Just to add my two cents. These Live events last week were my first ones. I am a fairly new player. They were a blast, but like everyone else has said before me, there are some issues that arose. I am going to try and be brief about this, since a lot of good points have already been made, and there is no reason to rehash things. On the actual content of the missions: Montreal mission The teamwork in the google doc was amazing. The connection with the field agent through Periscope was awesome, we could actually see what was happening and if we had sent the agent to the correct place. The immersion was fun. The fact that you managed to sneak a picture of the agents taking a picture and post it on twitter was impressive. The clues were mostly balanced. I felt only the last clue was a bit vague, and I don't think we would have gotten the right place if there hadn't been a clue from Dispatch. Operation Jadelion The first puzzle was difficult, and left a lot of people stumped for hours. But I admire the fact that you guys were sparse with the clues, especially because it turned out, some agents were on the right track early on. Which taught me never to leave a lead unfollowed and don't trust someone too quickly when they say it's a dead end. The rest of the puzzles and live portions were a blast to follow (again Periscooooooope!), but they were solved fairly quickly. I did not participate too much in the last part, the attack plan. The idea of it worked and got people to work together, but in my personal opinion it was more a task for a small group of players. Perhaps you could have accepted multiple attack plans from multiple groups, so that more people had something to do. This part also did not gel well with me immersion wise, because personally I don't see how modern weapons would work against a mythological being able to control lightning. But that is a personal opinion. On community issues: Personally I don't think using Teamspeak is a bad thing. In a game where you always have a ton of programs and tabs open it is just easier to communicate with people without having to read and type. I honestly believed it was an official channel of communication, because when Discord was suggested, it was pointed out that there already was a Teamspeak channel. If we all agree that the forums and IRC are the only official channels, then we should make a bigger effort to mainly use those channels. The fact remains that there will always be issues with any medium we choose. A google doc that anyone can edit is open to trolls posting red herrings, a whiteboard that anyone can draw on immediately makes people draw penises. It's up to us to make sure everything works smoothly. However I kinda want to point out that the people in Teamspeak are not purposefully withholding information from the rest. In fact I can think of only 2 missions that were solved too quickly in Teamspeak. And that was more a matter of individual people solving it quickly than a disconnect between voicechat and IRC. It went fast for the others in Teamspeak as well. Even we were asking excitedly what was going on when someone shouted "I think I got it". And it was posted in irc almost directly after it was confirmed that the mission was solved. I think most of these missions were meant to be solved by a single person, or a small group. This causes people to feel left behind when they were not witness to the thought process. When you get a group of people working together there are always going to be people who take charge and are ahead of others. Because this game is played with a large community it is our responsibility to make sure no one walks over someone trying to be heard. We have a lot of veterans who know the ropes. Maybe pull the new agents into the conversation, ask for their opinion, make them contact dispatch etc etc.
This makes a few good points. Again, this references the existance of "power players." This is really not something that can be easily fixed imo. I like the idea that was posted regarding a separate channel on IRC for live missions, like we did with the secret missions of season 1, etc... I try to include and accept any new players opinions or ideas, but obviously that cannot be said for everyone. Sometimes people get so excited about what is happening they forget to listen to newbies as well, as they have their own say in certain matters. Again, I feel that the mission itself was great, but I feel that the best missions were stuff like FALCONREACH, NIGHTFALL, and BLIND ANGEL. These missions took their time with things, while these felt... Idk... Rushed? Like, the mission was fine, but there were sections that happened so quickly, that after I got back from work, 3 seperate objectives were completed within the 8 hrs I spent at work. I get back, and we are already done. I like it when missions are spread out over the course of a few days, not just one or two. Also, the stuff like the cryptography page on TBW from Nightfall brought the community together in an amazing way. Just my opinion
Okay, I've monitored the whole Feedback thread for a while now and I want to add something to the oppinions Presented by various agents. Personal oppinion and problem analysis First of all the seemingly wide spread idea of denying alternate channels of communication and focusing ALL communication on the IRC and the forums. This is a very bad idea. Focusing all information to be piped through two single channels without any preprocessing outside of the community's public information channels, which are IRC and forums, will result in atleast one of them, the IRC, becoming clogged with data, overflowing the chat with posts and making it hard to impossible to follow it. So we shouldn't entirely deny the use of other channels of communication, this is a very bad idea, beacuse the live missions rely heavily on the individual performance aswell as the performance of the community as a whole. But forcing all communication resources used to be entirely accessible to the public would remove the individual performance part. Please keep in mind that I'm only talking about entirely denying ALL other channels. What we definitely need to have the live events stay playable is the creation of smaller groups outside the community that people can cycle Ideas through before posting them to the public channels. In general the existance and general use of other channels for, lets call it, "Idea Preprocessing" is not a problem at all and it is first and formost unavoidable by any means, if the dev's were to block it from the game, it would just continue in smaller, more secret groups. Driving the elitism and grouping in the community forward. The problem we seemingly have, or not have, depening on who you ask, is that there are groups that hold back information in order to get the prestiege of "Solving the puzzle first.", but I want to add that the agents using the TS server provided by JantsoP is not one of these groups. Its not intended to hold back information from the community. While it is true that especially on the last part of the live mission the TS just took the cake and posted their crafted attack plan to dispatch, leaving no option for the IRC to review it. In fact that was due to the nature of the mission, not the nature of the TS. The mission was a 1 hour time trial and even though TS was used as an aid, it was still solved only 5 minutes before the deadline. Solving this mission entirely on IRC would've probably resulted in failure, just because of the tight timeframe that was given to us. Suggestions So my first suggestion of course is, as a community, keep all information you craft outside the official communication channels as public as possible. Noone should demand other channels to be permanently closed or people constantly doing voice transcripts of the TS, but it should be obvious that no matter what you use to collaborate and with whom, you should keep the information sharing fair at all times. The next suggestion is not for the community but rather for the devs, you should make it more obvious how credit is given in live missions, because people seem to assume that you get extra credit for sending in the solution for the current step, which shouldn't be a case. All agents active at any time of the live event should be given full credit for participation, noone should be valued more or less, so we can avoid "prestiege grouping". Another suggestion in general for livemissions is to rework the way that you can get the achivement for participation. My choice would be to have everyone who connected to the client and entered the sitroom to automaticly be able to claim the live mission as completed on their next login, everyone who was unable to connect to the client during the mission should be given a about 6 hour time window to connect after the mission was closed and a total of 24 hours to use the code system already in place so as many agents as possible can get the participation credit. The last suggestion is to make the live puzzles less time intensive, because tight schedules justify the need for faster, more clean means of communications, to reduce the "overhead" of filtering useless information out of the stream.
Aetheros, I like you as a person, you know this. That being said, I think you're completely off base here. The last thing we want to do is further split our resources by 'pre processing' things. Rather than say 'well people want to form cliques to solve puzzles and we can't stop that' we need to foster an attitude of community and cooperation. I don't think credit is an issue-- if I recall, you are the only person who seemed concerned about being credited for things, in the last mission. Most of us seem to understand that when something is sent to Dispatch, it will almost always be credited to the community as a whole. I don't think we should be using team speak for live mission solving, for reasons involving accessibility and people talking over each other/being disrespectful, as well as potential logging issues. I posted a potential solution to the IRC clogging problem you brought up, but really I think this problem can be best solved if we all accept that it is a problem(and it is, Aeth. Continuing to say you're unsure it is when so many people have said they feel it is a problem is just kinda rude IMO), and be mindful of our actions moving forward. I'm not saying information was deliberately withheld at any point, but we were not behaving in a way that was mindful of the IRC and forums. That needs to change, and the first step is acknowledging that there's a real issue here.
This right here is a problem we need to combat. A fan declaring something official doesn't make it official, but poor communication leads new people to believe it is.
Well, I think you didn't quite catch what I was talking about, might have been a phrasing issue on my side aswell. I am not denying we don't have an issue, I'm just saying that the solutions presented are sometimes very ranty and not througth through. The whole preprocessing model was part of the figurative scenario where we would treat IRC as the definite only channel of instant communication. So all thoughts would go there, no exceptions. Which is of course an exaggerated scenario, because that wouldn't happen, but I added that just to show exactly that fact. The dream solution of just using IRC and the Forums for without exception, everything, just won't happen. Because if it did, it would become a problem of its own and we'd go back to square one anyway. So this should show that its impossible to fully deny the use of other means of communication. What we very well can do is advice administration and thoughtfull use of ressources. As in, "don't jump on TS if IRC would be enough to solve the mission", which as said by many aswell, is very dependent on the nature of the mission itself and would not only require discipline from the community, but also mission design that wouldn't make it so easy to bypass said disciplinary rules such as a 1 hour timeframe. Which I guess everyone can agree on being a bit to short for a mission that was meant to be solved in a 150 user IRC. You're also mistaken in me not being aware of the problem, what I'm unsure of is how big it ACTUALLY is, I'm not suggesting that it might be unimportant. I'm a game-dev myself, so I very well know that no community issue is unimportant. What I'm saying is, you are post number 24 on this thread, if you substract the initial dev post and this type of "Feedback on Feedback" stuff thats going on in here, we only have about 15 posts of actual community feedback, thats really littel compared to the 100-200 people who were around during the live mission. Without enough feedback given, the problem might allways be smaller, but aswell be far bigger then any of us imagines. This also boils down to a communication issue, I don't know how many players even know this thread exists. I don't want to undermine the complaints posted in here. But I also want to avoid jumping to conclusion to fast. Currently the solution is pretty easy, leave out any other channels of communication as much as possible, again, entirle is just not happening, I'm not going to ride the idealist road here. But there might be issues that we haven't yet discussed in this thread at all, that would have to be taken into account. On another note: This whole discussion and the general ranting on the TS server being available caused the server being temporarily closed, effectively denying means of not solving puzzles, but as just hanging out and having fun as a community. While I do agree that the TS needs fixing during live events. I can't accept the fact that this feedback thread transformed into an argument thread against the TS in general. Which is another reason why I say that the problem is not there being other channels of communication available to the community, because the TS in general is fine, but the problem is how we use them.
I am not sure if it is useful to discuss the writings of anyone here...or to start a discussion about a post... I think this thread is for the devs collecting opinions from us players. If you want to discuss someones posting then maybe open another thread or do it in private conversation, so that this thread here will not get hijacked by ourselves, thats just my humble opinion...
Yeah, I feel that this thread will be very helpful to the devs in finding out a good solution to the issues at hand. We don't need any thread derailments. I just feel the largest issue with the live missions so far are two main things: Communication, and Mission Length. Funny enough, those things go hand in hand. Due to the mission length, people start to look for quicker ways of communication, leading to wanting to join a Mumble/Discord/TeamSpeak/Whatever server, and that leads to a hectic situation. Granted, I like the fact that some parts are really short and it adds intensity to the mission. I can understand that part. But honestly, there needs to be some sort of structure that makes it accessible for most people. Since people have jobs, etc, it makes it really hard for people like me to just jump into the IRC and start working on the mission. I like to have enough time to just get home, and work on it then after my shift. I don't like to get home, hoping to help out on the first part, and then see that part 1 (soon after followed by parts 2 and 3) is completely finished right after it started.
