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
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Exploration: While I did like the system in general, I do look forward to seeing the extra clarity in the future! One thing I did experience, however, was the fact that since most locations only had five slots available there was a lot of pressure to make rather large groups to submit. Obviously, working with other players is great, but when it comes to playing characters that ICly aren't the type to want to team up I feel like there's a certain OOC pressure to not like, be rude/greedy and take up one of the few slots with a single character's exploration submission. Admittedly, this could all just be in my head! The easiest solution if other people feel this way would be to up the number of slots, but I can see how that would potentially pile on mod work, so obviously low priority, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.
Solutions: Thanks in advance for the future work on balancing a variety of hints and potential solution clues. Even though Hayame made a bunch of new friends (lol), I really did enjoy the IC debate mechanic in the decision making log! Congrats on all that math calculating the success/fail in the argument presentation log- I had no particular feeling on knowing the formula beforehand or not, but I can see how some people would want to know.
Dossiers: Very shiny, good work on those! I will second some others though and ask for maybe a touch more information on locations? That could just as easily go in log information too, either way!
Items List: Admittedly, I found this kind of clunky. I can understand the desire to want to head off questions about items availability, but I feel like it could be accomplished in a way that may be easier on both mods and players. Like, the post was a masterpiece of organization, but it seems like it must have taken a lot of coding and thought to do for something that I think most people do not keep track of quite that close. I keep track of significant items for my char., but things like "broken sword", "wooden toys", "wood bundle" and such as that, I feel like most players can be counted on to handwave responsibly. With missions like Hanabira where there seems to be a certain period or cultural information I think it could be easier to just spell that out, perhaps in a "items that could be found in Edo period Japan are in general available in Hanabira" sort of style, with specific item listing limited to items one wouldn't expect to normally find? Just a suggestion.
Future Missions: Seconding some others in saying that I would love a short, Zeta-12-esque mission at some point. Very fun and easy, maybe around a busy holiday season? For more serious missions, I would love to see a mission planet that is just SO BIZARRE. We've mostly been dealing with humanoid races that have what could generally be called human values, but I think it would be a riot if we went to a world that was just VERY not human. I'm talking like "ten feet tall aliens with sixteen legs and the entire world is designed for their anatomy and also they think the sound of sneezing is a challenge to a duel" kind of weird. Maybe???
OOC Notes: Found these helpful! Would like to see it continued.
Applications: I realize we're not at a point to critique the system, but I just wanted to ask when we might find out information about how applications are going to go down when they next open. Like, will it be a free-for-all race for potentially only six spots from a specific set app-opening time, will there be a reserve system, will queue be back? That kind of information.
I really enjoyed the Hanabira mission as a whole, and most everything not mentioned here, so thanks again!! Sorry for the word vomit.
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Regarding applications, we will be announcing how this will be handled along with April's calendar. We're still figuring out the details, but rest assured we will try to make it as fair as possible! Again, thank you for your input and please let us know if there is anything else you'd like to add.
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I'll just slide in here belatedly with another random future mission suggestion since I was thinking about it-
A more thriller style mission, where perhaps the guild is sent to a planet that serves as a seal/prison for some sort of powerful spiritual entity. The seal keeping the thing contained is weakening and the guild has to do something (re-energize the sealing stones? find the broken sigil? recomplete the ritual?) to plug the hole... but things are complicated when the ancient being begins influencing the guild members, possessing those with cracks in their hearts to accomplish their goal... ~freedom~
Dun dun dun...
ALRIGHT I'LL SEE MYSELF OUT NOW, thanks again mods see ya!