Special Discussion [PLEASE READ]

[cityship]

It has come to the mods' attention that there is a signficant chunk of players that have concerns about the health of the game and think it's dying. Unfortunately, this means that everyone's in a holding pattern waiting to see what happens and the problem with this is if we collectively do this as a game, we might not make it past rebellion.

So the mods have decided to address the issue head on to discuss it.

For our part, the mods want to encourage people to send in plots, tag around, invite people for June, and put up posts. We'd also like to take suggestions and answer questions and want to try to reassure you that we will do whatever we can on our end to make things fun. Our response times for plots and answering questions about things people can do in the game are down to only a few days (usually 3-5 for complicated issues/questions). Sometimes we can even get a response back the same day or just 1-2 for simple issues. If players want to run plots, we can definitely get an answer back to you very quickly, and in the case of milk runs, you pretty much have free reign to do those whenever or however you want. So now's the time for us to ask the question: what do you need from the mod team to have fun? What things do you want? What things might you want to see?

What things would players like to see from other players? This is also a good place to discuss that. As of right now, close to thirty people have posted for and made AC, which means that there are a good chunk of players that have have at least some interest in continuing to play. (Hopefully that will be reassuring to those of you worried about mass drops.)

At this point, the game is really only what we make it, and while there were a lot of problems over the last year, we are very dedicated to working on the ones that were on the mod end. The game can be made fun again, but now that the backlog of work and mod duties have been caught up, it is definitely something we need to discuss and cooperatively work on and confront head on as a group.

So discuss away, and please plurk and replurk this to your heart's content, point other players you know to it via AIM, etc. It really is something we need as many eyes seeing as possible.

EDIT: Please keep commenting, even if the mods don't respond to each of your individual comments. We're incorporating all the player feedback into our discussions about this in modchat.

EDIT 2, EDITINING: The mods are going to have a big modchat on Friday the 25th to iron everything out and probably have communication go up then or over the weekend.

Comments

[flunkingspanish]

I'm a bit of a slow-tagger (okay, more than a bit...) but I think the game still has go in it.

As one of the longest-term players, my primary problem right is mostly time -- the end of the quarter's coming up, my work actually has work for me to do, I'm in a couple other games, and sometimes I just need to veg out on the internets rather than tag things.

Perhaps we could do something like the Support Group Meme that popped up on bakerstreet in our own crack comm? Rather than listing "my character is interested in X, Y, and Z", it could be a more organic way to tag out of comfort zones and figure out which characters should be thrown at each other IC.

[anwei]

Crack premise: we're supposed to have an AI Therapist now, right? Maybe it starts ambushing people and putting them into 'group therapy'!

[morphitudinous]

Huh! Now there's an idea. They'd be in categories like 'doesn't play nice with others', 'father issues', 'compulsive liar'...the kinds of stuff that characters have in common but we might not realize easily and might not think to throw them together?

[flunkingspanish]

It's not like we didn't have GLaDOS once put force fields around people until they kissed!

[anwei]

And then GLaDOS started impersonating The Therapist and everything went sideways.

[governorkang]

...I like this. A lot.

[grimbiker]

Yessss group therapy. I wanted to do that so much with my characters and felt especially bad for dropping Mark because of it.

[on_your_nerves]

...That is brilliant.

[moltenman]

Awesome idea. I can think of certain characters who would not get along with this therapist already. Mark (for instance) has a couple of issues already: his temper problems, and a little more famously his gambling problems back home (which I should try to get more into soon).

[flunkingspanish]

Additional suggestion: Maybe we should have a page on the Wiki or something with suggestions for ideas for open posts? I know that I've defaulted more than once to "my character is wandering around the ship, what is YOOOOOOUR character doing when s/he finds them?", which puts the work on the other party, which isn't really fair. There are certainly things that everyone does in reasonably public places -- like eating, or cleaning things, or entertaining themselves by reading the graffiti in the Public Bathroom. It might be nice to have them all in one place for the "I wanna do something, what should I do?" brainfarts.

[on_your_nerves]

This is a good idea, plus we could toss up sort of scenes-in-a-can ideas that people could do on milk runs. Maybe we can morph the plot in a can post to a wiki page and have it be a plot AND scene in a can thing and periodically link to with things that are relevant to it, like AC and plot discussions and the weekly roundups of intros.