Recollé Mods (
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recallings2018-03-04 06:03 pm
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FEBRUARY FEEDBACK;
Hello everyone! 🦄 As promised, we're here with a feedback post for February's event and we'd like to chat with the player base about how everything went down, see what worked and what didn't.
We learned a lot after August's event and we took several steps to try and help fix a lot of the errors that came from the summer plot to ensure they didn't occur for February. We wanted to make this particular event as fun and stress-free as possible. However, there are a handful of things the mod team themselves noticed while running this event that may have flagged concerns for you guys as well.
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! Specifically, we are interested in any comparisons some of you may have based on August's event in comparison to this one! While we may not answer every single comment individually, we are planning to read everything and take the feedback into account for going forward in the game.
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.
Finally, now that February is over, please be sure to check out the new assignment board, the revised world regains page, and as always the NPC inbox is wide open.
We appreciate you guys and for coming along on this wild adventure with us. Thank you so much for your time and attention!
We learned a lot after August's event and we took several steps to try and help fix a lot of the errors that came from the summer plot to ensure they didn't occur for February. We wanted to make this particular event as fun and stress-free as possible. However, there are a handful of things the mod team themselves noticed while running this event that may have flagged concerns for you guys as well.
💠 Team Assignments We realize that some of you were moved to teams outside of what you requested in order to make things fair number-wise, but we also realize that the group sizes were quite large and may have made planning objectives a bit difficult.
💠 Objectives. The pacing of some of the objectives may have been slower in some places than others with some players finishing assignments sooner than others in their objective sub-groups. In the future if we do something like this again, we will have secondary objectives ready to roll out for those players who wish to have something additional to do.
💠 Assignments. The mod team recognizes that there was a bit of a delay in some weeks when it came to handing out assignments and sub-objective write-ups per group. While there were several outlined objectives prepared, the delay came from assigning all four groups several objectives all at once while mildly customizing objectives based on who was in what sub-group.
In the future if we do something like this again, we may alternate so that one pair of groups gets their assignment info first and then the other group gets theirs slightly later to balance and improve the turn-around time. Alternatively, we may put a cap on the amount of people who may sign up for a plot in order for the mod assignments to be more manageable based on numbers!
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! Specifically, we are interested in any comparisons some of you may have based on August's event in comparison to this one! While we may not answer every single comment individually, we are planning to read everything and take the feedback into account for going forward in the game.
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.
Finally, now that February is over, please be sure to check out the new assignment board, the revised world regains page, and as always the NPC inbox is wide open.
We appreciate you guys and for coming along on this wild adventure with us. Thank you so much for your time and attention!
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I liked the outlines that the mods provided for objectives, so it didn't feel like we had to ask you for more information, or for the results of every action, so we weren't taking up your time. In August, it felt like we needed more supervision, and I'm glad that we could be out of your hair more this time.
The event section within the city was great, and I liked how it tied into the out-of-city objectives.
Finally, the emotion bonds allowed for some really neat RP, and it was a good way to get at least one guaranteed piece of CR within the event groups, I really appreciated that.
Overall, 10/10!
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We're very happy to hear all of this! We wanted to allow for a more unique experience unlike in August that would have a larger impact on the game and we felt that a more hands-off approach this time around would help with players telling their own stories and creating their own narratives. It's why we also allowed for some players to create their own objectives later down the line.
We appreciate the feedback and we're happy to hear you enjoyed it!
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The all or nothing rewards for the exploratory group seem unbalanced in comparison to the city group. The city group needed a minimum of 15 comments for a freebie, which hey, that seems reasonable to me, but then with the exploratory groups it was the all or nothing rewards with a 30 comment minimum, which is a lot hard to achieve when you're threading with three other people. I'd propose to have a lower minimum (like 15 comments) to get one regain as well, regardless of group. How you want to split that across threads isn't such a big deal, but the vastly different minimum requirements seemed odd to me. While I appreciated the bigger reward for 30 comment requirement, a lot of people in my group didn't reach it. It's kind of disheartening to be like, five comments off and feel like your contributions to the event mean nothing. Even with players being contacted after the event wrapped, going into future events with a fairly standard minimum seems reasonable and fair, and if there's an intensive group (like the exploring groups) they could have an additional, higher requirement for more rewards. Just not 'all or nothing.'
Overall, I did love the concept of the event and I appreicate the work put into it! I know this isn't going to be 100% smooth sailing but I mean, I'll definitely be participating in future events.
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20-24 comments: One freebie memory
25-29 comments: One freebie memory + the 10-20 point item/20 points
30+ comments: Full rewards
Everyone received a comment with their adjusted rewards based on their comment counts once the event officially ended (yesterday.)
On the other hand you are correct that a smaller minimum may have helped! When we initially set the base at 30 comments for these rewards this was under the idea that it was an average of one comment a day on an event with multiple objectives, multiple people, and multiple action-based prompts unlike the city log that only had the same set of prompts all month. Additionally, the comment-count was a little higher since this was a sign-up event versus an in-game event that was running nearly on auto-pilot. However, we do recognize that we may have overestimated due to a handful of factors including not anticipating some of the groups would have sometimes up to five people that would make for a slower thread in order to abide by tag order, etc. Should we run another event like this, we will take this into consideration and work on a sliding scale.
We're happy to hear that you enjoyed this event overall and we appreciate the feedback!
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February's event did run a lot smoother than August's, and I'm super pleased with how all the kinks were worked out in regards to the objectives so that there was a lot less hand-holding overall! (Though Ty was also in our group, so having her on Discord for small, quick questions/clarifications might skew my personal perspective on this)
Having sub-objectives was something that was also on my mind, so I'm glad it was brought up above! I know that I'm a fast tagger and during the first three weeks of February, I also had very large chunks of time to sit down and boomerang threads, so I admit to being a little bored compared to how August's was. I did juggle two event groups in August, but I still think it was a bit slow for me. Maybe because there were ~double the amount of people in each group? So that the number of tasks were about the same, but (maybe this is just how our group split things up and other groups did it differently) for the most part, we had 3-4 character groups and that alone made things a little slow. In August (city, Cognac specifically) I remember each week I would have multiple threads with different people to complete tasks (both objectives and sub-objectives) so that was good for keeping me busy but also for getting to thread with lots of different people each week. In February, I tagged out as much as I could in travel/downtime threads and also topleveled, and even after that, my character did not manage to interact with half the group. Not a huge deal, but it was potential for cr which I'm always greedy for and I was a little disappointed I couldn't do more with everybody. Having so many people in the group also made the Discord overwhelming (my personal problem, maybe, I know I'm easily overwhelmed and thus stopped popping in after a while unless there was something I wanted to discuss). Otherwise, I think our group organized everything well— thanks, Ty!♥— it was just... a lot, for me, personally. I like smaller groups, because they feel easier to get to know each other both ICly and OOCly, which is what Cognac felt for me over the summer. But I know that splitting everybody up into smaller but more numerous groups is a lot more work to mod, so the change in structure this time around was good on that front. One thought I toyed with was having the same 4 groups, but splitting each location in half so that Team A and Team B get essentially the same objectives and everything, maybe customized a little depending on the characters, but OOCly they'd work independently and maybe that might be easier to coordinate. idk!! I'm just spitballing here.
Overall, it was a very fun event! The heart stone and partner link(!!!!!!) mechanics were A++++++ and I absolutely love and appreciate all of the "actions have consequences" in terms of how everything we did affects our characters and the game as a whole, rather than how August seemed a little more like just going somewhere and bringing back info. Thanks for a great time♥
EDITS THIS IN!!! another thing I really appreciated was allowing for communication between groups and the city this time- I know that August's was a special case, but having communication open and also the one break day kept my cr together and I'm really thankful for that.
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First of all, we're really glad to hear that February ran smoother than August! That ultimately was the main goal and though February had kinks, hearing that it was easier to do things is really good for us to know what worked and what didn't work.
When we did August's event we had objectives and sub-objectives and we learned that having both presented with certain points to hit put a little unwanted pressure on players. However, one of the things we should have done was have those on hand anyway for players who finished quickly instead of the downtime that came (i.e. group 3 had their karaoke, etc.)
Group size is definitely an issue we'd like to address if we ever do this again as well. In August, Lucy and I split the groups among ourselves and had double the amount of groups, so it felt a little less cramped than it did this round. One of the things we'd like to do in the future if we ever do something like this, we would focus on smaller, more-concentrated efforts for faster threading and more CR building.
In truth, we do think perhaps this round we should have capped the number of players who signed up when we knew there would only be four groups, but these are all lessons learned and we appreciate hearing how it worked in comparison to the smaller groups in August!
The other thing we as mods agreed on (as Lucy was also in Group 4's Discord) was that the Discord grew a little unruly at times as there were so many people talking all at once and it was hard to really hammer things down even with sub-channels! Group size, we think, is definitely a good chunk of the rough spots we hit this time around.
Splitting each group into Team A and Team B is an idea, but the main reason we didn't this time was mostly in terms of creating the different objectives and making sure they weren't solid repeats of one another. However, we definitely hear what you're saying and if something like this happens again we'd consider preparing ahead of time a column a and a column b for players to pick from in their group.
Overall though we feel that with the new quest system and everything that will allieviate a lot of these issues and provide players with opportunities to do things like these large events on a smaller scale to do more concentrated objectives and better CR! We're honestly not sure if/when we'll do something on this large of a scale again now that we're in Phase 2, but for future team-based events these are definitely points we'll bring back to the table to organize better both on the mod behalf and on the player side.
We're really glad to hear what you've enjoyed as well! The partner mechanic was a new thing for us we wanted to try and similar ideas may crop up in the future, so it's nice to hear that it was well-received by several members of the game. Actions having consequences is a large theme we hope to present in Phase 2 as well, so generally speaking we're glad that the tone was set, it was enjoyed, and we really appreciate hearing your thoughts. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak up!
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It was an improvement on every level! I liked the open communication between the city and the groups, as was noted above, so it didn't feel like we were isolated or being railroaded into this one thing. I liked having less pressure (to an extent); I was in Group 2 this time around, and the attitude was a complete shift from being in Team Brandywine last time. We were able to joke around and have fun
and make shitpostsrather than constantly worrying about deadlines. I also liked having an NPC who seemed like he actually... cared? While I love me some cyborg Morgan Freeman, I felt like our opportunities to interact with August's NPCs, despite working for them, was really limited. I won't beat a dead horse here, but that was part of why Team Brandywine brought nothing to the table after August's event-- and that was telling.I liked not needing to have my hand held in order to advance a thread, and the quirks in the event were charming and fun. I felt like it was super exciting to see what everyone else was doing because everything felt somewhat personalized. I also felt like the paces given were true to what I signed up for.
I also love love LOVE the introduction of the quest system. So far the next phase of the game is going exactly how I hoped it would! I've been in two previous games with quest systems and I absolutely adore them, whether they give fancy rewards or not. It's just... cool to have something for my character to work toward.
Here are the things that stuck out to me, that weren't quite what I expected and could maybe use some tweaking:
I think that's about it. Overall I'd say I'm very happy with February's event, and despite my wall of text here all my suggestions are very minor things. You guys really do listen and take our suggestions in consideration. I'm really excited to see what the next year brings!♥
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First of all, we're so glad to hear that! We do appreciate hearing that this event was well-received for the most part and we're happy you've taken the time to chime in.
All of the positive points you've brought up are really great things to hear as well since we were hoping to change things up a little, make this a little more independently run, and give the game a liaison to work with rather than an RNG NPC raffle like in August. Initially when we started the game we were limiting the use of NPCs as a whole, but we've realized that as the game shifts in order to help smooth plot stuff and relay information people don't always get from the plot, we needed to have a "face" for the game, so to speak. So basically we're glad to hear that was achieved.
We're ultra-excited for the quest system and we'll talk more about that at the bottom while addressing your concerns since we feel this might tie into them!
-That was definitely on me (Ty) as the plan for characters to go home in the middle of the month was something we settled on after the event had started. With that, we definitely ended up shorting people time on objective two and though backdating was allowed we definitely get that it ended up feeling like a rush and it wasn't super relaxed. So for that we definitely apologize! That was on us for timing and in hindsight this makes sense. Our mindset at the time was that getting the main chunk done or at least figured out would be fine in those four days and backtagging would occur without really taking into account that it was definitely in the middle of the work week, despite having that Friday "off", technically.
-Like addressed above with Kelsey part of our shortcoming was not fully anticipating that people would group up to be 3/4/5 person groups and again, in hindsight, duh that makes total sense that it would be hard to hit a minimum. Should we do something like this again in the future we will take group sizes into account when setting a minimum. Our goal is never to let you guys fully fail, but we are still working on a good system as we go.
-As addressed in the comment above to Card one of the things we maybe should have considered was a cap of characters for this event given there were only 4 groups this time rather than 9, but we were excited, you guys were excited, everyone was excited. The guide helped this time but smaller groups are definitely a priority next time.
One of the reasons we didn't split those groups in half is solely because…well, there's 3 of us and over 200 characters in the game and in truth that gets a bit overwhelming when trying to work with everyone and customize it, make it fun, etc. One of the things we did like about August versus February was the smaller group size, but with the way this event was designed splitting the groups in half this time would not have been entirely feasible. In the future, we would most likely either have two sets of objectives prepared beforehand or limit the number of people who can do these big-style events.
Generally speaking though we're hoping that the introduction of Phase 2 and the quest system will help adjust a lot of these problems, too! This way people can have their characters explore, they can thread at their own pace, they can work with a smaller group and still contribute to the game and work on personal arcs and CR. While we most-likely won't do anything this large again (if not for a long while because of the quests), for any future team-based events we will definitely keep those points in mind!
As said above we really do appreciate you coming to us with feedback and we're so happy to hear both the good points and less than good points. We are excited for the next part of the game and we hope that we can keep working with you guys to make this as fun as possible!
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I'm glad that you're flexible enough to change with the game. That's a really important part of modding, I've discovered. You don't necessarily have to implement every suggestion, but it's good that you recognize the shifting needs of the playerbase.
- Adding onto the first point, my subgroup didn't get our objective to start until late Saturday night. So that's probably part of why it felt rushed. Some of that was on us as we waited until Saturday morning to finalize everything (not wanting to leave people out), but regardless, it's all stuff that you've acknowledged, so I don't expect to have that happen again. And we'll be prepared if it does, I hope!
- I'd be fine with a character cap on big events! I understand that splitting groups is freaking insane so I won't be disappointed if it's something that never gets implemented. That's a LOT of extra modwork and it may just be easier to lean on the quest system in the future. That said, there's probably a few people in the game who would be happy to play 'plot fairy' and NPC/run small parts of plots, if you asked. (I'd volunteer if I wasn't dying at work.)
Thank you for listening!
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+ Zee is a great success
+ the world expansion in this event was great and incredibly well defined
+ I'm looking forward to this next leg of the game a lot
+ The material of the endgame of the quests was awesome.
So I'm going to identify what I see as a few structural issues that I think will be mollified just from how "phase 2" here looks like it's going to be, but I think are nontheless worth mentioning:
Objective delays and Objective fatigue ... This is going to come off a little strange because I think on the whole (for group 4) Objective 3 was the best one in terms of giving creative individualized arcs which demanded the whole DMing style approach which was done with this event. But he's the skinny: at least for myself I know by then I was starting to get a bit more burnt out on the event and the the whole objective oriented rigamaroll of consulting with the mods to sort of OOCly hash things out (especially with delays in responses in objective 2 and early objective 3). I get the necessity of it, again, and I do think it made for a stronger more personalized experience. But coupled perhaps with group sizes (though we in group 4 at least largely were in groups of 3 which helped a lot) I'm sort of led to question...
For out Objectives 1 and 2, while the individualization was nice, might it have been both easier on the mod workload and on the players if there was a looser objective definition and sort of a list of possible prompts for people to pick from and run with. Like the whole matter of us being tested by the wolf in objective 2, I did find myself sometimes thinking that a list of trials outright might've made that whole thing cleaner on both sides for organizing rather than waiting on the individual prompts. A lot of objective 1 probably similarly could have been identified with set dressing details and then perhaps people probing for slightly more specific things.
I'm not precisely sure I'd want to change it to that more broad style, mind, but if it would help with things being gummed up and (perhaps just as pressingly) the fact that while the event was presented as being loose deadlines there did end up being somewhat hard week-ish deadlines if that might have helped.
But honestly all of that sort of comes together as I say: the whole 1 straight month of intense plot-event every six months model is a little exhausting? Like August way more than this event but a little here, I wonder if perhaps splitting it into a three month timetable for slightly less earth shaking but still plot relevant events might be better on both ends for planning for for lessening a sense of overwhelming fatigue by the end of things? I think this will be abated somewhat by the mission system though, so it might not be ass pressing later on. But it's a thought I know I was having by the end of it.
Plus, if they were more frequent than six months (and again, I can get where there might be hesitance for this so don't take it as gospel) it might be possible to implement caps on sizes for certain groups which are considered more plot relevant or laser focused for the DM-style stuff.
Oh actually though one more thing, I appreciated a lot how much there was to do on the homefront and with the ability to contact people out in the signed up for stuff. I think I had as much fun with Natalia and the prompts there without it feeling trivial. Which is a really, really nice feeling. I don't think I mentioned that which is honestly cool.
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Sorry for the delay, we wanted to reach out and reply though and with juggling other responsibilities of the game this was the first free moment as a team we were able to sit down and write this out.
To also break it down, we will be breaking it down into bullets.
-You’re right, it probably would have been a little easier to make objectives 1 and 2 a little more loose for players to jump in rather than a personalized story and that was on me specifically as a mod. While putting together objectives and outlining things, things that were taken into consideration were characters’ strengths and weaknesses, players’ goals for their characters, the overall story, and how to make things a little more challenging for characters! What this led to was a bit of a delay while doing the research and tweaking the objectives to allow for these things.
Overall part of this also would have been solved by smaller group sizes which is something we thought of in hindsight. A smaller group with that kind of more niche objective would have worked fine! Doing this for at least 30ish small groups per objective did lead to some delay and we recognize the facult of that.
As mentioned to someone above, we initially didn’t really think of it as hard deadlines since we allowed for backtagging on this one and tried to space it out. Pacing was a thing we noticed, too, and if we run something large like this again it’s something we would consider breaking up.
-A month of intense plot-stuff every six months is not a model we are continuing, nor was it a model we were ever going to consider continuing! February was our last large-scale like this thanks to the introduction of the quest system and opening of new areas. Our goal moving forward is to be able to spread out the best parts of these large events over the course of time and areas. We wouldn’t want to lock the game into a specific calendar of mod-plot events either solely because that would feel a bit forced for the game and the players, plus it would always be up against newbies coming into the game as we work on a bimonthly app cycle. Somehow the timing would always be a little iffy and we prefer a system of taking the pulse of the game and then plotting large events. Again, however, we’re hoping with the introduction of the new system we can maximize the best pieces and avoid burning out our players and ourselves.
This would also address your points about cap sizes and DM-style objectives and their feasibility!
We are glad to hear this re: the homefront though! That was one of the major things we wanted to improve on from last time as we know the city log from before was absolutely lacking and the game was split in half. We will probably follow this similar model again should anything like this go on again in-game on this large scale.
We really appreciate you taking the time to leave us feedback and we hope this addresses everything!
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I realize that in this situation it just wasn't feasible to work around given the amount of work stretching y'all thin already, but in the future, I personally feel that it would be best that if there is information that must be conveyed by an NPC, there should probably be a proper NPC available to convey it, rather than this weird echo chamber thing I had an issue getting past. That way PCs can organically react to what's given to them, rather than a handful of players absorbing it on an ooc level first, then trying to work out a way to write this secondary character that must pass along certain information to the other players that also already absorbed that information.
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Sorry for the delay in response, but we did want to address this and this was the first day that we could all get together to write a reply without working on other game maintenance ,etc.
One of the things with the groups having objective-relevant information being handled by NPCs is that the information was fairly broad and opened up for interpretations of how the NPCs would respond to people, what kind of information they would give and etc. This was an oversight on our part as we did not realize this would be a problem. Several of the other groups also had NPC-related objectives and worked with the mod information presented to work out a chain of events to distribute the information and create an action thread and in this occurring we did not realize it may be harder for another group. In addition, we did have a group ask for mod NPC input and I stepped in to provide mod commentary for an action/chase thread. Generally speaking though most of the groups ran on autopilot and so without anyone bringing this up as a problem we worked on answering other questions and taking care of the game.
However, one of the things we would like to counter is: “ having objective-relevant information being handled by NPCs that are being played by PCs who already know the information and thus have nothing else to really...do...in a constructive manner...felt kind of redundant to me.”
OOCly, yes, you guys knew the information, but with the IC/OOC divide your characters should not have had the information and they would have been able to react to it and work out a conversation. In addition, as a mod team we were available to ask for further information as well and when asked we provided more detail to help guide threads without actively threading this out with groups. Objective 1 for a lot of the groups and subgroups were basic, loose objectives to get started to lead up to greater objectives! We apologize that it felt that you were parroting mod information, but you are correct, it wasn’t feasible.
As stated in various comments above, we will not be doing something on this large of a scale again in the nearby future, if at all! These were not meant to be NPC-heavy threads, and again, we were available for additional questions to help build the organic feeling! We do apologize that it was strange to thread for you but in the future we would be happy to rectify this by being more available to answer questions should questions be asked. In review of your particular thread I can see why this was an issue as the thread was started off as though it was jumping in the middle of a conversation and we do agree that would make it difficult to thread! In the future, we would err more toward eliminating NPC interaction entirely for simple tasks.
We appreciate your feedback and we hope that this helps address your comment.