Brave New World Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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bravenewmeta2014-02-04 11:59 pm
bravenewmods) wrote in bravenewmeta2014-02-04 11:59 pm
Entry tags:
Feedback and Input!
The first of our announcements tonight is a call for feedback and input! Brave New World has been open for approximately a month, and we've just finished our first major event! Thank you all for joining us throughout this process! While we've had a ton of fun modding and playing so far, we'd like to check in every so often to see how you guys are feeling. As mods, we aren't always aware of how the game appears and how certain mechanics of the game work from the outside, and we'd like to make sure we're open and receptive to any issues that our player-base might perceive.
In terms of mechanics, these are some of the issues we currently believe could be improved:
Wild Pokémon Encounters:
When we were planning out this aspect of the game, what we really wanted was to capture the feeling of running into something unknown - the excitement of walking through tall grass and coming across a Pokémon that you've never seen. We feel the RNG model we're running with really helps encapsulate that idea, and we've had a great time running all of the Pokémon threads that have come about because of it.
However, we decided early on that it would be impossible for us to run every single thread. It would be simply too much work, which is why we compromised early on to say that we'd only run undiscovered Pokémon. We are feeling, though, that this means that some people would like to thread things out and will not have an opportunity to do so either because nobody they know is willing to thread with them or for other miscellaneous reasons.
Our plan, therefore, is to ask for help. This plan will be further detailed below, in our next section.
If you have any other thoughts about how else our wild Pokémon system could be improved, please let us know! We will take your thoughts into consideration, but we may or may not be able to utilize the ideas. However, it will be valuable for us to get a sense of what you guys want to see.
Player Plots:
Player plots are an important part of this game and something we definitely want to encourage so you guys can get the most out of the RP! While we as the moderators have lots of intensive plot planned, player plots will be important to flesh out details and make new discoveries and add new technology to the world. You want to push beyond the boundaries of the map? Go for it; we have more areas in the works. You want to start building a smaller settlement in the middle of the swamp to facilitate travel? Go for it; we can add the Sinking Swamp Palace to our Information Pages. You want to use a dowsing rod to search for gold in the Verdant Forest? ...Well OK maybe that won't be too successful but we can see about having you stumble across a hidden cave system and open up a new, smaller area with other Pokémon.
We want to encourage player plots and reward creativity as much as possible, but once again, it's a lot for us to handle on top of our other work. Our original idea was to give any relevant information to one of the players in the player plot and allow them to act as Log Deputy to do the necessary NPCing. However, for one reason or another, this may not always be feasible, especially for Player Plots that are for the character development of a single character.
Our solution to this is to... also ask for help.
Which brings us to the plan!
We are asking for people who would be willing to help run wild Pokémon and player plots to help us out! This is how things will work: we'll choose a certain number of people to be official Helpers. When a player plot is submitted, we will contact them with our scenarios and ask one of them to run the log. The Helpers will also be free to help contribute ideas as to how the log should go.
In terms of running wild Pokémon, these Helpers may be contacted any time you'd like a Pokémon thread NPC'd, whether already revealed or not. Of course, you are still free to ask your friends, but these people will be officially there to help you with your needs. If they are unable to run the thread, they can send you on to the next Helper. There may come a time when all of our Helpers are busy; we apologize if this is the case, but we ask that you understand if it happens.
As an incentive, our Helpers will receive advance information on some of our events and plots and will have the opportunity to help craft the world as it evolves. If we ever want an extra mod entirely, we will also be picking one from amongst our Helpers.
If you are interested, please go to this page. You may also volunteer to only run Pokémon or to only run Player Plots as you wish. Helpers will be contacted and chosen within a week's time. We ask that you be generally familiar with Pokémon to be able to play out the bonding threads, and we ask that you generally have a good level of activity and are able to see threads to completion.
That said, please respond below with any other feedback you may have on the game in general, on the event, or on the two issues we've outlined above. If you do not feel comfortable responding with your journal, you may comment anonymously. Comments will not be screened because anon feedback will not be able to see our responses to them if we do so.
Thanks again for a fantastic first month and we hope there will be many more to come!
In terms of mechanics, these are some of the issues we currently believe could be improved:
Wild Pokémon Encounters:
When we were planning out this aspect of the game, what we really wanted was to capture the feeling of running into something unknown - the excitement of walking through tall grass and coming across a Pokémon that you've never seen. We feel the RNG model we're running with really helps encapsulate that idea, and we've had a great time running all of the Pokémon threads that have come about because of it.
However, we decided early on that it would be impossible for us to run every single thread. It would be simply too much work, which is why we compromised early on to say that we'd only run undiscovered Pokémon. We are feeling, though, that this means that some people would like to thread things out and will not have an opportunity to do so either because nobody they know is willing to thread with them or for other miscellaneous reasons.
Our plan, therefore, is to ask for help. This plan will be further detailed below, in our next section.
If you have any other thoughts about how else our wild Pokémon system could be improved, please let us know! We will take your thoughts into consideration, but we may or may not be able to utilize the ideas. However, it will be valuable for us to get a sense of what you guys want to see.
Player Plots:
Player plots are an important part of this game and something we definitely want to encourage so you guys can get the most out of the RP! While we as the moderators have lots of intensive plot planned, player plots will be important to flesh out details and make new discoveries and add new technology to the world. You want to push beyond the boundaries of the map? Go for it; we have more areas in the works. You want to start building a smaller settlement in the middle of the swamp to facilitate travel? Go for it; we can add the Sinking Swamp Palace to our Information Pages. You want to use a dowsing rod to search for gold in the Verdant Forest? ...Well OK maybe that won't be too successful but we can see about having you stumble across a hidden cave system and open up a new, smaller area with other Pokémon.
We want to encourage player plots and reward creativity as much as possible, but once again, it's a lot for us to handle on top of our other work. Our original idea was to give any relevant information to one of the players in the player plot and allow them to act as Log Deputy to do the necessary NPCing. However, for one reason or another, this may not always be feasible, especially for Player Plots that are for the character development of a single character.
Our solution to this is to... also ask for help.
Which brings us to the plan!
We are asking for people who would be willing to help run wild Pokémon and player plots to help us out! This is how things will work: we'll choose a certain number of people to be official Helpers. When a player plot is submitted, we will contact them with our scenarios and ask one of them to run the log. The Helpers will also be free to help contribute ideas as to how the log should go.
In terms of running wild Pokémon, these Helpers may be contacted any time you'd like a Pokémon thread NPC'd, whether already revealed or not. Of course, you are still free to ask your friends, but these people will be officially there to help you with your needs. If they are unable to run the thread, they can send you on to the next Helper. There may come a time when all of our Helpers are busy; we apologize if this is the case, but we ask that you understand if it happens.
As an incentive, our Helpers will receive advance information on some of our events and plots and will have the opportunity to help craft the world as it evolves. If we ever want an extra mod entirely, we will also be picking one from amongst our Helpers.
If you are interested, please go to this page. You may also volunteer to only run Pokémon or to only run Player Plots as you wish. Helpers will be contacted and chosen within a week's time. We ask that you be generally familiar with Pokémon to be able to play out the bonding threads, and we ask that you generally have a good level of activity and are able to see threads to completion.
That said, please respond below with any other feedback you may have on the game in general, on the event, or on the two issues we've outlined above. If you do not feel comfortable responding with your journal, you may comment anonymously. Comments will not be screened because anon feedback will not be able to see our responses to them if we do so.
Thanks again for a fantastic first month and we hope there will be many more to come!
E-Mail Notifs for Mod Posts
(Anonymous) 2014-02-05 05:31 am (UTC)(link)I suspect this is due to you posting it locked to only yourselves or setting it up as a draft instead of posting it immediately so you can edit them before they go live. Unfortunately this means that notifications for those posts only go out to those who are allowed to see them at the time of the original post, not when they become visible to everyone else. So those who track the comms or track individual tags you might tag them with, never receive e-mail notifications of the posts going up.
I don't know if you're aware of this particular quirk of how Dreamwith handles notifications or not, but this has made it difficult for me to keep up with the game and especially the mod posts. Sometimes I don't find out about the posts having gone up until one to three days after when I see it mentioned on plurk. And a few of them - particularly during this Earthquake event - have been pretty important and relevant and needed to be gone over more immediately than three days later.
I track the comms and have notifs sent to my email because I don't have the time to review all of my various character journal's friend's list every day. I have been considering dropping the game because of it as I feel that so far the game and earthquake event have been moving at a very fast pace and having notification of relevant information as soon as possible is really important for those. If I can't keep up, for whatever reason, I will have to leave.
I do not begrudge you posting in this manner, but it's increasingly difficult for me, personally, to keep up with relevant game announcements due to this.
Thank you for listening.
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For full disclosure, the way we prepare things is to make locked posts a few hours prior, edit and discuss amongst ourselves, and then delete them and repost them without any restrictions. The way we do this should mean that you should be getting the notifs, according to what you say, so we're not sure what's going wrong.
We will take special care in the future in making sure that we post straight out to the comms. We'll prepare our posts elsewhere beforehand. Please do let us know, though, if the notifs continue to not work for any reason by commenting in our Mod Contact/Suggestions page anonymously or some other means.
EDIT: Oh - actually, could you tell us if you saw notifs for these two most recent posts, just so we can try to diagnose the problem better? These two were posted clean.
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(Anonymous) 2014-02-05 05:59 am (UTC)(link)If you're posting them straight then I should be getting notifs. So if you can't figure out what, if anything, you're doing wrong, the issue may be something on Dreamwidth's side of things. Heavens know the code push that made everything go to the inbox whether you wanted them to or not has been a beast to deal with. And if it is, it is unfortunately still a big enough issue for me personally to leave the game over. At least until it gets fixed. Thus far I'm not having the same difficulty with my other games, however I will keep an eye out for that as well.
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There are a few other alternatives - checking the individual comm or checking for posts by the mods with the ?poster=bravenewmods addition at the end of the URL, or following the mod Plurk as suggested by the anon below! We will say that we try to do posts at around midnight EST when they happen so if you check in the mornings, you won't miss them. We can also try to announce in advance when we expect to have our event posts up. If none of these work for you, I'm afraid there might not be anything we can do, and we apologize for that!
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(Anonymous) 2014-02-05 06:22 am (UTC)(link)I cannot check plurk at work as my employer blocks most social media sites. E-mail is important for inter-office and client communications so I can still check any e-mail notifs and keep up with my games when I would otherwise not have the ability to.
I do recognize that this is very much a personal use issue on my end, but it is one that is usually a relatively easy fix via the mod posts going up directly which is why I brought it up. I don't intend to drop tonight and will see how it goes for the next couple weeks. Thank you again for taking the time to try and help keep the game accessible for me. I do sincerely appreciate it.
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(Anonymous) 2014-02-05 05:56 am (UTC)(link)Additionally, you mentioned the earthquake event was moving at a fast pace, but it honestly seemed rather spaced out compared to most games. The whole thing took a little over a week if I'm right, and that's a nice lengthened time for a number of players.
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Thank you for understanding!
same anon
(Anonymous) 2014-02-05 06:03 am (UTC)(link)no subject
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We'll report back to you when we've done so, and you/anyone else who was confused can let us know if it looks more accessible or if it's still confusing!
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When we post Week 5, we will also include a more elaborate explanation of some of the forms to fill out.
Please take a look and see if this makes things easier for you/others to understand. If it's still unclear, let us know!
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Please take a look to see if the edit and accompanying explanation is sufficient and we thank you for bringing this to our attention.
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However, one idea we can try to do is include on the Application page a list of all the important things to read so that you know how to apply and fit your character into the game. Do you think this would be helpful?
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But yeah! I think that might help! It's definitely worth a shot.
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