recallings | AUGUST FEEDBACK POST

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! mod announcement

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.

💠 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!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Please use this comment for notes/general feedback about plots for past events and etc! You can also used this for ideas for the future to incorporate into future events (i.e. more teambuilding stuff, more action stuff, etc.)

Okay, first of all, I want to thank you for running this event! It was intense, and I had an absolute blast, and the team setup is something I've missed in RP lately. I absolutely loved this event, and I'm already excited for the next one.

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!

The thing I was most impressed with about this event was the breadth of canons you took ideas from to populate everything. You were all over the map and it was amazing, it helped create something for everybody. (Now I'm getting into an online CCG despite saying I would never do one of those, just because the art was so ridiculously pretty. /shakes my fist.) The fact that the monsters from the bestiary were all from a few people's canons to possibly facilitate regains for them was a nice touch.

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.

Recolle was a fairly fast-paced game to begin with, but I think this might have shown where the "too fast" line is? I know I saw some comments around plurk etc. from Group 1/2 people about being tired, a little burnt out, not top-leveling at the finale log because they were worn out already, etc. The pace of objectives definitely contributed to how slow things were for Group Three, I think, because everybody else was just too busy to thread with us.

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.

the stuff you've already posted covers other stuff I had in mind, but! I totally get keeping things a surprise, but for future stuff it'd be good to know more about what we're getting into-- based on what we had I know I kinda picked a group just based off 'well if I want to have more options for points maybe 1' and then when plot info and logs came out I was like damn, the group two stuff is totally my jam

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

SOME IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK:

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.

Echoing Hannah here, on basically all counts.

I really enjoyed myself, and I had a blast with most of this, across two groups. I felt like the team setup worked really well, and making the squads mod-selected rather than player worked out nicely too!

I found that Ethanol had a lot of trouble making the 10 monster thread secondary objective and the primary objective work. It just seemed overwhelming and like there just wasn't quite enough time to get it working around work schedules, time zones, and other things.

Again, I had a lot of fun with this and you guys are my heroes for making it work.

I was about to say "more events where the network is down!" but actually, all the events so far have pretty much been log-based already! I wonder if there's something cool to be done with a network-based event... a puzzle/ARG-style thing for everyone to work out, maybe.

Thank you for this post, mods! I want to start off by saying thank you for running this event, taking on so much work, and putting in a lot of effort to make sure everyone could complete their stuff! You guys worked like crazy and I really want to underscore that above any other feedback. I had a blast playing with my group 1 team, and I can't wait until the next time we have a big gamewide thing like this!

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!

Going to second this from the Ethanol side of things; we were able to get to the five monsters in the final week, but I feel like ten was an awful lot on top of the primary objectives on top of real-life obligations, and the fact that we were trying to all balance a large amount of time zone differences on top of all of that.

Overall, I had a lot of fun, though, and am looking forward to more action-oriented events like this.

+1 to the +1, making secondaries a little easier to hit next time would make it less stressful for sure! we just could not get more monster fights going on top of the exploration threads and their boss fights. dropping it down to 5 the last week helped, that was a good target to aim for, but 10 was a lot (especially when we had monster fight objectives every week.)

I feel like the primary objectives were fine though! a little intensive, but still felt like we had enough time to do them.

Speaking from the point of view of Team Brandywine we did notice some balancing problems when it came to the amount of work we had to do.

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.

Sarah covered most of my thoughts Super well, so I won't repeat that. But speaking as a player of a character who sucks with NPC interactions - I would've liked a clearer heads up the "event" was going to involve NPCs. Definitely would've chosen differently and given other players a better chance to thread with the NPCs.

I'd love something like that. This game does a really good job showing up for log-based stuff; I'd love to see what we could do with some sort of mystery that uses the internet and retrospec itself.

(also i love args... and i've never been able to get in on one at the ground level. please help this dream come true.)

Please give us more information about the event expectations in advance: I had quite literally no clue about what I was getting into up until it happened, and even after players asked multiple times I only had the most bare bones idea of what the expectations for my participation actually were. Furthermore, our group was together and had a plurk up and running for communication right at the beginning of the event, but we still took a day or two to get to anything simply because we had no idea what we were supposed to do. How many groups were we supposed to split up into? Is the opportunity to go off the path an option or a requirement? I personally only managed to figure out how to proceed from watching Team Yzma, which was presumably being guided along by Lucy.

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.

hell yes a network based thing would be neat-- it'd make participation pretty easy too!

As with the other comments so far, I also loved the event and would like more opportunities to do something similar in the future!

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.

Edited 2017-08-26 04:35 (UTC)

This was pretty much all of my problems with this event. I felt really behind for the whole event, like I was scrambling to get all of everything in. Part of that is me being slow in general, but the fact is by the time Week 3 rolled around I had gotten to the point of just tagging so that we could get it over and done with, rather than because I wanted to and it was fun.

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.

This month was an absolute BLAST, so thank you mods for all the time, work, dedication, blood sweat and tears??? that went into this, because I'm honestly amazed by how involved you guys had to be in order to coordinate things with so many different teams, so quickly and thoroughly.

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.

Totally with you, especially when it comes to the load balancing point, given our team suffered from that(Riddle Hell, anyone)? But yeah, we got fairly lucky when it came to NPCs(I.E. mature adults who could ask good questions) but I definitely saw the problem going on with other teams, so that's honestly something to be addressed tbh.

So, this event was far more stressful than enjoyable to me. Mostly because I run three other character slots in another game, and this hasn't been a problem before this event.

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!

Event expectations would be great, too.

Agreed with everything here.

Cosigned here.

I'm not understanding why on the last week of this lengthy event, why team Brandywine got saddled down with so many objectives at the end as opposed with the beginning. By the time the third week came, I was already mentally burned out. Much like Jirou-mun and many other people, the deadlines and time management with this event felt too harsh.

I couldn't even find time to tag outside of the event at hand nevertheless at my other games. It was just all too much.

First, I want to echo everyone else in thanking you for all your hard work in putting this event together! I had a lot of fun with the explorations.

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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OVERALL PLOT FEEDBACK

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