In post 5327, Brian Skies wrote:
And your post, which is clearly taking shots at the mods, has perfectly acceptable tone?
I agree that the lack of reward in relation to the challenge was a problem. The dreams were vague and difficult to decipher, but the mods also thought the dreams would be obvious to figure out, and that probably played into their setup's design.
On day 1, watching people figure out what that day's dreams probably were, we thought (and Vi agreed) that we'd made the dreams way too guessable, and if we'd had it to do over after Day 1, the dream text would have become less obvious than what we put together for this game.
I think The day one selection was a combination of fairly easy to guess dreams. The day 2 dream guesses were also pretty spot-on, and I'm not surprised Day 2 was the day the scum team decided to use the dreamspike global block.
By Day 5, even though the Hider dream actually had the word "hide" in the text, and the image was someone hiding in a box, town had lost interest in guessing the dreams. That day, more scum players voted than town did, and they voted as a block so they got the dream they preferred.
Why this happened? I'm not sure. It probably had something to do with the Monty-Hall style partial reveals. "Do you want the dream you know something about, or do you want what's behind Door #2?"
All in all, I'm a little regretful about the Monty Hall approach. Maybe we should have provided the pictures to go with the text for all three dreams each day.
Another thing we discussed a lot with the reviewers was whether discussion of the dreams would get in the way of scumhunting, or if players would get tired of talking about the dreams and start ignoring them. At one point the moonrise phase was going to happen with an open thread so players could put off talking about the dreams until after the lynch was accomplished. The Monty Hall idea won out.
But I think we were onto something when we worried that choosing dreams would become less of a priority as the game progressed.
There are some aspects of this design that we'll use again. The Dreamtimer worked as expected, and definitely penalized players for stuff we thought would be bad for the game. We'll consider possible tweaks, but that style of deadline battery will show up again in future game designs of ours. Fortunately, in this game there was very little posting behavior we wanted to penalize aside from a few really reeeeaaaallllyyy slow real-life days.