foundationmods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
foundationmods) wrote2020-05-31 11:35 am
foundationmods) wrote2020-05-31 11:35 am
Entry tags:
Round 5 critpost
Hey there everyone! It's your mods here.
We have put up this critpost so you guys can give us crit you have on how round 5 went. We're always seeking to improve, so we will gladly listen to anything you have to say! However, before you leave any crit, we ask that you read the following and keep it in mind.
1: This is a place for crit. We do have a love meme going on now too that can be used for positive comments, and we certainly appreciate positive comments mixed in with crit. But if you have no crit to offer, then we ask that you please use the love meme. (The love meme can be found by clicking this link.)
2: Please read though our comments below first. All three of us had some things we wanted to talk through individually first, regarding our experiences with this round. So we request that you read through our words first before you comment.
3: Please respect that we may not accept your crit. We mention this because we have gotten crit during this round that boiled down to "You are doing this in X way, I prefer Y way." You are certainly free to like having things done a certain way, but any crit that is about a difference in opinion like that will get a "I'm sorry, but we are choosing to run the game in this way" in response.
4: Please be respectful. We have had problems in the past with people getting inflammatory with us. Please use respectful words.
5: Please be patient. Depending on how much crit we get and how our schedules line up (as we want to talk through everything together before we respond to anyone), it may take a couple days to get a response. But we will get back to you, even if it takes a little while.
6: Only players in SCP please. We would like the opinions of those who participated in R5 with us, either as a participant in the 2000s side or a participant in the 2020s side.
7: This crit post is public. If you would like to talk to us in private, feel free to leave a comment on the mod contact page.
Thank you for sticking with us and participating in SCP round 5! We'll have more information on round 6 sometime in July.
We have put up this critpost so you guys can give us crit you have on how round 5 went. We're always seeking to improve, so we will gladly listen to anything you have to say! However, before you leave any crit, we ask that you read the following and keep it in mind.
1: This is a place for crit. We do have a love meme going on now too that can be used for positive comments, and we certainly appreciate positive comments mixed in with crit. But if you have no crit to offer, then we ask that you please use the love meme. (The love meme can be found by clicking this link.)
2: Please read though our comments below first. All three of us had some things we wanted to talk through individually first, regarding our experiences with this round. So we request that you read through our words first before you comment.
3: Please respect that we may not accept your crit. We mention this because we have gotten crit during this round that boiled down to "You are doing this in X way, I prefer Y way." You are certainly free to like having things done a certain way, but any crit that is about a difference in opinion like that will get a "I'm sorry, but we are choosing to run the game in this way" in response.
4: Please be respectful. We have had problems in the past with people getting inflammatory with us. Please use respectful words.
5: Please be patient. Depending on how much crit we get and how our schedules line up (as we want to talk through everything together before we respond to anyone), it may take a couple days to get a response. But we will get back to you, even if it takes a little while.
6: Only players in SCP please. We would like the opinions of those who participated in R5 with us, either as a participant in the 2000s side or a participant in the 2020s side.
7: This crit post is public. If you would like to talk to us in private, feel free to leave a comment on the mod contact page.
Thank you for sticking with us and participating in SCP round 5! We'll have more information on round 6 sometime in July.
Eski
But, a big issue this round, at least for me, has just genuinely been how we were treated. We're humans and we'll make mistakes or forget things - especially me - but it felt a lot like we weren't really allowed to do that this round without major kickback from certain parts of the playerbase.
It also didn't help that sometimes, people would just...do far reaching things without telling us the full extent of what they wanted to do. There was a lot of pushback against us for saying no or 'you can't do that', esp when it came to 'please don't try to inherently break the rules of our game/the setting.' I understand that it can be frustrating to get that, but a lot of the time we were saying it in order to not have to break the inherent 'rules' of the round, due to lore constraints. Which leads into my next point:
I also felt pretty discouraged how it felt like some people genuinely lost faith in us being able to deliver on the plot, or that there was a reason behind why we kept saying no. We weren't saying no just to shut down cool ideas - the intent behind that was often locked in with what was happening behind the scenes, and that meant we had to shut down some avenues. Seeing people continually try to keep going with things we'd explained or said no to felt a lot like 'well, we don't actually care about why you're doing this, because we're just here to have our own fun.' And that is an awful feeling to have, especially in the pentultimate round of a multi-round, story focused game.
All in all, it felt less like we were mods/fellow players this round, and more like we got treated like fun dispensers - and it's worse because it really wasn't the entire game treating us this way. Most of the playerbase were genuinely good and worked with us, but lord, sometimes it felt like we were in unpaid customer service, and that's not fun. Especially when you don't get a paycheck for it, and you're doing it it have fun with everyone.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to bring them here or to me, personally.
Maple
I want to echo Eski's thoughts from above: for a good chunk of this round, it felt like we were being treated as 'fun dispensers'. I'm sure this wasn't anyone's intention, but it felt like people were only coming to us to get an 'okay' for whatever plan they had in mind. Sometimes we had to say 'no' to people's ideas and plans, because they just didn't work in the grand scheme of things. And while most people accepted that 'no', sometimes we were met with either people trying to bargain their way into getting what they wanted (which isn't okay, because 'no' isn't an invitation to try to argue your point) or outright trying to undermine that 'no' and sneak their plans into the game in other ways (which also isn't okay, for obvious reasons).
We also had trouble with players pursuing their own wants without considering how those actions would impact others. I personally had to come down hard on this in ghost chat once, but there were other incidents of this same kind of behavior throughout the round. We had 29 characters in this round (I'm counting mod characters here because they were PCs). In a collaborative hobby like this, it just doesn't work if people are being inconsiderate of others. It really felt like people were going "Well I'm going to have fun MY way, I deserve it!" rather than working with others to create those fun experiences together. Sometimes it felt like people were trying to 'win the game' by breaking the setting or something. And that really isn't the kind of 'fun' we want to have here. Those kinds of entitled attitudes really aren't fair to everyone else. It's not about what a single person does or doesn't deserve. It's about what we accomplish together.
There was also a lot of accusations and guilting thrown around. There were a few instances this round where players came to us with ideas, and we were able to work with them to find a way to make it fit into the game. But nearly every single time we were able to do that, at least one player came to us complaining about how it wasn't fair. Why did this character get to do this? Why didn't everyone get the same chance?
I want to draw everyone's attention to the last part of one of our rules: So while every character will get a chance to do something within the game, not every character is going to get exactly the same chance for exactly the same CR and game involvement. This rule has been a rule since round 1. The wording has changed slightly since then, but overall the spirit of the rule has been the same. We can't give every character exactly the same chance to do exactly the same thing. But every character has their own special power or skill that will let them do SOMETHING. And I think that several players lost sight of this rule during this round.
We also had some trouble with players going to one mod, getting an unsatisfactory answer, and then going to another mod to try and get a different answer. Eski, Pan, and I communicate EVERYTHING with each other, so we caught them doing it. But that kind of triangulating and 'using mom and dad against each other'? Unacceptable.
And related to that point, several people were extremely rude with their comments of "I'm taking this to the crit post" or "I'm not coming back to round 6." In those instances, they were used as threats against us. It had an air of "You're not doing what I want, so I'm taking my toys and going home" which made it seem like they were trying to bully us into doing what they wanted lest we risk harsh crit or a player dropping entirely. And that's...really not ok. Bullying a mod into getting a result you want REALLY is not okay. And the fact that I even have to say that is honestly disheartening. (To clarify, one person DID say they weren't coming back to R6 in the chat. This is not about that player, as they said their part respectfully and without intending it as an attack against us. This is about other conversations that were had in private.)
Once again, it wasn't all one person doing every one of these behaviors. One person did one thing, another person did another, and so on. But they all piled up and it was a lot to deal with.
So, going forward, we're going to be firmer about a few things. First off, 'No.' is a complete sentence. We've tried to avoid saying 'no' in the past, and instead going with "well, let's change it up a bit to make it work." But after being dragged through the mud for it this entire round, I'm honestly kind of done with being treated like trash because I dared to try and make the game fun for everyone instead of letting a few specific players walk all over the game. So 'No' is going to be coming out a lot more in round 6. And when we say 'no', you need to accept that. 'No' is the end of the conversation, not an invitation to argue the point.
Secondly, we're going to be a lot more stringent on apps and power nerfs going forward. This one is on us, we should have been stricter about it to begin with. But a lot of the problems this round came from a misunderstanding of how certain powers worked, and that tells me that we need to watch that section more closely to prevent further problems. And since R6 is a 'mostly-veteran' round, that does mean we may need to nerf some people's powers going into R6. We'll address that when it's time for apps, though.
Thirdly, infomodding is not allowed. This includes sharing information with players who have characters that are already dead.
Finally, there's one last point we need to make explicitly clear: we're going to run this game in the way WE see fit. I understand that the way we mod might not be to everyone's play style. A couple people have already said they're not returning for R6 because of it. And honestly, that's valid. You're free to decide "this isn't for me, I'm going to bow out". I won't hold that against you, and I'm sure Eski and Pan won't either. But everyone has to realize that we've always been very straightforward with how we mod. Our rules and game plan are clearly laid out for anyone to read at any time. If that's not for you, then ok. But we're not going to be very tolerant to people who app into the game knowing how it's going to be run and try to force us to change how we run things. It's been five rounds, guys. By now you should know how we run games.
I just want to end this by saying that I'm not trying to point fingers and blame people here. This is me saying "these things happened, and they can't happen again going forward." So please, respect these boundaries we're setting as we go forward into round 6.
Pan
I will repeat the point that it felt like we were fun dispensers. While we are all open to working with players to let them do something cool, there were times we had to say no because it would make it frustrating or unfair to the majority of players. This was met with some outrageous behavior where we were even told by someone that they didn't care that we had other players to consider. When we had to nerf or limit something, we found that they were trying to sneak it into play anyways or try to find ways to wiggle around it.
I don't know if it's just the world is on fire, people are at risk and feeling antsy with lock down, or if there were other contributing factors going on we are unaware of, but it felt like some were taking it out on us at times and didn't care about the game, their fellow players, or us as people.
Which didn't feel great at all and was pretty disappointing at times.
I was also given some great advice about how people may be looking at mod characters for setting the tone of the game as well as any hints or answers. Which is why we made it clear both icly and oocly our characters can be wrong and do not have the answers. (For example, in one trial Ango and WWX both were debating a wrong theory together)
I will admit that I did mess up a couple of times. For that I am sorry.
However, it got to a point that it felt like people didn't want mod characters participating in anything. Even when other players or characters asked for my help or my character’s help, someone would nudge me in private about how I shouldn’t have done that or that they weren’t comfortable with my involvement.
It felt like people didn't want me participating in the game. I will again take the good advice I was given going forward and learn to better balance things, and I want to play with everyone.
Thank you for taking the time to read my words. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to let me know.
New Edit- The players who came with me with concerns or their thoughts did have good intentions and were trying to help. It's one of those things where it just kept happening and it just wound up feeling like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Where I was asked to do something by other players, but also asked not to by another. I do appreciate you all and you have been amazing. You all approached me because you care a great deal and I do appreciate that.
no subject
So, first and foremost, I apologize if at any point during the round I said anything that may have contributed to you three feeling like fun dispensers. Let it be known that was never my intention, but hey, when it's written medium the mood doesn't come across well, so it's perfectly possible stuff I have said came across wrong. So yeah, I really apologize if that ever happened.
Now, let's see...hm, I hadn't expected to leave this in public here, but after reading what you all three said, I figured it may be good. First, to leave that apology, because given I offered some criticism and tried to be helpful it may have contributed to the stuff said there. Still, it makes me think of a couple things that I really don't think can be chalked up to just a difference in opinion. I really do think SCP is a fun game, and even though, well, I have said things, I'll keep the series itself as dear to me. So I'll try my best to be as objective as possible and avoid personal opinions!
...for the most part, since there's a single one I think counts as personal opinion, but I really feel needed to be said since, well, the focus of SCP is very narrative. I think I'll get that one out of the way first and foremost.
The plot of the round was...I think it was good! Like, honestly I did feel invested into it. That said, I admit that for 1/3 of the game I didn't feel that at all -- in fact, it was kind of hard to care about the story? That was during the early part of the game. To be exact, it was Todd and Agent Timmy Turner.
I'm not going to say I'm terribly qualified to say such things, because honestly I think I'm not a terribly good writer. I think I know the basics and the theory stuff, but putting them into practice is hard, so what do I know. Still, when it's about stories, I think it...is hard to get invested in a story when it doesn't take its own important plot beats seriously. The introduction of the main antagonistic force, and the point where the mission the characters were sent to is revealed to have been a failure due to their own actions, are the perfect chances to deliver some really good punches, and establish the tone of everything, the cornerstone of the round's narrative. However it feels like...the humor that got inserted there pretty much diminished any strength those vital plot points had, which in turn, diminished the effectivity of the narrative.
Honestly I don't really have anything against SCP's humor. I do find a lot of stuff funny, but hey, everything has its time and place. What happened with the moose and the raccoon that led to finding Tages' notes about those who weren't in the TDM was pretty fine! I think that was the right time for that because it was all about delivering a plot point that, in the context of the round itself, was secondary -- Tages wasn't the focus of the round itself, after all. The curse was, at least from what I can see and understand. And that's why, when establishing how much of a threat the curse is, making a guy disguised as an anime character is not really the best move. When establishing how much of a threat the ghosts can be by killing the agent because they found out about it, giving the agent a joke name is really distracting.
See what I mean? I admit by the end of Week 2 I was really unsure what kind of tone the round was supposed to have. There was an attempt to establish an atmosphere, but oh boy did the way the most important plot beats were delivered undermine that. I was pretty confused, unsure what to even think, and frankly, kind of foolish because of my own expectations. 'Engaged' was by far not in my mind.
However, starting from Week 3 I think it started to work! Like, the plot was allowed the shine properly. I believe SCP can have a good narrative, there are rounds that prove it. Even Round 2 had some great stuff, despite some flaws in how it was delivered. That's what started happening from Week 3 and onwards! Which I really have to give kudos for, because I think you did well with that. I'll have to cut this short because, well...this post seems to be exclusively for criticism, so I guess I should limit that in this message. I'll leave stuff about that in the love meme, then!
So, now that I said that, there's one problem I think encapsulates everything that may be an issue? I have been thinking about it a bit, and in a way I think this is how it can be summarized:
There's a lot of misjudgment on how things can be taken by the players. Like, I have no idea what exactly may have been brought to you in private, but...I can take a guess, given several times during the round I noticed a few things that really could be taken the wrong way, or taken badly. I'll try to give three examples among the many options, because I admit...there are many. Still, these three may illustrate things the best:
The first one is the by-now maybe infamous booze incident -- and right away I say there's nothing to blame Jeva for, I believe Jeva did nothing wrong. Honestly I think the concept of Dazai being able to breach through the curse of the mansion and being an useless drunk instead of taking advantage to do something useful is pretty funny. I love the thought of that! And of course, Jeva deserves credit for coming up with such a thing. But it may...have been for the better to aviod it. That one was causing kind of a big plot hole, and opened the door to just so many attempts to break through the curse with their powers no matter what. Believe me, had that not cut short, the incoming weeks would have been so filled with requests and ways to break through that, and that's because Dazai wasn't the only character that could feasibly do it. I can think of...like eight who could, one way or another, try to do that too, and from what I recall, it was going to be batted away with the miasma fighting against the powers.
The problem? There'd have been a lot of issue with that. I think that would have led to a lot of arguments about why their characters doing that was different to what Dazai did and why it should work. It'd have brought a whole lot of work for you all, and if everything was denied, I'm pretty sure there'd have been a lot of rancor towards SCP. The kind of 'oh. they let dazai do that and then closed the window to allow it. they did that after dazai did it. why.'. Thankfully, I think that was avoided. Your prompt action stopped what may have amounted to a lot of bad blood, but yeah, I admit I'm really surprised that issue slipped by on the first place.
The second one I can think is the whole fire thing. Now, I'm not going to say I know all the details because boy I don't. All I have is what was explained to me privately by a mod, as well as what was said to me in the ghost chat by other players. It's very likely I'm missing some vital information but...I admit once I got the explanation, I was so full of concern about the whole thing.
I'm...also pretty surprised that one slipped by too. Think of it like this: there's players making plans, and the objective is to destroy whatever is in the core. They get a lot of things that point out fire is the thing to do. During an event, a mere...three days or so before the plans are going to be carried out, there's a heapload of proof that fire is the right thing to do. It's being reinforced by the mod posts, yup. Everything that isn't fire is not working well, also proven by mod posts. Therefore, fire is what should be done, and plans are made with that as the cornerstone.
So, how would things be interpreted if, after the game built so many times, and so intensely, and so emphatically that fire is what should be used, when using fire the result is 'Oh, the fire actively made things much worse!'.
I really, really, really think that'd have been a major, almost irreversible mistake. Like...honestly I really think that would have been interpreted as outright unfair. I found out about the role of fire in that like...two hours before the eggsac was destroyed? And wow did I spend those two hours fretting about that. Hell, I got so concerned I wasted no time in saying it. When I saw something else that wasn't fire destroyed the eggsac, I was so incredibly relieved! I felt disaster had been averted.
I repeat once again maybe I'm misinterpreting things, but from the explanation I was given on endgame day, that was all what crossed my mind. I thought we as players had been supposed to deduce something was wrong with fire -- you know, find the inconsistencies and realize they were being led into a trap. Thought that was a clever thing! -- but that day I found out I was wrong about that, it really was supposed to be that the players should use fire, and that'd make things worse. Personally I had a theory the core was a trap, and even tried to find out if I was right, because I admit I had similar concerns, but honestly I decided not to really pursue it because I thought 'well, even if it's a trap, I'm sure it won't be a loss. The mods will handle it well'. That one in particular wasn't really a big deal, honestly, but about that, I think the way you gals did things about getting to the core and popping the curse open being the way to return to the real world was a great move. Seriously, that single move just removed any concerns about the core, yup!
The last example I can think is, well...ironically, it's been reinforced in this post. I'm...not very sure how much of a good decision it is to say things such as 'we're going to run this game in the way WE see fit'. Like, frankly I can sympathize with such thoughts. I absolutely can! And I agree. Your game, your ways. The thing is...should that sort of thing be said? What kind of tone does that give this? I know that's not your intention, I believe it is't, but it gives kind of a confrontational tone to so many things. The kind of tone that says 'if you don't like it then get out'.
And needless to say, that's just so ripe for any kind of misintepretations.
The other mod post, the one from...two weeks or so ago, it had a line very similar to that one too. Honestly, the SCP mod team pride themselves on how approachable they are, and I do think this is one of the most approachable teams I have known. I wouldn't be leaving this post if I believed it would be ignored. But wow does such things give the complete opposite impression. I think, if I didn't already know you three are really open and welcoming, I may have interpreted it as 'welp. they're not going to listen to a thing, it's useless to say anything'. Which of course leads to bad blood, which...well, you know it wouldn't end well.
See what I mean? The point I'm trying to make is that the mod team's huge flaw is that there's a lack of forethought about how things can be interpreted and taken by the players. I know it may be a bit, uh...presumptuous? Of me to say such things, since I have modded only two games? But personally I have made some mistakes when it's about how things are taken. I have taken some terribly, huge bad decisions in the games I modded. I saw those mistakes, and maybe I have gotten a liiiittle too obsessed about such things. I just can't stop thinking about that. So when I see others making errors of the same caliber I did...I just can't help myself and stay quiet. I really can't, I just can't because I don't want others to make the mistakes I did. I'm sorry, I'm really sorry if anything I said is not okay, I just get so filled with worry I don't know what else to do other than speaking up.
That's all I really wanted to say for the feedback post. Now that I read your three posts, I really have to once again apologize if I ever treated you three as fun dispensers, that was never my intention.
All in all, I think that's all I had to say.
I once again will say I enjoyed playing in the round, and also I love you three dearly, but yeah. I care way too much, I guess. So much I just...can't keep this all to myself. I'm really sorry, it's not my intention to be inconvenient. I just hope it can be useful in some way.
Thanks for everything.
no subject
A couple of the points you brought up (Dazai's booze escapades for example) were addressed earlier in the round, so we won't belabor the point again here. But we do hear you on those points, and we'll be keeping them in mind going forward.
As for the rest, we feel that they're largely in the 'different of opinion category' (one being the tone of the game), and say "we hear you, but we're going to do it this way." Which is honestly why we put the "We're going to run the game in the way WE see fit" thing at the beginning: some of this stuff does boil down to personal preference, and when it comes to that, we're going to go with what we feel like running.
We're not trying to say 'if you don't like it then get out', but rather be upfront and forward with how we're going to run the game. That way anyone interested in applying can see what we intend to do and make their decisions based on that information.
But thank you for your crit, and we appreciate having you in the game.
no subject
I cannot wait to see how everything will wrap up after all the blood sweat and tears both you and the players have put into this.
I only have two points to bring up here that I think might be useful for future reference?
The first thing is event time management. This is a minor thing that is largely organizational and probably easy to fix, so I figure it's worth bringing up. This round there were a lot of mid-week events which is cool and has a lot of mod dedication behind it. I just noticed that it blocks off a lot of time that is then missing from making CR between PCs? Some of these events were pretty minor and only had like two pieces of info to find, but due to the fact that threads naturally take time to play out, they blocked off comparatively large chunks off time. Of course, players can tag other things while events are going, but experience tells me that usually everyone drops everything to popcorn because we're all excited about game plot. Personally, I found myself waiting for events / watching events a lot and I noticed it really cut into the space I had to develop my CR. I feel like combining events into fewer but longer / more info-intensive events might facilitate more player top-levels and CR growth there?
The second thing is going off what Nick already said: tone. The mod post that was made in the middle of the round kind of stunned me with regards to that. At the time, it read as very patronizing to me. I was surprised to have the round recounted at us the way it was and I was pretty put off by the fact that our worry of 'this seems more like the in-betweeners will get the endgame rather than our characters wrapping their own arc in some way' seemed to be addressed with the answer 'what you do DOES matter - to the in-betweeners'. I did not feel heard at the time.
Now that the finale has actually happened I am pretty satisfied with the way the ghosts figured into it. I didn't play Zabuza there because of muse burnout more than anything but I thought having their corrupted selves get a boss battle where they could really showcase their strengths and inner nastiness was cool. So the actual plot concern thatw as raised back then is resolved for me very sufficiently. In the end, it is the finale that makes you capable of evaluating a story's parts and in that sense, the finale did tie a good bow from the loose threads.
Now that I have read what all three of you said here, I can see that there was a LOT more going on in private than I was privvy too at the time. While I sometimes chatted with other players about the round, I was not aware of any player-mod-DMs going on and I didn't read the chat 24/7 so I might have missed things there as well. Coming at it with this knowledge, I think the tone is a lot more understandable even if not necessarily ideal.
What this boils down to is that I think it's important to evaluate how tone will come off to people who do not have these private facts. From my perspective at the time, I did not feel respected as a player. I understand now that this happened because you did not feel respected as mods either, which SUCKS obviously. Being a mod is a non-paying job and it can be rather thankless - but it shouldn't be.
So I guess my bottom line here is just a general "I think misunderstandings can be avoided by applying a more neutral tone in public unless the cause of aggravation is explicitly stated since otherwise the wrong people might take it personally."
OKAY and now I am done. Thank you again for letting me raise hell with that trials moral conflict, I had a BLAST playing that.
no subject
no subject
I also wanna add that event scheduling could be improved too. I think you guys tried to fix it as the game went on by making frozen top levels with times on them, which was a great help! But there were still issues where you guys would say (mostly in gy but this happened the first week of the game too) that something would be happening but not list a time and didn't ping anyone.
I know at least one time, one of the mods was sick day of and wasn't around to tell us, which is pretty reasonable! But it might be less stress on you guys to announce events more than a day in advance and to give a concrete time. That way players can plan to be around on the right day/time rather than waiting all day for an event or missing it because they didn't know they had to be around.
no subject
no subject
We're going to respond here for you + everyone who gave a +1, by the way. Since those were all echoing points you made.
We honestly do prefer the 'set aside days/times at the start of the week and tell people when the game events are going to be' method. It's something we started in R3 after getting crit about how spontaneous events were hard to plan for, and we feel it's worked out well since then. We feel that 1-2 a week is a good balance of 'events' and 'cr opportunities'. SCP has always been a bit heavier on the plot side compared to many murdergames, due to the 'multi-round' nature of it, so we do genuinely need the time to get plot info out. We will try to keep it as succinct as possible though. Unfortunately, we can't really do much about generating CR other than provide time free of game plot in which to do it.
In regards to the tone issues, we are glad that you found the ending to be satisfying. It was really, really hard for us to go "just trust us, it's all going to come together in the end" knowing that several of you had expressed concern over such things. That was why we made that mod post near the end of the game: given that several players stopped a game event to talk about it in the game chat, we felt like it was important to address in that moment rather than waiting for the end of the game.
As for the 'neutral tone' stuff, all we can say is "we tried". Unfortunately, all three of us are human, and getting harassed to the point where mods were talking about quitting SCP all together made it really difficult to remain professional. Which is, honestly, why we're setting the boundaries we have laid out in this post: it's not fair for us to be grumpy and short with players who are not the source of that grumpiness, and we need to cut those behaviors off immediately rather than let it affect our modding.
Thank you once again for your crit, and thank you for your time in the game. It's been a blast playing with you!
1/2
First of all, I just want to say thanks again for running another round of SCP! I had a lot of fun playing Date here and I thank everyone for dealing with his stupid shenanigans! I also appreciate that this must have been a very stressful time for all of you not only because of mod work, but also because of what you all are going through in real life due to the current state of the world.
In all honesty, I really hesitated to comment to this post for a multitude of reasons, one of which is because I acknowledge that I was one of those players that behaved carelessly and potentially spoiled people’s fun, which is what led to that announcement in GY chat; that was my fuck up for not thinking to double-check things with you guys, and I understand that I caused undue stress to everyone involved in that situation, mods and players alike. Again, I’m truly sorry for all of that.
However, the second reason is one that I feel that Nick and Luna have already elaborated on in their crit, but I want to reiterate it here: it’s about tone. I want to start off by saying that I’ve always found you guys to be very approachable as a mod team overall, and that I understand that you were all stressed out and felt disrespected during the game’s run. Nevertheless, as all of you have been honest with us about your feelings for the past few weeks, I want to be honest in turn: the tone of the Week 5 mod post discussing plot concerns and the tone of this very crit post both left me feeling very, very uncomfortable. I think Nick put it best—it comes off as confrontational, like you’re gearing up for a fight or anticipating that you’re going to get into an argument. And that, in turn, makes it difficult for me to feel like my feedback is going to be listened to.
Obviously what I feel and what will actually happen are two different matters. That’s why I’m still posting this, because I’m trusting you all to take my feedback seriously, regardless of whether you guys decide to use any of it or not. I’m also aware that after my blunder in the GY, my credibility is likely shot by now, but hopefully you guys can still find some merit in what I have to say.
Case Investigations:
Overall, I think the case investigations were run smoothly and I don’t think there were actually many issues here! It was nice that we could get clarification on things after the main evidence was collected, which did end up being helpful in a lot of the cases. However, I figured it might be worth pointing out some things that might have helped streamline things some more.
First off, area caps. I understand not wanting five people to pile onto the same location when there might only be three pieces of evidence to find, so I think it’s reasonable to impose them. However, it may have helped to scale the size of the caps to the amount of evidence present in each area. I was only there for all of the Week 2 investigation so that’s where it stood out to me most, but it became apparent early on that most of the evidence was actually in the greenhouse, with the other locations only having 1-2 pieces of evidence iirc. This didn’t really give much for a pair of investigators to do in those locations, so it might have been better if those areas were capped at one person while upping the cap for greenhouse investigators (maybe to three?). With this suggestion, I get there might be concerns about spoiling where the body is (because presumably it’s in one of the areas with a higher cap) so it would probably work best only if there’s already a body discovery thread done beforehand.
Another thing that stood out to me for weeks 1-4 was that the bulk of the case investigations seemed to be run solo by Eski, with Pan stepping in to provide clarifications after all of the main evidence was discovered. This was actually pretty concerning to see since a couple of times it seemed like Eski wasn’t getting enough sleep and held off on getting food because of the investigation—so while I really appreciated the enthusiasm and dedication, it was also worrying from a health standpoint. Thankfully, I did notice that there was more delegation happening in week 5 because I can’t imagine how difficult it would have been for one person to handle all of the evidence that was scattered around for those cases. Hopefully you guys stick to splitting the workload when possible, because running investigations can be pretty stressful, and I know how awful it can be to try to keep chugging along while fighting off a headache and fatigue.
Mechanics:
There were a number of different mechanics that were used this round, like the rotating rooms, the use of traps, the unique trial rules and the way the inbetweeners fit into the round. Thus, this section might end up coming off as a little scattered as I switch between topics, so I hope that you guys bear with me here. I’m also going to just bold where I start talking about different mechanics so this is easier to sort through. Anyways, here we go.
I hesitated to discuss the idea of rotating rooms here since I’m not sure if you guys will ever revisit the concept (presumably in other games and not R6), but I figure I’ll keep this in just in case. To start off, I really did like how the hallways were used each week to create the image of a spiderweb; I thought that was clever and it fit the idea of the characters getting drawn into the curse’s trap, as well as tie into the spider motif that was present throughout the round. I also found the idea of a rotating layout intriguing in and of itself, although I did start to get the sense that it ended up getting to be a bit much for you guys to keep up with when the room descriptions ended up rather sparse by the time we got to weeks 4 and 5.
However, one thing that I don’t think landed quite as well was the use of the Winchester house as a setting—if we weren’t told about this OOCly or on the intro log, I wouldn’t have recognized it from the locations page because there was very little emphasis on the eccentricities of the mansion, beyond the unusual shape of the hallways. Little details like the stained glass, the 13 motif, doors opening up to nowhere and other bits were never really integrated into the locations, so it mostly felt more like a generic mansion setting to me; there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it just felt like the setting didn’t appear as advertised, that’s all. Showing things rather than telling us OOCly would have been a better approach here, in my opinion.
The use of traps in the setting reminded me a lot of R4’s death games due to how reliant some of them were on RNG. While the death games were advertised in the Round 4 FAQ as something that would happen during the course of the game, while mention of traps this round seemed limited to either OOC chat or when they first popped up on the week 2 log. There was no real warning for it on the FAQs, which is where I would expect to find information about round mechanics. I will say though, I appreciated that the traps gave ghost players something else to use for their hauntings and I did like that some of them were puzzles.
Nevertheless, this ties into what I felt to be an issue surrounding the traps: in general, there was very little reward for investigating, despite the high risks. In the first couple of weeks when healing was still functional, I feel the traps were less of a deterrent because most grievous injuries could be dealt with rather easily, but it started becoming apparent later on that people were slower to investigate, which was most evident when no one at all volunteered to explore the vents in week 5.
What I’m about to say might just be an indication of different modding styles, but I can say that for me personally, I much prefer it when players feel encouraged to try and explore things with the setting. However, the way the traps worked often meant that players were outright punished for not being careful enough, or for fiddling with certain parts of the room, or for getting a bad RNG roll. While I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with promoting a more cautious exploration style (and I think that figuring out ways to bypass the traps can be fun in its own way), there was also no real incentive to bother with the risk most of the time, both from an IC and OOC standpoint. And when that becomes the dominant mindset, people will stop taking initiative unless there’s a way to guarantee their safety. I feel like if the incentives to explore were better (probably in terms of information, although unique items and equipment could also work), explorations would have felt more meaningful rather than a waste of time and energy when it turns out there was no reward to the whole thing.
In the same vein, I think that dying to traps might be off putting to some people. I understand that this is a murdergame, and I understand that this was a doomed round where everyone was expected to die at the end. However, some of the lethal traps, like the log pushing someone into a fire, or the acid showers, seemed to me like they would have resulted in a very abrupt, unceremonious death. In most murdergames, both the culprit and the victim generally have some say in how they die, either with the way the case is planned or with how the execution is written. In this scenario though, someone who dies by trap is unlikely to get the same reactions or focus as someone who has had actual case involvement. Certainly, the death can hurt characters with close CR and those who are softhearted, but for anyone else, it can feel pretty anticlimactic and ends up more as a “well that’s unfortunate” moment. Dying by trap is something I wouldn’t find unusual for players that decide to drop or idle, but putting it up to RNG for active players (who are probably more inclined to explore and get engaged with the plot to begin with) seems almost like punishing them for trying.
It might be redundant to mention this since you guys probably noticed this as well, but I think that running traps had the inadvertent side effect of increasing mod workload by slowing down explorations. In particular, characters were no longer inclined to explore solo because it was unsafe, but the OOC consequence is that multiple people would tag in and thus more coordination was required. In addition, rather than going straight to certain actions (e.g. going down the stairs, picking up and looking at an object, etc.), there was a higher likelihood of characters poking cautiously in order to not trigger anything, which dragged out the thread and left you guys tagging longer. Lastly, when RNG is involved, rolling for a bunch of different things takes time, particularly for multiple players in a thread.
I just want to end off this section on traps by talking a bit more about the use of RNG. First off, I want to say that I’m not knocking the decision to use RNG, because I understand that you guys enjoy doing rolls for stuff and people have fun with them in chat too. But I have felt that it’s been used inconsistently at times—I’ve seen some exploration threads where there is no RNG use at all and some with multiple rolls within the space of a few tags. The contexts vary wildly as well, with some rolls being done for simple tasks like finding something in a room, to actions that would rely more on a character’s skillset (e.g. success of a sword strike, reaction time, etc.). It feels somewhat arbitrary at points because it’s unclear which actions would result in rolls and which wouldn’t, and it’s uncertain as to how many chances characters get as far as the number of rolls they need for success or failure. At times, it also feels as if rolls aren’t tweaked to account for character aptitudes as well, which can feel unfair to some if their character would have the skills to dodge, fight off or otherwise deal with the issue. In general, I think that being more transparent about what criteria are used to judge when you guys decide to roll, as well as scaling or adjusting rolls to account for character strengths would both help.
While I think most of the trial rules were pretty standard, the rule about needing to vote out as many people as there are victims was not advertised in the premise. Mind, this isn’t a complaint against the risk of being wrongly voted out or anything—the fact that this was a scapegoating murdergame was advertised, so anyone apping in should understand that aspect is always a risk, so that part is fair. The issue is this rule implies that people can end up as additional collateral damage to a case, which not everyone may be okay with, doomed round or not. Certainly, it is a murdergame and people can die at any time, but it helps to be OOCly transparent about any additional mechanics that can contribute to character death, the same way you would advertise that scapegoating is a possibility in your games. Otherwise, you risk blindsiding the players.
Lastly, I want to talk about the role of the inbetweeners in the plot. I do understand this was something that you guys were setting up for, what with how R5 was framed as watching old recordings and how the goal was to prevent Mayuri from becoming an O5. Nevertheless, I was very confused that we were only told about this during week 3 (and only in chat), well after the game had already started. I had apped into R5 with the assumption that I would be playing my R5 character for the whole duration of the game, so being told that the final week was for inbetweeners only was jarring, mostly because I would have expected this sort of thing to be mentioned on the Round 5 FAQ due to how it would affect players who don’t have any inbetweener characters to participate with. While I don’t believe this was the intent at all, it did end up feeling exclusionary to new players who basically wouldn’t have anything to do on the last week, besides tag on the finale and epilogue posts. Again, I understand why it was set up like this from a narrative standpoint, but getting a heads up from the very start or giving the new players something to do during that final week would have been good.
2/2
I’m sure this section looks pretty ironic coming from me, but I figured I should include it regardless, because there were some points that weren’t brought up before and some specific to my case. I should also note that I +1 everything that Luna said about event timing and the other points made about scheduling.
I also want to put a disclaimer here. Obviously, what I have to say is just from the perspective of a player who only sees what goes on in the Discord server and Plurk, so I can’t comment on anything other than the impressions I get from that and I acknowledge that my interpretation of certain events may not be the correct one. Nevertheless, there were points in the game where I felt that there were some communication issues or just a lack of double-checking between mods. The first example that comes to mind was at the very start of the game, where there was a question about the lack of doors on the map—the impression I got from the mod responses was that the issue would have been caught with some double-checking. There were also points where mods contradicted each other; the latest example I saw was with regards to unlocking the voting post after the round was complete. There were also some inconsistencies about if traps would be triggered when using the rooms normally (it was said that they would not), but then some traps like the acid showers and mimic locker would have easily been set off by using the room as intended.
There was also at least one instance during week 3, during the event with Agent T’s ghost where it was mentioned in chat that the other mods were left blind to the details (and thus could also participate in the event). I understand that you guys want to have fun too, but leaving co-mods blind also means that there’s no one there to double-check your work, like ensuring that any puzzles you have are solvable, or making sure the structure of the event works for what you’re trying to convey. Furthermore, it puts all of the workload of that event all on one mod, which can slow things down when there are multiple threads to juggle.
As for case-related stuff, I want to thank you all again for working with us on the case and executions; I had a good time working with you guys, but I feel that similar communication issues soured the experience a little.
The first thing is admittedly rather trivial, but it stuck with me. For context, during my case planning we were discussing possible motives and a mod suggested the timer deaths. While I did express that I thought it was a viable motive, but I also wanted to put my own spin on it and ended up writing out a tweaked version of it, which I put into the case doc on Sunday night. I then notified you guys about that and I received an affirmative from one of the mods so I assumed that you guys were okay with using the motive I put in the doc. However, on Monday, I saw that the motive post simply had the timer motive; it didn’t change things for the case so I didn’t bring it up at the time (plus it had already been posted and I didn’t want to make you guys ask people to delete replies to edit the post).
My issue with this wasn’t that my motive wasn’t used, it was the fact that it felt like what I said went ignored, despite getting an okay. I’m honestly not sure what happened there and I assume it just slipped your minds, but it was something that could have been easily rectified by checking in before posting the motive. Again, it was a very minor thing overall which is why I didn’t think it was worth bringing up earlier, but I think it ties into what was a bigger problem during the trial.
I want to be clear that I did address this before in murderchat, but I want to bring it up again, because there were points that I wanted to add. Again, as a reminder for the context, during the trial, the players got two extensions: one to 7 PM and another to 7:30 PM. First of all, I want to say that I understand why these extensions were given and that I fully support the reasoning—two cases in one 6 hour is a lot, especially when it took about 5 hours to resolve Hikage’s case. It’s only fair to want to give the players more time to solve, so I definitely get that. However, not once did I get any sort of heads up about this for either extension, which was an issue because I initially wasn’t planning on staying at trial beyond 7 PM because I had RL stuff to take care of. I’ll admit fault on my part by not talking to you guys about this earlier when the first extension was issued, but I was sympathetic to the players and I would have okayed the extra hour anyways so I figured there wasn’t a point in saying anything. However, I really did not expect the second extension (which, when including the execution, dragged things out even later).
Again, I get wanting fairness for the players and giving them enough time to solve. However, it’s problematic to not check in with the culprit player because you can’t make assumptions that they’ll be able to stay in trial for the extended period of time. People have other obligations to take care of, and you get other problems cropping up if the culprit isn’t available. Take checks, for example—if the culprit’s not available to respond to them, it can actually hold up trials for longer as discussion halts when the other players wait for the results. And of course, for cases where interrogating the culprit is important, that line of inquiry is instantly cut off if they’re not available, and they also aren’t able to defend themselves if accusations come their way. Lastly, it’s just courtesy, and that goes a long way in showing that you respect the player and their time.
This ended up a lot longer than I expected it to be, sorry! I hope that at least some of this is useful somehow though, and as always, feel free to hit me up if you want any clarification on some points. Thank you again for having me this round and I hope you guys get some good rest between this and R6!
Re: 2/2
To start with: the week 5 post. As we said to Luna above, we felt the need to make the post after the game chat got derailed by (honestly valid) concerns. Our intent with that post was never to be aggressive or defensive, but rather we were trying to address people's concerns without spoiling the things to come. The fact that it was addressed to everyone also made it really hard to dance around deadland spoilers too. Given how thoroughly the discussion that day took over the chat, we thought it was important to address those issues as best as we could. We do apologize if it came off as aggressive, though.
We're also going to echo our point about tone that we made to Luna: in order to prevent our frustrations reaching a boiling point again, we're going to be a bit firmer on our boundaries going forward. The rules page will get a re-tooling to reflect this as well. But we think that having those firm boundaries in regards to how people treat us and player behavior in general will help the game overall.
Investigations: The thought of 'scale the investigation group size to the evidence' is a pretty solid one! Now that you've said it, we're going to incorporate that into our investigations for round 6. So thank you for that advice. As far as Eski running things, that's honestly a byproduct of previous rounds. Maple usually worked during investigation times, so Eski ran most investigations solo (the exceptions being R1, which was over the summer, and several investigations in R2, which were during winter break.) It is part of why Eski and Maple brought on Pan as a third mod, in fact: Eski needed help running investigations since Maple couldn't be there. We're still working on how to best integrate Pan into that role, but we're hoping to have an established pattern in R6.
Mechanics: We did like the rotating rooms aspect, but if we put it to use in the future (not during SCP, since R6 won't have it), we do have plans on how to tinker it to be better. One of the big flaws was that we often waited until Sunday night to do the maps, since we wanted clearance from those involved in the case just in case they needed a specific room. That meant that descriptions got rushed. If we bring the mechanic back, we would not wait until Sunday night to do the maps again. Having more lead time to draw the maps and write up descriptions will be better all around. We do agree on the traps comment, and don't plan on bringing them back.
(This part right here is Maple specifically speaking, because a few of your points are related to choices I made.
In regards to the lack of the doors, That was an oversight that was missed at first because in all previous rounds we had no doors on the map at all. Rather, there were open gaps where the doors would be. That didn't look right with the map design we had this round though, so the first map (the static area one) went up without doors. I showed both Eski and Pan, who OK'd the design, and we went with it. When we saw the immediate confusion though, we realized that the map wasn't as clear as we thought it was (I thought the placement of the doors could be easily interpreted, which is why I didn't draw them at first), so I changed that map and was sure to include doors on all future maps. So it wasn't really an 'oopsie', but rather a stylistic choice that wasn't as clear as I thought it was. Also, I was the one who ran the puzzle that you referred to. Both Eski and Pan knew the puzzle was happening and what the eventual end goal was, but not the individual parts that went into each section. I did this so they could participate in the puzzle too. Given that it went just fine, I think it was okay? Like, we wouldn't do it with a huge part of the game, but I wouldn't mind doing it again for mini-events like that.
The death timer was also me, because I had to write up Ango's explanation of what the motive was. I took the motive we had discussed and put it into an explanation that Ango would give. And given that he's a bureaucrat, a timer for the players to act seemed like a good idea. But my intent was to still use the motive you wanted, just worded in a way Ango would say it. If that part wasn't clear, I do apologize. But I also wish you had said something that day, because if you had spoken up with "hey this isn't quite the motive I wanted" then I could have edited it to be clearer. It's too late to do anything about now, but this is why we're always like "come to us with problems". It's a lot easier to fix those kinds of things right at that moment.
Anyway, Maple signing off here, back to all three mods talking.)
Voting: originally when we were asked, we were asked about ALL unlocks, not just voting. So the 'later' was an answer to unlocks in general. But for the votes, we as a mod team went back and forth on releasing the votes. On the one hand, people were asking for them to be shown. On the other, we've never done it before with any of the votes. This was why we ultimately decided not to release them: to keep that consistency.
Trial extensions: while it was an oversight on our part and we should have spoken to you first, we did work out a solution with you at the time. Thank you for working with us then.
trial rules: the 'you have to vote out the same number of people as victims in the case' was added in later, yes. We do try to have the round set in stone before the TDM goes up, so all information is present and available for people to see. But sometimes we come up with late additions, usually as a result of either player actions or questions posed to us later on (see: allowing you guys to break the 'fight' button in round 4), so we did the best we could with it.
role of the in-betweeners: this was clearly communicated or presented in a way that could be easily extrapolated several times (round 5 info posts, the 'watchpost', the end-of-round writeup post, us saying it was the case several times in chat, etc.).
Everything else: you have a few other points in here that are basically a stylistic choice, so we'll have to leave it as "the way we did it is the way we decided to run it."
Ultimately, we thank you for bringing your concerns to us. Date was fun to have in the round! We hope that, despite some hiccups along the way, you had fun too.
no subject
I think my feelings around the graveyard are pretty well known: I'm a huge advocate for how dying shouldn't feel like a punishment in murdergames, and that players shouldn't be left to fend for themselves once they're no longer living.
To the first point about dying not feeling like a punishment: having a mechanic in place where the ghosts can interact with the living freely does help with keeping things open and engaging for the dead. However, given how the ghost mechanic worked in this game, I don’t think this really panned out the way it was intended. The ghosts were set up to be antagonistic which is fine, but that's pretty much all they were allowed to be except for the early weeks. As a result, it seemed like even the early ghosts had trouble getting any kind of footing for cr once they were dead because antagonistic cr isn't something everyone wants to play, and it was very one note by being constrained by despair. In later weeks, this was made even worse because the PCs had been through 4 + weeks of the same threats: you’ll be one of us soon, we want to see you suffer etc, which leads to dilution by repetition, especially with the number of ghosts growing each week. While being ominous can be fun, there were few ways to back it up beyond injuring the PCs, which requires player consent. And don't get me wrong, player consent is absolutely important, but because it was pretty much the only option available and not everyone wanted their characters to suffer a penalty, not many living PCs opted into this.
To sum it up for dead <--> living interactions, it pretty much wound up being: you can communicate with the living whenever you want, but you can only play this despair-ridden side of your character while doing so. The dead had nothing to offer the living, and given how the miasma twisted the dead, that value was diminished even more. There was no incentive to build CR with ghosts if it wasn't established already: a battle thread or a small puzzle with a chance of injuries or death for minor rewards simply isn't worth the risk, not to mention that neither scenario really lends to actual CR with the ghost involved especially since the puzzles were mod run.
While I know that this round was advertised as having no deadland, it seemed like it was a bit awkward to play out dead-to-dead interactions on the living comm. This was alleviated in later weeks by having a gy post, however, I feel that with the way the ghosts worked, there was zero incentive for gy participants to mingle with each other. For one, they were still restricted to playing out the despair angle of their characters, which limited the types of interactions they could have with each other. For another, they were all part of a hivemind, so it's not like they necessarily needed to poke each other about: hey why did you do before you died? (And as a side note, the actual details of how the hivemind worked were fuzzy and difficult to reference). There also weren’t any events or activities that would facilitate bonding, like IC drinking games. While I get that ICly they would not be able to drink alcohol, giving the ghosts more options would have helped foster some type of activity that all of the gy could get in on. Something to remember is that being dead already means you're excluded from investigation/trials by default, so stripping characters of parts of themselves without giving them anything to replace it really limits what can be done with them. One way this could have been addressed in the round is that perhaps GY characters could be their past selves only when talking with each other in the GY. On a whole graveyard activity was very low compared to the general activity in the game, which I think speaks for itself.
To the second point regarding graveyard having to fend for itself: I joined graveyard later so I can't speak to the early events, but we were given very little heads up on what we were supposed to be doing. When we were told more about our goals, it felt very straightforward with little chance for players to be dynamic; it came off more as an order rather than a task or puzzle. During endgame, I tried to organize ghost-living battles, but it was very difficult to do without the living weighing in, as OOC preferences should be given priority even if some characters would target others ICly. I feel that this process could have been facilitated beforehand with mod help, given that the living players already knew that their characters would die at the end of week 6.
To that end as well, we weren't given any notice that there would be a battle with the curse during the final log of week 7. While we could have assumed that there would be a final confrontation, knowing what kind of time limit we were working with would have helped tremendously as some fight threads had as many as 6 players in them. General OOC organization for endgame was also poor as ghosts had no idea how to even approach the living: there were numerous questions on where ghosts should comment, and even on the assault/inbetween round side there was literal direction as to how comments should be structured (by room, by character etc). If we had known who was going to go where there could have been headers for specific fights or areas which would have streamlined the process.
A final note: I really think it would help next round to have a dedicated graveyard mod, regardless of how the graveyard shakes out to be (even if it's similar to r2 in a fashion where being dead pretty much just means you're missing out on trials & investigations, this still applies). It's really hard to keep a pulse on how graveyard feels if you're not actually playing in it, and as all mod characters either died late into the game (and both were vessels, which was a unique experience from the other ghosts as they received more privileges) or made survivor pool, the mod experience was likely pretty different from the average graveyard player.
Thanks for hearing me out, and thanks for the round!
+1
I feel like, honestly, having PCs play the role of primary antagonist while having them be bound by the amount of restrictions we were subject to just wasn’t feasible for players to keep up with. W6 at least would have probably gone smoother using a mod character or device of some kind instead of expecting gy PCs to essentially become nothing but plot devices for the week. That being said, I don’t think there were many players who were willing to play with the mechanic due to these issues, and it was very much a mechanic that needed refining or retooling.
I’ll save the rest for my own separate comment but just wanted to note that I agree with the overall assessment that graveyard mechanics this round were very difficult to play with and did not allow graveyard players much room to develop or maneuver their characters.
no subject
no subject
I'll save the rest of it for the love post but just wanted to preface with that to emphasize that my crit is coming from a place of concern for the game as well as (hopefully) a bird's eye view of changes over the rounds and where I feel things had issues in execution or might benefit from tweaking (obviously this is just from my point of view but hopefully provides some insight into where players are coming from this round, though I will also try not to reiterate points that others have made already).
I also wanted to address what was mentioned in the mod post about players who privately let the mods know that they would not be returning for R6: as one of those players I wanted to make sure and clarify that at no point did I mean my communication as a threat or anything other than an acknowledgment that at this point my differences with the game and the way it is run are too vast to be reconciled, and to express regret that that is the case. If I gave any impression otherwise, I apologize, as I know my tone may have not conveyed that properly at times -- but I would not have stated that I didn't plan to return for R6 if it wasn't already a done deal, and thus not based on whether any mod actions were taken.
With that being said I'll dive into some of the issues I saw this round and hopefully provide some constructive feedback that can help in the future.
PLOT, LORE & PACING: I wanted to start out addressing this because while in a lot of cases these game aspects are definitely a matter of opinion, I still wanted to take some time to lay out why I felt like the lore and pacing this round was a lot more difficult to follow and interact with than most past rounds. I've previously given some feedback about how the round felt railroaded in both the living side and the graveyard, and while I'm sure we can all agree that doomed rounds are a bit more rigid than regular rounds out of necessity and there wasn't a whole lot that could be done at that point in the game, it seemed like a good idea to address that again now that the round is over and we've seen the payoff in endgame.
The pacing and plot/lore distribution felt kind of uneven across the round, and I do feel like that was because so much of it was being saved for endgame reveals, but there were also instances where the general buildup was problematic as well. For example: The Agent T issue. We'd never heard of Agent T before three characters made contact with him, and then none of the rest of the characters even got to see him before he got fridged. His fate was decided the minute he made contact with the characters, but for some reason it was being portrayed ICly as a choice on the part of the characters. The living had no time to actually be invested in him or any value he represented before it went poof, which is why I put this in the pacing section because having more buildup or time with him really would have helped here (I'm aware that he was brought back later, but it was more as a momentary plot device than anything else). A large number of graveyard events had this issue, where ghosts seemed to be set up to antagonize the living but the living had very little context with which to be antagonized, so it just kind of... fizzled out. The exception was probably the list of votes for Rin, which was based on existing CR and gave the living a proper base of knowledge and investment from which to deal with it -- I think that was a good use of graveyard knowledge and ghost agendas. The other issue was that there were no stakes for the ghosts: it was a done deal that the ghosts would more or less succeed at everything they did, with no consequences otherwise, so there was no tension to these events.
Going back to the issue of frontloading everything into the endgame: that meant there was a lot of pressure on an already fairly chaotic double-decker endgame involving firstly the 2000s characters and then both the 2000s characters and the 2020 characters, and I do feel like there were a number of things that fell through the cracks due to this. For example, and this is another case where there was little time to build investment in the lore, the graveyard only learned about the baby spider right before Week 6 -- and then there was absolutely nothing planned for us to do with that knowledge throughout the week. I feel that this could have been mitigated by introducing the NPC earlier and allowing graveyard to interact and develop more organically alongside it, especially if graveyard actions during endgame had been allowed to have a more broad spectrum than straight up simply murdering the living or leading them to the core. Once again, I understand that doomed rounds can be necessarily more rigid, but in this case it definitely felt like the graveyard was stuck in a week-long cutscene in W6 while the living also had relatively little to do during endgame week even in terms of planning; endgame weeks to my understanding are normally about wrapping up loose ends but here that was pretty impossible due to lack of information and overall inability to communicate thanks to mechanics. The ghost miasma levels I mentioned in my other comment probably contributed to this weird 'pre-frozen' feeling for the graveyard side.
Sorry if this is a little scattered, by the way, since I'm trying to round out my points as they come up but it may be a little disorganized. But basically, apart from the problem of the main behind the scenes antagonist being introduced extremely late to all players, the endgame didn't really leave room to actually learn the lore: the existence and lore behind the baby spider and the mother spider was never really expanded upon except to the graveyard, the use of fire (or not) in endgame was confusing and also not really clarified, and while I appreciated the inclusion of the Tages/Romani element in the game in retrospect, it felt like that was only very loosely related to the main plot rather than being integrated with it. There was no real incentive for the doomed crew to pay attention to their original mission (which I'm still not sure was related to Tages in the first place, in general there's a number of plot points that I'm admittedly still confused about) and in fact a whole lot of incentive for them to simply abandon it and pay more attention to the actual spider miasma murder hell they'd been thrown into -- in that sense it definitely felt like the Tages twist was more for the benefit of the inbetweeners than anyone else. I guess what I'm trying to say is that presumably CRing Tages 'earned' an ending but because 2000s crew got so little information or incentive regarding that part of the plot, it felt more like we tripped into it while running away from spiders than anything else. Essentially, the plot balance was skewed because of the way plot information and lore was distributed: we spent a lot of IC time, effort and attention on something that couldn't be changed (baby spider) due to all the lore pointing that way, and had very little time to explore what actually affected the ending (Romani/Tages) because it was not something that held IC weight in 2000. This definitely isn't a knock on Tori or anything, because I think she did well in balancing out Romani's CR and development and hints through the round, but just a note that the hints and Tages' role in the plot could have been better integrated with spiders, miasma and the house.
I want to finish off this section by saying that while I put down a lot of thoughts about the execution of the plot and pacing (and I agree with the issues in atmosphere and jokes vs. serious plot balance that have come up in other feedback), I do think there was a lot of potential and ambition put into the premise and plot that maybe tripped it up to some extent. Evening out the pacing, balancing the sides of the plot and the living and graveyard progression are fixes I'm offering not because I think they're absolutely right or perfect solutions (and obviously the round is over so this is more in retrospect) but simply observations as a player that I think would be helpful reference in the future.
COMMUNICATION: I'm also aware that this is a topic that has come up multiple times and so I'll try not to be too redundant or belabor it too much but it's important enough and has come up in enough rounds that I do feel the need to address it myself as well. Generally I've found the mod team responsive to concerns and discussions in-game, and I can understand there are issues that have come up behind the scenes this round that have contributed to a more adversarial tone in the mod team; but my focus is going to be on actual event, case and general in-game communication rather than tonal issues.
Event communication has been a big issue this round, especially in the graveyard. Frequently graveyard players would be given very short notice, no notice or very late notice when we would be involved in an event -- I understand that life circumstances can come up for mods in this respect, but in that case it's important to make sure that the entire mod team can cover for each other or provide backup in case of emergency. Once again I'll emphasize that I understand life happens, but this is an issue that has come up repeatedly over the course of the round rather than just in emergency circumstances. The other issue is that we (graveyard) were frequently expected to contribute a lot to events with very few guidelines: the phone hijack event is a good example, in that we were given some notice the day before but it was extremely vague, there was no communication as to why the event was happening or what our priorities or goals were, and there was also no timeline set for the event. That contributed to the whole thing feeling kind of aimless and confusing, and in fact everyone spent a couple of hours on it before it felt like anything plot-related actually happened and that was because Sissel did something almost entirely unrelated to the point of the event. The same issue came up with the spiders and fire event -- I can understand the delay in notification in that case, but the event timeline also wasn't communicated at all until halfway through so that ghosts couldn't really pace what they were doing, and extensions had to be given because of the confusion. Speaking of lack of guidelines and timelines, the graveyard was expected to come up with traps on very short notice, it seems -- because we had to wait for the murders to be mapped out, which gave us a small window between (more or less) Sunday night and Monday morning, and traps-wise there was no communication on what types of traps were expected or what was needed in terms of trap complexity. I do feel like guidelines or more buffer time would have been really helpful in this regard (I'm aware that traps are not planned for the future, but this would apply to any type of player-driven setting element).
Similar problems happened with both endgames: in the 2000s endgame it was never communicated to the ghosts exactly what they would be defending, leading to questions about the structure of the core in the middle of the event and a lot of improvising on the part of the ghosts to try and keep the momentum going. I was also really surprised when RNG was used to determine the order in which the living had to die, given that I had assumed individual deaths would be worked out with those involved; it felt pretty chaotic because there were very few provisions made for organizing with the living ahead of time. In the 2020s endgame we had no idea there would be a deadline for ghost fights in the form of the spider suddenly appearing. Having more information communicated ahead of time would have helped pace and organize ghost fights for a much smoother and more efficient endgame, especially for those of us playing multiple characters.
I also wanted to address issues that came up during casebuilding: specifically the issue with magic sensing that ended up rolling all the way into trial and created a stall in the middle of what needed to be a much more smooth and organized process. I had already noted that magic sensing would not be as effective or the main tool for solving the case, and made provisions for it to be solved in other ways: the case outline was finished by Monday of that week and ready for review. I do understand that it was a complex case and trial and I really appreciate you guys for working with me under the circumstances, but stalling the entire trial in order to hash out the magic issue that I assumed had been reviewed and approved over the week was not something I expected to be dealing with while also trying to play in the trial as culprit. This was something that could have been addressed and clarified earlier if there was an issue with it, and if I had been made aware before the investigation and trial I would have tweaked the case to account for it. As is, it made playing during trial very difficult since I was basically blindsided by having to reorganize evidence on the fly, and it was also an inconvenience to everyone else during the trial who had to keep playing around it. I will emphasize that this was one of my main issues with this round, and I hope that communication and clarity is improved in future cases so that this doesn't happen again.
Overall, I want to reiterate that I appreciate that this was an ambitious round with a lot of moving parts and that doomed rounds are tough to do -- as someone who hasn't modded a murdergame or a doomed round all I can offer is a player perspective from someone who has been playing in SCP for a long time and enjoyed settling into it with my characters. SCP has been a big, big chunk of my murdergame life and I've made a lot of friends and had the chance to do some really cool character arcs here. While I won't be returning for R6 proper, I will be cheering from the in-between sidelines and otherwise engaging with my existing characters from beyond the veil because it's both saddening and amazing to see something this big come circling back around to an ending. I want to wish you guys and all of the R6 players the best of luck in finishing up with a bang. Thanks for listening!