Cartesio NPCs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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cartesiobackstage2018-11-25 07:30 pm
cartesio) wrote in cartesiobackstage2018-11-25 07:30 pm
End of Game Feedback
Hello everyone! First and foremost, thank you all so much for playing in this game for the last two months, whether you lived to the end or died along the way. Just how much all of you put into this game helped make it what it was, and we're grateful for every bit of it.
However! This was all of our first time modding a murdergame, and we would love to hear back from you on how you thought the game went. What things went well? What went poorly? What should we reflect on, for any future games, in this continuity or otherwise?
Was there anything you felt we could improve on, as mods? Any concerns to make future games a better experience for everyone?
The post will be unscreened, but if you have any concerns you'd rather bring up privately for any reason, feel free to DM or PP them.
Thank you all again for the last two months!
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But let's see what I can do about answering those questions!
What went well?
The amount of impact we were allowed to have on the game world was just incredible, and so was the amount you guys were willing to work with us to make our crazy ideas reality. I felt like our characters mattered to this plot as opposed to just being cogs in a metaplot machine, and it was awesome. Also, kudos on the plot reveals - the mock week characters still being in the town stands out to me as just a moment that absolutely floored me. Like, I was a mess in real life in the best way possible. I don't know how to wrap this up nicely, but just let me reiterate that so much of this game was a joy.
What went poorly?
I think this is more of a minor gripe than anything, but sometimes it felt like there were very specific things that needed to be done to further some puzzles but we weren't given the guidance we needed toward those solutions until it was too late. The jukebox event comes to mind offhand, since we didn't realize we needed to input song-messages back until the last ten minutes of the event. It wasn't a huge problem, but that particular event is one I remember being kind of :/ about at the end for that reason.
What should you guys reflect on?
If I'm honest... just, finding a way to keep people active. I don't know if that means making AC a little harder to clear or what, but. I definitely needed to die when I did, given how I basically idled out of deadland, but I know the entire time leading up to it I felt a little apprehensive about doing so since Millium had been one of the more active characters and it felt like we had a pretty small pool of those. I don't really know how to word this without sounding terribly mean-spirited, since I'm certain other players just found themselves with Life Happening So Much, but it was definitely an uncomfortable feeling I had leading up to my volunteering to die.
Was there anything you could improve on? Any concerns?
This goes out to Ashley, specifically:
Listen. I don't know what went on in Lockdown and frankly, I don't care. But replurking something calling a player in your game abusive was just jarring and upsetting. I can't trust a mod that's willing to do something like that to one of their own players, especially when they're the one that went out of their way to add their players on plurk. Because you did that, I felt uncomfortable with you for the entirety of the game.
I hate to end my feedback on that note, because my feelings on Nick and Luna as mods, as well as the game as a whole, are overwhelmingly positive.
So I guess I'll end it with this: it's a bittersweet feeling, writing this, because it means that this murderboat is finally docking. But I'll be eagerly waiting at the port for the next one, because this was an adventure I'll never forget and I can't wait to see what else you have in store for us.
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Yes, that was incredibly poor behavior from me as a mod, and I understand your worries. I shouldn't have let personal issues from a separate game cloud my judgment, and for that, for how uncomfortable I made you feel, I'm incredibly sorry. This goes for anyone else feeling similar things. I'm only relieved enough that it wasn't something to ruin the whole experience for you.
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Just chiming in with some general agreement about concerns re: activity levels. I think what was suggested about making AC harder to pass should defs be considered for implementation for future rounds as I feel there were quite a large number of inactive players here. It's hard to say y'all should punish people for having lives outside of RP, nut regardless, I think the minimum AC requirements were set a tad low and could have easily been bumped up to 20 comments/week. That still averages out to doing ~3 tags a day which doesn't seem like it's asking for much.
I also like the idea I've seen implemented in other MGs where there are IC benefits/incentives tied to tagging more than the minimum AC requirements and would maybe suggest that as a mechanic to consider implementing in future rounds to encourage higher activity levels, if you don't feel the minimum AC requirement should be tweaked! Maybe consider that alongside missions? The missions were fun and I liked what you guys were trying with them.
That's about it for my concerns with the game?
Otherwise, I'll again have to second Kay there in saying that you guys really did do an amazing job of allowing characters the freedom to really impact the game. I know in the past, I've struggled with MGs feeling a lot like "kay, time to just clear the predetermined hurdles and not accomplish much of anything else" but Cartesio really did feel like a 'choose your own adventure' kind of game and that was genuinely refreshing and a serious blessing to have!
Keywords are irrelevant I just wanted to finally use this icon
However.
I don't know if the genre switch was flagged earlier than the gameplay making it apparent and I just didn't catch it, or if everyone else knew going in that this was inspired by Zero Escape and that's why it hit me (and apparently only me) like I'd stepped on a quantum immortality horror rake, but... from where I sit I went in expecting Twin Peaks But More Death and ended up with The Matrix Only Bleaker. Frankly I wouldn't have apped in had that been advertised, "none of this is real, even you" is a personal mega-squick (and is the reason I haven't tagged endgame or the last few GY events: I couldn't come up with a reason for Eric to react to the idea of being a copy of a possibly deceased original without it turning into "well, there's no reason for me to keep existing, I am an abomination that shouldn't", and nobody should have to play off that).
That said, changing investigation time to mid-afternoon was a good choice for the majority of the players but left me cut out - I'd apped in partly because a late investigation start would have allowed me to participate, had I not shot myself in the foot by apping a haughty grieving trainwreck. (WHY DIDN'T I JUST PLAY WIND. WHY. WHYYYYYY. DAMMIT. I AM A FOOL.) Catching up after that was pretty much impossible, but I'm glad you guys let me have input on Eric's death at least.
There was a lot of CR I wanted to develop but just lost the drive to after it became apparent that this was SF horror, not fantasy horror - but again, that's on me. I just feel like I took up a space somebody y'all actually know might have had, and I feel like an ass about it. Overall this was damn impressive for a bunch of first-time moderators, and while I probably won't be back (because [NONONOCat.wav] @ the particular subtype of SF horror this is taking after), I look forward to seeing how future rounds play out!
no subject
I thought Cartesio had an amazing gameplay concept. The way the choose-your-own-adventure things worked out in the missions was really innovative and showed the results of character's choices, letting us solve things in unique ways. The newspaper was a really good way of telling us how we did IC. I'm honestly so impressed you guys were able to maintain such a mechanic through the entire game, that must have been so much work! Future murder-game mods could really take a leaf out of your book here, this was all just objectively really good shit.
As someone who was basically inactive and made it to survivor pool, I think it would be fine if you were to up the AC requirements, as long as you feel that this has to do with how you got so many inactive people in the first place. Because on the other side of the coin, I probably could have comfortably dropped and left everything to the more active players, if there were not so many other inactive people before me. As things stood, I was grateful that it was so easy, because it meant I could at least fill my slot to the best of my abilities given my circumstances. I hope the reason I wasn't victim rolled is that I was doing that better than others in game who were not very active, and I'm sorry again that I technically failed it regardless in the last week.
That said, my advice if you want to make it 20 comments a week but still have an AC that is reasonable for everyone, is to allow the comments to be spread out over multiple threads possibly with a thread minimum. Requiring it to be two threads with ten comments each = Please dear god no, this is actually so hard to pull off if you're busy. 4 threads of five comments = Good and reasonable and encourages more tagging out anyway, anyone taking this seriously should be able to do this.
Keep in mind though, I think the success of Cartesio's first round will bring more players to you who will stick it out. Speaking from personal experience, I think new mods sort of always have this kind of struggle since no one knows what to expect from their game. Parasomnia had shit tons of drops in the beginning and so did 15 Strangers R1. It's just kind of a thing.
Incidentally, my strategy for making AC had eventually come to be just participating in the events, and I feel that the reason I failed the last event was because there was more solving on plurk than IC in the tags. I'm not sure we actually needed to let everyone else solve each other's puzzles considering how fast it was done. Maybe try letting the groups do it themselves and see how it goes next time. The puzzles themselves were very fun and good.
But this may be a useless complaint if the goal is not to let people like me coast anyway?? Or maybe not, because you want to keep the people you have in it and for me this was an easy way to get involved. Having things to do always helps for activity so like, just kudos again for the event system, it obviously worked really well.
The cases were also for the most part very good as well. I loved the emphasis on creative uses of the evidence like the knife mop and the candlestick arrow, or even the dildo launcher even though we didn't really figure that one out IC hahaha. The point is, there was a lot of stuff going on there, and it really hit on that off-the-wall danganronpa vibe. I don't often say this but I would be very interested in seeing the plotting stages for some of these.
I will admit that I took another major hit to my motivation in the Frasier-Rose case where it was really obviously plotted that Niwa would be using her birds to surveil the event and it seems this was not taken into account at all by the culprits or the mods. I threaded this directly with the victim (who straight up ASKED HER TO DO IT, I wasn't previously using her powers for this!) so I'm not sure how this could have been missed and in light of that I was pretty annoyed that I was given absolutely nothing to work with, even given some outright contradictory evidence to what had really happened. But the case after that you actively picked up on my confusion there and made an effort to reach out and offer more, which was really sweet! So I think you guys already know to pay closer attention to this kinda thing, but I'm just trying to be complete here.
The only other case thing is I felt bad about how dead the Bolin trial was, and I think that has to do with there being more suspects than non-suspects around at that point. You probably should have ended the game a case earlier with the numbers like this, but live and learn I guess, it's definitely really hard to figure out that kind of thing.
I also REALLY liked the twist ending! Thank you for making it so creepy and villain oriented, that's great! I was reminded strongly of SDR2's ending and yet it was still pretty unique. I wish I was playing a character who would care more about it, but reading it made me feel more hype than a murdergame endgame has in quite a while. In general, I had a ton of fun playing out the endgame, which speaks to how well written it was considering I was objectively pretty uninvested for most of this for my own reasons.
My biggest gripe is actually a really simple one. It drove me completely bananas that "cartesio" was the mod journal instead of the comm name despite being the name of the game. I understand if you can't make the comm name the same as the game name because the game name is taken, but if it isn't at the start, please don't do this to me!! I'm the type of person that types in the URL every time instead of bookmarking it, so this always resulted in me messing it up lmao. I also thought the game profile should have all of the links instead of just some of them, because some pages always took me some digging to find. It's kinda pathetic but I genuinely think frustration with this stuff is part of why I had a rough start from the beginning. Sorry for being such a grandma.
Anyway I think that silly note is a good place to leave it. Thank you for running an awesome game and schedules willing I'll definitely be back for more (WITH SOME ACTUAL GODDAMN EFFORT THIS TIME, I PROMISE. :'D)
no subject
First of—I really like some of the new approaches taken here, particularly the newspaper, interactive setting, and missions. It's nice to see innovation in the murdersphere and for the most part I thought there were pulled off pretty well. A few pieces of crit I have:
Missions. I really liked these, but as the game went on and the pace built, I disliked how the involvement in them seemed to switch from voluntary to necessary. Not for OOC reasons, but for IC ones. The arson in the diner and hostage situation comes to mind—most if not all characters would have some reaction to such big events, and it was hard to keep up at some points. Not to mention, one character making an ic decision could derail the entire thing. It's easier to cause chaos then prove trust, in other words.
AC. Going to +1 that the AC should be upped. I also think having incentives for tagging would help too, whether that's in rolls, regains, or what have you. I actually feel like the mission focus of the game may have affected AC, but that's just a guess.
Cases. I know this is a murdergame and all and we need to suspend our disbelief in a lot of things, but I really feel like some of the cases could have used mods logic/fact checking more. I don't want to be specific, because I don't think it's fair to call out any single case, but mods should really be watching (and if necessary) commenting as the murder plurk/doc goes on.
All that being said, I did enjoy my time here and A++ for being flexible mods!
no subject
Anyways, so I’m going to start with things I feel needs to be changed or tweaked a little bit. And I admit, most of this is coming from someone watching things from the graveyard and trying to keep up. I know my experience differs from those involved.
A lot of the events felt like chaos. While participating in the theater, I was surprised by the amount of people who were involved. From the wording, it sounded like you would only let in a few people in each part, but it turns out it was anyone and everyone could jump into the pool. There’s both good with this and bad. And I feel that the resulting chaos of everyone running in trying the things or being all over was hard to keep up with. I had an easier time keeping up via watching through flatview or keeping a thread open. But when I thought one thread was advancing the puzzle or trying a thing, another thread would pop up with mod responses instead. And I know it’s first come, first serve, but we were trying to organize something and going with a plan and wound up not really necessary or taken into account. I will absolutely say I adore the outcome of how that particular mission went down, but it was confusing.
A lot of events wound up being basically.. Chaos. People all jumping into the pool, trying their own thing and without really any communication between players over what was happening. At times, it felt like people were ran over while they were trying things, or things wound up lost. Des touches on the puzzles and how people were racing to complete the puzzles without giving people a chance to do it themselves or work it out. The same thing happened with the theater, where someone jumped in and finished it without letting anyone plot or plan.
So maybe let characters have time to actually hash things out and maybe encourage communication oocly. And maybe split events up to parts if you want a lot of involvement. Another idea is to consider limiting the number of people who are involved with like swapping out to let others jump in if there’s a lot of parts and puzzles.
Okay, next is about the town NPCs. While I adore Nanette and she feels the most believable, the hoard mentality felt a bit much. The escalation to violence felt unnatural and it honestly felt like the players didn’t have much impact until they spared the festival.
An event that comes to mind is the hostage at the graveyard event. This actually hits on the communication and chaos for me as well (and it gave me a headache trying to keep up with everything), but it also is the best example of the violence being escalated to frustrating to watch levels.
For every action someone did or try, it seemed like the escalation and violence was going to just be amped up regardless. With flying buckets of paint on fire and people trying to use their cars as battering rams, which could have injured their friend and wrecked even more of the town’s beloved history. And every time anyone did something or tried something, there was another tag with the town escalating without giving the players any time to breathe or hash out a plan. Going to take a moment to touch on communication and chaos again, but like… it felt like players were discouraged or didn’t have the time to actually communicate or plan anything out. It was a mad dash of trying all the things until something worked. And I know that wasn’t the intention or what you were going for.
The last thing is the Graveyard. Luna is amazing, and did her best. And I do not regret Nine being executed as early as he was.
However, There was some frustrating moments there. Kay touched on it with the communication events actually. Like shit posting was a lot of fun and figuring out how to communicate what information with what we had was fun and creative, but it was also frustrating at times. It didn’t really feel rewarding.
And most of the information the graveyard had access to was stuff the living found out too. Like at times, anything we wanted to explore or investigate was covered already by the living. Or information we shared at the end, was just an extra confirmation to stuff the living just found out. It maybe could have felt more meaningful if they got our message first and then the extra stuff they found was further evidence and new things to add on to it. They would have known to look for something to give them admin rights and look out for a password.
The dead did grant them admin rights and confirmed some stuff for them, but it didn’t feel rewarding or like we gave them something huge to me. And then the dead didn’t have say in how the ending went.
I was also confused because from the information we had, it sounded like those behind the simulation took people from worlds and scanned their brains in. And that there was a possibility of people returning to their worlds or bodies with the help of the influencers. Also it felt like the point of the program was because the world was a wreck, but it turns out that wasn’t it either. So i’m still pretty lost there.
There was also a huge disconnect with the graveyard at the end there. It kind of felt like we were forgotten, only to get like a congrats message after just having to sit and react. I didn’t get a feeling of relief or yay we did it. It was just over and we weren’t really part of the ending.
I think going forward, it may help if you guys were more strict with the AC and also tried to give the dead something to work towards that’ll feel more rewarding.
Also I think Luna definitely needed some back up. She did amazing with what she had and could do, and I know when things were going we were all rushing in and jumping to do things and all over and she kept up or even communicated to us clearly when she needed us to be herded in a place or let us know when she needed a moment to wait. So she was great and amazing and I can’t stress that enough. She did good, but I think it might be wise to get a fourth mod or just someone to step up if things are stretched all over. I know some of your guys schedules conflicted with things and there was sometimes one mod handling things alone. You all did the best you could and communicated, which was great. And I loved that. Like really you guys rocked with that.
I’m going to just plus one the activity suggestions and a lot of what LB said in her crit.
For positive, I had a blast with the environment. And the puzzles were great. You guys giving us some wiggle room and going along with our creative attempts at making changes over on the living side was amazing. I was laughing for a lot of the game and it was fun. So the game was enjoyable overall and we had a great time. So thank you for all of your work.
no subject
This may come down to a player preference thing, but I personally enjoyed the chaotic element of those missions. I don't really like it when events are plotted to death oocly because the fun in RP for me is the unpredictability and spontaneity. I can only speak for myself here, but I felt that the events themselves were not chaotic to play in, even if they may have been chaotic to try and follow from an observer's perspective. Or rather, even if it was chaotic it never actually became frustrating to me personally. I liked seeing how other characters were dealing with the same situation.
For me, IC > OOC for things like missions. If the characters are not ICly coming together to form a cohesive plan, I don't really see why this should be artificially forced. If characters individually are doing their own thing and trying their own methods instead of communicating with one another -- as long as that's IC, I think having a game that allows this is a definite feature and not a flaw. It should be on the characters who want to come together and form a cohesive plan of attack to speak up and make that happen.
That said, I do think players individually were responsible for pointing out in the mod plurk what their character was up to and I do think that players were often bad at this, myself included. I don't necessarily, feel that's on the mods? I suppose if the mods had requested players communicate what their characters were trying a bit better, that could have been one way of handling the situation. Tbqh though, I think the missions tend to be less enjoyable when there's an excessive amount of player coordination, like with the final "save the parade" mission for example where everything was handled oocly, there wasn't a whole lot of IC interactivity.
Apologies that this feedback wasn't really clearer in providing a specific direction, but I figured I'd offer a perspective from the living player's side. I guess tl;dr mods could have probably stepped in and said "ok there are 5 different things going on, work things out icly to figure out what the final plan will be" if things are getting too chaotic, but otherwise... /vague hand gestures.
I did think the switch to splitting missions into parts was a very good one, and would definitely keep that for the future.