my groups, it would've been nice to shift things up maybe at the half way point or once a week to see a fresh set of faces. We all play in a big game for a reason, and there's such a wealth of cr to be had from inhabiting a game and a city this big that being distilled down into groups this small loses some of the spark. Furthermore, because without our own groups we were then grouped into two or three people subunits, we often meshed up based on reasonable ooc factors like who was online at certain times or their specific tagging preferences which, more often than not, resulted in the formation of very similar groups across weeks. I, of course, applaud those groups that were able to divvy up cr really efficiently and see lots of combinations within their group - but speaking strictly from my experience, there were some time constraints about the reality of my groups that caused us, very often, to be repeating some of the same stuff.
That being said, I do like the idea of group work - especially if the groups are randomized! It gives a lot of space for new cr to blossom, much like the bingo thing did. If we could rotate big groups or rng subgroups or anything to encourage more shakeup during long (3-week plus) events that would be really great going forward.
IC/OOC Information: I know there's been some discussion of transparency - but I would've definitely liked to know when we could ask for mod interaction vs. when we couldn't. Part of that is completely on me, for sure. I figured I didn't want to give you guys more work than you had to have and only wanted to come if I absolutely needed a mod so I never asked for mod tags - I think having more of a guideline of like "okay well this particular instance we'll join you" would've helped me a lot, because then my groups could've gotten more into the nitty gritty of going back and forth especially when it came to alternative solutions. Most of my tasks were "do a and then come back" whereas it seemed like some of the super fun things i saw happening tended to be like "do x with mods" which led to all kinds of random things like dragons and big macs?? and whatever weird cheese skeleton yzma??? things??? like you guys created such INTERESTING ideas to play around with, i would have loved to have more of those scenarios. so like more of a line of like okay guys heres what you can do to play around with this instead of just the like "do a and then come back."
the other side is especially in terms of npc interaction, i felt like failure of communication within teams lead to a lot of issues surrounding plot information. others have touched on how npc interaction was handed out, and i know there's no real good way to decide with so many people in a game like this, but my question is more of a way to figure out how to get what information does get out to all the players. i'll use brandywine as an example - i know there was plot information in our group, but so often I felt like what we were doing was tasks rather than gaining real insight. others would talk about what nifty clues they were getting in their groups - but i think it's really telling that when the ooc roundup document went around that brandywines entry was pretty much we did some math puzzles?
maybe in the future having more plothooks in subtasks, or requiring teams to go back and put together all their information before moving forward might help that. it's great that players are now trying to get all of their information together, but i think it would have been super helpful for me, from an ic standpoint, to have information my characters would have as both something to bring to the ic knowledge table and also as a reason for them to come to the table at all.
Finally, and unrelatedly, I'd also like to make a note about tdm timing. I think if we have another situation like this one with a tdm during such a large scale event, it would be nice to either forward date it to "everything is fine again" or have it not be canon for that particular round. I felt so bad there were people I couldn't hit up with Mari - friends and the like - because they hadn't given a group-2 compatible prompt! I definitely always want to be able to welcome the newbies, and I think the tdm should also stand as something that gives an idea what our day to day feels like, not what our big exciting once in every six months events feel like.
Thank you again for all your hard work both through this event and in general! Recolle is a super enjoyable game and I only bring these concerns because I want to see the game continue to prosper, and I can't wait to see what we're up to next time.
+1
+1
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I ended up in group 3 because my schedule did not actually allow me to sign up for anything else at the end of July, and it did feel a little bit like being completely left out of the action. I did get some nice threads, but my character pretty much ended up stuck at home waiting for his friends to come back and with nothing to do in that time. Calls for help from group 3 regarding info did come in late in week 3, but by this time it was a bit late to actually organize anything meaningful.
I also need to mention that while my character IC-ly has no idea of what exactly happened and that's normal, I myself OOC-ly am also not very clear on what actually happened. I didn't have time to scour all of the group 1 and 2 logs - and I admit I may have missed some OOC info - but the thing is I have no clue as to where I would have found that information. So even now, I have no idea what group 2 did while they were missing and only a partial idea of what group 1 did.
That being said, this was actually an impressive event and I feel like with the size of the game it did run pretty smoothly. I did develop some CR that month even without much plot-incentive stuff to do and I'm looking forward for more things to engage with!
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First off, thank you so much for running a very involved and very complicated plot. I had a lot of fun, and I got a bunch of new CR I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I got to put Sorey in some really interesting situations, and he grew a ton in a very short amount of time! Also, it was really funny at parts.
My highlights: meeting Maurice and Mr. Baroque, reenacting Pagemaster (I didn't know it was the Home Alone kid, wtf), getting new CR, popcorning other groups' drama as Brandywine just plodded along.
Of course, there are some things that I feel could definitely be improved on. Many of them have already been mentioned, but I'll recap them here in handy bullet point format. As usual, grain of salt applies since I'll be leaning on my experiences as an NPC mod for this.
I recognize that you have already figured out a bunch of these, but it's worth re-stating so you know it's a problem.
On a similar note, please don't make quest turnins end before 9 est anymore. It's unconventional because people in PST (one of three major timezones in the US, not exactly a minority) are still getting home from work. Thursday also places it squarely in the middle of the week, so a lot of EST people are about to go to bed. It was awkward to work with all around.
This led to me threading specifically to achieve objectives and hit a comment count. Doing that for three weeks straight made me completely burn out. I wasn't really having too much fun at that point, because when you are doing something just to have it done, it's work.
2 weeks is fine for a maybe 1 or 2 objective event that isn't tedious. 4 weeks, even with 'break' weeks, might be too much focusing on one plot constantly. As someone else brought up, isolating the game from itself for the month made things difficult as well.
In the future, I strongly suggest leaving objectives open to players to thread for themselves with minimal guidance. It's more of a hands off approach than you've shown so far, but it'll help ease anxiety considerably on both ends. In the past, I've had minor clue gathering be available as OOC info in a post, then a final confrontation or whatever be threaded (if mod NPCs are needed).
All my questions and concerns during the plot were answered in a timely manner, which I super appreciate considering there's only 3??? of you. Bless all of you and you had a con or something too.
NPCs in a game have a purpose, and that purpose is to guide and inform: either through words, actions, or role. If you are shutting people out because it's "IC" then you're not playing an NPC anymore-- you're just playing a character. While I'm always in support of well-rounded NPCs (that has been my main job in all the games I've modded), you can do that in a way that keeps elements of the game accessible to all players. It's much easier to change an NPC or a minor aspect of a plot on the fly than expect people to change for you. 9/10 times they won't. This is part of why modding sucks and no one wants to do it anymore.
I also felt like NPC information was spread unevenly. This was a lot of plot shoved onto us at once, but my character doesn't know anything more than he did going in. That's because nothing was really shared. It was stated that all our other NPCs wouldn't give information or didn't know anything, so 'choosing' between the three (as someone who got RNG'd) didn't feel like choosing much at all.
I feel like we could've been thrown a bone or something... even if it's a partial timeline, a leaked document, whatever else works for you. The world info page will be good for this! But Brandywine would've liked to bring something to the table, so to speak. It helps people participate in the info-sharing rather than being passive.
Additionally, being more forthcoming with plot info/clues will keep us interested OOCly as well, and that's a huge part of what drives people to tag into metaplot-heavy things.
Another thing. Brandywine hit all the primary and secondary objectives we were given and we didn't get much of anything at all. Week 2 didn't have a reward and week 3 had Baroque leave abruptly without providing any info. It was really disheartening to get nothing, especially since a couple players had super bad anxiety about schedules and finishing things on time and there wasn't a real 'point' or advantage to doing it.
I think that's about it. Please don't feel discouraged by how long this is-- I had a lot of fun, and I'd probably do it again.
Thank you once again for running such an amazing and HUGE plot. I can't give you guys enough credit.
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Definitely didn't appreciate how the NPCs were handled for our team. That was highly disappointing and mildly insulting on every level. Like the favoritism is blatant at this point and the mods quickly lost some of my favor with that.
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As for my own crit, a lot of people already covered issues I had much more eloquently than I could and I already talked to you guys through PM about my main issue, so my comment will be a bit briefer.
I felt the requirements for the freebie memory were excessive. I know it was an incentive for players to participate, but 30 comments over the course of three weeks for a single memory when a regular regain takes much, much less was a bit over the top. The same could be said for the freebie requirements for bingo plot last month. From the sound of it, you guys want us to get as many regains as possible, so I'd definitely suggest lightening up the requirements for next time (like maybe give a freebie memory per week of participation or something).
I also want to echo the sentiment about being more upfront about need to know OOC information. Mira covered this pretty well in regard to Team Cognac Group 2's experience with the puzzles - but the monster team came across this issue a little as well. We would come up with a plan with the information we were given to defeat a monster, only to have you guys pipe up suddenly with some out-of-nowhere reason it wouldn't work. A great example of this: when Maurice declared that Noah's armor piercing anti-demon claw would not pierce the armor of a demon for...reasons? We would have not learned that tidbit if we hadn't done a full thread with Maurice, and it came across as you guys making up rules on the spot because you wanted the monsters beaten in a specific way. Which I don't mind if you want things done a specific way? Just please tell us up front if that's the case. I know I would be perfectly fine if when introducing the monster you went "Even though it looks and acts like a demon, there's something about it that makes it immune to typical anti-demon powers". Then we would know and could plan accordingly.
If anything, the sudden new rules/revelations made several of us fighting monsters less inclined to contact the mods/NPCs about monster fights because we wanted to get the fights done (cause yeah, we had 35 of them to get done) and not deal with a sudden out-of-nowhere plot twists. So I think just being more upfront about stuff in the future would be best.
As for how long the next plots would be, I definitely would lean with 1-2 weeks instead of the 4 weeks with breaks. 4 weeks is long time even with breaks in them, and it would basically consume the game. From my own experience with RP, 1-2 weeks tends to be the sweet spot for intense plots.
Again, thank you for the plot and all your hardwork! I really would like to see more of these kinds of plots in the future. Just...not right away since I'm pretty burned out atm.
+1 to this
And with regards to the OOC information issue, I'll add that there were a couple of threads I was involved in that felt like there were rules just tossed out on the spot. The one that stood out the most to me was a Yukiko, Ros, and Orion that included a bunch of ice golems. There was a mod tag in one instance where Yukiko's magical fire seemingly damaged them normally, and then another that explicitly stated that it didn't affect the creature at all because Yukiko didn't have some extra thing that another character did. It was a little confusing for me, and left me feeling a little blindsided given the previous tag.
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Group 2 was a blast. I would definitely appreciate more opportunities to isolate characters in the future, provided they're done sparingly. Being stuck somewhere without reception of any kind's a unique scenario when characters normally have access to Retrospec at pretty much every waking moment.
Like mentioned above, Snow White ran into some availability issues that resulted in us usually teaming up based on our time blocks.
For time length for future events like this, I'd prefer two weeks long, provided it's done sparingly. Having abnormal events that are longer than others shakes things up, and makes things easier ICly imo. Less "Oh, it's the 3rd of the month, something weird's going to happen. Don't worry guys, it'll be over in a few days," if that makes sense. Anything that breaks the pattern is more intense for characters. Maybe even a 10-day event sometime, or a 17-day thing. Again, as long as it's pretty rare.
That said MANSION HELL WAS AMAZING. 10/10, would subject characters to Mansion Hell and Bathroom Civil War again. I haven't been that stoked about something RP in a long time.
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Answering questions. I came to you to ask for the results of the castle building, and you told me to go back and tag more. This was an event on a cramped timeline and we could have used that information earlier than it was provided. This is not a job or an assignment, this is a game, and this setup where my number of tags and effort put in is graded before I can progress is not enjoyable or productive for me.
Just do it. I had fun interacting with my teammates, I did not have fun accomplishing the goals. They felt obligatory and didn't involve any creativity on my part. I still have no idea what we accomplished, why, or what's happening now. I am burnt out and don't really want anything to do with the wrap up.
Pressure. Cognac was successful because other people in the team organized it. If we hadn't had that discord which others relayed into a plurk, I would never have been able to keep up with this.
That said, I recognize the absolute mountain of work you undertook to organize all this for us, and I'm in awe of it. I really appreciated the chance to interact with new CR, and in general always appreciate that. I think without some of the pressure, it might not have been so successful throwing all these strangers (IC & OOC) together. There are pros and cons to all of this, and I am glad you're taking the time to consider our feedback. I really like that you have been willing to tweak your approaches as you learn and grow as moderators. So thank you for your efforts and thoughtfulness.
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First off, this was really fun! Thank you mods. Especially Ty for taking care of me along with the rest of Team Snow White. :>
pros
- With enough team communication, the objectives were easy to meet and keep on top of
- Maps were easy to understand, care was taken to make each venture unique
- Choices were given to have flavortext to work at own pace or indulge with mod responses, it's really sweet how you even backtagged for a battle, knowing how big the game is! I wasn't expecting that
cons
- From Group 1 comments I gleaned above, NPC's maybe should have been voted within-group who speaks to them or they RNG themselves so there aren't hard feelings
- I didn't find 10 comments too unreasonable and only rushed with a last-second room, but if I had to lower it, maybe 7 would work?
- Ending with a boss fight after all the other fighting felt a little redundant this time around, but will probably work out better when it's less of a breakneck pace
For future event pacing,
- 1 intensive week: theoretically ok, I wonder though how much can be accomplished in such a short time
- 2 weeks : 1 objective: slightly too long? I'd say meet midway at 10 days
- 4 weeks with in-between breaks: again, too long but on the breaks department, I'm not sure what I would recommend here though
I'd say the best sounding to me on first glance is the 2 weeks length!
And there's my two cents, I'll +1 some of the other inputs in a bit.
+1