Miscellaneous Commentary (Part One)
When I designed things, I wanted everyone to have some level of paranoia. I was getting awfully frustrated, since instead of SOME paranoia, it seemed like players were having OVERWHELMING paranoia. I was also worried that if I intervened in a certain way, there would be no paranoia. Eventually, this problem corrected itself, settling down into just the right levels, where I actually expected the paranoia to be. A level where town and scum equally benefited/suffered from it. Confusion caused town to submit actions hurting town, but also helping town.
The game was always going to be a puzzle, but it was meant to be solved primarily by scumhunting, with roles being used to fill in the gaps. Information at the disposal of the town was meant to give them the edge necessary to survive the onslaught of chaos and disorder and general kill-happy populations in the game, where they would be able to sift and sort through what I had given them thusfar and make deductions, deductions that would piece by piece get closer to the setup as it was, but probably never fully getting the whole thing.
So many people thought (wrongly) they had figured it out, when I was practically screaming at them the correct answer. Even the scum fell into this, at various points in time, when the answer was right before everyone: a simple trick. In spite of there being six town factions (undead, vampire, individual, west, east, north), all of them together comprised the town; in spite of being separate, the individual nosferatu and undead risen slaves share a wincon which made them special, there were two mafia, and there was a cultafia which nothing was known about.
It didn't help that I was bombarded endlessly with a string of question after question with these complex mechanics. Now, mind you. I'm autistic, so that gives me a brain-wiring that is different from most. So two people asking a question which might mean the same thing could receive two different answers because they worded it slightly differently, and my brain therefore interpreted the question (meant to be the same) in a different way.
Different ways of asking wasn't the only problem; different roles would also have different responses because their wincons were different. For instance, an obvious divergence: I had to give a different response to the undead risen slaves than I would to those with a pure town wincon, because the undead risen slaves
weren't
purely town. In short, I didn't quite have a standardized response, aside from: "Go read the game mechanics." When I had designed the game, I was expecting the game mechanics to be self-explanatory.
And to be fair...they were. Many people in the signups gave me PMs along the lines of, "Hey, I want to ask you something", I was like, "Sure, shoot", they read the mechanics post, and were like, "actually, nevermind, the mechanics post answered it for me". I built it to be as thorough and detailed as humanly possible, to answer any possible concern, so when people were questioning me, most of my answers were just paraphrasing the mechanics post, restating its words differently, maybe slightly elaborating on them, and giving them a more clear answer, but it was still a frustrating mess to be in: people thought there were all these contradictions, and I was trying my damnedest to face 28 players bombarding me simultaneously often from multiple sources (private chat, PM, topics, game thread), so keeping that in order was...well, not very easy, and I do apologize for that.
Another thing to apologize for was the miscalculation in balance. Now! Granted. This was a role madness, multiball, cult, game. It was ALWAYS going to be swingy. I underestimated the town's strength and overestimated the scum's, even if only slightly, though, and that led to a gamestate where the players doing the best at surviving were the lurkers, because the players who were active were self-destructing, drawing all sorts of negative attention to themselves be it town or scum. Not ideal.
A fun fact about the colors this game which people didn't seem to notice: I decided that the west empire would be red because of the desert. I decided the northern tribes would be cyan because of that color's association with ice. I decided that the east kingdom would be yellow because of their plains, with the undead risen slaves as orange to be close in color to yellow, and individual undead as green to represent their jungles. I decided silver for individual vampire to represent their pale skin, and gray for individual nosferatu for much the same reason.
Black was chosen for isolationists because of its tie to the night. Crimson was chosen for the wulden because it's a typical scum color aside from red, and blue was chosen for the individual humans for the same except on the pro-town side. I wanted scarlet for individual wuldens, though later learned the board doesn't support that color, and chose brown for individual lycans, both thanks to how close they were to the wulden color. This, of course, wasn't picked up on, just like the relationship between names, that I told you about in
the opening flavor, wasn't.
You know all those character names? They weren't random. This wasn't from a source material, though; it was my head. So, how were their names meaningful? Because I had pre-assigned certain names to certain places, as per the documentation both in
the original posts and in
the modding PT. This is actually where some of the nation/location check value could be found: certain regions would make more sense for a character name's origin than others.
Speaking of the names: the names for the individual factions were easy. West/East/North, easy. Cult, easy. I had a little bit of trouble naming the Wulden, Isolationists, and Undead Risen Slaves, though. This might not have seemed important, but with a FACTION COP in the game, and the possibility of people flavor-speccing (I didn't expect them to use it so heavily, but I wasn't blind to the possibility it could exist), I knew that I needed to pick their names carefully. To this day, I'm not happy about my selections, because I think choosing the faction name "Wulden" for the Wuldens solidified the idea of race = faction (the opposite of what I wanted), and the name Isolationists did not properly convey...well, anything.
So overall, I think that this will be the largest-scale game I will ever do. Largest on flavor. Largest on mechanics. Largest on number of players. Largest on everything. It was a TON of work, at every stage. I quite literally devoted the last three months of my time exclusively to this game, at the expense of all other activities. It was a lot to think out, every minuscule flavor detail to enrich the world of Agnigi. Every mechanical interaction, and how to deal with it all. Every bombardment I was assaulted with. Every day that I needed to read posts, and deal with them as effectively as possible. (I received many players complaining about other players at various stages of the game, and playing the literal definition of moderator, I had to do my best to smooth things over.)
It was all a lot of work, a love letter to mafiascum of me giving my heart and soul to a game, which I wanted everyone to enjoy. Which I wanted to be a blast, I wanted to be a good thing everyone would enjoy, so I hope I at least partially succeeded there. To be honest, when I designed the game: I advertised it with the line, "This is a game that I absolutely guarantee you: if you don't play, you'll wish you had!" and also, "I absolutely promise you: this is not a game you'll want to miss." That's because when I designed it, I wanted it to be a game which, without any shadow of a doubt, would be
game of the year material.
I'm not sure I succeeded: the game wasn't quite perfectly balanced, and there's been a lot of postgame bitching, which there was also plenty of during the game: "mastin isn't telling us our alignment" "mastin this game was broken" "mastin this game is predictable", dead thread, PM, scum threads, and so on and so forth. I meant for the game to be "Frustratingly Fun": for players to be frustrated at the difficulty level involved, but for it to still be, first and foremost, primarily, FUN! I wanted it to be a game everyone would enjoy, and everyone would come away from thinking, "I would play this game again", or similar. Given the reactions, I don't think I quite got it down, in spite of my work as a moderator. Being there as much as possible, with VCs, with answers, can only take you so far, so I don't think I quite made my mark as I wanted.
Still! While I didn't get that, "Oh, yeah, this was definitely THE game of the year!" reaction I was hoping for, while I didn't nail down things perfectly, while I did make a fair share of mistakes, I think that I did succeed overall: this was a momentous game. It was massive. It was grand. It was an epic project, which I shared with the world, from start to finish, taking you along for the ride. And I hope the rollercoaster was worth it in the end.
![:]](./images/smilies/icon_smiling.png "Cheerful Smile"){kind=icon}
