End of Game Feedback

[cartesio]

How was your time in Cartesio?

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!

Comments

[pecker]

Hey mods! Thanks for running a magnificent game! Here is my feedback.

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)