Feedback on Star Trek Game

Baggly

Hi gang,

Hope you enjoyed the game just gone. Really appreciate your participation and/or following the thread if you weren't playing.

If you have any feedback on the roles in the game, the pace of the game, or any other aspect of the structure of the game, it would be great to get it here.

What did you like? What didn't you like?

Lord TSC

More a general comment.

I think there were three or four instances (myself included) of people posting after they had been killed. In my case, it was a post made as my kill went up, and because it was a bullet, it wasn't that I knew I was pushing it. Twas a genuine mistiming and a mistake. But I do know Digi (I think) said my post-death post influenced his decision to push for Maha to get offed, which I felt bad about in a way. It happens most games that someone dies, but doesn't read it and posts.

Would it be worth while sending a PM to whoever is about to be declared dead to stop posting? Like, right before the mods post "X is dead", they also fire off a "You died, please don't post again!" PM? Might help people who don't check every single post?

(Overall, though, easily my favorite game I've participated in thus far, so thanks to the people running it )

Digital Solitude

It did affect my thoughts, but you can't really stop it. There are several factors at play, and any one of them moving by 30 seconds would have made that post legal, imo it was okay. If you're alive to start writing the post and dead by the time you reach the end of it, the post should probably stand.

On roles, I know I've voiced this several times but I didn't like Q, it was too distracting a role. I'm not trying to beat the mods with it, but I can see myself withdrawing from Jester games in future. I'm as bad as if not worse than any for creating games and roles that will be more entertaining for mods than players but I'm trying to kerb that after realising not all the interesting roles that make everyone doubt everything are fun to play with, some are just a pita.

I haven't a bad word against how the game was run and managed, think you guys did a great job and the whole ship sailed smoothly start to finish.

Ectoplasm

I wasn't wild about the Q role myself and while I don't think I'd withdraw from a game it's not something Id like to see every game. That said, I think it was great that the mods announced Qs death in thread and if a Jester will feature again I'd say it's necessary for that announcement to be made when it happens.

I thought the game ran incredibly smoothly so a big well done. One thing I think I'd like to see is that if the wolves get a *real* kill on night zero that other night actions happen too...ie a seer pick or a communication etc. I actually like what happened in the Marvel (?) game where a fake body kicked off the action coz it means that everyone gets a chance to play at least one full day.

tritium

Im at the other end here. I really liked the jester idea. That said i think there are probably a few tweaks it might need to work well in the game with 1 day cycles, as i think it dominated discussion too much. I think Jay had discusses a role called the alien in the past and thats kind of how i saw the jester working. Granted it would be much harder for jester to win so maybe some calibration required

MrsFlushdraw

I really liked the game and the modding went really smoothly, except for the back rooms which I still can't see lol.

I am also a fan of killing off cannon fodder first night to give everyone a chance, even worse when a new player to the fold gets killed and it could put them off playing here again.

I think the biggest issue this time with the people posting after they were dead was more to do with the Queen role as we expect that for them and each time it happened I got excited that we found her!

Q was a good idea but I think everyone got hung up on it way too much (including me) and spent more time Q hunting than Borg hunting.

A great modding team for sure

Baggly

I didnt set this thread up for pats on the back, but i wont say no to them either

quickbeam

Great game.

As for Q, I don't really have an opinion one way or another, but I do think too much talk was lended to the role. To me, I just figured I'd not bother with him one way or another and if he won, so be it, the winner of wolves v villagers could just take second place.

I think it was a balanced game from the start, but taking out Robyn first certainly tipped the balance the wolves' way which continued for the rest of the game. But that wasn't the mod's fault - their job is just to balance it from the beginning and after that see how it plays, and they did that.

Other than that, very enjoyable, extremely well run, loved the Q&A pre-game session idea, mods were attentive to queries in the back room without being intrusive. All good.

mahamageehad

Lord TSC wrote: »

...
Would it be worth while sending a PM to whoever is about to be declared dead to stop posting? Like, right before the mods post "X is dead", they also fire off a "You died, please don't post again!" PM? Might help people who don't check every single post?

(Overall, though, easily my favorite game I've participated in thus far, so thanks to the people running it )

Yeah, we tried to do this when modding the Simpsons game - PM the player the minute they died so they knew. Would have been useful for me this game- I dropped offline for a few hours (though stayed logged in so I was a "lurker") and I had maybe 3 or 4 pages to catch up on! I was multiquoting as I was reading, with another tab open where I was writing out responses, then I got to the page where I had been shot! I could easily have come back and just posted "catching up" without realizing I was dead. It wouldn't work in all situations tho, in the anon game in the other place I didn't think I was a munch target and I had a long post written to post and when I clicked post the message failed because I was killed and my permission removed while I was typing so that's annoying too. In general I don't see a foolproof way of stopping people without adding too much mod work or interrupting game flow. I thought the mods in this game handled it beautifully - when PJ did the "I can explain" post and the mods were like "Oh no you can't" I had a giggle!

Ectoplasm wrote: »

...
I thought the game ran incredibly smoothly so a big well done. One thing I think I'd like to see is that if the wolves get a *real* kill on night zero that other night actions happen too...ie a seer pick or a communication etc. I actually like what happened in the Marvel (?) game where a fake body kicked off the action coz it means that everyone gets a chance to play at least one full day.

+1 on this. I know you can't base stuff on previous games, but if I had still been playing when Digi came out as seer and he said he didn't get a N0 peek, it would have been cause for me to doubt him completely.
I get the having the fake body thing, but I see both sides. The person that's killed first provides info for the villagers - why did the wolves target this person. With a dead body you go to lynch the first time with no info. It sucks for the player that's out first, but it also makes more sense to me as a player. It's less of an issue with the anon games becuase first dead can be subbed back in easily.

Ok, other feedback. I really enjoyed the game, great job mods.

This is less a criticism of this game, and more a personal opinion - I don't like the recruitment mechanic, especially not used in conjunction with a blind-spot seer. I really think it puts the village at a massive disadvantage. The recruiter mechanic has been used a few different ways in different games, so I'll focus on how it was done in this game. I liked that the recruited lost their powers if recruiter, but by not making power roles exempt from recruitment, it's too powerful as it can't fail. Plus it basically resets the clock on the village, undoing some of the work you've done over the previous days. In other games where there's more than 1 team, or where recruitment would fail if you targeted a roled player, I still didn't like it but felt it was a little easier on the village.

The other thing is the meta - defo appreciate that the mods wanted to keep the game under control but disallowing the talk about stuff that happened on thread was muddying the waters a bit in my opinion, particularly as I was later partially killed for a meta reason - not responding on thread but being "online". Not sure how to resolve that - you can't tell people that they can't make obscure reference to RL - e.g. "I'm away cleaning toilets on the ship for the afternoon" as it's just human nature to try to excuse absences in a game like this, and also it's human nature for others to pick up on them - "Where's maha, she hasn't posted at all today".

As for q, I liked it as a mechanic but think we focused too much on it. As I said on thread, the game continues anyways and even if Q won on night 1, I don't think it would have taken anything away from the final wolf victory. It's an interesting mechanic, I think it could still work with a few tweaks or just once players get used to the idea. As a mod though, I can completely understand not wanting to add a mechanic that could end a game you worked so hard for on night 1 so playing on was the right call.

The theme of this game was over my head, (and I'm signed up for a FB game next with another theme I don't get!) so that didn't really impact on the game for me, but it was nice as always to see how much people got into it. Well done to all the modulators for a well run, enjoyable game.

Mollyb60

Pter you must be a manager IRL with yer feckin feedback! :P Actually no this is a great idea. Especially when you're introducing new roles in a game.

TBH I LOVE the idea of the jester role but I was never 100% satisfied with how it went. We felt we needed to announce on thread when he was dead just because we realised how much it was taking over everything. We had tried out an idea where the Guinan role would be able to do peeks specifically to find Q but we dropped it eventually because I think it just got too complicated. I would like to see it in another game but maybe other mods will have a better idea of how to treat the role.

In hindsight we should've allowed the seer to have a peek on N0. There are plusses and minuses to having a rando death on N0 and I'm not sure what the right way is but I do agree that if you're having a wolf kill on N0, you really have to let the other roles do their thing too.

I thought that the game was pretty well balanced but having the wolves take out the Shaman on the first go was just a devastating blow to the village and I don't think they ever recovered from it. Just in case anyone didn't see on the other thread, these were the 3 totems that the shaman was going to get:
Totem 1 (Night 1 after lynch): Cloaking Device - nominated player is invisible and cannot be affected by any powers (seer check/bodyguard/vigilante/berserker)
Totem 2 (Night 2 after lynch): Deflector Shield - nominated player cannot be lynched or munched
Totem 3 (Night 3 after lynch): Ktarian Game - prolonged use of the game renders the player vulnerable to external suggestion. Nominated player will reveal their character and role on thread
These totems could have vastly changed the state of play in the game. Especially the last one. We were so excited to see the last one play out. I cannot explain how horrified we all were that the wolves went straight for Robyn.

The problem with the PM's and dead players is that if you don't refresh your page you don't get the notification that you have a PM (AFAIK). I was posting the munch/lynch story and getting the PM out within I'd say 3 minutes so if you're in the middle of writing a post there's not much the mods can do about that. I don't see it as a massive problem really. Also Lord I actually you were the only person in the game that I forgot to PM to tell you that you were dead. Sorry about that! I think it got lost in all the beserker mayhem and I didn't realise until the next day. At that point your permissions had already been changed so there wasn't really any point in PM'ing you. Sorry again!

The controversy about Jayop's EP thing got WAY out of hand in the game. Again in hindsight maybe we shouldn't have made it such a big thing but I think it annoyed us that it was an erroneous assumption (WTF - who am I with all these big words?) that just got jumped on. We didn't think it was fair to BJ so we tried to stop it. It didn't go as smoothly as we hoped.

The whole thing was such a great learning experience for me. Very stressful at times and Pter and Uriel will tell you that my husband got quite annoyed about how much time I was spending on the game (I sent them a pic of his extreme grumpy face at one point) so I'm happy it's done. Not sure if I'd be able to run another game. It took so much time and the only reason I could actually be as attentive as it needed was that my boss was on leave for the week and I had no one hounding me to do actual work.
Dunno what the **** I'm supposed to do with my evenings now?

MrsFlushdraw

Molly! wrote: »

The whole thing was such a great learning experience for me. Very stressful at times and Pter and Uriel will tell you that my husband got quite annoyed about how much time I was spending on the game (I sent them a pic of his extreme grumpy face at one point) so I'm happy it's done. Not sure if I'd be able to run another game. It took so much time and the only reason I could actually be as attentive as it needed was that my boss was on leave for the week and I had no one hounding me to do actual work.
Dunno what the **** I'm supposed to do with my evenings now?

And here is me organising one to start this week and it is my wedding anniversary AND birthday lol. I am bad!

quickbeam

What? Why does that say I posted that comment? That's Molly's. Odd!

MrsFlushdraw

quickbeam wrote: »

What? Why does that say I posted that comment? That's Molly's. Odd!

That really is odd!

it even takes you to your post. even odder...

mahamageehad

I'm guessing she had a few mutiquoted and tried to delete some multiquotes but it went arseways? The link goes straight to your post from earlier in the thread).

Agreed though on the work part Mol, I was in no way prepared for how much work was involved, neither was Cross I don't think. I did literally nothing else for the first two days of our game except mod. It was insane. That's why I like the current trend towards 3 mods, it helps take the load off!

mahamageehad

mahamageehad wrote: »

I'm guessing she had a few mutiquoted and tried to delete some multiquotes but it went arseways? The link goes straight to your post from earlier in the thread).

Agreed though on the work part Mol, I was in no way prepared for how much work was involved, neither was Cross I don't think. I did literally nothing else for the first two days of our game except mod. It was insane. That's why I like the current trend towards 3 mods, it helps take the load off!

So if you had everything lumped into one forum, you wouldnt know it was baddies goodies dead mods etc posting? Thats sounds fine then

mahamageehad

Deleted User wrote: »

So if you had everything lumped into one forum, you wouldnt know it was baddies goodies dead mods etc posting? Thats sounds fine then

Yeah basically this time I saw "goodie rooms" then I clicked through to "Sick Bay". You could lump all in one place, but that'd make permissions trickier, or give a seperate forum to each so instead of Goodies > Sick Bay it'd be just Sick Bay. That's more work for mods. We did the Goodies and Baddies forums in the same way they were done this game and I didn't notice the dot, but I did notice it as a player this time.

Tigger

mahamageehad wrote: »

Yeah basically this time I saw "goodie rooms" then I clicked through to "Sick Bay". You could lump all in one place, but that'd make permissions trickier, or give a seperate forum to each so instead of Goodies > Sick Bay it'd be just Sick Bay. That's more work for mods. We did the Goodies and Baddies forums in the same way they were done this game and I didn't notice the dot, but I did notice it as a player this time.

It's more work but it's interesting feedback as well.

Tigger

There were some good things in the game and inthing thatvitbaddedbtonthe evolution of the forum
I believe and I said it to the mods during the game that the jester should either be the game end if it wins
Having it as a technical win where the village v wolves thing continues takes from the effect
But overall a well imagined and ex cuter game

Uriel.

Tigger wrote: »

There were some good things in the game and inthing thatvitbaddedbtonthe evolution of the forum
I believe and I said it to the mods during the game that the jester should either be the game end if it wins
Having it as a technical win where the village v wolves thing continues takes from the effect
But overall a well imagined and ex cuter game

Thanks for all the feedback.

Our approach to a Q lynch at the outset was to avoid a situation where Q got lynched in lynch 1 and game over. Obviously in such a situation the game continue as a wolves v villager game but we weren't sure how players would react, ie would the remaining players consider it a dud game.
I think the abandoned game was also in our minds in the sense of a game ending early (particularly after time investment both at player and modulator level)

sKeith

mahamageehad wrote: »

Yeah basically this time I saw "goodie rooms" then I clicked through to "Sick Bay". You could lump all in one place, but that'd make permissions trickier, or give a seperate forum to each so instead of Goodies > Sick Bay it'd be just Sick Bay. That's more work for mods. We did the Goodies and Baddies forums in the same way they were done this game and I didn't notice the dot, but I did notice it as a player this time.

Ah, i think i know the dot you speak off...
I just thought that was a lag and that it wasn't refreshing properly.
The dot would disappear as soon as f5 was pushed.
I don't think it had anything to do with other forums, as if it did, then the dot would not disappear until you read the new posts.

Triceratops Ballet

MrsFlushdraw wrote: »

And here is me organising one to start this week and it is my wedding anniversary AND birthday lol. I am bad!

when's your birthday Mrs FD?

MrsFlushdraw

Triceratops Ballet wrote: »

when's your birthday Mrs FD?

My birthday is on Friday, be the grand old age of 45!!! arggghhh

sKeith

Re: the dots, I'd be willing to run an experiment to prove it, but I don't think the dots are revealing the info you think they are. in fact, by believing the dots are doing what they are doing because of what you think, and if you were looking out for them, then you would be giving yourself bad data.
The dots are there to let you know that there is new posts that you have not read.
Why would it alert you to posts in a forum you are unable to read?
That would be a mayor bug in mybb and would be fixed immediately.
it is more likely, that your browser picked up a cached page when you arrived at that page, which had notice for you that you have new posts, but when you push f5, it loads the latest version of the page which has the dot missing because you in fact have no new messages.

Triceratops Ballet

MrsFlushdraw wrote: »

My birthday is on Friday, be the grand old age of 45!!! arggghhh

Ah mine is on Sunday, I've never met anyone who had the same birthday as me so I thought "oh my, could this be it!!"

Triceratops Ballet

sKeith wrote: »

Re: the dots, I'd be willing to run an experiment to prove it, but I don't think the dots are revealing the info you think they are. in fact, by believing the dots are doing what they are doing because of what you think, and if you were looking out for them, then you would be giving yourself bad data.
The dots are there to let you know that there is new posts that you have not read.
Why would it alert you to posts in a forum you are unable to read?
That would be a mayor bug in mybb and would be fixed immediately.
it is more likely, that your browser picked up a cached page when you arrived at that page, which had notice for you that you have new posts, but when you push f5, it loads the latest version of the page which has the dot missing because you in fact have no new messages.

I never thought the dots were indicating stuff in another forum, I kind of assumed it was a glitch, as I've seen them both as a player, and as a mod when I have access to all forums!

Baggly

sKeith wrote: »

Re: the dots, I'd be willing to run an experiment to prove it, but I don't think the dots are revealing the info you think they are. in fact, by believing the dots are doing what they are doing because of what you think, and if you were looking out for them, then you would be giving yourself bad data.
The dots are there to let you know that there is new posts that you have not read.
Why would it alert you to posts in a forum you are unable to read?
That would be a mayor bug in mybb and would be fixed immediately.
it is more likely, that your browser picked up a cached page when you arrived at that page, which had notice for you that you have new posts, but when you push f5, it loads the latest version of the page which has the dot missing because you in fact have no new messages.

Oh are these the dots in question! Yeah when you move up out of, lets say, the BG forum into the goodies, you have to refresh each time to get the goodies forum to show as 'no new read threads'.

Sorry didnt realise thats the dots we were talking about.

I can understand why people think this is meta data, but its as likely a mod posted in the forum you cant see as the player themselves, so reading this data as 'oh the bg is online' is not a good idea, imo.

sKeith

Triceratops Ballet wrote: »

I never thought the dots were indicating stuff in another forum, I kind of assumed it was a glitch, as I've seen them both as a player, and as a mod when I have access to all forums!

Heres the reference to the dots.

Deleted User wrote: »

Brings me onto another point in the backroom actually when you have access to part of the backroom you can see if someone has posted elsewhere when the black dot appears beside the main headline for the grouping. Doesn't matter near the start of the game but may towards the end of the game if you see people being active on thread and stuff in the backroom.

Again this doesn't effect me as whats an end game?

Triceratops Ballet

I still think it's a glitch, because you can still see them when logged in as a mod and can read all the threads

sKeith

Pter wrote: »

Oh are these the dots in question! Yeah when you move up out of, lets say, the BG forum into the goodies, you have to refresh each time to get the goodies forum to show as 'no new read threads'.

Sorry didnt realise thats the dots we were talking about.

I can understand why people think this is meta data, but its as likely a mod posted in the forum you cant see as the player themselves, so reading this data as 'oh the bg is online' is not a good idea, imo.

But, why would you be notified of new posts you can't see?
Thats my point, that its not new posts in the other forums.

If it was new posts in some forum you cannot get to, then the dot would remain on forever, as you cannot read it, also giving you no data.

Triceratops Ballet

sKeith wrote: »

But, why would you be notified of new posts you can't see?
Thats my point, that its not new posts in the other forums.

If it was new posts in some forum you cannot get to, then the dot would remain on forever, as you cannot read it, also giving you no data.

agreed, it's defo not metadata! when Max comes to save us he'll tell us all!

Baggly

That's a good point. As a mod, i could go in and check them, and they did change when all threads in the sub forum were read.

So must be a bug that people are being notified?