April Fools game feedback

IcyLiquid · April 2013

Since it seems like people want give feedback, here is a good place for it. No guarantees that I will do what you ask, or even respond.

But other than that, shoot!

Nullzone · April 2013

I am a silly goose, please see my later post for better feedback.

Sterica · April 2013

Kidnappers are becoming informants that can free people.

DemonStacey · April 2013

I'm not sure where the problem lies but I cannot see the masks.

They seem to be placed behind everyone's avatars on my end.

NickTheNewbie · April 2013

The hints, for the most part, seem to require intimate knowledge of forumers. The only one I've gotten was one that heavily implies that the riddle is talking about a mod.

Tofystedeth · April 2013

After the game is over it'd be cool to see a list of riddles and answers. I've got a few figured out, but some I have no clue.

POKÉMON MASTER WT SHERMAN · April 2013

this has been superfun

Tofystedeth · April 2013

FakeRequest:The ability to scale and position the mask to fit on our avatar better.

Henroid · April 2013

I've figured out one for sure, and like one I've had a guess about and I saw the answer for another because some people like to be wet blankets. This is hard!

Edit - One thing I would suggest for future use maybe is locking people to only being able to solve a riddle correctly once. Unless that's already in, I dunno.

Phyphor · April 2013

The spam is extremely annoying. Fortunately the kidnappable set of people is ever-decreasing

The Dude With Herpes · April 2013

The game is fine, a day of fun never hurt anyone, and if it bugs some people, a day off the forums never hurt anyone either.

My only complaint, i suppose, is the thread spam. I'll check my bookmarks and a thread will have 15 new posts and 14 of them are Geth spam. It's definitely interrupting conversation. But again, it's just a day, so /shrug

Sterica · April 2013

It might be best if Geth doesn't announce the kidnappings.

Nullzone · April 2013

Rorus Raz wrote: »

Kidnappers are becoming informants that can free people.

So it's a game that only people deemed cool kids by the moderators can participate in?

(I'm not trying to snark, but it's irritating to have a potentially fun activity implemented but not actually be able to get anything fun out of it)

Bluedude152 · April 2013

I have to agree with the thread spam, 30 geth posts in the minecraft thread was a bit much.

Also the people bringing back threads that are years old to kidnap people are ridiculous

zerzhul · April 2013

Yeah, I think that it would be better, for future iterations, if Geth didn't actually post. Especially since kidnapped forumers have their posts changed to the muffled words, it would be better to just leave it at that. If Geth *has* to post about it, maybe a dedicated thread for it that only Geth can post in? I definitely am enjoying the game, but the Geth spam in the strip search comments probably makes zero sense to a ton of people that are only here for the comments.

Gaslight · April 2013

Rorus Raz wrote: »

Kidnappers are becoming informants that can free people.

Specially-picked kidnappers, or random kidnappers, or what?

I have to agree that now that I'm a kidnapper there isn't a whole lot to do.

I'd also say the pool of riddles to free people seems kind of small. It appears there's only about...a dozen, maybe? And I think I had figured out all but a few by the time I got converted.

IcyLiquid · April 2013

@Nullzone I don't know what I can say to you here that will get the point across, but I'm going to try anyway.

I spent my Saturday and Sunday coding this game for you to play today. Nobody asked me to do it, I don't get anything out of it other than seeing people have fun, and it has used up a solid 20 hours of my time. You can either be a bitter shitlord about it, and call it "dumb" because it isn't a AAA title with no bugs, designed by a professional game designer, or you can try to enjoy it and them provide some POSITIVE CONSTRUCTIVE feedback to the developer, like a grown up.

I did the best I could in the time I had available, and that's the game. Constructive criticism is fine, like the people who are mentioning the thread spam are doing. Your comment is garbage and makes me never want to put more effort in again.

My urge to punish you is super high, and the only reason I exercise restraint is because I serve at the pleasure of Tube.

zerzhul · April 2013

Oh, also, restricting it to people who have logged in today (like the valentine's day game) would probably be very good. This would reduce the folks who are abusing the game on old threads/posters.

zerzhul · April 2013

Gaslight wrote: »

Rorus Raz wrote: »

Kidnappers are becoming informants that can free people.

Specially-picked kidnappers, or random kidnappers, or what?

I have to agree that now that I'm a kidnapper there isn't a whole lot to do.

I'd also say the pool of riddles to free people seems kind of small. It appears there's only about...a dozen, maybe? And I think I had figured out all but a few by the time I got converted.

There's a bunch, but they're randomly chosen.

zerzhul · April 2013

Nullzone wrote: »

Rorus Raz wrote: »

Kidnappers are becoming informants that can free people.

So it's a game that only people deemed cool kids by the moderators can participate in?

(I'm not trying to snark, but it's irritating to have a potentially fun activity implemented but not actually be able to get anything fun out of it)

Nobody picks the informants. Geth picks the informants.

Nullzone · April 2013

@IcyLiquid You're right, I'm sorry. It just seemed like a lot of fun going around but it's hard to sit on the outside of it and drum my fingers not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if it's the game not cooperating properly, or what. Especially when riddles are involved, when I'm almost positive I've solved one but can't find any way to prove it I go a little batty.

I was/am annoyed but that's no reason to take it out on you.

So let me rephrase my original post and get the constructive bits:

I'm not having much fun. I was kidnapped, got stockholm syndrome, and have now spent the rest of my time looking for non-kidnappers to actually interact with. Unfortunately, all the active forumers I interact with are kidnappers themselves, so I can't do anythting to them, which means I'm left only to hunt down obscure/inactive posters and kidnap them just for the sake of hitting the button.

To make things worse, I can't do the other side of it, either - since I'm now a kidnapper, I'm apparently not allowed to rescue those who get kidnapped?

All around it just seems like if you weren't involved in the first 6 or so hours of the game, there isn't much actual play to be had here, which is kind of disappointing. I like meta-games.

EvilBadman · April 2013

@icyliquid Please post the puzzles when the event ends. I'm enjoying them.

End · April 2013

it was a lot more fun at the beginning

I think it would have stayed better if the population of kidnappers was kept smaller somehow (like you could only kidnap X people or your ability to kidnap would go away after a while). Even with informants, you still have a lot of people trying to kidnap a smaller number of active victims (informants are mostly just keeping that active victim pool from shrinking even more)

POKÉMON MASTER WT SHERMAN · April 2013

Nullzone wrote: »

You're right, I'm sorry. It just seemed like a lot of fun going around but it's hard to sit on the outside of it and drum my fingers not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if it's the game not cooperating properly, or what. Especially when riddles are involved, when I'm almost positive I've solved one but can't find any way to prove it I go a little batty.

I was/am annoyed but that's no reason to take it out on you.

If you solve it there should be a notification in the lower-left of your browser window, and the person is freed, and Geth posts in the thread.

Sweeney Tom · April 2013

This game is superfun, and thank you all for coming up with and doing it.

Gaslight · April 2013

If I could make a suggestion/observation...maybe it would have been good to disable the game from the bug reports forum? I mean, there's been a couple threads today where people asked about legitimate, non-game-related forum issues, and then people kidnapped them. Obviously it's only a very minor delay in them communicating their issue and getting help, and I think Icy immediately freed the kidnapped people anyway, it just seems sort of like a silly goose move to me to make somebody's post illegible when they're trying to report a problem with the site and may not even be aware the game is going on at that point.

IcyLiquid · April 2013

Alright we cool.

FWIW I understand your complaint. Its just MUCH harder than you think to come up with perfectly balanced game dynamics out of thin air once every couple months. There's also really no way to test how it will play out beforehand. All I have is a mental simulation based on how I think things will play out, and I'm not a smart man.

Each time I make one of these though, I learn more about what works and what doesn't, and things get smoother and smoother.

kime · April 2013

End wrote: »

it was a lot more fun at the beginning

I think it would have stayed better if the population of kidnappers was kept smaller somehow (like you could only kidnap X people or your ability to kidnap would go away after a while). Even with informants, you still have a lot of people trying to kidnap a smaller number of active victims (informants are mostly just keeping that active victim pool from shrinking even more)

I'm really, really hoping for some stats when the day is done. I want to see how quickly the plague of "becoming a kidnapper" spread and such, it seems like it would be really interesting.

This is fun, IcyLiquid. It has a few faults, but I like these overall forum events like today and valentines day.

Nullzone · April 2013

POKÉMON MASTER WT SHERMAN wrote: »

Nullzone wrote: »

You're right, I'm sorry. It just seemed like a lot of fun going around but it's hard to sit on the outside of it and drum my fingers not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if it's the game not cooperating properly, or what. Especially when riddles are involved, when I'm almost positive I've solved one but can't find any way to prove it I go a little batty.

I was/am annoyed but that's no reason to take it out on you.

If you solve it there should be a notification in the lower-left of your browser window, and the person is freed, and Geth posts in the thread.

Right, but "solve" here is a non-obvious task - if I know who it is, how was I to implement a rescue? I could find no buttons or other indicators to prove the solution. It was only after a great amount of tabbing around that I confirmed my theory that, as a kidnapper, I wasn't able to also implement rescues.

L Ron Howard · April 2013

If I could suggest anything, it would be to reduce the Geth spam. Or if Geth is going to post like he is, maybe have him link to the post where the person is kidnapped so they can be rescued.
I know those have been mentioned before, but those are the only things I don't like.
Joining this late in the day, I've missed most of the fun towards the beginning.

EvilBadman · April 2013

IcyLiquid wrote: »

Alright we cool.

FWIW I understand your complaint. Its just MUCH harder than you think to come up with perfectly balanced game dynamics out of thin air once every couple months. There's also really no way to test how it will play out beforehand. All I have is a mental simulation based on how I think things will play out, and I'm not a smart man.

Each time I make one of these though, I learn more about what works and what doesn't, and things get smoother and smoother.

The fact that you get to do these, and enjoy making them is awesome.

Gosling · April 2013

What happened, over in the D&D chat, at least, is that the people trying to solve the riddles didn't recognize any of the forumers the riddles were about, or alternatively realized that a lot of them were about forumers from boards they don't go to. So people kinda just gave up even trying to solve them within the 10-minute frame and just pooled resources, kidnappers and free alike, to just try and noodle them out at all. The game changed from 'save the kidnapped forumers' to a mix of 'everyone try to figure out who the riddle's about' and 'can you kidnap more forumers than the next guy'.

I think the game's still fine (though that may be because I'm one of the people going around kidnapping everything that once moved). It's just... a different game than the one that was intended. Maybe at the end of the day, if you have the stats available to you, maybe put up some numbers for 'most saves', 'most successful kidnaps' and the answers to the riddles, to reflect what the game ended up being.

Gaslight · April 2013

L Ron Howard wrote: »

If I could suggest anything, it would be to reduce the Geth spam. Or if Geth is going to post like he is, maybe have him link to the post where the person is kidnapped so they can be rescued.
I know those have been mentioned before, but those are the only things I don't like.
Joining this late in the day, I've missed most of the fun towards the beginning.

I'd agree with linking to the post of the kidnapped person. It would make Geth's post more useful if he's going to post at all. Sometimes I had to search back a couple pages to find the kidnapped person to free them.

Gaslight · April 2013

Interestingly, right after I complained about the small pool of riddles, I see one (the one to free EvilBadman) that is totally unfamiliar to me.

Edit: And the game just seems to have turned off for me, no masks, no ropes, no buttons...

mightyjongyo · April 2013

For the geth posts, it would be helpful for there to be a link to the muffled/garbled post. I could be wrong about this but it seems like the geth post and the muffled post are not always in the same thread. If there are only a few threads that I look at, I won't necessarily see the muffled post and maybe more importantly, it makes it hard to participate because I want to make a guess but don't have a chance of finding the post.

As a mostly passive forumer, overall I think it's fun to watch everything going on. Thanks for doing this!

I needed anime to post. · April 2013

Gosling wrote: »

What happened, over in the D&D chat, at least, is that the people trying to solve the riddles didn't recognize any of the forumers the riddles were about, or alternatively realized that a lot of them were about forumers from boards they don't go to. So people kinda just gave up even trying to solve them within the 10-minute frame and just pooled resources, kidnappers and free alike, to just try and noodle them out at all. The game changed from 'save the kidnapped forumers' to a mix of 'everyone try to figure out who the riddle's about' and 'can you kidnap more forumers than the next guy'.

I think the game's still fine (though that may be because I'm one of the people going around kidnapping everything that once moved). It's just... a different game than the one that was intended. Maybe at the end of the day, if you have the stats available to you, maybe put up some numbers for 'most saves', 'most successful kidnaps' and the answers to the riddles, to reflect what the game ended up being.

This seems like the "big issue" here. It generally seems like the focus is on primarily SE++ forumers which makes participating in the entirety of the game difficult for people who trend towards one subforum. The concept of writing subforum-specific riddles - or something even more insane - seems like so much work though that I'm not sure there's a way to elegantly solve that.

Gaslight · April 2013

I think the SE++ crew wrote the riddles, yes? So naturally they used people they knew.

Tofystedeth · April 2013

hahaha, apparently you can't view Geth's post history. Is that a normal thing or a limitation put in for the game to avoid tricksy people stalking him for new kidnappings?

Nullzone · April 2013

I've never been able to view Geth's post history that I can recall

psyck0 · April 2013

All I can see are the kidnapped post announcements. I haven't yet come across a single "muffled post" or whatever they are supposed to look like, even when I have specifically looked back through the post history of someone who has been kidnapped to try to find it. I haven't seen a single rescue button. Now that I am a kidnapper I am supposedly able to kidnap people but I can't see a button to do THAT anywhere, either. I also can't see whatever these masks are supposed to be.

There is a really frustrating (read: absolute, complete and total) lack of documentation on what is going on, so I am unable to join in.

zerzhul · April 2013

Gaslight wrote: »

I think the SE++ crew wrote the riddles, yes? So naturally they used people they knew.

Negative. At least, I know that most riddles were written by folks that are active in multiple subforums.

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