2nd Antag Contest: Debriefing And Reflection

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

In the spirit of both transparency and a genuine desire for information, Skull and I put together this feedback form and passed it around. We were genuinely suprised at some of the findings. The form has gathered 64 responses and activity for responses has dropped. It's still accepting responses until Skull closes it but I feel confident in making judgements based on the feedback collected. In this post I'm going to share the findings of the multiple choice sections, what the results mean for me, and how we can improve in the future. There were a lot of short answer responses, and I did read them all, but I'll just summarize the most common consensus' that they gave.

 

What Does This Mean?

Not too much here, to me, but I'm sure it's an interesting statistic to someone.

 

What Does This Mean?

This is one of the most important questions. Our obvious goal is to always get 100% on questions like these, since they are a "do you trust us?". Transparency in the methods and results has always been very important when I or any staff do anything like this, because trust and communication between the staff and playerbase is incredibly important for the health of a community. That is why I released the full datasheet on the contests' scores and numbers, and had another lore dev add up the scores, with both of us coming to the same conclusion of a Synth victory with only a few percentage points of deviation based on our method of score evaluation. I'm glad we have at least a high C in the trust grading, but I would like to know why the 25% of respondents feel the contest was not scored fairly.

 

What Does This Mean?

This one is very interesting to me, and it's related to the question of "did you feel involved?" that will come up later. A significant number of players place a bigger emphasis on player involvement for the station - but there's also a large number that are happy either way. To me, this means that we should continue to try and balance the two sides of this question. For me this is a small sign that the lore team is putting out interesting enough shenanigans to keep people satisfied even if they are not directly involved in whatever event is currently on-going.

 

What Does This Mean?

This one is almost split down the middle, and a symptom of my leadership habits. I'm a very impatient eager person when I put my mind to something, and tend to push things through in bursts of manic energy and get frustrated with delays. We did have a design document for the week long arc, and the lore team worked together on series of events and the greater arc plot, but the execution was not executed in a fully organized way, and it showed. The development side was spot on, and I deeply appreciate the work the coders put in on us going out on a lark. The main issue I noticed with the organization of the event is how centralized the thing was around me - which meant that when I caught an acute case of being busy IRL, things hiccuped. Obviously in the future we're going to put more work in hammering things out beforehand, so that everyone knows what to do, when to do it, and things can carry on as planned even if someone has to drop off. Our goal here is to at least reach 70% for any future projects like this.

 

What Does This Mean?

This one is related to the above, and it's a bit hard for me to not repeat myself. There was planning on the narrative, which, for a bit of trivia, was hatched after my original proposal for an event revolving an AI uprising was shot down, for understandable reasons. No story is entirely without flaws, but it's important that we improve our score here.

 

What Does This Mean?

This one is very clear cut For any future projects a full schedule of events will be posted somewhere - probably in the announcement sections. Such schedules should, and probably will, be kept. Given admin's IRL schedules being variable, and the nature of rounds having variable lengths, means an event schedule will probably be accurate within a few hours. There's still a chunk of people who don't need/want to know ahead of time, so I'll try to have any event schedules give a general idea of what will go on but try to avoid spoilers.

 

What Does This Mean?

This is what surprised Skull, and even me to a small extent. Our forum news articles were started as a lark in July, 2015 when I asked a simple question: "What if I rolled this wiki rewrite as an actual IC event unfolding right-now?" They've since grown to be expected from lore developers, and I think have given us a unique way of having a living lore for our server. I'm deeply satisfied that they're seen as important to the stories we're telling by so many players. Obviously these same players also feel that station events are important to the story, which I agree with, and this is another area where proper balancing is key.

 

What Does This Mean?

I'm going to make the assumption that this question had an impact on the first question about the contest being scored fairly. Each event on station was worth a point in score, and that decision was enough to swing the final score in any direction - if they were supplemented by respective faction objectives being completed. In any future events I feel that station events should have a much bigger impact on whatever is going on, especially with the strong player requests for more player involvement, and player impacts being important to the story.

 

What Does This Mean?

The two most important questions: "Did you like it?" and "Did you feel involved?" They are tied together so they're put together.

That orange "kind of" for feeling involved should definitely be smaller than feeling involved and important. Such a significant count of people not feeling particularly involved or involved is, for me, a loss. Slightly more people felt uninvolved than felt involved, which isn't ideal and the weakest score that we've received.

However what I found very interesting is how this relates to the enjoyment pie - a very clear majority of people enjoyed the contest even while admitting its flaws and issues. No one (as of posting) found it to be a disaster, and there was only a small minority that felt the issues outweighed the fun. I'm glad that I asked both questions, because this is a very interesting dynamic. Despite so many people not feeling particularly involved or left out, they nonetheless enjoyed the contest even with its flaws. Can you still enjoy events like this without being fully involved? Should we try to diffuse a station event to cater to more and more station crew?

For the contest, mechanically, little was actually changed. The Captain slot was given a new title and outfit, and IAA got an alternate job title. The Command power dynamic was altered, with the loyalist HoS (who commanded the muscle) and the Sol Officer (who commanded the commander of the muscle, but also everyone else.) It was my theory going in that this adjustment of captain would throw the whole thing out of whack, which was proved right - there was so much conflict going on because of characters dealing with the ramifications of what was going on, and coming to grips with it and how to handle it.

Short/Long Answers And What They Mean

Many of the questions were going in greater depth or context about answers they had given earlier questions, asking for greater planning, structure, or communication between/from staff. However, quite a lot of responses were europeans saying that they felt left out because the event schedule was catering to the american time zone. I do apologize to our european playerbase for this - because the event was centralized pretty heavily around me and the american staff, the timing of events reflected this. Even though europeans form our skeleton shift we still need to, in the future, do a better job at incorporating them. Even deadhour can have a relevant gimmick, because despite what the media says, europeans are people too.

On CCIA

My greatest failure for this whole shenanigan was not properly involving CCIA, and for that I apologize. I had made the assumptions that the relevant staff involved in CCIA would keep them in the loop, and kept moving forward on this assumption. I was very reactive with communication, and when the staff structure skipped over CCIA, they suffered, and unfortunately they had to shut down their IR's for the whole duration. This sort of glaring oversight won't happen again with any major event or shenanigan that I do in the future, and I'm resolving to be more proactive with communication.

What Is Your Take?

What do you think about these results? How do you feel about how I am interpreting them? How do you interpret these findings? Do any of them surprise you?

[Felkvir]

Ahem, I don't know about the other voters.. But I personally chose that option because I was thinking of the overall participation coming into play instead of the major significant/notable events. And the fact that synths were apparently initially to be given full benefits even though it was a 'minor' victory for them.

[Fire and Glory]

...but I would like to know why the 25% of respondents feel the contest was not scored fairly.

The objectives for the majority of the contest were very very wonky, "points to the pro-synth's for doing nothing at all because nothing is going to happen to Robotics or this IPC", etc, and as far as I know these weren't corrected, not to mention with how long the contest went, I imagine everyone lost enthusiasm and couldn't be bothered to fight for one side or another, wouldn't be a decent judge of how well either side was fighting.

[Scheveningen]

Sucks for the community for not participating when they could, then. The option was always there.

[Mofo1995]

On CCIA

My greatest failure for this whole shenanigan was not properly involving CCIA, and for that I apologize. I had made the assumptions that the relevant staff involved in CCIA would keep them in the loop, and kept moving forward on this assumption. I was very reactive with communication, and when the staff structure skipped over CCIA, they suffered, and unfortunately they had to shut down their IR's for the whole duration. This sort of glaring oversight won't happen again with any major event or shenanigan that I do in the future, and I'm resolving to be more proactive with communication.

 

I take full responsibility for this. As the only dual-CCIA Lore writer, I should've transcended the gap and enhanced staff coordination.

[Ornias]

I would like to know why the 25% of respondents feel the contest was not scored fairly.

Despite absolutely loving the contest, the way that it was scored felt so... off.

Perhaps 'unfairly' is the wrong word, but the anti-synthetics were clearly the most vocal and dominant force. They won most events, and without a constant tracker of THIS IS THE CURRENT WIN-LOSS RATIO, it was incredibly easy to feel throughout the contest like the anti-synthetics were winning by a mile.

I guess the issue for me was that the first part of the contest seemed to have so little... impact ICly. Unless I missed something obvious (which would be a problem on it's own), it was a purely OOC thing to provide ideas for your antag play (which people don't tend to get involved with). If there had been some obvious IC build up, even then, it would have been really enjoyable. If there had been visible effects THROUGHOUT, it would have felt so much fairer.

But as it stands, it was all one buildup behind a curtain. Sure, it may have been graded exactly as it was meant to be graded, so in the strictest sense it was 'fair', but that was completely invisible up until the contest was finished.

 

"Did you like it?" and "Did you feel involved?" They are tied together so they're put together.

This was what made the event so enjoyable for me, I think. The involved bit.

A good event is impossible not to get involved with. I daresay those who frequently play xenoes rated higher than those that didn't, but that's just speculation.

At one point, while I was talking with someone ordering an exosuit, I let slip a joke which was derogatory to Sol (X was tighter than a Sol Governors daughter). I was immediately threatened with physical violence, and I backed down- and that was one of the things I remember clearest about the entire contest. The individual events are fun, yes, but the best parts will always come from character involvement. The idea that the event actually means something beyond just 'oh, shit, time to play ATLAS' or 'oh, shit, time to play Synth Protector™.

I loved this event, but I can see that people who didn't get involved might not. It's not their fault for not doing it - it's just something to improve on in future events, making the effects more wide-reaching.

Oh, and can we please remember that GAIA is the leading party of the Sol Alliance? Not ATLAS?

[Skull132]

As already stated to Jackboot, the fact that so many players thought the news to be as important as gameplay kinda blew my mind. I guess Aurora has changed. Though, it's fine.

Also, the antag contest stuff needs to be a lot more concise in the future. Though I imagine we've expended that specific format for the near future. Running 3 of the same things back to back would be meh. But the lessons learned can definitely be applied elsewhere. I also enjoyed the amount of buzz the week long generated from a good amount of players at least as far as I was able to gauge. All in all, it was a learning experience and did confirm that the playerbase seem to approve of, if not enjoy the heading Jackboot has taken with the active lore integration.

 

I take full responsibility for this. As the only dual-CCIA Lore writer, I should've transcended the gap and enhanced staff coordination.

 

That responsibility is not yours to take. It's that of me and GarnItzal. Occasionally Sackboot.

[ToasterStrudel]

I do have to say, I did enjoy checking the forums every day during the event to see what was posted in the news area. It made the event feel a lot larger, like there were things happening outside of our little station, not just focused on us but the whole system.

[Outboarduniform]

I've been terribly inactive for the past 2-3 months, but if I recall last, I believe Anti-Synths were completely dominating the competition. unless there was some dramatic win that nulled the Anti-Synths advantage, I would be kinda suprised. I thought it ended a while back as well...huh.

[Fire and Glory]

I've been terribly inactive for the past 2-3 months, but if I recall last, I believe Anti-Synths were completely dominating the competition. unless there was some dramatic win that nulled the Anti-Synths advantage, I would be kinda suprised. I thought it ended a while back as well...huh.

If I remember correctly, since no one could actually see the numbers they didn't know that pro-synths were winning the objectives rubbish stuff (the stuff that rewarded prosynths for 'protecting' IPC's or robotics, yeah.) and basically it ended up being a very close tie with anti-synth's ending.

Don't really want another mechanical point-based antag contest after that.

[Faris]

A certain amount of objectives were removed from the total count what you mentioned, it changed the outcome from a major victory to a close one.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Sharp misrepresents the intended goal. The objectives were not removed arbitrarily. They were the result of a glitch where pro-synth would gain a victory with the Protect Robotics objective... By not doing anything at all, because there was no check if there was an Attack Robotics objective.