HOW'S MY DRIVING

[strangerpeople]

HMD




Hey there, everyone! It's time for an HMD! The last HMD of 15 Strangers...current overarching story arc. And man has it been a ride. And it's a ride we've been proud to go on alongside you guys as R6 ended with a Golden End!

We've said it before and we will keep saying it, but what makes this game as successful as it is, is you, the players. You guys are our lifeblood, our literal and metaphorical heart. You guys are what help to drive the story, the characters, and ultimately the future of the game. And, we always try and implement what you guys suggest when HMD comes up after every round, though it's not always fully successful or consistently implemented (Hey there, links to weekday menus! Where'd you go after Round 3? Did someone forget you? :/ ). But your critiques and suggestions are always welcome, and the end of this round is no different. Even if this is the end of Camazotz's reign of Tabooty terror, it's not the end of the game.

Looking back, we can say there's been good, there's been bad, and there's been Round 4. And one other thing we as the mods all agreed upon as Rounds 6 came to pass was our own little critique of ourselves. Namely, that the mod team definitely needs to take a break. 15 Strangers has been a labor of love for a little over three years, and it's been one that everyone has been working hard to try and make as excellent as possible, no matter if a mod joined the team in R1 or R5, no matter what's been thrown our way.

So does this mean this is the last round of 15 Strangers in the end? No. (In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.) In fact, we're planning on continuing the game, and R7's story was decided some time ago. In fact, this particular round has been in the works for...well, some time actually. And you're probably all going to scream once you see it, when it is finally announced.

The overarching plot will also still be present, with callbacks here and there-after all, as as a certain brain said, the Meme is ever-present and cannot be contained. But future rounds won't be as Extra-Strength Plot Concentrate as it has been and will be more self-contained. At least, that is the hope!

In the meantime, though, we're taking a murdergame mod vacation. We'll still be here, as will backtagging, the 15 Strangers Round AU meme that we will be putting up in the near future, and probably a tiny bit of incessant R7 teasing over the coming months. Possibly even a Mock Week 4, hmm? But this spring and summer at the very least, we're going to take a rest and come back recharged and ready to go.

And with that...thank you. Thank you so much, all of you, and we'll see you again some time in autumn, 2020!

Comments

[silvertongueheir]

So, I think one of the big issues here was definitely lack of informing people in advance of potential big events. Both the temporary deadland visit and the deadland final boss fight basically came as a surprise because they weren't telegraphed in advance. I know the deadland visit was given a before-the-fact announcement when a meeting on that day was also mentioned, but that ended up happening when some of the players were already asleep and would likely miss it.

[telecosmetic]

Ah, and another thing-for the punishment in the last week, apparently the players weren't informed beforehand what the exact details of their conditioning would be? They had to ask in the Discord chat and it took a while to get all that up. I think that they should definitely have been PMed in advance, especially since they were already marked for punishment at the end of the execution, which theoretically should have given enough time to inform them what would happen. As it was, I feel that ended up delaying some of the potential reactions as people had to wait for information on how they would be conditioned.

[illusionarymelody]

I do want to say that overall this round was pretty fun, but there were some very clear problems with communication to players and things being handled in a timely manner. While I get that Ni and Kay had stuff going on, it was pretty clear this round that there is a very serious issue with communication between mods and players.

Gray already stated one big issue that came up, announcing important events during the week. The deadland visit especially should have had a placeholder comment so players knew that something was going to happen that was going to take their attention for a good chunk of the day. We didn't find out about that until the day of and only because a player was trying to plan something that day. We also didn't find out about it from the mods, but from Lenga. On top of that, we were told that it wasn't important enough for a placeholder, yet that visit event took nearly the whole day OOCly to tag even if ICly it was only 10 minutes.

Another issue of miscommunication happened in the first case. It really wasn't very clearly communicated that Nanaki could have been alive and walked to house 14 himself. The evidence made it look far more like a third person who was still alive had to have dragged him there, which led to characters then accusing the living suspects. This could have easily been cleared up with Arthur getting the vision for Nanaki's death, but we didn't get that. Now I get that Kay was busy that weekend, what confuses me is why this wasn't prepped in advance to ensure we'd get all the evidence or why there wasn't other evidence that indicated Nanaki's death wasn't instant because characters definitely got that impression.

The deadlands event with Snachel that led to her demise was also another issue, though I get that deadlands events are more chill and not mandatory for characters to attend. However, the event itself was very difficult to come up with reasons for characters to not be there because of the way the announcement was made ICly. I think that could have used some more clear communication as well or at least an easier way to justify absences for characters who would have come, but players weren't awake yet or were busy with RL stuff.

Now one other thing I do want to bring up: the distrust mechanic. First off, it was very frustrating that the FAQ gave the impression that characters would distrust everyone because they would be given an impression someone was working with the mastermind. Then when the round started, oh it turned out it wasn't going to be like that, we were just going to distrust the other characters just because. I have two serious issues with how this went down. First is that we were very much mislead in how this was even going to work. The second was that we know this mechanic was put into place to prevent people from splintering into groups based off their rounds and instead it ensured that characters would do exactly that. This was definitely a very poorly done way of attempting to resolve a problem that may not have even been a problem to begin with and I still feel could have been resolved in a far better way.

However, I doubt that is going to be something that will affect future rounds. My main concern is that the mods do a better job in the future of communicating to players and also for having means of making sure things run smoothly. Lee mentioned on last round's HMD that Ni really needs to delegate better, and it was clear this round that is still an issue. We get that the mods can't help some of the stuff that happened this round, but you guys can do a better job in making sure every member of the mod team is capable of handling stuff. Outside of playing NPCs, there shouldn't be just one mod capable of handling most tasks. I'm sure Kay and Ren do plenty, but to us players it really looks like Ni is handling most everything because a lot of things really came to a halt in weeks 3 and 4 when Ni got sick. I don't fault the mods for the fact that stuff happened, the issue here is more that there weren't measures in place to ensure that someone else could handle stuff too.

[needlemouse]

Hi, Kay here! I can't address absolutely everything in this comment, obviously, but I can address the stuff that relates to me.


The short answer is that a lot of this boils down to me dropping the ball, and I'm sorry about that.

I'll start out by saying straight out that I really haven't been around at all to fulfill any of my responsibilities for the majority of this round. I've been going through a lot in my personal life - a lot more than just "oh I was out of town for one of the weekends," but I really don't feel like here is the time or place to get into specifics. The end result was that I severely underestimated how much the external stress would impact my ability to do... well, anything.

There are reasons I was not present, but I do not consider them an excuse. I had an obligation to all of you - players and mods alike - that I failed to fulfill, and I'm deeply sorry for how much I wound up letting you all down.


In regards to the first case - the original plan had actually been to have Nanaki alive for the trial. Having them both dead was actually a last-minute change because I'm horrendous at keeping track of when things are occurring and didn't realize my trip overlapped with the first trial. I thought it was a week later. I believe it was fairly shortly after I realized that and we had to abruptly change plans that something major went down in my personal life, which led to me not really being around to plan things like the visions. And then during the trial proper, I wasn't available to write it up ad-hoc.

The tl;dr of that is that you can blame any of Case 1's failures on me. They are 100% because I wasn't around when I should have been.


The issue with the distrust mechanic doesn't relate to me directly, but I did have a hand in trying to put that together, so I feel like I can at least speak to it in part. The intent was for the distrustful/negative thoughts to be imprinted onto PCs, much like memes are in The World Ends With You. At least on my end, I thought of it as a fun way to tie it in with the metaplot meme, and less so as a way to keep people from "splintering." I apologize that our intention was not well-communicated.


Regarding delegation - I do think this will get better as rounds go on from here! Please understand, I really don't think that any of us are intentionally just leaving everything to Ni, or that Ni is refusing to give us responsibilities. It's more that these rounds have been primarily Ni's brainchildren, and while there is documentation, in 99.9% of cases it takes longer for any of the other mods to dig up an answer for you guys than it would for Ni to just take it herself. Never mind that the majority of the mod team were missing at least a year and a half of vital information due to coming in later! It's been difficult for the lot of us to truly figure out where we slot in and nail down what our responsibilities will be, especially in the midst of this culmination plot. With future rounds becoming more standalone, I'm hoping we'll be able to really hammer out how delegation of duties goes.


So, there's a lot of words here, and I've spent long enough writing this up that I'm just going to post it and hope for the best that these don't sound like excuses.

I'm sorry for where I've failed you guys this round, and it's my sincerest hope I can do better for you all in the future.

[commandurr]

Ni here to second this. Generally, I don't respond to HMD because my own personal general philosophy is that actual actions speak louder than just posting "we will totally implement this" or "we will do better!". But I can confirm that a lot of the problems in this round specifically was because real life events severely and clearly negatively impacted how we ran R6. No way to sugar coat it-we were not remotely at our best this round and communication was no bueno.

Just to put into perspective-we were originally meant to have a larger mod team, which included the person who had come up with R6's canon as part of the overarching plot to begin with and who would have been the resident expert, which would have given us six people working on the round. Of those six, five of us had major Real Life events happen either in the months or even weeks or days leading up to R6, had to drop out of R6 as a result of Real Life, or had something happen during R6 itself, all which resulted in breakdowns in communication and just generally being able to participate fully in modding. The R6 canon expert also had to drop from modding and as a result, I ended up being the resident expert, more or less.

Not going to get into what others were going through, because that is not my business to say, but in my case, aside from work (which is also part of why we set R6 when we did, it was supposed to be best for me and everyone else), I ended up getting sick, as has been mentioned, during Week 3. It was a shitstorm to say the least. We probably could have (and, thinking on it, probably should have) even delayed the round, but ultimately, we didn't.

In regards to delegation, I'd been doing my best to try and do a better job delegating duties, because we didn't want a repeat of R5, and so I had been generally limiting myself to NPCing living Kyuubey/IT, investigation clues, posts and Vending RNG-ing. But as Kay said, Stuff happened, Real Life dumped on nearly everyone, and even having documentation and giving explanations to everything didn't always help those who hadn't been modding the whole time, because not everyone was as intimately knowledgeable of the plot as I was as head mod. (And even then, I got one somewhat big thing wrong about AWiT canon despite knowing the canon pretty decently, and didn't catch it!) As a result, at points there was little choice but for me to jump in and do stuff. In the end, the buck stops with the head mod.

In regards to the distrust mechanic. It's pretty much what Kay said, with the intent of both tying into the meta plot, and trying to prevent the things that...it ultimately didn't prevent. But the intent is also tied into communication and how we communicated it, and ultimately the fact of communication being the opposite of optimal because of the factors that hampered nearly everyone on the mod team comes back into play.

I could keep going, but in short: we sucked this round, and in particular with regards to communication. We are definitely aware we sucked this round, regardless of the reasons that hampered us. It's a big reason why we are taking a vacation to try and recharge, to reorient, and hopefully not have what happened this round to happen again. (And knocking on wood for the Real Life factors.) Also, to take the time to make more clear delegation of duties and backup duties now that we don't have to worry nearly as much about the overarching game narrative.

For me, I've been modding 15 Strangers for a little over three years now. When I am a part of a project I am invested in, I invest very heavily, and this game has been no exception. Even as I am writing this, I am working on bits of R7-mainly just the maps, but go figure. However, R6 really drove home that we all need to take a break and not simply be focused on 15 Strangers and developing it 24/7 during whatever non-working hours I have, but I especially need to step back from the grind for a bit and I am well aware of this. Because modding, as much as I love modding this game, can be a grind, whether the game is successful or not. It can be a drain on the health, no matter what. I'm still trying to recover from all the sleep I lost from last weekend, even though I and everyone else am glad that things turned out all right in the end.

I guess TD;LR is: we hear you guys, and we are very well aware of these very big issues that especially plagued this round. While there were reasons this was so, it doesn't excuse the issues, and we intend on making sure this doesn't happen again when R7 comes knocking.

[mermaidkin]

Gray and you have both spoken to my hint about the deadland visit now so I want to just address it really quickly. I agree completely with Gray that an announcement a couple hours earlier on the same day of the event should not qualify as following the guidelines of schedules and curfews that many players including myself have been requesting for the entirety of 15S's run (though many other players have wanted to prioritize spontaneity). I want to clarify that I did not mean the event was not important enough to warrant a placeholder. Rather, I myself am just an NPC player and did not plan this event and did not feel authorized to insist that there be a placeholder. Other events that I executive-produced did have a placeholder like the Week 2 Monday motive foreshadowing event. But I was even originally informed of the event in a manner that underscored Matt already knowing about the deadland visit because of playing Jun who was dead, leading me to feel that the mods considered confidentiality their tip-top priority. It was only when I realized that players coming in late could be faced with a choice between attending a meeting and attending the (deadland visit) event that I felt an obligation to do something. (Logic of events affecting the entire setting was a major concern from multiple players during MW3 because of everything occurring in a single house.) At that point we were only a couple hours away and I thought to myself "well, when the event's thrilling reveal only occurs at like 12:30 and we just get mere hints of Something Very Important at first at 12, is it that bad to have the hints at 10. No"

We can also see in hindsight that I just had genuinely incomplete (to the point of misleading or inaccurate) information about the event since I specifically thought the ghosts were going to go back to deadland relatively soon after the hosts' arrival comment at 3 PM EST, we repeatedly described this as "last minute part" and were subsequently shocked that there was enough time for characters to leave the premises and come back with other items.

Maybe I should have voiced a firmer opinion in favor of placeholders earlier... Anyway, I get it that you guys are probably talking more about the mods' role in that situation than my own, I just wanted to provide some more information. (Case in point: I had to post the Trial 2 announcement in discord, clearly not an inappropriate spoiler on my part but raises concerns about the mods.)

I would also say that Ni alone handling most/all, to the point of causing problems, of at least some task types was my impression of the duties pertaining to the Hosts this round. Going back to the deadland visit as an example, Ni was the only mod who was willing to express any guidance on how IT was going to react to the event and therefore how the Hosts under its command should react. It also seemed like IT's reaction to the visit was not planned out at all at first and only began to be worked on and considered when I requested this guidance. There are many other examples including much simpler tasks like posting me/Matt's stuff with the mod journal.