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

[paperpusher]

After reading through other comments on this post, I'm following up with the question I asked above here.

There's an implication in some of the responses that players "expect" to be handed plot details in exchange for leveling up in rank, and so the official mod response is that rank is just for IC flavor/new avenues for CR and that investigation results depend on the character's skills and creativity in approaching the problems. This is imo both overcorrecting in its response to (a misinterpretation of) the problem, and implying that the problem is with players for not thinking outside the box enough. I have indeed seen the mods tell people that certain avenues of investigation were a dead end, often when they were coming up with creative ways to approach the problem. That's nice that we don't have to keep chasing our tails, but one of my questions is... why is that a dead end? I'm thinking of, for example, a lot of responses to Ringo's kidnapping; I saw so many people trying to brainstorm ways to get involved in the form of asking the mods for more information, all of which went nowhere because the plot needed her to not be found to enable the Wasteland plot. That's fine! But the reason so many people were asking after it in the first place is because trying to engage with events in this game has often felt like crossing your fingers and hoping you come up with the right question to ask the right way to get you somewhere. Like, maybe the answer IS trying to track down the kidnappers. Who knows, because all that's in the post is that someone came in and pulled an NPC out the door, boom, end of event. The surprise twist doesn't give us anything to do except to play out our "oh no what's happening" reactions.

Earlier in the post, you guys have clarified (presumably in response to the idea that IC rank automatically gets IC plot info) that rank isn't used like this (whether this is a shift from how it's previously worked or if this is how it's always worked). I agree that characters regardless of rank should be able to find clues when they investigate if it makes sense. What I'd like to call out specifically is that rank clearly does matter for the things referred to in this post as "small side plots run by the mods themselves," assuming this is stuff like Kate planting the bomb in the Shuten warehouse and Hizen getting told to do a hit on Yizhi. If there are other instances of characters being given surprise plot opportunities by the mods (vs. responses to things when they reach out), I don't know of any that have been given to non-ranked characters. That's fine if everyone knows it's an option. So is rank purely IC set dressing, or are these mod plots only available to characters who have rank? How will they be distributed in the future? You reference these being public, but does that mean that the mods reach out to the characters and then follow up with an FYI post on the public plotting page that something is happening? Or are these sorts of things no longer going to occur?

(I also should clarify here that by "surprise plot opportunities," I'm not referring to the off-hand mention of random characters as points of contact in the event writeups. I appreciate that this is probably a way to make people feel more included/recognized in the game without rank to go along with it, but it's an odd thing to do to assume that players are available to take up a heavier role in that particular event and not really advancing plot the way the other examples are. I'm assuming no one has been asked about this OOCly in advance based on my own experiences with something from my canon being referenced in a mingle post.)

On the subject of how players are essentially required to ask questions of the mods in order to get plot information, the mods have had some very curt responses to players asking questions that the mods seem to think have already been answered. I'm thinking of these two examples both because of the strength of the mod reply but also because in both cases, the mods misinterpreted the player question:
Question re: smuggling through the wasteland
Consolidating OOC questions on one post

I appreciate that in the first example the mods went back to apologize for having misread the question, but personally, why should I bother asking more out-of-the-box questions to the mods when there's a chance I get an exasperated response about me having some detail about the game incorrect? Both of these responses imply that the person asking the question has either missed something blatantly obvious like the fact that people ask questions on the substory post or are trying to contradict established canon. These sort of responses from mods do not give me the impression that you love answering questions and it's not bothering you to ask questions. In a plotting scenario, I'm more likely to give up instead of clarifying and then be quietly frustrated when someone asks essentially the same question but gets something out of it.