Feedback post

[vicedirector]

Congratulations on achieving SevenVice's Golden End! You guys did great.

Thank you everyone for participating and doing your best. For all of us, this was our first time modding and it was a learning experience.

So, feedback!  If you guys have any feedback you'd like to say, please say so here. You can leave praise, constructive criticism, advice, etc, but please keep it constructive. 

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Comments

unscreened please!

[detanimetion]

Hey, Anna! While I did have a lot of fun in Vices, there were definitely a couple of areas I think you could have improved on in your behavior as a mod and in the game in general.

1) Scheduling. There was never a firm schedule as to what time investigations and trials would go up. While the vague assumption was that trials would be posted around 5PM CST, sometimes they wouldn't go up until hours later. While I think this did get better once Eski got on board, the lack of a firm time that the trial would go up was still pretty frustrating to me. Investigations were even more sporadic when it came to the schedule - I never had any clue when they'd be going up, which made it really difficult to be around to tag them.

On a related note - trials being posted so late was also an issue for me, especially since a lot of people had asked after the first trial for them to be posted earlier. And while you had agreed to post them early-mid afternoon from then on, it only happened on occasion (and I believe Eski was the one who put those up as well). With trials being essentially timed posts with a deadline, having them up so late - especially on Sundays when many players have work in the morning - got exhausting to deal with.

2) Availability. This one I had a huge issue with. It often seemed like during trials, getting hold of you to answer questions became a chore. While I understand not being around the entire trial or needing to wait on answers from the players involved, there were frequent instances where the trial would be stalled for hours because you weren't around for answers. If you're not going to be available at some point during a trial - and no one expects you to be around every second - then you should let one of your co-mods know so they can take over for you. Additionally, I saw you plurk a few times about other RPs or playing videogames when we were waiting on you for mod replies or posts to go up, which struck me as pretty disrespectful of your players. You don't have to give up everything when you mod a murdergame, but you shouldn't just ignore it and make players wait for you because you're feeling stressed.

Again, related note - it was kind of weird that Eski had to constantly wait for you to get back to her before she could answer anything? Not only does that defeat the point of having a co-mod, but the only people she should have needed approval or answers from if she needed verification were the players involved in the case. It would have made trials much smoother if she didn't have to double-check everything with you and could run cases entirely on her own if you weren't around.

3) NPC/metaplot intensity/vagueness. As the game headed towards endgame and more of the metaplot was revealed, it felt more and more like we were simply playing in a story you had already written and that our characters had very little actual agency or impact on where the game was going. I honestly kind of got the sense that we were all the NPCs and Miata and Katerina were the ones calling all the shots. None of the backstory the players discovered seem to be helpful towards them breaking the game, and with the posts now unlocked, it doesn't really seem like the moles had much of a purpose either. The metaplot of a murdergame should be the backdrop to the players and cases, and yet here it felt like the players were the distraction from the metaplot. Also, a lot of plot points seemed like they got dropped or went nowhere? The doors, for example, while interesting didn't seem to lead to anything actually related to endgame beyond Sans finding Sloth.

Also, there were far too many NPCs and dropped threads. If you're going to make an endgame that's so mod-intensive, you need to actually be able to handle a ton of mod tags. Pretty much every door except Undyne's and Sans' got dropped before they concluded - the one that Team Shady went into barely made it past two steps. Was there a reason why your comods couldn't handle some of the mod tags and thereby also released some of the pressure on you? Same goes for the demon kill logs; while some of them were played to completion, there were some you barely tagged or didn't even tag at all. If you want to kill a bunch of active characters off suddenly, that's fine, but it's not fair to not let them have their moment to shine in at least a kill log since they won't be getting a trial centered around them.

4) Endgame lockout. While I was initially sympathetic to you for being stressed about endgame as I've certainly been there before, upon reviewing the situation and learning more about it, I have to say that you handled the situation where a group of active players got locked out of endgame rather abysmally. Yes, it was originally a player plot, but as the head mod it's your job to catch these things and either nip it in the bud or open it up so everyone can participate. It shouldn't have to take completely unrelated players to have to point out to you and the person running the plot that a) it kind of sucks cutting the survivors out and making endgame focus almost entirely around the ghosts and a character that had close CR with the NPC and b) excluding a group of highly active characters from even knowing about the endgame plot for IC reasons that honestly didn't make a lot of sense, let alone participating in it, is not a cool move. Whether you didn't realize how hurtful this was to the players involved or simply weren't paying enough attention to realize how big the plot had gotten, either way the lack of action until people had to call you out of it was honestly appalling.

Furthermore, I really can't approve of locking Rhys out because of his IC distrust of Miata. While you claimed that you were worried he would lead the game to Bad End, that not only shows a really flawed misinterpretation of Rhys' character and all of his actions up until this point, but it's also another reason why I felt we were being railroaded into a metaplot completely unrelated to the actual players. If Bad End is going to be an option at all, the mod shouldn't interfere OOCly to prevent players from reaching it. IC actions have IC consequences, and that's just how RP should be. It really made it seem to me like you had gotten overly attached to your NPC and were punishing players who didn't like her ICly.

Also, I felt like there was some bad IC/OOC bleed regarding Team Shady, as the "IC reason" they were also locked out was that they were a team that would support each other no matter what. However, Team Shady was just an fun little OOC nickname for these characters, and in actuality they were simply a group of okay friends who shared a few beliefs at the start of the game and also had one of their members die week 3. By the time endgame rolled around, you could definitely argue that Break and Gilbert were as close to Clover and Undyne as they were to Morrigan, if not closer, and yet they were locked out thanks to a nickname bestowed on them at the start of the game that hadn't really been relevant for weeks.

5) General avoidance. Look, I get modding murdergames can be hard. I get it can be stressful and that sometimes you need to take a break. I have been there multiple times! But if it gets to the point where you're avoiding the game for days and aren't even paying attention to what's happening because you're stressed thanks to IC PvP or feedback - which happened multiple times in this game - you should really reconsider modding them at all. Modding murdergames will always be stressful and time-intensive, and murdergame NPCs will always have negative CR. Those are just the facts.

Also, I noticed that you never really thanked Eski or the rest of your mods in public beyond a few instances of specific jobs they had done, which strikes me as really inappropriate. Considering that it's come into light how much work Eski did for this game, it honestly leaves a bad taste in my mouth that you never thanked her publicly at the end of the game or acknowledged how much effort she put in, and was simply content with taking the majority of the credit for the cases and trials when people thanked you for running them. While most of the other behavior I'm willing to excuse as simply the mistakes of a first-time murdergame mod, this is the one that will be making me avoid any other murdergames you mod in the future unless you've shown that you've learned from this experience and changed your behavior accordingly.

ALL THAT SAID AND DONE, I don't want this to feel like a huge attack on you or that I'm trying to make you feel ashamed of all the work you did in this game! A lot of this, such as scheduling slip and dropped threads, I completely recognize as simply the mistakes that every mod makes, especially a first-timer. I did have a lot of fun in Seven Vices and I built up some killer CR and made a ton of great new friends, so thank you for that! The things that worked really did work (I loved the ghost mechanic for example, I think that was a great way to have the dead still be involved in the main game). I just think that if you are looking to mod something again in the future, to please take the lessons from this game to heart.