Hello Agents, For many of you this would've been your first live mission with The Black Watchmen so we hoped it was as fun for you all as it was for us! Running an event with this scale for an audience the size we had is no easy feat. Many, many days of planning and preparation went into making this event and I would personally like to thank Anashel, Codex, and everyone else on the dev team for putting in as much effort as they did. We're really interested in seeing what everyone thought about the event, and seeing what we can do to ensure all future events are even better. Which parts did you like? Which parts could have run a little more smoothly? Any and all feedback will be appreciated. The community we've built up has always been the heart of this game, and I want to say well done to everyone who participated in the event, no matter how much you got involved. It's really great to be able to watch so many people come together and enjoy it. Here's to the next one! - Agent Dylanamite
We need more active moderation on discord, it was sorely lacking the last three days. Other than that, nothing comes to mind. It went off well, was fun for the parts i was lurking in.
10/10 - But never pick Salem's network for a streaming ever again. Extremely satisfied with the tension and interaction with the green agent. It was captivating.
Hello! Yes, this was my first live event and this kind of made it difficult for me. My biggest problem is that I have no idea how the whole thing works! It took me three days for me to realise there was a Twitch stream, for example. Also, how can people with Red clearance participate more? I did the phone chant thingy but I would like for more options for people to participate. If there indeed was, can you please make it more clear in the future such as having a guidebook or putting more of the aspects/puzzles of the live missions in the game client itself? (Yes, this is a call for help. How do the live missions work and how can I participate more in the future?) P.S. I'm not saying the live event was bad by the way. How can I say something is bad when I do not know how to work it?
Got to say, despite the technical difficulties that were had, I thought the A&S team did an INCREDIBLE job at keeping the ship afloat. The puzzles were interesting and fun, and the live aspects that we saw looked fun. The only negative feedback is about the community side: a LFF channel wouldn't have gone amiss and stronger moderation overall would have been fantastic. Sadly, most of the moderators on Discord are inactive, with only Dylan himself being active during the entire event that I saw. As such, I would recommend a discord server staff shuffle at the earliest convenience, at least before the next big thing anyway. Hopefully, the next location will have better internet! Thanks again A&S! EDIT: Might I recommend speaking to the staff from Game Detectives for help with controlling so many people, they've learnt many a lesson from WARG and Sombra and could help with some plans to help suppress the masses
The puzzles and investigation themselves were good, but definately for most of the final day there should've been some significant moderation. I also think a document or guide in the discord giving a rough run-down of what to expect in an OP and what is/is not generally acceptable behaviour wouldn't go amiss. Besides that, nothing really sticks out to improve. Huge props to everyone at A&S who worked on this and looking forward to seeing your future endeavours in the new year!
Moderation was lacking at times (either not present or not active), that's the only concern I had. Other than that, excellent event.
This was my first live ARG with TBW (previously I'd done the Tron: Legacy one) and I have to say, while the puzzles were frustratingly difficult at times, I did have a good time trying. For the most part everyone involved was nice to each other, and no major derailments happened. I look forward to the next one, hopefully I'll be a little more useful than just giving moral support next time!
I liked all of it. Even though i could probably not solve most of the puzzles, i think the fact that all of us got together to solve one big puzzle is great! But dam at the end when you had to make us decide between the strike team or the rescue team, Having to endanger the public to nab us extra Intel or contain the threat but risk losing critical information, for me you knew how to throw me off when it came to which one is morally right. I started seeing posts about Moderation while writing this, i do agree. Even though i did have the heated argument between me and Leukocyte when it came to strike team or rescue team, the chat should not have really joined in on it. All in all, great event and lets hope the next one goes brilliantly as well. Merry Christmas! And happy new year! -- Agent HSF3232
This was my first event, as I joined The Black Watchmen only last summer, and though it happened during a very busy Christmas season, I did really enjoy it and think it was well done. I wish I could have been more active but I surely learned a lot, and that is very important. Congratulations to all the A&S team.
The live event in itself was good but kind of messy, i think some things should have been planned in advance like the connection problem in Salem, the dispatch account on Twitch (when we suddenly passed from anashel to division66-dispatch) and the private stuff in the house (like when rin read the diary of the guy to which A&S rented the house) but even these mistakes weren't too bad, the live event still stayed very cool. The Community, however, was going all the time nuts and seemed unfriendly (Usually they are very friendly but weren't at all at the time of the event), like how people were yelling at each other half the time and how there was a disconnect between voice chat and the operation chat (and the operation chat even acted like a twitch chat at some point) and how someone insulted somebody else (won't name names) because he wasn't agreeing with the others answer and how a lot of people were memeing half of the time and how half of the newbies to live events didn't know what to do a lot of the time (like me), etc ... all these problems and more showed how much the community was uncoordinated, that made a lot of people unable to either appreciate or understand half of the live event but hey, some parts with the community were really fun, like when rin entered the house and until the battue part with the books (i don't know if the rest was fun cause i went sleeping but i assume it was with some parts that were annoying). And still, special thank yous deserve to be delivered : Rin, who was an excellent green agent contrary to what some people could say; Dispatch (or/and A&S), who had to put up with our shit for the entire live event and managed to stay calm even when some people were acting like degenerates; and finally, the serious people in chat and voice cha, who managed to connect the two ends and resolve half the puzzles seriously. But this (first for me) live event was overall good even when it had some problems, i loved it and hope to be part of the next one. -Thanks for all and happy Christmas (or hannukah) and happy new year to all, you were all amazing this year, Cmdr Rabbit
Problems: 1. There was a lack of organization where things were meant to be posted in the Discord until late in the last day, here I'm more so referring to #op-tidalvortex and #op-tidalvortex-screenshots. It felt like for the first two days it could be a mess of screenshots alongside chatter. This would cause a lot of clutter in chat, and simply make it even harder to follow. 2. This is partly the community, but partly A&S as the an alternative didn't exist for documenting important information. Pins were extremely disorganized, and a horrible way for people to catch up. 3. The Liaison role that was, for whatever reason, suggested and added was not given enough time to be voted on by the community when it came to who the Liaisons would be. This also did not seem to serve any purpose, anad I still do not fully understand what the purpose of the role was. 4. There was a lack of organization when it came to documenting events. At any time there were multiple documents, multiple people working on the documents, all of this ontop of the Game Detectives wiki created a lot of disjointment when it came to information. 5. The community was largely unmoderated from what I could see. The only moderator that was active at most points of time was dylanamite. 6. There aren't very clear guidelines for how agents are supposed to behave during live events, and I think this didn't help with the moderation problem. Solutions: 1. I would suggest a four channel system in regards to the op. #op-tidalvortex, #op-tidalvortex-screenshots, #op-tidalvortex-lff and #op-tidalvortex-offtopic. Just to keep discussions more organized, and keep off-topic chat away from people who are attempting to work on the puzzles. 2. Add a lff channel like the one that was added for Dawnbloom, in order for people to quickly catch up on the latest happenings. Give archivists access to this so that they can keep this updated. 3. Inform agents of systems like this in advance, give us more of an outline as to their purpose, and give us more time to elect these representatives. 4. The community should come together and decide very early on who wants to document things, and should start up a Google Doc or everyone should focus more so on the Game Detectives Wiki. Another fantastic solution would be to concentrate more information to the archives. Perhaps adding a wiki like xwiki or mediawiki to the archives where certain approved agents can document live events for others to read later down the line. However, the latter requires a bit of time and effort from Alice and Smith to develop so it may not be the best solution. 5. Recruit more moderators, that are more active people in the community. 6. Add some sort of "Live event guidelines" that are written out by Alice & Smith in collaboration with the mod team, so that everyone is on the same page. Then mention that to agents, announce it and discord, and perhaps even put it in the announcement email for the live event as a reminder. The rest of the problems I had mainly had to do with some people being disrespectful, as well as the community band wagoning when it came to some ways to approach puzzles where they wouldn't really think of anything in a different way, or listen to people who tried to. Which is not something I can really think of a solution for. I would like to end this post by noting that despite all of these problems, the live event was fantastic to play, and I had a lot of fun. I am sure everyone else has as well. The team did a great job when it came to writing the story that we got to uncover and see, as well as developing the puzzles that we needed to solve. Keep up the good work
For point 6 maybe we could resurect and enhance this thread: https://forums.aliceandsmith.com/threads/live-events-etiquette.568/
And maybe a reminder for people to check their junk mail from now on? Because I have found a whole lot of messages from you guys there! Whoops, amateur mistake.
My main suggestion is that the Discord needs more active moderators. We have at least 3 who don't participate much at all in the community there, and could have some more active mods like Codex was.
I see there's a lot of talk about increased moderation, but one of the things that I think could have been improved was milestoning progress during the event. We were able to do this fairly well in the first part using the google doc, but after we activated the green agent, it became hard to track the puzzles and how they were solved. If we could develop some way to clearly track what puzzle is currently being worked on, and how past one's were solved, it would make it much easier to onboard agents just arriving at any time. Non-suggestion feedback: This was absolutely some of the most fun I've had playing TBW! I had a blast, especially in the discord voice channels, and made some new friends. Having the initial live feeds into the house felt like participating in a horror movie with all of its suspense. OPERATION TIDALVORTEX has left me quite excited for Season 3.
So this was my first event, and it was fantastic! I can see how people get excited for them, and it's made me want to get the rest of the TBW seasons (I've only done season 1 at the moment). More moderation in chat wouldn't be amiss I think. I personally didn't see much moderation during the event (A lot of it happened while I was sleeping though). Things got heated during the discussion on Miller segment, but overall I'd say that part went well. A lot of different points of views came across and were debated heavily, which I thought was great and exactly what should have happened. I also second a general OP guidelines/ rule document. I was asking a lot of questions regarding how these usually work in the main OP chat in discord. In hindsight, might have been better to post that in another chat, but some kind of archive file that went over the methods of communication used and general structure of these events would have been a huge help for me. Maybe having more seperate rooms would help as Lexi suggested. Could let the people that want to destress/vent by posting memes and off topic stuff do that without interfering with those that want to take part in the puzzles. Letting agents know well in advance what has been set up and how it will work should make things smoother going forward I think.
I've had a few live events under my belt before this one, and overall I really enjoyed this! I liked the setting, puzzles and the "rift-haunted" house experience (even though I was not the one on site). To me, 3 hours to decide between strike vs. rescue was maybe a bit too much time, which led to recurring heated spam of arguments over one another, and sadly even some inappropriate chat behavior...I think the voting solution during COM-Division live event ("agents, have you reached consensus?") was a more elegant one, but then again this was a bit different task to decide (but anyway an interesting psychological observation) and we have more agents now, than we had then I'm already seeing a lot of good feedback over here, so I'm hopeful what wasn't good this time can be improved on! Thanks to whole A&S for dedicating time and energy to do this, and all agents for this experience...o7
