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AKUDAMAX FEEDBACK POST
AKUDAMAX has been a unique challenge. With so many areas for investigation, opportunities for player plots, and general knick-knacks, we moderators found ourselves overwhelmed at first, and many comments were overlooked or delayed. (This included the Black Market. Criticism of the mechanic has been noted, and it will not return anywhere in future.) Sadly, it was necessary to shorten the game from the planned six weeks to four weeks, with a heavily modified endgame. We truly thank our players for their patience and compassion in cooperating with us to bring the game to a conclusion.
While there will be no "AKUDAMAX R2", we welcome your comments as moderators who may run games in the future, and will gladly address any remaining matters or questions concerning the current game. Comments are initially screened to allow anyone to voice confidential concerns. Feel free to write "please unscreen" anywhere in your comment and we will promptly do so.
While there will be no "AKUDAMAX R2", we welcome your comments as moderators who may run games in the future, and will gladly address any remaining matters or questions concerning the current game. Comments are initially screened to allow anyone to voice confidential concerns. Feel free to write "please unscreen" anywhere in your comment and we will promptly do so.
no subject
first, i wanna say the game had a great playerbase and i very much so enjoyed my threads and reading other players threads. the cast was great from start to finish and im glad i got to be part of it. that said, there were a lot of problems on the mod end.
having been on the mod side of things in parasom (even if just as a code mod) i can see some stuff changed and im glad, but it feels like overall this game had many of the same problems only worse.
i don't suggest modding again. some people find modding really rewarding but, being frank here, you dont seem to enjoy it. it honestly feels like youre annoyed whenever players do something you dont expect or deviate from your plans, then you... just don't want to work with them? or try to find ways to punish them. i am not sure how much of it was intentional and how much of it was subconscious but it was very obvious sitting in on talks with the raid and seeing how things played out that you did not want to engage it, did not want to give anyone anything, and despite saying you wanted to use it to springboard endgame you gave absolutely nothing and instead mashed all endgame info into explorations the next week. also, to be clear: the raid is one glaring example but it is not the only time i noticed this behavior.
like, i could be wrong about the above? but it honestly was really hard to read some of your responses to questions, see how you reacted to plotting, and how long it took to get answers to literally anything. most of the time it felt like you had no respect nor any faith in players and, uh, honestly? in some cases some stuff just felt weirdly manipulative. if you consider modding again then please reread any crit you got from parasom and from this game because most people only want to help improve and have given great advice. obviously not all feedback from parasom applies cause i do feel you were more open to creative solutions in parasom vs akudamax but much of it is still applicable.
also, consider getting more mods. a team of 2-3 is usually ideal but due to conflicting schedules you guys probably need 2-3 in addition to you two to handle investigations and a designated mod to handle announcements and discussions with players. based on the final case and then final week, you guys might've been relying too much on nick the same way you relied too much on michi in parasom. other than that my advice is to be more forthcoming and communicative cause the communication issues were really bad all game.
no subject
First I want to thank you for coming back and having an active presence in our game even after concerns with Parasomnia, where of course you were also very helpful as a code mod. (For followers at home:
So moving on to communicating with the players, there is a particular incident within the raid planning that I regret where a character used a different ability to remove their band, and I suddenly piled an injection on top afterwards in an attempt at fairness in the sense of equality of outcome. I can really see the possible manipulative affect here. Sometimes, in general throughout the game, I took a long time to come up with an answer to a player plot in an attempt to make sure it was meticulously presented, and sometimes in determining an answer in a shorter amount of time, I was unintentionally forceful or even completely misunderstood things. I am really sorry, my actions during the raid planning and other plotting were unwelcoming and hurtful.
There are a few more things I'd like to address in the hopes that knowing our plans will give you some peace of mind, rather than as a defense per se.
Any punishments in the game were intended to serve one or two purposes. One, to give the characters the opportunity to remain in the setting. Two, to elaborate on the story about conflict within a surveillance society. However, excessive punishments were a criticism in Parasomnia as well, and that had a totally different story. Furthermore, there were still issues with facilitating relationships in the sprawling setting. So this is cause for serious reflection.
In the case of the police station raid, maybe it would have been more accurate to say that the event could be used as an IC reason for the game to last 4 weeks instead of 6. Sorry about giving you really specific expectations that were not met. The leads to Chuo Tower, Ichiza, and the Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony were intended as valuable spoils, while there was still information spread across many other NPCs and locations. We were aware as soon as it was read on Wednesday that it was a total failure of pacing and simply resolved to provide exploration more promptly in the future, after using Thursday through Saturday for case preparation, investigation, and trial.
Thank you again for all your advice and support. We really appreciate it.
1/2
I took a while to compile this feedback because I wanted to make sure I was able to structure this into particular sections that I felt were most important; with that said, a number of the points discussed may overlap with another point made in other sections because some of these issues did affect multiple areas of the game. In addition, I want to note that I will be bringing up a number of specific examples here, which may include situations which already have been resolved; I do this not to shame or embarrass you guys, but rather because I feel it is more helpful to see how a particular issue has actually manifested during the game itself. These examples are also not meant to be an exhaustive list of instances when I saw these issues occurring either.
Anyways, here we go. In addition, it would be appreciated if you could please unscreen all sections of this feedback, thank you.
Communication:
In general, I feel that many, if not most of the issues in this game stemmed from poor communication. This includes things like lack of communication, miscommunication, making assumptions and poor tone.
Lack of communication:
This has been a consistent issue throughout the game, where players were not always informed of when things were going up, there were long delays when answering some questions and when players were not informed of delays, mechanics, or consequences. This was apparent as early as the first day of the game where it was unclear when weekly logs were going up, and continued well into the later weeks where we had to ask about when the Saturday endgame post was going up. Honestly, I feel like some of these issues were probably at least also partially connected to organization and scheduling too, so if it’s easier to keep up a Google Calendar or something for players to look at, then maybe that could help.
The other issues around surrounding delays (e.g. the week 2 investigation ended up hitting a lull somewhere in the middle where everything just seemed to stall for a couple hours and it was unclear why) can be easily rectified by telling people something came up and that things will resume in an hour or so (or however long you think it takes to resolve the issue). The same goes for some questions; it’s fine to say that you saw the question and you guys need time to discuss instead of just letting players sit in hours of dead air. While players understand that you guys aren’t at your computers 24/7 and can’t answer all questions rapidfire, it helps to reassure people that you saw their question and are working on it, especially since you guys have sometimes seemed to miss entire questions that were asked hours earlier.
Regarding lack of communication about mechanics: I understand there’s the desire to keep things hidden to surprise players or whatnot, but a lot of elements (e.g. the glitching effects, the voting mechanic) really should’ve at least had a token mention on the info pages. Since you couldn’t opt out of the glitching (even if the players could soft opt out by not playing it out in-game), I feel like it should’ve warranted some sort of warning that there would be elements of body horror or distorted perceptions or something like that. It doesn’t have to be worded to give away the twist, but it should’ve had some kind of mention just in case people didn’t want to play with that (or alternately, if they had a character pick that really would’ve worked well with the mechanic).
Regarding the confusion around the voting mechanic during the first trial, I don’t want to beat a dead horse about that point since I imagine getting a bunch of questions in mod-ask made that clear already. However, I do want to note that the response (telling players to bring these voting-related questions ICly) was not… great in my opinion, since it seemed to miss the point that players were OOCly confused and seeking OOC clarification. Even if the concern was that players who aren’t active in Discord wouldn’t see the answers, I feel like it would’ve been better to stick to OOC channels to address the confusion (e.g. crossposting clarifications in the trial Plurk).
Lastly, I don’t want to belabour the point about unclear consequences since I feel like you guys likely get the point by now after some of the plotting we’ve done. However, I just want to emphasize how important it is to reach out to players when there’s any kind of plotting involved since that was such a big issue throughout the game. I appreciate the fact that there were efforts to address this in the last week, particularly when I was asking about destroying the hotel building and everything related to that, so thank you for being transparent and for keeping everyone involved updated on how it would affect them.
2/2
I'm not sure how else to put this, but sometimes it feels like questions just aren't answered properly. I don't mean in terms of detail, it's more that sometimes it feels like the point of the question is missed entirely, or that the mod answer requires the player to interpret the intention instead of providing an explicit answer. Let me provide an example from mod-ask.
Around the end of week 1, there was a question about if the Kansai internet had music videos and parodies of popular English songs. While part of the question was answered (about the kind of music videos available), the second part of the question about popular English songs was left unaddressed while a link to an investigation about the music available in the setting was provided. While a player can interpret the intention here (that there are no mentions of English songs in the investigation and therefore there are no English songs available in general), it's just better to be explicit and provide a yes/no answer if a yes/no question is being asked.
Another small example that came up earlier in the game was whether or not comments with NPCs or investigations counted towards AC rewards. Again, rather than leading off with a yes or no, there was an oblique answer referencing something written on the AC page and how it was only talking about the Friday murder investigation.
The point is, sometimes it feels like these answers end up getting caught up in elaborating on details rather than directly answering the question. While some additional details are appreciated (especially if players ask for it), just be mindful of double-checking that you're actually answering the question that is being asked.
Making assumptions:
This has been another consistent problem throughout the game, which is that you guys seem to assume a lot about what players and characters will do instead of asking. This has created multiple problems in the game, from smaller posts (e.g. Lucilius stealing a computer from the net cafe) to larger plots like the police raid and even endgame.
Some of these assumptions also often feel unfair in ways you might not realize, and I want to bring up the case of Lucilius stealing the computer as an example. First of all, I do want to say that again I'm grateful that consequences for Belial were rolled back and I'm glad you guys were responsive to that situation. However, there were still issues with how the consequence post was basically plopped down and assumed a lot about how Lucilius and Belial would react to the arrest (e.g. that Lucilius wouldn't struggle, or that Belial wouldn't intervene, etc.). I understand you guys are busy and this was not meant to be a big event, but getting players involved in a discussion really helps address where potential misconceptions might come up and allows players to write their characters as reacting in a way that's authentic and IC for them.
Similarly, there were issues with making assumptions about what the characters would do during the police raid plotting (e.g. characters would kill the Commissioner right in her office). Rather than asking about certain details or requesting elaboration on certain points we had on the Google Docs we were using to organize our plotting, a mod response was drafted up with very little communication to us. As a result, we had to use a lot of extra time to clarify certain things and correct particular misconceptions that were made in the mod response. To be frank, the process would've gone far more smoothly if you guys had asked us details before writing up the mod response since it saves everyone the frustration of needing to backtrack constantly.
Furthermore, because of how the mod response was formatted (as a separate Google Docs), it also did not feel like a discussion at all and contributed to the sense that you guys weren't interested in hearing what we had to say. Obviously, I don't think that was your intent at all, but there is a difference in tone between sending a long letter-like response to our plot ideas versus asking us questions on how certain parts of the raid would be handled. The latter shows someone as being more open to player contributions while the former comes off as less open to discussion and changes.
Ultimately, my advice here really just boils down to ask players for clarification if you're not sure or if they didn't specify certain details you feel are important. It's always better to make sure instead of risk perpetuating miscommunication because a bad assumption was made somewhere.
Poor tone:
I'm not sure if this happens because you guys are stressed out or are just feel pressed to answer quickly so you don't check how you word things, but sometimes certain answers or responses in chat come off as condescending or borderline passive aggressive. It's hard to point out specific examples here because I feel like it was a cumulative effect over the whole game and it wasn't something that was necessarily limited to the mod-ask channel either. Part of this was also probably exacerbated by the other communication issues mentioned above, so it really felt like players weren't necessarily being listened to or considered at times.
However, one in-game instance that really stuck out to me was this mod interjection during one of the endgame week meeting threads here. The fact that the questions were quite pointedly leading felt really condescending and it was offputting to see this in the middle of a meeting. I understand not wanting players to misinterpret evidence and clues, but there were better ways to handle this then to do this. If it's really that important, the onus is on the mods to provide additional hints so players can actually get to the right conclusion, rather than doing this OOC nudging in mod tags or otherwise.
Organization and Modding:
Investigations and Workload:
I understand there were some random tidbits of lore and whatnot that you guys wanted to get out during the week and I appreciated that you guys were willing to drop that stuff even when people didn't specifically investigate an area. With that said, I really got the feeling you guys were stretching yourselves thin at some points because some of the mod responses came quite slowly and basically had to be backtagged into the next week. I really do recommend telling people OOCly to just not start new investigations on Thursdays because you're working on case stuff, and request that people not investigate more than one location per week.
Endgame Scheduling:
While I'm aware that endgame was hastened, I wanted to bring up the scheduling here because I recall it being an issue in Parasomnia as well. In general, it would've really helped to give us all a heads up how endgame would go at the start of that week, even if it was a post mentioning that Monday to Friday would be time for us to investigate the setting and Saturday at 12:00 PM would be for the final trial/confrontation. Instead, we were just sort of left in the dark outside of some comments made in the General channel, which were easy to miss. This led to a lot of us not exploring places which had the plot clues early on in the week. (As an aside, providing basically three week's worth of areas all at once probably contributed to this issue too because I recall just feeling overwhelmed at the number of new locations.)
In any case, providing the endgame route post alongside the endgame schedule on the Sunday of that week honestly would've been better for activity since we would've had more direction from the start of the week. Instead, since the endgame route post was put up late on Wednesday night, everyone basically had to scramble to investigate in the second half of the week, which was also awkward since it seemed like there was an event of sorts set up for Friday via the ribbon-cutting ceremony. It would have also made it clearer that Friday was still mostly meant for investigation and the ribbon-cutting thing was optional, since I recall being a little confused about if Friday events were important to endgame or not.
While I understand that you guys might've wanted to keep things flexible because of how endgame could change, please remember to provide players with some kind of OOC guideline and schedule for endgame, since people need to know for planning purposes.
Miscellaneous:
I compiled some of these here because I couldn't find another appropriate section to put them in and they're pretty self-explanatory, but please consider the following:
Game Mechanics and Plot:
I recognize that the game ended earlier than anticipated and thus certain plot beats or hints may not have been showcased properly due to the sudden adjustments made to the game, so I’m going to try and keep this section relatively short and limited to things I felt were issues before the early endgame was announced.
Powers:
I’m going to be frank; it really didn’t seem like the setting or NPCs were set up to be able to deal with some of the OP characters we had in the cast. The NPCs were woefully underpowered considering we had people who could mow down armies of mooks (much less poorly armed civilians and normie police officers), nuke sections of the city and teleport circles around other people. I was lucky to be on a character who would play around and not try all that seriously, but I can imagine it being awkward for others who played characters who would have no IC reason to behave and would be likely to go all out when fighting. I know OOCly, we as players are responsible for limiting our characters so we don’t ruin other people’s fun, but it was still kind of awkward to play around; I know one of the selling points of the game was little to no nerfing, but I really think you guys should’ve nerfed some of us so the NPCs could actually pose a credible threat.
Because of this, there was honestly very little IC reason for some characters to take the NPCs or the setting seriously--and honestly, this would be less of an issue if it didn’t seem like you guys had some kind of aversion to larger-scale plots like the police station raid. During the plotting of that raid, it really seemed like you guys underestimated the amount of firepower and skills some of these characters had; the one example that comes to me off the top of my head was that it was estimated that they couldn’t free all the prisoners and destroy the building because they didn’t have the manpower, which was kind of egregious considering you guys didn’t even ask us about the characters’ capabilities beforehand. It also made some potential executions pretty awkward; not all characters are going to sit down and take it, and I find it really hard to believe that Liz could’ve restrained characters like Sephiroth, Zenos, Akira or Belial long enough for them to be executed. Maybe you guys had something else planned in those instances, but considering how underpowered the Mastermind seemed (especially since most of the attacks seemed to be based on hard light anyway?) it just felt like it would’ve been underwhelming to see them executed via the Commissioner or something.
Glitching & pods:
While I assume the reveal about the glitches being an illusion were always planned to be an endgame thing, I feel like this was something that worked better as a plot element in a story rather than a mechanic in a game. Maybe we didn’t investigate the right things, or maybe you guys intended to drop more hints in the second half of the game, but I just feel like having a major mechanic like this (particularly since the pods were advertised every week) turn out to be an NPC lie that we couldn’t really get much info about felt kind of… disingenuous, I suppose? Checking out the pods and monitors when the treatment was occurring didn’t seem to do much, doing Internet searches didn’t bring up anything, they couldn’t get close to the area where one of the characters ‘exploded’... the list goes on.
It’s particularly egregious because the inconsistencies associated with one of the effects (apparent displacement to the side) would’ve also been very obvious to many of the characters even as they do everyday tasks (e.g. reaching to grab a drink and missing entirely because they miscalculated the apparent distance, bumping into something because of perceiving it to be further away, etc.). I also don’t feel like there were also many indications in the setting or otherwise about hardlight projectors or whatnot being everywhere to facilitate the glitch illusion either, which made the reveal feel like it came out of nowhere; I think there were ways to foreshadow early on it was a lie, it’s just that they didn’t seem to be there. As it is, I feel like a lot of the characters were just suspicious of Liz’s info and affiliations, which is why ICly a lot of them didn’t buy into the pod thing.
I could be wrong about some of the details here, of course. However, I do feel like there just wasn’t enough info to contradict or counter the fact that the NPCs were lying about this whole thing, which kind of made it feel like the reveal was done as something of a ‘gotcha’. Again, feel free to correct me if I misinterpreted certain things or whatnot here since I know this is kind of a ymmv thing, but that was my impression as I was playing. It’s possible the glitches were never meant to be that important, but it just seemed like it was from how it was presented in the NPC intro log and with the pod headers each week.
Anyways, sorry to have gotten so long-winded with this, and apologies for submitting this so late. I hope you guys found this helpful although I also echo what Mandee said up above about rereading some of the Parasomnia feedback too, because it did feel like a lot of issues that came up there also returned in this game. In addition, feel free to hit me up anytime if you guys want me to clarify on anything I've mentioned in here, since I'm aware I ended up a little scattered at times when elaborating on some of the points.
no subject
Organization and Scheduling: Thank you for the notes on examples of announcements (or lack thereof) that were particularly confusing. We had a lot of daily events in this particular game's story to show the ebb and flow of the city. Based on the problems with scheduling these events and any other events, we will be looking at a lot of different options including reducing the amount of events. As it was, many planned elements of the game were cut and reframed due to the reduced runtime (and I'll come back to this later to explain some specific elements).
It is especially important to know what players need in an endgame post. While specific circumstances contributed to the format, it is still good to know about the ways in which Discord or other channels are the most useful to the players. Furthermore, we take the many players' comments about the mechanics very seriously and have learned a lot about what needs to be present in information pages for the game.
Communication: I am likewise grateful to be trusted with examples of times that communications from the mods did not strike the right tone. Honestly it is true that sometimes I straight up misinterpret things, even direct questions. Sometimes I think that I am giving people an opportunity to "revise a response if necessary", or am giving them "more information that is relevant to their actions in the game", when it is important to be aware that it was not formatted in an appropriate way based on their experience, and I convey my apologies to all players who experienced these problems. I will try my best to learn from what happened in the game and make sure that we dedicate enough time to plan each event.
Powers in the game: It is actually true that Liv could not solo e.g. Belial, and that we had a lot of very different plans for such situations. It was coincidental due to player character actions that each of the three trials were resolved pretty differently from the hosts bringing down the hammer, and hopefully these resolutions were satisfactory to the players. Even so, based on events overall particularly the police station raid, we completely agree that the game would probably have been improved with a different balancing on powers.
Role of pods in the story: Thank you for sharing your perspective, it is always good to know as a writer whether parts of the story "work" for someone. I will explain how the elements had been unified in our plan since that might be of interest. In terms of advertising the pods, this was one of the activities that could have been a path towards the Zendama/Zendamax endings. The "composite line" on the graph showed the characters' willingness to accept an "ideal world", which was related to the graveyard/Kanto element of the story. A large proportion of the characters were suspicious, rebellious, and generally inclined towards the Akudama/Akudamax endings instead, which is totally okay. Likewise, some of the other event opportunities in the game (though none advertised quite as overtly) might have been ignored or rejected by a more compliant and lawful group of characters.
The extreme attention to covering up events such as the character's explosion and the vans moving bodies was supposed to itself be the suggestion that a façade was being projected and socially protected. The glitch illusion was wirelessly conveyed from Chuo Tower into the characters' technologically enhanced bodies (this may have never been explicitly stated). It's more an illusion in the sense that it was externally induced and not an inherent result of their cells the way that Liv falsely stated. So that's why the effects were "real" (in their daily lives grabbing cups and so on) and why there weren't smaller projectors anywhere.
Thank you again for your time in the game as a great player as well as after the game working on this feedback, especially as you have been gracious towards us and given a chance to try again after specific issues arose in the game. We appreciate everyone who was part of Akudamax as well as Parasomnia and will be carefully considering everything going into the future.