jigokuooc | Plot/Event Feedback Post + open discussion!

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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.

Threaded | Flat

Since this came up a few times in this post and is still kind of vague:

Can the team please clarify what the purpose of rank ups are as far as your intention with the ranking system? I understand there's an element of IC change of responsibility, but it sounds like per what you've described here that OOCly it doesn't come with any additional benefits, at least not in regards to the plot or specific followup.

While I get in a sense where you guys are going with this and that all players deserve a chance to get their hands in the pot given some creativity, I think it would be helpful to be far more clear on what ranked character players should expect from their choice to submit for a promotion, as far as what they may or may not be able to do within the game environment or what differences they may expect interaction with the city, the npcs, etc. This might help alleviate some concerns with current ranked characters or those of us wanting to pursue rank at another time.

Someone more eloquent than me could probably add to this, but I'd personally feel better having this made very clear.

Hi mods, thanks for all the updates!

The only thing I wanted to comment on is the issue of closing apps. I totally understand you guys wanting breathing room after the huge last app round, and I also understand that the current plot is a big one, but I feel like this is such a big decision that it should have come with some prior warning. I know I had a handful of friends not currently in the game who were interested in joining, but now are looking at waiting four more months. I also was planning on TDMing a second during this time, so it just came as something of a shock!

I'm not sure if it would be possible to squeeze in one more app round as a "last warning" sort of deal or if it would be too much for you all, but I at least think it's worth noting going forward that decisions like this should be advertised in advance for sure.

Thanks so much for all the hard work!

RE: Plot Info Dissemination

If the intent is for players to look for plot hooks and threads via questions, it would make sense to give a few leads as to where to start looking. Put some areas and specifics in bold. It doesn't have to be that many phrases, but at least a little direction would be of help. Players can always inquire about other areas, or ask questions at different angles.

During a tabletop session, there's usually a few leading questions or verbal highlighting that the storyteller will give to the players. I do understand that DWRP is different from tabletop, but some starting direction could go a long way.

Right now it feels like blind guessing and full RNG if there's any information there or not. Some characters seem to hit information more often than others.

RE: Plot Transparency

I'm not sure what the team means by "not a matter of public accord but more transparent." Does that mean the nature of the mod plot will be unknown but players can sign up to be part of the plot?

Thanks for all the consideration, mods. A surprise increase in the game population does throw a few bumps in the road, but live and learn.

My other current game has a big focus on investigations/plot info dissemination as well, and they do a few clever things that I think could be useful to consider (they are also much, much smaller than this game, so some of these ideas might have to be massaged to fit a game of this size.)

When there's an event going on, perhaps there could be a section on the event post for handwaved "investigations." For example, a comment for each faction where people can post things like, "Godot hits up Sutoku HQ and bribes the tengu at the front desk with a cup of coffee before asking about how that big string cheese job is going." Mod NPC replies with "he says it's going well, but they keep having problems with the demon rats trying to steal all the cheese." Quick reply, info provided, my character has something that they can share with others ICly. Or...

Another concept which seems to work really well is a an OOC/handwaved "plot share" post. After some amount of time in which people can "gather" information, there's a post where everybody shares that info. This could be divided up into the factions for our purposes, or I could say something like, "Godot found out about demon rats stealing string cheese, but he'll only offer this info if someone buys him a cup of coffee." People who tag me can thread that out or we can hash out the details and keep it handwavy, but the idea is that there is an obvious place to share and get plot info, and nobody has to guess who has it or how they can get it.

I also like the above suggestion of bolding plot hooks within event posts, just to give people a more obvious idea of things to ask about. I think a lot of times people just don't know where or with whom to start if they want to get invested in a plot, and giving them a lot of easy ins is a good way to make sure they are able to do so with a minimum of stress.

Hi mods, some of the feedback I left previously hasn't been addressed here, namely the suggestion we have a set OOC calendar so players know when to be available.

A transition to using the ooc comms for preplotting would be very much appreciated as outlined, but not knowing when exactly posts will go up doesn't solve the issue of players falling behind if they don't check the game for a few days, leading to some of the issues outlined regarding FOMO/people being left out of the loop. As is, people are unable to plan rl commitments to online availability.

Thank you for the thorough writeup and for taking the time to go through our concerns.

Hi, mods. Thank you for taking the time to write this feedback post!

I think slowing down would definitely help a lot. A lot of players in the game tend to be on the slower side, and it takes time to understand, organise, plot out and then thread out plot-relevant threads where information might be shared between characters. My memory is really bad but the general feeling in this game has been a log/EMBER/tdm/something every 1-2 weeks, which is a decent time ICly, but in that amount of time most people probably get maybe 4-5 tags into each thread they've had. If we move to 1 big log per month, of course we also run into the risk of people feeling like there isn't much to do in between ... I think it's worth trying to see what happens?

I also enjoyed what you mods had done back in the tower log to choose players to be involved in plot, and I feel like this should be employed again. It would give everyone a fair chance to be involved. You opened up sign ups, had people make a case for why their character would be useful and why the faction leader should choose them, and then RNG'd to pick who gets chosen. Additional chances (+1/+2 etc) can be given to ranked characters, and people who can provide evidence that their characters have been investigating or involved in the lead up to the plot (e.g. had discussions with other characters to form theories and mentioned providing this info to the faction leader, or going out to do some snooping around themselves).

"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."

Factually no. The rushed event has been a major focus, but it's also caused other issues to come to light that have been noted and criticized in the past. There's been enough plausible deniability that I personally thought was individual moments of "that's weird", but in retrospect I realize were parts of a bigger underlying issue. I know people have made crit in the past that has been ignored.

I'd like to emphasize that, with regards to the rushed event, it really can't be understated how unwelcoming it has been to many new players. So many newbies I've seen have no idea what is happening, how to get involved, what events even lead up to the current plot, what's even expected of them as members of a given faction, and how to establish a CR base to get any foodhold in the game. That's a major concern.

The rushed event has also meant that players who are slower-paced (which this game has a lot of, see the 8-comment AC) or international players who rely on backtags, either have to rush themselves, or sit things out, or drop older threads to stay current. None of those three options are appealling.

"People who've been in the game for awhile know this was not a usual thing."

Waggles hands. While the Blood Storm event was generally paced more evenly (foreshadowed in Get To Work then all of June to experience the main event) the conclusion to it pretty clearly ran into scheduling issues and bumped up into TDM. Not the worst thing in the world but still an indication that scheduling is a prior issue.

On that note, while I was a randomized participant in the Blood Storm conclusion and enjoyed the log, it raises a different issue that I'll go into later.

"Applications will be essentially frozen until January 2023. A cap is also being considered"

~180 characters at time of comment, so yeah.

"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."

The bounty storyline needs leeway time, so yeah.

"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."

True, in that event questions have gotten "this is a dead end' responses.
Please don't think that just because one person gets a question response in their inbox, they can't look to the side and see someone else ask almost the same question and get a different one.

One example is during Tanabata. All of Sutoku asking questions, many of whom have connections or are sneaky, and get hardly anything about Kaberou… And now a massive infodump about Kaberou comes to light that frankly contradicts what was said before?
Another example is this bombing event. Why does a Shuten lieutenant, who works closely with Jiro and has a direct professional line to something like the warehouse, ask the fire brigade about the warehouse fire and get nothing, but an Enma officer gets first dibs?
Why, in the July mini-event, did a newly-apped character learn about gyokuto's secret instantly, when that's been a mystery the entire game, and it says in the game's FAQ that yokai/mythical player-characters won't get special treatment from the game? https://jigokulogs.dreamwidth.org/47812.html?thread=6723012#cmt6723012

"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."

The summaries that go up after the fact, so people who would have wanted to participate have no idea what they missed until it's too late?

"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."

Why do players have to sift through however-many comments, in the hopes that one of the responses is going to have what they want to know?

Why should so much basic intel be locked behind "ask the right questions" ? Isn't that so much more work?

I had been under the impression that questions were more for tidbits and side-stuff, but that has not been the case at all. Why did I have to ask what the video broadcasted to the entire city even looked like?

If the answers were consistent across the board, wouldn't it be easier to have an ooc event post of what you could find out based on your tier?
"A 3*** character could find out this: [...]
A 2** character could find out this: [...]"
etc.

By the way, speaking of rank influence, why was Tamamo behind the bombing of Shuten's warehouse, yet most of Tamamo, especially higher-ranked characters than the person carrying out the bombing, were completely in the dark?

"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."

Engage with it more than reacting it, you mean?

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

What? Player concerns were about the game-wide plot's transparency. The multiple events/incidents that occurred adjacent to the bombing were all part of the game-wide plot. Would you like to address that part?

"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."

So I have gone over the full response post a few times, and this is the part that hangs closest the the biggest issue in this game.
Everyone has noticed that only a handful of people get opportunities, get extra intel or perks, get IC-recognized authority regardless of rank or activity, or get major involvement in the main plot, and other people who try, or who are active and on-paper should have rank and authority, are given nothing. I'm not going to name names but everyone can see it.
You might think you're giving people perks and gifts, but I can tell you that multiple people who have been picked to be a mod "teacher's pet" have been deeply uncomfortable with their status, have realized that their wishes to be involved with the plot and community have been twisted into favoritism, and don't want to be singled out anymore.

Even in events that invited people outside of that circle have been structured in deeply weird ways. I'm going to use the Tower Expedition as an example. The teams were randomly picked, yes, and it was a result of player participation and work.
It still all came down to the rest of the game watching 8 people be the main characters.
In retrospect, I do not feel good about my participation. Even with player participation, the door should have been open for a wider effort. In-game victories, or defeats, in a game of 100+ people, need to be shared across the game.

"We would like to emphasize that we cannot control, and have no intention to control, how players disseminate information on their own plots."

I'm doing my best to respond to this productively, but I can't believe this. This is a mod response from a team who has clearly seen the crit about hidden information or information that's hard to find because it's scattered across random logs/posts and event question threads in two communities, and it says, "It's your problem now." Okay.

"On our part, small side plots run by the mods themselves will not be a matter of public accord as well"

Why?
Do you not trust people to infomod?
Why shouldn't events that affect the game setting and have ramifications for everyone be kept a secret?

"Namely, we'd like to see players making more use of our OOC comm for plotting purposes."

After people asked why the OOC community wasn't in use for plotting and there wasn't an ooc event plotting post for the bombing event, you mean? I'm sure you're not taking credit for someone else's suggestion, because that would be bad.

"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."

You're lying.

I know for a fact multiple people have brought up crit, both to your face and in the screened post, and gotten nothing or gotten told "We'll work on it" and nothing has changed. There is no reason to believe anything will change now.

I think you need to take a long and hard look at what you really want a game for. Do you want to run a game for 100 people and give those 100 people a chance to shine? Or do you want a sandbox of 10 with an audience of 90? This isn't a question of "Yes, if they want to participate," because I see people time and time again jumping to ask questions or get interested in the plot or take their faction premise and run with it, and I see them get no-sold or stopped in their tracks, and only a handful ascended to the role of main character.

I'm not here to fill seats. Bye.

I still have sincere concerns for how the game functions, when situations such as Kaberou's work were quite literally told to me to be just a joke that the mods weren't interested in pursuing. This halted my own questioning, and left me even more confused when more information came out about Kaberou in later investigation threads at Tanabata itself, and then in regards to the raid on Kaberou's office.

I understand situations where a modteam has to operate on the fly, and doesn't have something fully written. I could also understand a lack of interest in getting in to nitty-gritty, but this is a crime game about connections and businesses, with an NPC clearly coded as important to keep tabs on, so I admit I don't understand the choice to tell me it was a dead end, when a simple "we're still working on that!" could have sufficed. I would also expect a crucial NPC for the kidnapping plot, like the financier of Sutoku and parent of the abducted, would have had details hashed out ahead of time. And the one lead I was given, about the moon rabbits arriving "soon", never...happened this month? I wouldn't expect it to be next month, either, so I truly don't know if my clue is a dropped thread.

Obviously this is just one example from one stretch of plot, but it's the most direct example of my experiences with the game.

My broader question is thus...how are we meant to interact with story prompts, besides react to them? Our actions with substories especially feel too loose and without weight; there's no way to thread out a resolution to the drifter, or the magpies, and have any of it impact the game in a meaningful way. How are we meant to interact with situations like the celestials, or NPCs like Jiro, who lost souls might theoretically have more contact with than the faction leaders? And then there's other things getting a much larger mod response- like, where and how the heck did the Dandelion raid factor in to any of the plot? What is the status of that, is it concluded, was it directly involved in the bombing or just timed alongside it?

I was gonna try and back off the post because I've been all over it, but I did have one other point to address.

"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."

I can respect this approach. I GM tabletop games, I've employed it myself.

The trouble with this idea is that without adequate hints and a willingness to work with players on finding those solutions, this stops being a fun puzzle and starts being a purely arbitrary guessing game.

This is probably the only one of these points that has been a point of frustration with me personally, and it has come up multiple times for me. I've tried to investigate events and ask questions, and rather than being rewarded for my efforts, I just hit a giant NO and, without further guidance, am forced to guess randomly at what I was "supposed" to be paying attention to or else give up entirely.

Van has explained most of my complaints pretty concisely. But I wanted to add a few more thoughts.

"We would like to emphasize that we cannot control, and have no intention to control, how players disseminate information on their own plots."

I think it's ridiculous that you are blaming this on the players who come to you with ideas. If things such as the flower shop raid, Tamamo bombing Shuten, and the infiltration on Kaberou's office are the result of player plots, as you seem to be implying, then it is not up to those respective players to tell us. You are the ones setting them in motion and integrating them into the main plot of the game about Iron Bear; especially with the bombings, it is your job to tell us what's going on and how this has bearings on the rest of the story, not chalking it up to the player to explain a section of a mod post that was not explained.

If incidents are being incorporated into a larger plot, such as Tenkohime intending to hamper the entire Shuten clan, this is something one would logically think the higher ups of Tamamo should be privy to. If rank is not about receiving plot opportunities (which I agree should not be completely closed off to people with no rank in fact), and it's not about actually being informed in what is going on in the clan, or having a say in what is going on in the clan, then I'm not sure what it's for. The higher-ups of a clan ICly being told information that is kept from the non-ranked characters seems perfectly sensible to me, and then the higher-ranked ones could tell people as they wish, but OOCly everyone would still be on the same page. I especially don't know how this game can be said to be steered by player actions if they're not being allowed to have any influence, or being given any information to influence with.

Besides that, you haven't mentioned a single word about mod favoritism in who is getting plots and information, which I know some people have brought up to you as a problem. People have asked the right questions, had rank influence, and have still been told nothing while others are handed that information, the example with gyokuto and the bomb during this plot being praticularly brazen. You wanted to keep information close to your chest because it would be revealed in a later post, but as far as I know the gyokuto's elixir of immortality plot point has never come up, and the only thing Toraguma revealed about the bomb was that... it was definitely Tenkohime and Tamamo that did it, and not Iron Bear? Which the playerbase had already been led to believe because of Kate's role in the bombing, and the plot post already saying it was not Iron Bear. Effectively all it means is that mod NPCs got to be the ones to tell Shuten about Tamamo, rather than a player character who was actively trying to be involved in the plot.

It's gotten to the point where I have personally felt like it would be useless to even try and get involved with the plot, because I legitimately couldn't figure out how; on top of that, I know I'm not alone in thinking it would be useless to ask mods questions, whether that be because I know it would be useless, or because I was scared of how the mods would react if I wasn't one of their favorites. This problem with tone has contributed to me and others thinking we could not get anywhere, when apparently according to you all I had to do was ask a question differently, and it's my fault for thinking something has been a dead end?

Edit: Hmmm. I believe that others have spoken about Stars/Ranks, Slowing things down and app cycles better than I have. So, I will remove those comments other than to say I'm fine with a slow-down and would recommend a little more clarity on Ranks for players.

I am reserving further comment for the moment. While I personally have experienced no difficulty in this game and enjoyed my own personal experience, it is clear that others have not. I wish to see how the mods will choose to approach these concerns. There is one other matter that I will be keeping an eye on, that I sincerely hope will not repeat itself.

Edited 2022-09-30 20:07 (UTC)

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.

Some thoughts particularly about this month:

Not only did the playerbase increase immensely, but a detail I've talked about with other players was how perhaps both mingle faction and time to work logs (mini-event bomb plot aside) were posted too closely to one another and if anything mingle faction felt like we could have done without since each faction had a network post to welcome their respective newbies this round.

Moving forward, I think unless the mingle logs have more meat to them plot wise, it might help with the pacing if they are cut out or you focus on Time to Work and fold some mingle ideas into that instead since those move the story forward/reveal the relevant beats.

As a player who engages lightly with the plot, I appreciate the space the game makes where I can definitely make my own fun, but I am concerned with how some details are left hanging too long in the air. People have brought up the issue with the lack of description for what rank responsibilities and perks apply once a character earns one. On the one hand, sure I like making things up within reason, but otoh, you run into issues when it comes to ranked characters trying to engage earnestly with the story but not getting much out of their efforts. I don't think it's a huge ask to commit some details about how each rank differs from the other and what the tangible and intangible benefits are.

In terms of overall plotting and OOC communication, everyone else has better input because they have put their time and investment in it. I think the slowdown is a good idea to let the mod team take a good look at the current size of the game, where it could go, and reprioritize. Thank you for addressing the player concerns.

So I guess this is more for the playerbase than the mods? (I may comment with a proper response to the feedback later. Just woken up, did not get nearly enough sleep. This is copy-pasted from my plurk and expanded on slightly.)

Here's what happened:

[OOCly]
The day before the mini-event went up, I went to mod contact because I was trying to figure out future directions for Kate within the faction, and happened to ask; I was hoping you could do me a solid and give me some ideas of, say, Tamamo subdivisions / roles? [...] Is there anything else that might be in the faction that I've missed or suggestions / things you have hidden away for the faction?

The mods asked how I felt about her placing explosives, and I said sure. So my involvement in this plot was rather last minute. I can't speak to what the mods' plans were had I not left that comment, and I would rather not do so while frustrations are (understandably) still running so high.

On a personal note, I do think that this plot could have benefitted from being telegraphed to Tamamo clan players in advance, at very least the ranked ones, but again, I cannot speak to when this part of the plot was conceived etc.

[ICly, mini-event]
> Kate was ordered to place explosives in the Shuten warehouse, triggering the big boom in the mini-event
> This strategically seemed to be done to sabotage Shuten's attempts to reach Iron Bear/Ringo
> Said bomb was sabotaged to go off earlier than it was supposed to, catching Kate while she was making her escape and making her fall off a rooftop
> As far as I know, the bomb at the warehouse and the bombs planted in the rest of the city are not related (I.e. Tamamo had nothing to do with the rest of the bombs), and nor was this related to the raid on Dandelion
> Info on this hit was kept low by design so if you're playing a ranked Timtam and you're like ?!?!?!, your character wasn't supposed to be in the loop. See the OOC section for my thoughts on that.
> Post-bomb, Kate was taken back to Mizukume and has more or less been completely sequestered there for her own safety and healing.

[Consequences wrt my character]
I do not currently want to commit to saying whether Kate gets caught for this until all the info is out in the open, because I don't know what else the mods have planned. I've plotted some limited stuff purely because I made a rather last-minute decision to make her bombing related top level more closed than it initially was, and I didn't want anyone to feel as though they were locked out by my own scrambling.

I will say my preference runs towards "consequences are fine but I don't want it to somehow become IC gamewide knowledge within a week". I'd like the time to pace myself and not become overwhelmed by characters (rightly) going what the fuck, Katherine. And, on a personal note, I think the longer-term suspicion and uncertainty is going to be more fun to RP. But I don't want to commit too much to one side or the other while there's still a lot to learn about this event. The other thing I will commit to is that I would like her to not be killed. Things up to that can be discussed though.

As stated in the previous section, Kate is currently stuck at Mizukume and I will be waiting on the NPC posts/full breakdown of everything before I make any decisions on when she'll be released from the compound. I understand this might be frustrating for players (especially in other factions), as it limits the amount I can do rather severely, but it is probably the best option for my sanity right now.

On another personal note, I am very intrigued by the sabotage to the bomb and that will probably be where my energy will be going once we get a post from Tenkohime.

Edited (i keep catching bad phrasing i'm so tired) 2022-09-30 17:46 (UTC)

First off; I appreciate pausing things to address the concerns you got on what I assume is somewhat short notice. Thank you for your willingness to have this conversation, and I really hope things work out because I've enjoyed my time in the game and want to see it change for the better.

Suggestion to change your mod approach, overall
I understand the below suggestions goes against your philosophy so far, but I think such a change is necessary to address the criticisms, and prevent future appers from having them as well. Basically, the idea of "we'll let the players come to us with things and respond accordingly" isn't working out, partly because there are now so many players that most will get shy and/or overwhelmed when they see that so many other people have already asked questions/ done things etc. The game is also too big for easy co-ordination between the playerbase as a whole, and so info, prompts and opportunities do not naturally spread as they did before. Hence confusion, frustration, and loss of engagement with the plot.

All my suggestions below revolve around a philosophy that the mods should now be more pro-active in disseminating information and prompting players on investigation results / how to progress the plot. Always mention that the option to approach the modteam with original ideas is open and encouraged, but opportunities need to be manufactured that are easy to participate in for everyone that isn't someone like Ryouma (no offence intended to Ryouma! Ryouma's great, I write this with all respect to Ryouma and how much he gets up to.)

Suggestions for Plot Transparency
While I found the poke-around-and-see approach fun at first, I don't think it's feasible for a game of >30, let alone at this size. Please consider making investigation info available to everyone, so anyone can jump in without having to ask you, ask the player with the info, etc. There's simply not enough plot to go around if it has to be divided into small pieces to hand out to individual question-askers.

I think releasing a lot more information upfront is needed, such as:

> For every main event, pre-prepare a summary of how general investigations go and release that information with/right after the event. For example:

After the Tanabata event, reveal that characters investigating the scene find out about the tunnels, the Shuten plants etc., characters chasing the kidnappers find out about the Wasteland, characters investigating Kaberou find out about him planning to announce a bounty & receiving photos of his daughter, etc. Either at the end of the event, or in a separate post after.

This is so that players can just handwave joining an investigation team without worrying about the logistics of "Character X asked the mods about this, how can I get my character to get the information from them?"

> A summary of the game tone for the current month. Or at least the existing summaries need tweaking, as a mismatch between player expectations and what actually happens is one reason for the widespread frustration. I assume the modteam has reasons for not doing a calendar yet, so this is my suggestion for an alternative. For example:

"September is an app month, but we'll be having a big plot event at the end of the month (replacing "Get to Work"), as well as working a few player plots into that big event." OR August's Event will be a festival. There will be a plot development at the end that will remain a talking point for the rest of August into early September. However, most of the August event log itself will be celebratory/festival prompts."

I think the move to slow down the current plot event is good
Some good news for ya. The negativity in this post is necessary and comes from a place of valid criticism, but it must be a lot for y'all.

Suggestion for Newbies Struggling To Get Involved with the Plot
>Replace the Intro Mingle with an IC briefing regarding the current plot beats and give new joiners some kind of role/task to do related to that. The intro mingle doesn't actually help new characters find a purpose/role in the city, it's just a fun socialisation activity, and I think helping new characters with more of the former will address the complaints that people are struggling to get involved. For example:

September's Intro Log could include a briefing from an NPC (leader/deputy/unnamed guy?) explaining the Iron Bear, that he recently kidnapped Ringo (and who that is), that he lives out in the Wastelands and the Wastelands have thus far been no-man's-land becaues XYZ, and so the factions are planning an expedition out there soon. Also, newbies can get jobs via XYZ channels, but if they don't, can they please help with XYZ faction-specific task (e.g. taking inventory, preparing potions, patrols.)

Future App Rounds
I'm neutral on the freeze; my two cents is you should play it by ear and maybe not commit to it now. Quite a few people are dropping, so come year-end the game might be small enough that we can afford another app round. If it's because you won't have the bandwidth to process apps, then disregard this, but if it's in response to complaints regarding game size, I think the suggestion to have a capped round in November is a good one.

Please consider a game cap. I didn't want to say it earlier as I thought it was stepping on your toes as mods, but my sincere opinion is that the game you want to run (dynamic, with room for player engagement and actions to really change the plot) is only feasible with a relatively small playerbase. I wouldn't say "cap it to 30" or anything like that, but a line was crossed during the last app round, that led to all the downsides of a player-led approach to go from "still tolerable" to "not at all tolerable".

All the best, modteam! (○´・ω・)ﾉ

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.

As a new player, I want to emphasize how daunting and unwelcoming this turn of events has felt in the last few weeks. It feels a little like a bait and switch from the TDM and the intro, and it's so frustrating that everything kind of blew up (literally and figuratively) before new players/characters were really able to find footing and develop good solid CR. I want to urge the mods to be really thoughtful about how you approach the feedback given in the entire post, because everyone makes some really good points.

In terms of thoughtfulness, it might be worth polling the players once you have some solid options for how to deal with a lot of the issues that are happening. Whether you decide to do that or not, it would be really useful to have a follow-up to this post where you announce the solid changes you plan to put into effect going forward. Right now, I don't know what to expect from staying in this game, and it makes me feel really uncertain about my future here. I'm sure I'm not alone. Knowing how things are going to work from now on would be very helpful.

Having read through a lot of the feedback, I wanted to add my +1 to a few different points.

Apps and general pacing
In a way, the explosion of plot happening feels kind of like a situation where the mods didn't "read the room," so to speak. What I mean by that is that it feels like you guys had a really solid plan in place, and refused to look at the way players have been interacting to think "do we need to change this at all to accommodate the huge influx of new characters?" I know tabletop RP is vastly different from DWRP, but one commonality they have is that mods need to be able to pivot or change directions based on what's actually happening in the game. You guys have to be able to look at what's going on and say "gee, we should probably hold off on plot and just make this an ordinary mingle" when you get 70+ new characters in an app round.

And I think you're having the same problem with apps. Putting in a blanket "at the very last minute, we're going to close apps for basically 4 months" is a pretty extreme response, and it's not reading the situation well at all. You guys are the mods. You set the pace. It's your game, and the rules/schedule are set because you have set them -- that means you can change the schedule to suit what works best for the game as it stands when that time comes around. You could easily say "we're going to push apps off by a month/month and a half" or even "we're capping new apps at [x] number" (or both, or an overhead game cap, or something else entirely), but just a blanket last-minute full-stop feels like a really thoughtless solution. What I'm asking here is for you guys to be more thoughtful and flexible about how you approach the problems that have come up.

Plot transparency
To be blunt, this entire section of your post is pretty lacking. All it says is "we haven't been transparent and we're going to." The thing is, this doesn't mean anything until and unless you say how you plan to do that. OOC plotting posts is a good way to start with that, but a large contingent of players honestly feels like you're playing favorites and picking/choosing who you dole out plot hooks to, and you make no mention of how you plan to fix that lack of transparency.

To that end, I want to echo the suggestion for rng signups, which can be really helpful in a multitude of capacities. Do I think that players who go the extra mile and poke the bear should be rewarded on top of that? I sure do. But having some kind of "we're going to have a plot, here are sign-ups, you sign up at your own risk" mechanic would make it way easier for characters to get involved. Especially characters who are new.

So basically: tell us how you're going to be more transparent with plots and plotting in the future. Tell us how you're going to make it more streamlined and accessible for players who want to get involved.

OOC plotting
The Discord operates sometimes at a frenetic pace, please god move plotting to the OOC comm.

OOC calendar of events
This was another suggestion mentioned in an above post, but I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for players to know when things are happening. It's massively important, not just so we know when to start getting our writing brains in gear, but also so that people can sign up to be involved with full knowledge of how much they're getting themselves into.

The other thing an OOC calendar does is it makes it less necessary to have the exact same schedule every month/two months. Right now, the way the game is paced has you guys kind of facing a wall: you have to have this part of the plot up at [x] time of the month, because that's what the schedule says. The calendar offers us some transparency, and offers you guys some flexibility. Best thing for everyone.

In spite of the negativity I've expressed here, I'm really eager to see what kind of changes and amendments you guys plan to put in place to help with these issues. Modding a game like this is not an easy job and I'm really grateful that you've taken on the task anyway. Thanks for your hard work.

I am also a new player, and I am admittedly someone who went away for a week right after getting in, but there are still a couple of things here I'd like to comment on.

Hearing you say that "the mods are going to use the OOC comm for plotting from now on" is quite concerning. In every game I've played in, it has been so standard for the mods to make an OOC post for a whole-game event that it never even occurred to me that this would not be the case here. An event that affects the whole game setting, like a bombing, is something that would ICly change the plans and priorities of almost every character. I don't think it's a "hindsight is 20/20" matter to say that this should have been announced in a forum viewable by the entire game at least a week before dropping it into the logs comm. I know others have talked about being blindsided, but I just wanted to mention that specific aspect about using the comms for official information. Not everyone uses Plurk/Discord in the same way--some prefer to keep Plurk a tight circle and freely chat on Discord, and some prefer the other way, and some may not even use one or both of these channels. Official game Plurk/Discords should be a supplement, not the main warehouse for official information. Maybe this isn't true, I've only been here a short time, but I'm a little taken aback at how many people have said that it has been used that way. Which brings me to this--

I don't think it's right to say that you have no power to make players disseminate information on player plots that impact more than their own circle. It may not have been the rule in the past, but I think that most reasonable people would agree if you made a post that said "given the size of the game, we're now requiring player plots that will impact more than a small circle of people to be announced on the OOC comm" and remind players of that new rule when you approve a plot. I think this is a very doable thing and would help, along with implementing some of the other suggestions that people have given.

I think people here have already addressed the majority of my concerns here, so I'm going to focus on things I didn't see already. (Though if someone did mention something I say here too then I'm sorry I missed it when I read through the first time.) For reference, I'm coming at this as someone who has modded in the past, and my suggestions are things that I found worked for me and my past mod teams.

mod tone in posts

First, I wanted to talk about this comment from the post:

"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."

I feel like this comment is missing the mark a bit. As mods, it IS your job to exert some control over player plots. Ideally you won't have to do much and can be mostly hands-off, but it's your job to make sure player plots fit into the game and don't conflict with either the main plot or other player plots. As mods, you are the only ones who know exactly where this game is going! And because of that, you're the only ones who know if player plots will have a negative affect on the game in the long run. Additionally, as mods, you can require that players communicate their player plots on the OOC comm. Which I think you should, because we're already having trouble with "players not in the discord are missing out on things" and that is a huge problem when the discord is optional and not everyone is using it. I wouldn't say every detail should be outlined in OOC comm posts (Like reading Agatha's post below about the plans to drop Aerith, I do think Aerith's death in it being kept quiet is a good idea, because that's the ultimate climax of the plot in the first place) but the general idea of "an attack is happening at this day and time" or "this weird thing is happening over in this part of town" is something that can and should be discussed on the OOC comm ahead of time.

I guess my main issue is that your initial comment sounds like you're trying to push player plots away from mod responsibilities in an "if things go sideways then it's not OUR fault, WE didn't make this plot", when it's not really about 'blame' to begin with and it actually is your job to proofread plots and tell players 'no' to parts of the plot that won't go over well. If this wasn't your intention in the first place, then re-wording what you mean in regards to the player plots may be a good idea, because this is what it sounds like to me.

Also, I want to point out that this is just one instance of a problem I see happening over and over in this post here: accountability. It feels like the mods are trying to throw their hands up and go "hey, this stuff isn't our responsibility, don't get mad at us!" Which is a Very Bad Thing for mods to do, honestly. You are the mods, this is YOUR game. You get the final say on what happens and doesn't happen. This is because, as mods, nearly everything that happens in your game actually IS your responsibility. So trying to back off on the responsibility when things go sideways isn't a great look, because you had every opportunity to say 'no' to everything that's happened in this game. If something goes wrong, you need to own it! You need to say "we wanted to do X thing but it didn't work out as we planned. This is what we learned from it and what we're going to do going forward." I feel like that is kind of showing in this post here, in some places? But in others there's still that tone of "it's not our fault", and that's not helping.

I want to say too, I think this is something you can fix going forward. As long as you take that responsibility now and continue to be accountable for the happenings in the game, things will be okay.

picking players for special things

I'm going to keep this part brief since a lot of players brought up transparency already, but I just wanted to express some thoughts and methods that have worked for me in the past.

I think others have it right on the nose to say that just grabbing people randomly and going "hey, do this" (like how Eski and Nik have expressed below, in regards to Hizen and Kate's involvement in things so far) really isn't a good method to get players to do tasks in this game. For one, it relies on you mods to specifically seek people out for the job, which is possible to do in a small game (like, how big the game was when it opened) but really isn't feasible with a game of this size. I expressed it in another comment, but it's really not fair to you guys to expect you all to remember all 180+ characters at all times and what they're all good at. And secondly, it's not transparent enough. When all we have is private chats with mods asking a player to do something, that's where accusations of mod favoritism come in. Especially since this game is anon-mods and we don't know who the mods are, it's very easy for people to look at that lack of answers for how characters are picked for special plot things and go "this character is getting Special Stuff and we don't see why, this is clearly mod favoritism."

So I think you should post monthly sign-ups with brief descriptions of the kinds of characters you're looking for with these requests. So for example, for the bombing plot, you could put out a notice that says "We need one character for a plot thing this month. Said character needs to be a member of Tamamo, 0 star rank, and ideally someone who just apped in this last round." Or as another example, you could say "we need a member of Shuten who will carry out a hit on someone else", or "we need someone from Tamamo who works as a courtesan" or anything else like that. Then you let people who qualify sign up, and then you either RNG from the list or pick the 'best fit' from that list. Though I must specify, you need to state ahead of time if you're going to do 'RNG' or 'we're picking the best fit from those who sign up' so the players know exactly how characters are being picked, and there should be a "cooldown" of a month or two before a player can sign up any of their characters again. You don't have to give the full plot details when you do these signups, but just having a "hey we need people for A Thing" in the plotting posts will go a long way towards providing the kinds of transparency players want.

Another part of the 'transparency' problem is answering why some players are able to get information through asking questions, while others who arguably SHOULD be getting information are being shafted. Again, this was covered more by other people, so I'll keep this brief. But I think an easy solution to this- and I saw some people touch on it too- is to just have a 'Q+A' section when new events go up and specify in the section which kinds of characters will be able to get extra information. "if you have questions ask here. If your character works X job at Y facility, they may be able to get extra information." And then give out information as people ask. Also, don't be afraid to tell people the same things! You don't have to give out unique information to everyone, it's okay for several players to get variations on "yeah we saw someone in Tamamo garb plant a bomb but we don't know who they were" when they ask questions, it's realistic that people would get the same information. Especially because, again, we have 180+ characters and nobody expects you mods to give out 180+ different pieces of information with each plot post.

the elephant in the room

I'm kind of hesitant to bring up this last point because it's talking about a specific player (albeit without mentioning their name, but I think many people will be able to figure out who it is anyway), but I do feel like this needs to be said. I'll try my best to speak vaguely because I don't want to be shitty and cause the player a ton of stress about this, but it DOES need to be addressed in some capacity.

I don't want to go too much into detail about what happened, because again, personal information and all. But basically, a certain player anonfailed with the mod plurk, revealing that said player has access to the mod plurk and is very likely a mod. And really, I'm not personally concerned with the possibility of them being a mod. What I AM concerned with, however, is the fact that several people have directly asked the mods "hey, is [player name] a mod?" and that screencaps of the anonfail have been given to the mods, and yet the mods have not said a single thing on this. There hasn't even been a "we're not going to comment on this, we're anon mods" comment on it, which is the bare minimum of what I would expect in this situation. In fact, the opposite has happened: comments got screened, then anon comments got turned off, THEN it got set to "members only can comment". And while on one hand I do recognize the desire to avoid people shitstirring just to shitstir, there was at least one player in this game who used a sock account to bring their concerns to you anonymously because they were worried about retribution over saying anything at all about this. And ultimately it was all for naught, because you screened comments and STILL haven't said a single thing about this situation. As with other problems in this game, I feel like the issue isn't the identity of the player involved (though I do know some people disagree with me here, and I invite them to speak on it as well), but rather the lack of transparency as to their part in this game and what they have access to.

Again, I don't want to go around saying anything about this specific player or their past. I literally have never played in a game with them before, we don't really have any CR here (not because I'm avoiding them or anything either, I've just been having shit luck with my health lately and my tagging has been slow), and I don't really have an opinion on anything about their past because I just plain don't know them. But what I DO think is that, if there are players who are uncomfortable with this player, you are doing them a huge disservice by not addressing this situation and instead taking actions that make it look like you're trying to sweep everything under the rug. And again, I don't want to talk about this player's past or the identities of anyone who might have problems with this player. I'm pretty sure EVERYONE in DWRP has at least one person they don't want to interact with under any circumstances, and what I'm about to say is coming more from a place of "this is what I would expect anon mods to do if they have people who have specifically told them 'DNI' and know that these players might not know that they are interacting anonymously with someone they don't want to interact with."

At a minimum, this is what I think you should do:

1) give some kind of statement on the situation. If I were in this situation I personally would come out and say "yes, [player name] is a mod here" or "no, the player is not a mod, but they helped us make the game and thus have access to the mod plurk and journal". It's a foregone conclusion at this point, we KNOW the player has access to the mod plurk. But I would also understand if you went with a "we're not going to confirm or deny the identities of ANY mods, because this is an anon mod game" post, as long as you're saying SOMETHING about it. The players want to know that you are listening to them, and at a bare minimum they deserve an acknowledgement that you are reading these questions people are asking.

2) if this player does have access to the mod journal and plurk while not being a mod, I would remove that access. Mod accounts are for mod use only IMHO, and letting other people see private correspondences with mods when they themselves are not mods is a HUGE violation of privacy. (Disregard this point if the player in question is a mod though, I don't expect them to stop being a mod just because they anonfailed.)

3) To ease concerns about interacting with people they don't want to interact with, I think you should state a public message along these lines: "as anon mods, we know you're putting a lot of trust in our hands. We also recognize that not everyone wants to interact with everyone. So we want to assure you that if you have ever expressed that you do not want to interact with one of us, then we will not place your characters in our specific factions and we will let other mods answer your questions. We know it's a lot to say 'we'll do it even if you can't possibly know, just trust us', but this is the process we're going to follow and we want you to know what we're going to do, even if you won't be able to see us doing it." I think this applies to all of the mods too, since anyone can have problems with anyone and we all want reassurances that the mods will respect our boundaries. If you were non-anon mods, these two points (not placing someone into a faction run by a mod they do not want to interact with, and also having that mod sit out from talking with that player/making decisions about that player) would be pretty standard anyway. Trusting the mods to follow this same process even if we can't know for certain that they are is very important to keeping the game running.

4) Going forward, please at least acknowledge difficult questions like this, even if you don't want to confirm anything directly. This whole thing has been festering for weeks now. By not responding and instead limiting anon comments gradually (first by blocking anon commenting, then by making it so only members can comment), all you've done was give people space to go "I knew it, they're covering it up now. Shady mods" when I really don't think that's what's happening here. Appearances do matter, especially for anon mods. And how you handle things like this is how you build trust with your players. If the players can't trust you, then they'll eventually leave.

I think that's it from me personally. TL;DR these are the issues I see in the game, but I think they can be fixed and that the game will do better in the future if these issues are addressed.

I don't have anything to add, other than ... can the mods respond to the above concerns soon? or, to what is happening to the game in general? It's been over a day, and yet no answers from the mods themselves.

I feel a lot could've been resolved with proper response and reassurance. Now everyone is having doubts about the future of this game.

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not feedback, just a rundown of mini-event stuff from my perspective

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