Round 5 critpost

[foundationmods]

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.

Comments

2/2

[eyeforai]

Communication:

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

[foundationmods]

Hello Fishy! Thanks for taking the time to give us some crit. There's quite a bit here, and we appreciate the time and thought that went into it.

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.