POST-MISSION ASSESSMENT
Hello, Ophelia! With the completion of Mission: Hanabira, we'd like to once again open up a discussion on game observations. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, after every mission, we like to give the mods and players the opportunity to talk with each other about things we've noticed during the past mission -- what worked, what didn't work, and what we'd like to see going forward.Please note that any changes we decide to make will not be implemented until the next mission or later!
ASSESSMENT RULESWe don't have many rules when it comes to post-mission assessments, so please follow what few we do have: - PLEASE DON'T SPEAK FOR OTHERS. Only speak for yourself -- in other words, try to refrain from "others have said" or "some of us agree" types of statements. If you are uncomfortable leaving us crit with your name attached or in a public forum, you may always contact us on our Mod Contact page (anonymous is enabled).
- BE RESPECTFUL. The mod team is anonymous, but we promise we're people behind the journal! We put a lot of collective time and effort into running the game, and it's something we are very invested in, just the same as you. Please treat us with the same level of respect you would grant any other player in the game. On that note, respect any players giving their opinions as well. You are welcome to express disagreement, but do so in a civil manner. We will do our utmost to extend the same courtesy to you, as we believe no one should feel intimidated to share their thoughts on this post. As always, let's all be kind to each other!
MOD OBSERVATIONSBelow are a few bumps in the road we noticed during Mission: Hanabira, as well as some potential ways to smooth them out. We may or may not make changes about these points, but we want to be transparent about what we have seen and experienced ourselves during this first mission. - BOUNTY BOARD. As stated in the recent updates post, we have noticed that it can be somewhat of a struggle reaching the 10 comment requirement for the white, green, and blue bounties, particularly because the bounties for this mission were geared more toward slice-of-life. The mod team is currently discussing lowering the requirement for these bounties to 5 comments or adjusting the requirement on individual bounties as needed, depending on their genre. Let us know your thoughts!
(Bonus behind the scenes history: our original motivation for making the bounties 10 comments across the board was to resolve some inflation concerns we had with Season 1's reward bank; the more "coins" someone stacked up, the less special the system and rewards became, and we wanted a way to ensure the bounty rewards maintained their value by being something that players have to work for. We see now we might have gone a little overboard, and this is why we're considering adjustments!)
Regardless of what we decide for lower-level bounties, purple, orange, and spec bounties will remain at the 10 comment requirement. Our reasoning for this is that higher-level bounties have higher-level rewards, so they should have higher-level requirements.
- EXPLORATION. We noticed there seemed to have been some confusion on both ends about exploration groups! Should we utilize this again, we plan to be more clear on what we expect from players and what they can expect from us; exploration groups were meant to be a chance for players to take initiative and get specific questions answered rather than simply sign up and get clues like in the search system of Season 1. Our response length and content generally depended on character actions; the more specific your character's actions were, the more likely it was that we would be able to give you a good response, because we were able to tell what you were looking for. We apologize if this was unclear or made anyone unhappy! In the future, if we use this system again, we will try to be as upfront as possible about this.
We'd also like to take the time to explain why we don't answer follow-up questions: we aren't trying to be stingy with plot information, we promise! The fact of the matter is we have fewer plot mods than we used to and the time we can dedicate to the game is limited. We would genuinely love if we could answer all of your follow-up questions, but at the moment, we're just trying to keep the game moving forward! Because we don't answer follow-ups, we try to give all the information needed from the get-go in our responses; every exploration response we gave was relevant to the plot, no matter how small or large it was.
Players from Season 1: did you prefer the search system? Did you like the exploration system? New players: what did you think about the exploration system? Would you prefer to do without it entirely, or did you like it? Let us know!
- SOLUTIONS. While we attempted to legitimize several solutions to the mission, we know several players felt railroaded into the empress marriage due to evidence pointing in its direction. We now realize that when the marriage solution gained OOC traction, we should have switched gears and focused more on legitimizing the other workable solutions we had in mind to strengthen their arguments. We want to give players freedom to do whatever they want with the plot -- if players had chosen to kill the entire Mountain Clan, for example, we wouldn't have stopped you! -- but we also don't want to leave you without any hints or any ideas at all, so it's a difficult balance to strike and sometimes we miss the mark. All we can do now is try to do things better next time and hope that it didn't impact anyone's fun too badly. We're going to try our best to strike the right balance in future missions, so please bear with us.
We also noticed that the way we chose to determine the mission solution might have been confusing or unfun for players. So we're asking: was the argument post unclear, too much work, or otherwise not fun for you? Would you have preferred a simple poll to determine the winning idea with the guarantee of the empresses' agreement, assuming it was a viable idea? To explain our ~secret~ algorithm: we determined whether the idea was successful by taking the number of characters currently not on hiatus and stating that 70% of that number would be passing; from there, each character was assigned a point value based on whether their argument was good, whether they were a Negotiator, whether they were royalty (as the empresses would recognize and respect royal diplomacy), and whether they had a good reputation in Hanabira (determined by bounty submissions).
We wanted it to feel like characters actually had to work to win so it would be more fun when they actually did, but it was a completely new idea, so we understand the way we went about it may have been a misstep. Let us know how you felt about it!
DESIRED FEEDBACKIn addition to our observations above, we'd like to hear players' feedback on a few smaller mechanics. These aren't so much things we've observed, but things we're curious to see how you feel about! You don't have to answer every question, but these are the types of things we're looking for feedback on: - DOSSIERS. For those of you who were here in S1, we changed the dossier around a little -- did you notice? ;) We'd like to ask all players how the dossier format is working for you: is there any information you would find more helpful? Is there any formatting that could be changed? Did you find yourself going back to reference the dossier, and if not, is there anything we could change to make it a more valuable resource?
- FUTURE MISSIONS. Is there any genre or topic you would like to see in a future mission? Anything you wouldn't like to see for awhile? You can also leave mission or location suggestions on the suggestions page.
- OOC NOTES. We typically leave OOC notes at the end of logs, and we have begun experimenting with an additional "upcoming events" section as well, since the logs go out bi-weekly. Do you find these notes helpful? Have the upcoming events and quicklinks been useful? Did you utilize them or just stick to the calendar and navigation pages? Is there anything else that might be helpful to add?
IN CLOSINGWe always encourage plain and transparent communication between mods and players, and we hope you all take the opportunity to let us know your thoughts on how this mission went! No matter if you would like to see things tweaked or to stay the same, we won't know unless you tell us. However, there are a few topics that we would prefer not to receive feedback on at this time, as the mechanics are very new and we would like to give them more time to settle: - ACTIVITY CHECK/HIATUSES. The mods spent a long time debating over the new AC and so far there's only been one true AC, so we'd like to give it a real go and give everyone time to adjust first! We know this is a strange adjustment for players carrying over from Season 1 and we hope you understand.
- APPLICATION SCHEDULE. As stated on the recent updates post, we decided to lower the required amount of slots for an app cycle to 6. (Although current players can always apply for a second character between missions regardless of open slots, as they already have a space in the game.) However, we still want to see the 'only open between missions' scheduling through for a bit before taking any feedback on it, though if you have any thoughts about the content of the application itself, please let us know!
- GAME CAPS. This includes player caps, cast caps, and how many characters one player is allowed. Like the above items, we're still feeling out our new mechanics and would like to give them time to settle in before taking feedback. Although the cast cap is not new, we don't have any intention of changing it any time soon, since it's been in place for a long while and we haven't run into any problems; if it's not broken, don't fix it!
- SPECIALIZATION SYSTEM. Spec assignments, spec powers, using the bounty board to level up, etc. Everyone's very low level at the moment, which means we haven't had much of a chance to fully utilize this system. Hopefully in the upcoming missions we'll get a chance! Fingers crossed. :)
Thank you in advance for respecting our limitations and not asking for restructuring of any of these mechanics at this time! As we grow into S2, we may ask for feedback on these topics (or others!) if we notice any problems with them, but we'd like to see them in action first.
Thank you for taking the time to read our assessment! We are happy to discuss any feedback or suggestions you may have, explain our reasoning for choosing certain game mechanics, or just chat about our future plans for the game. We know that we can appear ~mysterious~, but we love to talk about Futurology and want our game environment to be as open as possible, so don't be shy if you have something to say! |
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axiology2018-03-10 06:47 pm
no subject
I was one of the players who felt the heat about the amount of comments it took to complete a bounty, and while I think a lot of the more action-y bounties should be 10+ (after all, it probably takes that many comments to gain momentum so they actually reach a conclusion instead of petering off and people getting credit for handwaving), but slice of life bounties it can be very hard to drag them out that long if there's not a secondary driving action. (Which, admittedly, is a player thing- some people had really emotional conversations come out of the sake drinking one, but that's not always gonna be the case.)
tl;dr I definitely think bounties with higher rewards should have 10+ comments, but perhaps 5+ for simpler, "cuter" SOL bounties.
EXPLORATION
Definitely agreeing with Tifa that the time crunch was a bit taxing and kept me from really thinking of things, but I do like the idea and think it just needs a little bit of tweaking! I thought the group thing was a good idea, but it was really unwieldy to thread out. The only thing I can suggest to fix that, however, is to let people pick ONE "NPC" to ask a question of and everyone gets their question answered, and then they take that information and thread getting it/offering it out. One of the higher points of ALASTAIR is when people got bits of information and shared it and then people gave the information they got.
It's basically the same thing here, but with less focus on organizing groups.
To summarize my rambling point, say you have an NPC fisherman, an NPC mother, and an NPC baker. A player can choose ONE of these three to direct a single question to and to describe how they approach the NPC. It's... essentially what was already done, but with less focus on groups, because... again that was unwieldy to thread and I never finished a single one, which is sad, and might have had an effect on my overall understanding of the plot.
SOLUTIONS
I agree with Tifa that explorations are a GREAT way of introducing solutions, but the problem here was just a single solution gained a lot of traction really fast and had a lot of support, and while there's no way to predict where the wind is going to blow and what players will latch onto, the lack of a perceived alternate plan with any real evidence was a bit discouraging, and while I LOVE the arguments post in theory and definitely want to see more of it... what it felt like in this particular instance was a lot of people with a lot of evidence shouting down people with less evidence who were mostly just against arranged marriage. It didn't really matter if the other ideas were good or not- no one had any way of arguing against something that seemed very obvious, so it became pointless to contribute or argue.
And one of the ways this can be improved is by....
SPECIALIZATIONS
This event as advertised as being very Negotiator-friendly, and that's awesome! I like missions tailored to specializations, like Woodhurst was tailored to a very fighter/science crowd. But I think what could really help (and certainly give the mods the right amount of structure you need- because I know that SOME structure is needed) is to lay groundwork for solutions that work best for certain specializations.
This ties into what Tifa mentioned about having time to ask more detailed questions- characters will often ask about things that pertain to their wheelhouse or will pursue leads that relate to what they, personally, are good at.
Obviously, you can't put a bunch of specialization-specific solutions into every mission- especially when you have missions like this that skew heavily diplomatic and missions like Woodhurst that skew heavily inventor- but it's a good thought when laying groundwork for possible scenarios, AND will help us figure out how to use our specializations to help with missions.
DOSSIERS
The new dossiers are super cute and I love them.
no subject
As for the explorations, we are definitely going to keep this in mind; we agree that sharing information is an important part of plot-heavy games, and we understand doing so can get a little complex when groups are involved. Our reasoning for encouraging groups was to encourage CR and to put less strain on the mods answering questions, but having a "one question" rule seems like a good solution to both concerns!
Regarding solutions and specializations, we hear you, and we will be making adjustments going forward. For specializations in particular, we are planning on making each mission different enough so that everyone will get their time in the sun, so to speak, regardless of their specialization or abilities.
Again, thank you for your feedback! Please let us know if there's anything else you'd like to add.
no subject
Everyone else seems to have covered anything else, and, honestly, you guys addressed all my concerns in the initial address as something you're working on, and I really appreciate that. It made me feel super comfortable to know that my concerns were already being looked into without me having to say anything. Seriously, you guys, keep up the good work! I'm in this game for the long haul, and your excellent modwork and your awesome missions are why.