HMD

[foundationmods]

How was the round? How did we mods do this time around? If you have any comments for the mods, feel free to leave them here! We want to continue to improve and do better in future rounds, so your input is important!

If you would like to contact us privately, you can do that as well by messaging either Eski (Eski#2807) or Maple (Mandy#0822) on Discord. If you want to talk to both of us, we can set up a group DM.

Comments

[imstuck]

Hello, I want to start off by saying that I really wanted to like this game, I really did! There were a lot of good concepts there that I really liked and there were some aspects that I absolutely adored! However despite how hard I tried it felt like there were a lot of issues that kept me from fully enjoying myself.

I will start off by saying that I won’t go into the mafia mechanic since you guys already are aware of the failings of that and that you aren’t planning on doing a mafia game in the future. However I will agree with what’s already said about the failings of the mafia mechanic of this game, both with it being too complicated and ultimately pointless with how the mafia and the deaths really having nothing to do with the overall story of the round.

One of my biggest issue is honestly how lax you guys seem with chatroom rules. It says up front that discussions of triggers won’t be tolerated. Nick goes into more detail in their critique but I just wanted to chime in to say that the lax nature with not even a real nsfw chat to put it in made me uncomfortable too. It was to the point where I had to have the chat muted for a grand majority of the game. And I know this is partially my fault for not coming to you guys earlier with my discomfort, but I was worried you wouldn’t take it seriously since you guys seemed so lax with the chatroom rules.

I also had quite a few issues plotwise, most of them have already been mentioned but I wanted to echo what they’re saying about how it felt like the players really didn’t affect the plot and it felt more like it was a psl between Gabe and Ichigo where there happened to be 30 other people there. And despite saying that this game is heavy in exploration, I feel like a grand majority of the plot and lore was just given to us, to the point that it was revealed three weeks in that there was a high probability that the dead will come back. Honestly it was so much information that was just given to us freely it felt like that the players didn’t contribute a whole lot to the plot.

I will also agree that when I apped into this game, I was expecting a heavy emphasis on The Thing and that it would emulate the body horror and general vibe pretty closely, since it was advertised on being based on The Thing. However, minus the snowy location and monsters existing (all of them were generally sympathetic), there is nothing connecting the game to The Thing at all. Honestly if you didn’t tell me, I would have never gotten that it was inspired by that movie whatsoever.

I know Everett already covered this, but having single character being given so much importance in Szayel, a roleless character feels a little weird. I wanna preface this by saying that this is not a jab at that player, since for the most part they were just doing what you guys told them to do. However, having one character be a class C researcher for seemingly no reason while everyone else had to be a class D seems really weird, and I can’t help but wonder how much of it was just because they were also a Bleach character. I’m not gonna go around accusing of mod favoritism, but it can feel that way sometimes when a character, seemingly at last minute, was given such high importance to the story. I know you guys wanted him to be a full out NPC, and I understand that, but I feel like being a little more up front with that, especially when Szyael isn’t a mastermind or even a major antagonist, would have helped.

One thing I have noticed that I’m sort of concerned about is the way you guys seem to dig your heels in a little when people bring up concerns. Not the worst I’ve seen, but when I saw people complain a week or so ago that the plot got lost you guys said that the plot wasn’t lost which… literally isn’t true since obviously at least someone got lost in the plot. Maybe not all of them or even a majority of them, but the plot was definitely lost somewhere. Then later one during the final regular trial when someone complained about the strict time limit for votes when people might be busy you guys just pointed out that you told us to be there that day before doing anything constructive to fix it. Now I might be alone on this, but when I read “make sure to be around for trial” I interpreted that as “don’t ignore this trial! There’s a lot of important plot stuff!” not “this stuff is extremely time sensitive and you will miss important stuff if you look away at all”. So at least in my case the fact that you said to be around isn’t exactly a valid excuse.

Communication also seems to be an issue, both between mods and mods to playerbase. I want to preface by saying that it doesn’t seem to be a major issue! This is just something that could be improved on. Most notably the confusion on Break Week AC and regarding Week 5 memories. For the former there just seemed to be a lot of confusion going on there. I feel like both mods should have looked over the AC at least once since it was different from normal AC for mistakes and I feel like Eski, once confronted with it, should have gone to Maple to ask what was going on with that first before saying that we still had to do AC anyway despite saying earlier we didn’t have to.

Regarding the latter, you guys seemed really frustrated when people didn’t fill out their Week 5 memory form, and I think a lot of that would have been fixed if you guys made extra reminders in plurk or an @everyone, as well as pm-ing those who didn’t fill them in a few hours before if they’re having trouble with the memories. This is especially true since, with everyone I saw who didn’t fill it out, it was a case of them completely forgetting to fill it in and they all seemed genuinely upset that they missed out on it. These are the only real issues with mod communications I’ve noticed, but they’re both issues that really stressed out the playerbase, and I have chatted

Speaking of I want to segue into another issue I had regarding the ic:ooc cycle. I honestly still have no idea why so many events had to take place on an irl timer. The one instance that really made sense was the trial (minus the last normal one) since the irl timer made sense so that trials don’t go on forever. However? The Atsushi event? The final normal murder taking place oocly six hours earlier? The way that all votes in the final trial were on a strict timer? I have no idea what’s the point of that beyond like, a “fun little quirk”. You could have them be normal lengths/start and end normally where everything starts around the same time and it ends when it’s solved/everyone dies/etc. And nothing would change. I don’t know how much of this is a nitpick and how much of it is a valid concern, but I’ve been wondering that for awhile and I still have no idea why that’s the case.

Sorry this ended up being a lot longer than I had originally intended, and kind of rambling at some points, but I really want to see this game be the best it could possibly be because I loved the premise! Please understand that I am giving you so much critique because I believe it can be amazing.

[blutsauger]

since these are things i didnt cover in my own critique; seconding the comments about break week AC and about the lack of announcements regarding the memory forms for week 5

obv i was dead and didnt need to worry about AC, but i know a lot of ppl were confused about why it appeared that break week required full AC, and i definitely felt that little situation couldve been handled better

and as for memories, the couple of people i talked to who forgot to fill out the memory form genuinely forgot, because obviously the holidays are difficult and things fall through the cracks. i absolutely agree that either making reminders as the deadline grew closer, or PMing people who hadn't replied yet, could have easily solved the problem