jigokuooc | Plot/Event Feedback Post + open discussion!

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Most of what I have to say regarding plot/information dissemination and character opportunities has has already been said in this post multiple times, so let me just +1 that and be done about it.

But specifically, I want to reply to this answer, because based on information given by the mod team in the past, ranks were indeed used as a guideline to provide certain benefits or plotting opportunities. I'll paste/paraphrase from my personal plurk about the matter:

I have a post I keep on my journal just for housekeeping like my threads and points and misc game info that I keep track of for my own organization. Part of that is that I saved certain links that gave plotting opportunity information that was hard to find otherwise, such as rank benefits. Early on in the game the modteam actually did list the tangible IC benefits for rank ups. All of these posts are publicly available on the regain page, but players would have to dig for them if they wanted to see them. As has been mentioned already, having to dig to find basic information that should be available upfront is extremely frustrating and a recurring theme in this game.

Here are the posts I saved- I kept an eye on the regain post to save a reference once someone got rank within my character's clan for the first time so I would know what I was working towards, so these are sampled from some of the earliest rank ups, up to the first 3*:

1* Sutoku Rank Up Benefits - This post was actually linked into Matoba's own 1* Rankup reply by the mods, as a reference for the specific benefits this rank is entitled to.
2* Sutoku Rank Up Benefits - This one comes from Matoba's own rankup, which iirc was not the first 2* but I happened to remember to save it just then. This one does not list tangible benefits anymore.
3* Sutoku Rank Up Benefits - This one, again, has no standard "list" of tangible benefits, and is moreso flavortext tailored specifically to the character. It does, however, specify access to a specific IC opportunity/resource for that character that I can say with certainty was not provided in Matoba's rankup.

As you can see, the rankups at first listed specific benefits, which are not specifically plot info, but they are IC access to specific things, which affects what a character can be reasonably assumed able to interact with. These benefits seem to be implicitly extended to all characters with that rank.

From the 2* ranking onward there was a noticeable shift in the modteam giving more flavor text-based regain messages that were tailored to the character or regain. Personally, I really loved these! I thought they were a great way to show a character's contributions were appreciated and the character felt like a part of the world. That said, because nothing had been really established clearly as far as what benefits were attached to ranks at that point, this means that early characters may have gotten one idea of the mechanic, while later players might get another impression. I feel this mechanic badly needed a hard clarification of the exact benefits beforehand, and if something changed in how the modteam felt they would be best handled, the entire game really needed to be notified that there had been a change in how these would be considered/handled.

The additional thing I would caution with this format is that tailor-written messages may lead to some feelings of disappointment that certain players are given either more OOC effort or IC resources than others, in the same way that a common feedback on this post is that plot questions are given a different level of effort and care depending on who is asking them. I would advise that the modteam is really cautious about this. These tailored flavortexts are fun on the surface, but can contribute to the sentiment that some players are favored compared to others, and I have been in other games where tailored flavortext/opportunities became a major painpoint for the playerbase as well.

Finally, I wanted to address specifically the assertion that rank has never been considered for access to specific plots. A while back I asked whether rank would be a requirement in order to have Matoba investigate and engage in business with Sutoku's trade boats in order to pursue a player plot that I had thought of, and was told that I would need a 3* Rank to gain the option to access that plot avenue. This directly contradicts what you are saying here that rank does not give the player access to pursue certain things for their characters.

I understand that the way a modteam decides to handle various game mechanics changes over time, but the fact that none of this was defined well to the game at large in a way that players could easily plan out their ranks, both whether they were worth spending the points and what opportunities rank would make available to them, and that there appears to have been either a shift in how the modteam decided to approach ranks or handled that access on a player by player basis, does not paint a pretty picture for players who are putting in the work to pursue those avenues only to feel that it was a waste of their effort and time.

Plot/Event Feedback Post + open discussion!

re: rank opportunities