Eridani Federation Week Debriefing: Survery Results

Hello! Our week long event has ended and like with our last long-term events we put up a survey to get feedback from the community in hard data. The results show a pretty even divide in several key areas as was expected. There are some exceptiions which will be outlined below. One of the major issues seems to be the expectation of this event's scope - quite a few people were expecting the Second Coming of Admiral Frost. This is pretty fair, since all of our previous long-term events have been Big Deals.

 

 

While there is thankfully more people that enjoyed or loved the event than disliked or hated it, there is a disappointingly large chunk of people that were apathetic about the event. This can partially be credited to the intention of the event, which was not meant to be a pervasive, all-encompassing, galactic shaking affair. The execution of the event nevertheless fell under the lowered expectations placed upon it. This can be attributed to many failings, including its launch on finals week, the lack of clearly defined, direct Eridani events, and a lack of event managers from writing the debriefing IC news articles that serve to summarize a canonical event. Nearly all of these problems swerve back around to the primary issue of us launching on finals week. While all major Heads of Staff signed off on the Eridani event, there were no alarm bells being rung about most of staff needing to drop off the face of the Earth for awhile to get their Finals in order.

The split between those that felt informed about Eridani character creation and those that didn't is disappointingly large. I am still wondering where we can isolate the failures here. We provided information on the faction on display in the announcements, news articles, and they have a wikipedia page. How can we better communicate these standards to you?

 

 

Every round the HoS office was given a special fax that outlined their objective for that round, which would be one of the above. This fax was specifically meant for the head security chief, who would attempt to execute the plan with security. They were meant to grating (coming down on a department for money or suspicious conduct) or fun (faking a crossfire round) with the potential of completely throwing a round's general flow (faking a crossfire round during an actual crossfire round and wondering if being shot in the stomach with a shotgun slug is part of the simulation being unusually realistic)

The take away here may be that such objectives should probably be sent to a more 'accessible' location, such as the command consoles. It's not really REQUIRED that all the members of the crew know the objectives the Chiefs had, but if such things happen in the future then knowing that these objectives exist will be good.

 

There is a split in the expectations of week long events. There was a

the intent of the event. It was not the second coming of Frost; it was a week long diversion to introduce a faction and bring the lore to the station. This was a success, as a lot of people were introduced to the faction and fell for it. Others were left dissatisfied. There is a split between people who'd like to see moderately low-key events, and those that want heavy hitters each time.

There is also a split with the conduct of non-command Eridani. This is not surprising, since the role was not whitelisted. My personal philosophy is that it is important to balance exclusivity with accessibility. While there were some extraordinarily, mind-blowing character concepts from a select few names that resulted in awkward conversations with staff, my view was that these risks were worth the exposure of the role and its lore and playstyles to new players. However, this leads into the next finding.

 

 

People seem more or less fine with losing a job slot for the sake of an event, but there is also a split on whether or not that job should be whitelisted. Both have drawbacks. A whitelisted job can risk that job being understaffed, since it requires whitelisted players, and then from that smaller population whitelisted players who want to play the role. There was more or less always at least one Eridani Private Security running around.

 

 

The split here is almost roughly even. There was a lot of grumbling on discord about the standards being enforced. My personal philosophy for these things has sat in the camp of having the standards in-between the two extremes, but that is matched by an even amount of players (and staff) who want to see extremely strict standards set.

 

This is the heaviest hitter, and the results are not where they should be. The biggest hurdle was launching during Final's week for universities. Everyone was busy. The objectives were intended to be proactive ways for the crew to turn the event into whatever they wanted, allowing players to craft their own events. This was not enough - players need more than objectives to make an event feel satisfying. It needs staff involvement. It needs events specifically for the faction. While we did have events, only two were specifically tied to the Eridani Federation. One was pushed back beyond the week of the event, and the rest were other factions coming in to do VIP visits that would test the skills of the Eridani security.

There was some misc feedback included in the final freeform question. Here is an excerpt of most of them.

 

 

So going forward, the game plan is for:

1) Better planning around major life events (finals!)

2) More specific events for the faction on display.

3) More proactive objectives on top of any IC objectives.

4) Trying to accommodate or reconcile the divisions in opinions from the poll.

5) Better communication of expectations and the 'oomph'yness of the event to players.

Yeah, I was one of the negatives. The event had a good idea but very very poor execution. Everyone was white lol. Even then all the Eridani did was “be sec officer but gangster haha teehee xxxdeee” and nothing else. It’s just felt low quality and cliché.