Plot/Event Feedback Post + open discussion!

[jigokumods]

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Recent Feedback Response

To start; an apology While this is a feedback on issues that have existed prior to it, we definitely feel most of this falls on us for how the mini event/"get to work" log was handled. Enthusiasm got the best of us and we threw out way too much with too little time for players (especially the large amount of new players) to really adjust to what we were doing or what was going in.

People who've been in the game for awhile know this was not a usual thing. Yes, the mini-event will usually have some major plot elements, but certainly nothing on the level of what we put in this most recent one and it was a mistake on our part to do so. It overwhelmed too many people, and pushed things too far and too fast, narrative-wise.

We don't intend to retcon what happened (it's honestly too late for that) but we do apologize for letting out enthusiasm get the best of us and assure we will be much more mindful of pace going forward. In fact, the crux of this feedback is about that: pace. Well, that and transparency.


Breathing Room This is going to be implemented in a few ways.

The most important is that we will not be having an app cycle in October. Applications will be essentially frozen until January 2023. A cap is also being considered, but we will see where the game is at the time we open apps again before revisiting that conversation, but for now, no new apps will be accepted for the next four months.

The Wasteland/Iron Bear/Haniyasu plot, the main plot, is going to be re-evaluated and made to be paced out over a longer period of time. Right now, we're looking at not closing it until November, and Toraguma's initial "we move out in 2 weeks" declaration will not turn out to be true, for IC reasons we can honestly pretty easily cook up.

We hope these two things give the game way more room to flex and for folks to actually find their legs beneath them in the game again.


Plot Info Dissemination We will start this by stating that while we have often played our cards close to our chest, it has never been the intention of the mod team to make the plot deliberately obtuse or impossible to decipher. Usually we only hold onto things if the reveal of said information is planned as part of another post. The most recent example of this is the bomb's nature being revealed by Toraguma in an IC post shortly after the mini-event.

That being said, this isn't a very tenable system sometimes, and this is one of those times where people were becoming understandably frustrated at the lack of ability to do anything besides reactive play, which is not what everyone is here for.

As far as character investigations and OOC questions go, know this: we will always tell you if you're going down a dead end. If you are on a cold path, we will let you know so that you don't feel like your time was wasted. That being said, not every question we're given is going to produce the most interesting answers. There is a certain level of player creativity that needs to be expressed to get to things, and this is a factor that is always going to be more impactful than character rank or their established CR in determining if the answer given will lead them somewhere interesting.

We are treading a fine line between allowing players to Find the Fun and guiding players where we want them to be, and it's hard to get this balance right. We like to think we've mostly done well with it, but sometimes things fall short of ideal. We never want people to feel like they're being railroaded, but we also don't want them to feel like they're completely lost.

We want to emphasize two things that genuinely help here, on the player end. First The Story So Far tag, and being sure to read up on what's happened before. These summaries cover the major beats. We also recommend reading other players' questions as they come in, to avoid retreading ground but also sometimes another set of eyes can find something others might have missed. Make the questions a collaborative effort. These are the tools players already have, but we are also want to provide more to that end.

We are open to suggestions on how to help with this process. Again, know that it is not our intention to lock plot information behind obtuse logic or NPC interaction or character rank or anything. None of those factors should be impacting folks ability to engage with the game's plot. We feel we're falling short of our own ideal here, so help would be appreciated.


Plot Transparency. This is less about game-wide plot and more about how things like player plots and smaller mod-run things are handled.

First, we want to put eyes on our brand new Player Submission post for substories and player plots. Previously, these were done through the mod contact page, mostly for the sake of convenience. Unfortunately, the comment screening in that post has caused big gaps in player awareness of what's going on, so instead we're moving all stuff related to player plot submission and subwtories to THIS page, so that everyone can see, and participate, in what's being planned.

You can also use this page to pitch ideas for your characters that you'd like mod help with. We used to do these through the mod contact page or DMs, but we want to move these to an open, public space so the process becomes more transparent and no one feels like anyone else is receiving special treatment.

If you have world-building, IC game history, or other similar types of IC questions, please ask them on the FAQ rather than on the Mod Contact page. This allows for all plot and setting related questions to be visible to all players. We have updated the Mod Contact page to reflect these changes.

We would like to emphasize that we cannot control, and have no intention to control, how players disseminate information on their own plots. However, if either the player with the plot or we as mods feel the plot in question could impact anything outside a small circle of people, we will strongly encourage players to actually make use of our OOC comm for plotting purposes, or at least for a heads up. We do hope this helps with the transparency issue.

On our part, small side plots run by the mods themselves will now be a matter of public accord as well; we will make use of this post to host them and will make the OOC process more transparent than it has been before.

Our hope is this increased transparency will lead to less feelings of FOMO or other anxieties associated with seeing plot things pass one by without feeling like one had a chance to impact anything.


Use of the OOC Comm/Discord issues. This is two fold because it kind of relates back to the same thing, even if they don't seem attached at first.

Namely, we'd like to see players making more use of our OOC comm for plotting purposes. On our part, this means throwing up an OOC plotting post for every major IC log now, mingle/mini-event/main event/etc. On players part, while we certainly can't make anyone do anything, we would like to see more player plots fleshed out on the OOC comm (and the previously linked Player Submissions post) vs doing so on the game discord or plurk.

Furthermore, it should be understood that our helpful Discord Mods (Eski, Dany, Fii, Min, and Caitie) are not game mods. The job they volunteered for is to help run and organize the Discord, and should not be approached about game issues, including about where and when people engage in plotting.


Future Issues Another thing we want to emphasize is we can only act upon what has been presented to us via official contact methods. Unless the issues are brought to our attention via these methods, we may not be aware of them at all.

We are grateful for the folks that came forward with feedback about the issue, but the scope of the issue wasn't realized until we were informed about player sentiments in other places. Even if it's something seemingly as little as feeling as if your question wasn't answered well, just please let us know via official contact methods. We want this game to be a fun and engaging experience for everyone.


Please feel free to discuss things below. We mentioned we're open to suggestions about better means of handling player investigations/questions, but we're also just open to discussion about all of this in general. We want people to feel like they can have these discussions without it boiling over into frustration.

Comments

[harimaya]

As a player that left feedback, I want to say thank you for taking the time to respond to some of the points.

That said, as I player who left feedback I want to point out that some of the concerns I brought up weren't really addressed and also, the reply you sent to me in private contradicts the message you are trying to give the entire game.

I'm not going to share the entire thing because I listed some examples that involved certain players/events. I don't want to hang those players out to dry in public when I only did so in private with you to document a pattern of oversight/bias by the mod team.

1. Important clues and plots are not accessible to players
When I brought this up, I especially highlighted that there have been private player plots that have been allowed to progress and have an affect on the entire game without any communication made to the game as a whole. I emphasized that it was fine for players to be rewarded for their efforts and to be IC-ly allowed influence because of their ranks but these important events should be communicated with players better because they have an effect on the entire game.

One example I cited was a current player plot that potentially affected many members of the Shuten clan but was only being communicated to a very exclusive group of players. It was not communicated to any of us OOC, there were no plans to make it public OOC, and IC characters involved were told to not tell others. Those of us who knew and found out weren't happy with this. I wasn't happy with this because the plot actually affected what might happen if I tried to do my own thing with the upcoming Wasteland event. It set me up for potential negative CR I hadn't planned for. It affected how I would have to play my character if I didn't want to cause trouble. The potential outcome would have predetermined how rewards were settled without my character having any say IC or me having any input OOC. I spoke to the players involved and was able to work out a compromise with some of them. I'm very grateful to the players who listened to my concerns and were willing to work with me on this.

Because this is not the first time a private player plot like this has popped up, I requested that you, as mods encourage players to be as inclusive as possible and to communicate plots that could potentially have a large effect on the game/factions.

I also encourage you, as mods, to encourage players to assign balanced privileges to characters with ranks. It isn't fair when some characters with rank can get certain results but others cannot.

I pointed out that this was a pattern that showed exclusivity and looked like favoritism.

2. Imbalance in investigation results regardless of faction, rank, skill, time in game, etc
I pointed out it was confusing how you were deciding information was given out to characters. I think other players have touched on this already in this post so I won't elaborate on it too much but the gist was: I pointed out that it was strange to me how characters with certain ranks, skills, factions, and had been in the game for a certain amount of time trying to pursue things often got one type of result while other characters sometimes just had huge pieces of plot given to them almost instantly.

I cited my own example here: Hizen was a 2-star Shuten member who worked for the armory. The storehouse was bombed. I laid out Hizen's connection, rank, and what he would do and look for… and was given nothing except, "The storehouse is the only place of note." Mods, you say in this post that you encourage players to use their creativity and what they have to progress and get plot… I did. I also pointed out in later feedback that the tone I received to my questions was honestly quite curt compared to some of the other responses people received. I dont' want to read into the tone too much but this isn't my first time a mod has answered me curtly and I'm apparently not the only player to experience either so…

Proactive players aren't being rewarded because they don't have CR with the right people
TL;DR I more or less pointed out it's obvious that there are certain characters that are favorites in this game for one reason or another. People who have CR with these characters are allowed to get involved with plot and situations that have pretty significant effects on the game.

Meanwhile, other players who are also proactive struggle to get information or anything to really feel involved.

I mentioned this isn't fair to a player like me who lives in Japan and can't tag everyone in the game as easily. I tag the people who work best with my schedule. It's not my fault I don't have time to tag someone who doesn't have a schedule that works with mine. I told you I wanted to be rewarded for my own efforts in game and not feel like I had to have CR with your favorite characters to get something.

Rewarded players becoming "plot dispensers"
I pointed out that recently I've had a lot of players trying to approach me to get plot and stuff because they thought I would know more than I really did. This put me in a position where I had to put a lot of my more relaxed threads on the backburner because I wanted to help characters with the current event when they were having trouble.

I pointed out that this isn't really fun for me to keep having to do. I don't mind help players but it's not fair to me, as a player, to have to help share IC information when… you, as mods, could just communicate things to us and tell us what our characters can find out/know.

Private mod plots needing to be shared
Speaking as someone who has received a private modplot in the past when the game was smaller, it was sprung on me very suddenly without a lot of warning. I had my own plans at the time and had to kind of work around the plot that was given to me. It was honestly a little stressful for me to prepare for because my time zone can make me difficult to tag with.

I'm lucky that my plot was much more private and didn't have a huge effect on the game tbh. I feel for the characters this month who had to have their private mod plots have a massive affect on the game and now… have to just deal with frustrations because it wasn't communicated.

I suggested that you run RNG sign ups for future events like this so you get players who are prepared for these plots and everyone can just know a plot is coming. They don't have to know the details! They just have to know something is maybe coming. My suggestion was, there could be an announcement like,

We are looking for players for a private plot opportunity.
Requirements: Shuten, at least one star
Timeframe: Must be able to available during these dates/must be able to complete a thread by this date.

Characters will be RNGed and notified on [day].

And players who were selected could be omitted for 1-2 future rounds so others had a chance.

These were the points I laid out in my feedback.

Furthermore, I discussed problems I had with some players in game with you. I won't go into detail about this but when I approached you with my problems with these players you then told me I was the problem.

You also told me, in response to my feedback:

We understand that you feel other players have been given special privileges to run wild, however what you are remarking on is an intended part of this game. We want to give people freedom to build their own ideas and run their own plots. This applies to everyone. We have indicated this several times when remarking on our ethos behind the game. The player plot as it was described did not violate the game's ethos, and it was not appropriate to push other players to conform to your vision.

Mods… I think this… directly contradicts what you just said in this post.

You just admitted to me in private that the game is designed to give people special privileges and run wild without communicating their plots that have significant affect on the entire game and their factions. In this post, you said plots that have potential significant effect on the game should be shared better ooc... but you just told me in private that actually, it's fine as is.

I have issues with that last little comment about me pushing my vision onto other players. I told you my issues with this plot. I told the player my issues with the plot. I spoke to other players about my issue with the plot. It's not "private" when it affects an entire faction. It's not "private" when it affects what might happen to my character and the entire faction without any of us knowing OOC or IC.

You tell me this in private but then pretend to address it in this post when you say player plots SHOULD be more transparent and aware when they impact a large group of players.

We would like to emphasize that we cannot control, and have no intention to control, how players disseminate information on their own plots. However, if either the player with the plot or we as mods feel the plot in question could impact anything outside a small circle of people, we will strongly encourage players to actually make use of our OOC comm for plotting purposes, or at least for a heads up. We do hope this helps with the transparency issue.

Which is it, mods?

I think the JGK playerbase is really good. There are a lot of active and proactive players here. They really wanted to work with the game. A lot of us willingly turned a blind eye to certain things in game and were willing to give things a chance. By playing obvious favorites and trying to turn blame onto your players… hm.