asgarddawning | MOD HMD;

Hello, hello! It's time for Asgard's first ever:

How's My Driving: The Mod Edition
which we hope is every bit as exciting for you as it is for us. As you may or may not know, last September marked the year anniversary of Autumn, Draggy, and me being mods in Asgard, and this December marks the two year anniversary of Asgard as a whole. We think the very best way of celebrating these awesome landmarks is to bend over and cough to make sure everything is working okay! If this HMD proves fruitful, we may consider doing one of these at the end of each story arc. So slap on some gloves and give us your everything, guys, this is open forum.

If you aren't interested in participating in mod HMD and would like to skip ahead to the player poll RE: Arc 4 and endgame, go here!

HOW THIS WORKS

Responding to this meme is not mandatory. However, we would greatly appreciate any and all feedback / criticism you might have, as it helps us better the game for your enjoyment. This post will not be comm-locked as the player HMD is, because the face of the game affects not only current players but past and future players as well, so we are leaving this open to everything. Anon is disabled, however, because we feel that our players are the only speaking authority on the game's successes and failures and we want to know that we can have a discussion with our players.

Because we understand that dishing out crit is not the easiest of tasks, we've decided to break down the things we feel are most important to be addressed so that you can simply respond to them if you feel the need. Think of it like the "Known Problems" part of the player HMD; these are the things we would most like feedback on, but they are by no means the limit to what there is to critique, so you can make your own comments as you like. The basic breakdown will be as follows:

EVENT FEEDBACK: We've listed out every event from Arc 3 with links to all related informations posts / logs in separate comments. You guys can give us your thoughts on the successes / failures of each one individually or on the month as a whole.
- Consider the set-up of the logs and the timing of the events. Was enough information given to understand the event? Was there enough for you to work with in terms of plotting, or were you left uncertain of what to do? Do you like our use of volunteer positions or do you think we do it too often / not often enough? Things like that!
- We also listed the opt-out options that we've given in separate comments. Please let us know whether or not these opt-out options have worked for you. Did they help keep your interaction with any plot you didn't want involved with to a minimum? Were they interesting / enjoyable alternatives to the main plot event? Is there anything you would like to see more of? Etcetera, etcetera.
TONE / PACING FEEDBACK: Let us know how this Arc's set-up worked for you. Were the events placed far enough apart / too close together? Were there too many of them? Did the tone fit the theme of the story arc? Was it too dark / too light-hearted / an uneven mishmash of all the squishy bits inbetween?
NPC FEEDBACK: You can call out one NPC in particular or speak to the presence of the NPC cast as a whole. Are they fun to interact with? Are they easily accessible / do they make enough appearances? Is there anything we should encourage more / less of?
INDIVIDUAL MOD FEEDBACK: If you feel the need to address any one of us in specific, here is the place to do so! We do pretty much everything together, as we have constant communication up in the background, but if there's something any one of us has done that you'd like to discuss, we're happy to do so.
MISCELLANEOUS FEEDBACK: For anything we might not've covered in our headers!

And that's pretty much it as far as the HMD goes. It's a free-for all, so respond to as much or as little as you'd like wherever you'd like. This post won't really close, since there is no deadline or AC for it, so feel free to respond and discuss at your leisure. We appreciate anything and everything you guys have to say to us, so have at it!

Before you go, though, we want to talk shop with you all. Arc 4 will begin in January, and though the overall storyline will follow Yggdrasil's collapse, it will also be pushing us closer to Ragnarok 2.0, which will likely take place in Arc 5 and ultimately conclude Asgard Eventide's run. Because of this significance, we are going to let you guys decide what direction the game takes as we move towards end-game. This is super duper important, so even if you don't choose to participate in the HMD, please still vote in this poll! To make room for questions and discussion, we've put the poll in a separate post over here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This was another simple curse to give various gifts from the gods. We like to do one of these every story arc for gifts from home.

RUNDOWN || LOG

That one with all the murder and stuff! This was our first attempt at a slow-burning event with big time consequences, which is why it lasted the entire month. Really important feedback on this one would be on organisation, involvement, and timing. Some if the criticism we'd received at the time was that it stretched on too long, so anything you can tell us about your experience helps a ton!

RUNDOWN || TRACKING POST || LOG || LOG || LOG || LOG || NPC POST || NPC POST || NPC POST

I'm not sure it necessarily was too long, just maybe that the ramp-up was a little slow to the conclusion. Which is good with the concept, but in play it was kind of a couple weeks of waiting for things to really hit the fan-- there was stuff to play with before that but personally, I think that having more to do with it outside of the corrupted group might have offset some of the feeling that it stretched on, considering that a good chunk of it kind of seemed like 'it's about the same as last week, only it gets worse'.

As someone not in that group, the lead-in to the end of it did sort of feel like it was a lot of waiting, and while the 'fully corrupting certain people' thing was an awesome concept it ended up coming off a bit like if you weren't one of them you were basically missing out on the meat of the plot-- at least, up until the last week where things went into full swing and then we got to deal with the whole 'oh shit you're one of them' business.

...which is all very subjective I know, but idk, personally I thought it was a really really cool plot idea-- and while I totally get not everybody can be more involved in a thing, was a little disappointed about not being able to do as much with it as I'd have liked until the very end, honestly.

I was worried that it would come off that way! And I'm sad that it did, especially considering that the "fully corrupted" really didn't do much until the last week. I think some of the problem in events like this stems from the 2:1 day ratio; we want to give enough IC time for things to build up and to make an impact without things feeling rushed, but when real time goes 1/2 the speed, it can seriously feel like it's dragging on.

Definitely agreed on that- like, if it were a 1:1 ratio and ran for 2 weeks I think we'd have had less drag issues, but running it for 2 ooc weeks and having it last one IC week feels way too short. Kind of a thing where I'm not sure there really was a better way to work the timing out with this ratio, so in the end I'm pretty on board with it having run the whole month!

Maybe having waves of the corrupted/however it's set up in the future would help? Like wave one is doing this one thing and it gets interacted with/resolved and then bam surprise that wasn't the only wave. It'd take care of the waiting until the very end of the month. People signing up could choose which wave they want to be a part of.

Speaking as someone who was on the other side of it, the nature of the plot made it harder for it to be interactive, I felt. "This thing happened here oh no" is something you can react to, but the very nature of the plot required that very little interaction could go on unless you signed up, and I can see how that might've been hard to play with or even to wait for. I think the psychological effects were supposed to make up for that, but that might not have been the case.

Leaving options for interaction from beginning to end might've worked out better, but I might also not be grasping what you're saying.

The psychological effects did help, I got one of my favorite threads in this whole game out of the results of the fugues and such-- I think more varying effects during the ramp-up might've helped though? I don't know, I think that for me it was more the separation aspect that bugged me about it, though that is largely because I was really really hoping to get in on the corrupted side of it and RNG didn't agree. Which happens! But it may have left me a bit more disappointed about the way things worked out than it might have if I'd had less interest in getting to play that out, to be honest.

Yeah. There were a LOT of hiccups and stumbles on my end - it was a plot with a huge scope and a lot of interaction, and there were definitely points where I had bitten off more than I could chew or where things didn't work out like I had expected them to. This feedback is exactly what I'm looking for, though; while we're never going to run something quite that way again, we definitely, definitely want to learn from the stumbles.

Yeah, it's cool! For me, it was like planning in the background and waiting for people to go "OH MY GOD THEY DID WHAT?" Even playing it out, there wasn't a lot of room for us to actually RP so much as come up with ideas to screw things over. Which was nice and awesome, but I can see how if you take that a step further, you might really not like what came from it.

It went off well, I guess is what I'm saying, but I can see where you can learn from it to make it more interactive!

I don't want AJ taking all the heat for this one, because while she did write it and directed most of it, it was something we all thought would be really fun and different since we haven't done anything of this nature in all of Asgard's run.

That said, in all likelihood, we won't do anything like it again. It was a lot to manage and overwhelming on both sides of the equation at the end there. "This sounds really fun" does not equate into a successful event, and that's totally on us as far as set up and accessibility goes. If we want to have another event where the Travellers turn on each other, we'll try to make it more like the Darkness plot where it's free reign and less decisive between who can do what and when.

Hopefully less annoying than its namesake. This was largely to give people a means of avoiding the extremely dark nature of BMR, but it also gave us an opportunity for some world-building and exploration. We introduced four new NPCs as well as the differences between the two kingdoms. It's super important to us that our opt-out plots provide something fun for people that don't want to be involved in the darker plots, so please do let us know what we can do to make these work for you!

RUNDOWN || LOG || LOG || NPC POST

MOD HMD;

SEPTEMBER

SPECIAL EVENT: FRUITS OF OUR LABOUR

PLOT EVENT: BAD MOON RISING

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

OPT-OUT EVENT: WE'RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO VANAHEIM