State of the Game #2

[balancemod]

So how's everyone enjoying the adventure? NAVIGATION 1. AN INTRODUCTION Hey everyone! It's your best friend, your roller of cursed rolls, your tree whisperer- team... here. It's been a real good while since we've done a state of the game, so we figured it's a good time now, all things considered since the last mission, to start talking about our thoughts, think about where Balance is headed, and solicit some feedback from you. The first time we did this was right at the end of our first mission. And Jay talked way, way too much in it, but he was absolutely gushing with love at all the amazing things we've all gotten to accomplish as mods and players in the game. For this State of The Game, we'll take a similar format at analyzing ourselves, thinking about the future, and make some adjustments to the logistical meta of the game, but we want to take the focus off of us and put the microphone in your hand. Let's have some good conversations. First of all, how's it going? Is everyone enjoying the adventure? 2. WHAT WENT WELL/WHAT DID WE LEARN? ○ Our turn around times are really good and our ability to personalize plot makes this game highly differentiated from any other game out in DWRP right now. ○ We've restructured how the mod team is set up. Prior, it was just Jay and Diane on plot, with Kat handling NPC's and Anne handling list modding. As of right now, everyone does a little bit of everything. It allows us to all flex creativity and segment out work that needs to be done. As we move forward, we're talking about moving one of the four of us into a metaplot mod role- IE: a mod whose sole focus is bringing us closer to end game and making sure we've gotten all the metaplot beats laid out and ready to be followed. See the sections below for more information on that. ○ Unhinging ourselves from the mindset that everything needs to be on a set schedule. If you sit down to tell a story and you have to rush through the really good, meaty, juicy parts, then are you actually experiencing it in the best way you can? Probably not, and we guess that you feel the same. Taking a look at how dense some of the dossiers and missions can be, and realizing that there's so much stuff that you can do with plot, we often take a look at logs, response rates, how involved threads are going- and decide that we need more time. Pulling ourselves away from a very strict plot/downtime/plot/downtime schedule has allowed us to not worry about timing and open apps when it makes sense to do so rather than throw a dart at the calendar and commit to it. The flexibility has created windows of opportunity for us to both catch a breath and see where we're at, and give you all more time to thread out the things you really enjoy threading out. ○ Limiting RNG requests gave us some lift in a time when we sorely needed it. A lot (read: most) of the last mission had two of our mods (Kat and Anne) doing a majority of the showrunning. It was a ton of work, and although it was insanely rewarding for us to see how things played out, it also took a lot of time to get all the wheels turning and making sure we were on top of interacting with you. 3. WHAT CAN WE DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME? ○ We spoke a little bit about RNG up there, but there's some additional thoughts about it that we'd like to share and get feedback on for improvement. What we've learned, and this is a tough one to find a solution for, but there are a lot of times RNG rolls are requested and they don't naturally produce threads. That makes sense in some cases- not every detail you find is going to be something that you want to grab a thread partner with and hash out. But in the same regard, we've noticed that some things that we thought would actually help create CR or push new, personalized threading experiences with haven't actually done that. Some people are content with claiming an RNG roll and talking about it, but not necessarily doing anything with it. Rather than create disincentives to roll, we continue to try to figure out a way to make them worth the while of doing- for both the plot's purpose as well as your own threading experience. ○ We as a team recognize that in Wonderland specifically, there were some concerns about the first and second logs not being as tightly connected and linear as they should have been. We completely own that, and we're sorry! There were a lot of factors that contributed to this less-than-perfect transition, but we do want you all to know that we're aware of it and working to course-correct so that this issue doesn't come up in future missions. Our hope is that designating one person to be metaplot mod assists with smoothing the road significantly in the future — see more on this in the section below. ○ As a point of clarification, we also want to address those nasty DC18s from Wonderland, which we recognize got people a little frustrated at times. While that's totally understandable, we do want to emphasize that DCs that high will not be the norm going forward! Wonderland was designed to be almost impossible to win, but while future missions will increase in difficulty in other ways, DCs will stabilize again to more of what you're used to. It's important to us to put this out there again just so people don't stress! We promise that in the next mission there will be more reasonable DCs and a failure won't end with anyone becoming a humanoid bear. 4. WHAT CHALLENGES ARE AHEAD & A REQUEST FOR HELP Sup, Jay specifically here. When I created Balance, I had a very clear picture of what the game would be at open, where it would be around midpoint, and what the ending event would be. As some of you know from listening to The Adventure Zone, you already kind of know where this is headed, even if we've taken a lot of turns off the path along the way to bring something "familiar, yet different" to the experience of playing here. For those of you who are canon blind to the series and are here for the wild ride that is the Balance Arc, strap yourselves in. It's about to get a little more wild. I've seen people on plurk state that we're about to start end game. And, honestly? Yeah, we're not that far from it. There are two missions left, along with an end game event, and then we'll be signing off on the last chapter of the story. We hope you enjoy what we have in store, but there's a good deal of metaplot that's going to start hitting everyone in the game very quickly from here on out. You've already seen it with Maya and The Man known as The Hunger, in the penultimate CTA for Il Prigioniero. You've discovered a whole lot about weird umbrellas. You've heard about planar research. There's still more to tell and a long road to keep going and unwind that yarn as we get closer. We just wrapped the final application round for the game. Due to events that will happen shortly, it will be impossible for Lucretia to attempt to bring in new Reclaimers from other planes of thought. That's a spoiler, but- it's also important to the logistics of the game in general. The last mission will accompany one short application round... but will only be available to people who were previously in the game at another point in time and wish to come back. We'll be transparent about the process when the time comes, so please bear with us until then. So what's left? The next arc. It's gonna be a wild . . . time. For this arc and beyond, we need to be candid: the volume of mod work we are going to be fielding will increase significantly. In an effort to try to anticipate this, we're in the process of a little restructuring. While we haven't yet made a final decision on who will take on this role, we are shifting our four-person mod team from two plot mods, one NPC mod, and one list mod to three plot mods and one metaplot mod. The job of the latter is going to be refocusing and streamlining continuity between mission logs, improve integration of metaplot naturally into mission plots, and overall keep an eye on the endgame prize. What we want is a really smooth six-month landing here, and in order to have that we need somebody thinking in the long-term. What we'd like to ask of you all is something we've asked before: we could use another set of hands! While the role of a fifth mod would be fairly flexible, including some list upkeep, some RNG work, etc., what we really need is someone to be there to pinch-hit when we've got a high volume of things to do (for example, when mission logs first drop) or when one of the team is indisposed. This would be hugely, hugely helpful for us, so if you're interested, please send a PM to the mod journal! We welcome you in advance. 5. WHAT CHANGES ARE COMING TO BALANCE? MOD ANNOUNCEMENTS We've taken a look at the path ahead and the anticipated end date of Balance, in comparison to where everyone is along their path progression. Beginning with this post and effective immediately, bonus AC may now be submitted twice per AC period. This allows the acquisition of two path actions per month, provided two separate threads are supplied in addition to the required AC. Go forth and level up! That said, it's also unfair for the newer characters to come in without a little bit of a power bump to catch them up to speed. Realistically speaking, if we were to allow the number of actions in that we've allowed in the past, many people would never reach an advanced path. To that end, we've decided to up the allowed apped-in path actions to expand to 7 (or 6 + 1 canon power). In short, anyone who hasn't obtained at least 7 path actions as of this post may immediately claim them. 6. PLEASE STOP TALKING AND TELL US WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO You are so valid! While our mod contact page is always open for feedback and suggestions, we'd love to see your thoughts too in the comments section below. It's a good time to celebrate everything we've done, talk about where we can find areas to improve, and of course, feel free to leave love notes for your fellow players that you've interacted with. No path patch notes this time around, by the way. We feel like we've hit a sweet spot with most of what's available there without overtuning anything in particular. We look forward to seeing the advanced paths open up real soon! That's it, everyone. Be amazing! blurb code by photosynthesis

Comments

[seasaltkeys]

I also just want to express my appreciation for the game and all the hard work that's been put into it! It's been a super fun experience and I'm glad I followed my instincts when I saw that initial plurk and hopped aboard. I have been playing Roxas for a long time, and thank you for letting me take him on a brand new adventure.

I think my biggest gripe has been with the RNG, but most of my issues have been also noted in the body of the post. I think the limited rolls helped a little bit, but it's hard to find that balance between threading it out ala DWRP and following the rolls ala DnD. I admit that I don't have much of a solution right now (as the only one I can really think of might create more work and that doesn't help), but I'll continue to meditate on it. Short of possibly more encouragement to actually thread out the rolls in some capacity.

I know that I've also felt behind a bit in the game, and missed some important things that came up that might have been discussed in the discord chat and things like (which I recognize is just sort of the Nature of Things and my own decisions), but I do really appreciate it when we have the summery posts in the logs with the links. Those have really helped catch me up. Idk if there's really a way to fix that either, but I figured I'd note it.

Again, thank you for a really fun game and I really look forward to see where this all goes because I got no idea. (I mean, I got some because I've listened to TAZ but I got the feeling there's some tricks up those sleeves)

[balancemod]

This is really helpful feedback, so thank you! We would like to ask out of curiosity about your RNG idea -- it’s possible it will be too unwieldy as you say, but it’s also possible that it’ll be more workable than you think. If you don’t mind sharing, we’d love to hear more!

We are pretty pleased to hear an overall consensus that the limited RNGs were a positive addition. Candidly, much of the reason for our choice this past mission was because we needed to limit our team workload somewhat, but it seems like it ended up being helpful on the player side, too. That gives even more incentive to implement it in the future.

Regarding summaries in the CTA OOC posts as we did in Wonderland, we’re happy to keep implementing those in future missions! It seems as though they were helpful to a lot of people, and the frustration of feeling as though you’ve missed things is very real, so we’re definitely going to use those consistently in the future.

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to leave feedback. We appreciate it more than you know!

[seasaltkeys]

My RNG idea was basically that, rather than asking for rolls, the mods could impose rolls based on what's going on in the thread. (I believe I was listening to an arc of TAZ: Amnesty at the time, so I had Monster of the Week Mechanics on the brain). Obviously that gets unwieldy since it's a lot for you guys to pay attention to and not every thread is going to require a roll.

i could see some sort of hybrid mechanic coming into play? But again, it's a lot and I'm not sure how it would be implemented.

[balancemod]

Good feedback! If we could structure things in a more MOTW style rule set, it would make dice rolling a lot easier on all of us (where the DM never rolls "against" the player, even if that's not what we're doing here, but it can feel like it since we're doing on behalf of the players).

I think we can be more liberal in how we approach the rolls, though- sometimes people submit things that aren't necessarily required for RNG to have an answer to, and we try to be really cognizant of when that happens so we can just say "hey, go for it!"

We'll have to think on this. We're so close to the end of the game, that maybe if we deter from the standard mechanics we've done up until now in an experimental style, we'll try something a little different.

Thanks for the ideas!