HMD

[strangerpeople]

HMD




Hey everyone! It's time for HMD! We want to thank you for making this an amazing round. Seriously, I had a lot of fun, personally (I being...well, Ni. Hello everyone!) and I truly hope you guys had a great time as well. As always, what makes these rounds so amazing is you, the players, and players both old and new truly made this round a memorable experience.

However, there's always room for improvement, and of course, this round was not perfect on our end, no matter how much work we put in - we know it wasn't and isn't. Nevertheless, we always strive to do our best to do better and be better as time goes by and as each round is completed, we want to know how well of a job we've done to try and meet those expectations. And so, we leave it to you to let us know how we're doing.

Anon will be allowed. Have fun y'all, and we will hopefully see you...come Round 8!

Comments

[hatesdeerstalkers]

First off, I will congratulate you guys on finishing the round! Any mg takes an obscene amount of work on the mods part to pull off successfully to the end, and I thank y'all for making sure we all pulled through. Pat yourselves on the back!

I'll start with what I thought were good things from the round first.

I have to echo tulip in that the maps were very clearly well made, and a lot of thought did go into the setting details and clues. Mod responses were generally prompt or quick, which was also appreciated! The powers were generally pretty fun to work with, and I did appreciate y'all being so willing to work with me when I asked about how the dead could interact with the living and the battle to rejoin them.

Now I have to move onto the not so great parts.

First off, and this is a big one as someone who ended up spending a lot of time in the deadland: There was very little for the dead to do once they'd arrived, especially with mods having living characters they prioritized first over everything else. I'm not privy to what happened behind the scenes, of course, but a major reason a lot of dead characters just did not interact was due to that we were pretty much plopped down in a mostly empty space with very little to do, and this actively discouraged quite a few players from even interacting with the deadland. It also seemed like mods were expecting player characters to pick up the slack and make deadland fun with...very little to do or go off of. Especially given that the place we were in was a double of the House of Hades, it feels like this was an especially missed opportunity.

I know I was told I could contact the mods more, and that there were irl issues with the mods. But to be fully transparent, it felt absolutely awful to be ignored and waiting on mod tags which were my only way of playing in the game for a long period of time while watching you play out the badger thing in the living area. It genuinely added to the feeling of being a complete afterthought, and there were times I also considered just giving up as well because of it. The major reason I didn't was because I didn't want to potentially leave the living in a lurch with deadland only information being inaccessible to them, and that I genuinely loved the cast. I understand that this was not the intent of the mods, but unfortunately it is what ultimately happened.

Something I also have to stress is that I was not pleased with mods outright removing player agency at times or just not communicating with players on things they should have - a minor personal gripe is I would have preferred to have seen Moriarty's execution text before it was posted, in order to make a few minor characterization suggestions, but the most major thing that sticks out to me is giving a player a 'get out of death free card' and then forcing it to be used without contacting them or the character that was going to be revived first. It was an unpleasant shock to find out, after making plans with and looking forward to playing with Hubert in deadland, that no, he wasn't coming, and no, neither his player or Kira's had been even asked ahead of time about the usage of the item. I did make a complaint to the mods when this happened, but I have to stress again that something like this is not okay, especially in a hobby that relies on OOC communication like this one does.

Players can choose not to use a special item given by the mods, and this is okay - the fact that the revival was apparently pre-planned from the start doesn't change that you didn't let the two people who were involved with this know ahead of time.

This also dovetails into another complaint: a lot of the plot genuinely felt like players were just there to watch or react to it, with not much personal stakes in it beyond 'get out and stop being in the murdergame.' A lot of the visions were more focused on characters that, while having a connection to the true mastermind, meant very little to most of the player characters, or just seemed extraneous. I'm a newcomer to 15s, but hearing that there had been multiple rounds first that involved essentually random characters beyond the DMC ones that may or may not have been callbacks to previous rounds did...nothing for me. Especially when the reveal with Aoi and Hubert was made, and the whole 'we're in a timeloop' thing was revealed. There would have been a much better and more compelling storybeat if players got visions of those past rounds they participated in, especially in a Zero Escape themed round. As it is, it made it feel like only certain special characters ever really got to do anything. Zack was an especially big example of this, as week 5 felt like the mods just hammering in that he was very special and important to the plot over and over again. While he did end up being important to the plot, also having him be a player character on top of it made it feel very 'look at my character'. The final trial with the mastermind also felt very...well, it was mostly about characters that the living playerbase had no way of communicating with, and the dead playerbase had a hard time tagging. Nero as well felt like a part of the plot that could have been removed with very little changing about the overall story.

I was also not thrilled with the inclusion of an entire Canon OC character connected to one of the player characters - again, that you did not let said player know about ahead of time - being a major basis of the plot. I understand that the desire to have things remain a secret in regard to plot is a big one, but your first priority as a mod is to communicate clearly with your players and not blindside them with stuff they would need to have known about beforehand. This is an easy mistake to make (god knows I have in the past) but next time please either let a player know or re-write so there is no connection to them at all. It sucks having to re-write, but it's better to do that than risk alienating your playerbase.

In the end, I feel the plot of the game would have been better if it wasn't a three-way canon mashup, because a lot of the plot of the game felt stapled on together and didn't really naturally flow with each other. I wish more time would have been spent making sure the plot was more cohesive, instead of on the smaller and ultimately inconsequential details.

On a more lighter note, I also have to admit that I felt the minigames were an afterthought that didn't actually really...need to be there, and felt more like they were either due to a tradition or just to give players something to do. This on top of a weekly investigation (which would often give players more clues than the minigames) was just an odd decision, especially when said minigames were often late or even skipped over in one case. Again, I understand rl mod issues, but when this was a constant issue it would have been better to not have them at all.

I will also say it felt downright awkward or uncomfortable to be in the discord chat at times, though that is mostly due to a mod that has already stepped down from the team, so I will only say that I was not impressed with the team as a whole and will not be returning for another round. That being said, I do wish all of you well in any future endeavors, and hope things turn out better for you all next time.