ROUND 3 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

[anonnomnomnom]

Hey guys! I loved this round and story and mechanics-wise it was definitely a big hit for me -- I really enjoyed the Witch lore and how the two NPCs bounced off both each other and the rest of the cast, and in general I felt like it was a great interaction and teamwork between player and mod storytelling. I had tons of fun and it was just a rewarding round in general, and I'm really glad to see that OOCly it went pretty smoothly too. :)

Feedback-wise, I'll be piggybacking off some issues brought up by other players and adding my own perspective as I do feel that having these issues addressed (some of them are recurring) would definitely help with improving the game for future rounds!

1. This has been a fairly consistent if low-key issue I've noticed throughout the rounds, in that OOC communication of, for example, announcements and other important mod-to-player things can get lost in the shuffle and busy roll from week-to-week. One example I can bring up from this round is that the investigation time change was put up to a poll that was linked in I think the first week's mingle, but there was no OOC announcement at all. It was my bad for missing the link, but it would have helped a lot to have some kind of OOC heads-up in the announcement channel on discord and on Plurk, as then I would have had a chance to set myself a reminder. I tend to be a very forgetful person and it helps me manage these things a lot when I'm given explicit forewarning about it.

Also, I'd like to encourage keeping up with announcements on Plurk for events and important plot threads (so, for example, the Watanuki visions, and in-between round stuff like the Moriarty exploration), since a number of players may not have consistent access to discord during the day even if they have time to tag. I had no idea the Moriarty stuff was going on at all until it was well underway. I'd also like to encourage players who put up meetings and mingles to also plurk them, since I've noticed a trend to keep these only to discord and it would probably help participation to spread the notice across discord as well as Plurk.

Just in general more communication in Plurk as well as more consistent announcements would be super appreciated.

2. Just a quick +1 to the servant thing, in that I feel like servants could have been better-integrated into the game. We did have stuff to do in the graveyard so it wasn't too big a deal on my end, but they did feel kind of like a one-off gimmick to get a couple of threads out of and that may have accounted for the lack of servant participation from week-to-week. I'm not sure if this was intended or not.

I did like the brief interlude where the dogs got used for the puzzle of the week? I feel like having the servants participate in stuff like that consistently would have been a fun usage of them. Just something to keep in mind for the future in case similar mechanics ever come up again.

3. The communication about graveyard endgame -- or lack thereof -- admittedly took me by surprise. We were explicitly told that graveyard characters wouldn't be needed until the end of the final trial and even then they would only be cheerleading. However, right before the start of trial, we were then told that demons and some servants could participate in fighting the survivor pool over cases and slinging Red Truths. This was a lot to spring on everybody at the last minute, and while I assume it was because the participation in the trial itself was optional, I liked the setup and I'm sure many of us would have liked to be able to plan for being there if we could. As it is, there was a lot of scrambling to find people who could be there for the trial, which I feel could have been better handled if we'd had more communication about what was expected of us in advance.

This was something that came up in R2 as well, where the lightning execution round blindsided many people who weren't made aware of how intensive it would be. I'm hoping that these communication issues can be worked on going forward so that everyone can have a smoother and more enjoyable endgame for future rounds.

4. I also wanted to add my support for raising the character cap back up. Previous rounds were a lot faster thanks mostly to the lack of activity drops and sweeps, which we had a lot more of this round -- so I do feel that either raising the cap back up to where we had it before or at least having some more numbers in case people do need to drop or step away would be a good idea going forward. It was a good round, but I felt a little more constrained in terms of being able to establish wider CR and the smaller cast was definitely felt during events and trials as well.

5. In terms of chat organization and having things lost in the chat during for example trials or events -- I do feel like we had some issues with organization this round that made it hard to catherd with trials and sometimes had people talking over each other or overwriting each other during puzzles, for example. Maybe having a dedicated trials/events channel going forward would be a good idea? It would help a lot with separating out idle chatter from actually trying to organize groups, discussions and speculation, and for this round's example figuring out how to stack Blue Truths.

6. One more thing I wanted to bring up since I know that this was a new mechanic for this round that I think we all did enjoy and it was brought up that similar mechanics could be implemented for either future rounds or separate games. The Blue Truth was a lot of fun (and the Gold and Red Truths too of course!), but I feel like the mechanic still wasn't completely well-adapted to the larger number of people. When Nirrti started not taking smaller Blue Truths I get that it made sense from a story/IC perspective, but it meant that it was harder for everyone to get a chance to Blue Truth, and moreover it made it harder to Blue Truth organically during trials.

I think we did manage to hash out a system by the end, but truthfully, I had a lot more fun with the Blue Truth in mock when people were able to jump in and build off of each other and speculate together rather than having to adhere to a rigid 'ask some questions and then round table it until two or three people set down the pre-planned Blue Truths'. I think having a better balance of both uses of the system might be a good idea, and help with the flow as well as enjoyment of players when it comes to using the Blue Truth itself if you do plan to use the mechanic or a variant of it again in the future.

To wrap up, while these issues were definitely noticeable in the round, I still very much enjoyed the game overall and had a ton of fun. A lot of these are smaller tweaks or improvements to existing things that I feel would help and increase enjoyment for everyone, so I really hope the feedback helps! Thanks so much for all the work and love you've put into this game. It's my home game and I'm hoping to stick with it as long as I'm able. ♥