IMPORTANT: Get-Together 2021 Feedback

[gimmepie]

GT Feedback

Each year when the Get-Together concludes, the GT staff like to ask you guys for your feedback on how proceedings went. With GT 2021 now wrapping up, it's that time again. We would greatly appreciate you taking the time to let us know what you thought about this year's GT. What did you particularly like or dislike? What can we improve on? Was there anything that we did better or worse than last year? We'll try to respond to your posts here as best we can. That being said, please try to keep your feedback constructive. We also ask that your feedback be more focused on the GT as a whole than on any specific events. Thank you for your participation in another great Get-Together. We look forward to seeing everyone back for the next one!

 

[professor plum]

@GT Management

• Let's stick to two teams from now on. Three was great for balancing purposes, in theory! However, a majority of the people sorted into Caelum simply didn't….participate as much as Solum/Aecor did. It was pretty demotivating to be on a team that inactive when compared to Solum/Aecor.
  
  While, in theory, there could be 1 very inactive team with only two teams, that wasn't the case during the 2019 and 2020 Get-Togethers, or the PC Discord Birthday event from earlier this year.
• Let's have team leads next year who can ping the team at least once a day re: various things, pin important things, etc.
• Let's suggest use of Google Docs/etc. for collaborative purposes - it was super helpful to have a centralized document that any of us could update re: status of the baton pass challenge or trivia answers.
• Quiz was gorgeous, and the ability to add/remove points was very intuitive. Good job!
• As far as the Discord server goes, would it be possible to do multiple categories for GT next year just for the sake of organization?

@Event Organizers

• Everyone did a great job!!!
• Baton Pass was so fun!
• All live events should have some sort of pingable role. [E.g. Picture Telephone & Speed Art Challenge would've benefitted from a pingable role]
• Next year, we need to have a centralized schedule put together in one timezone prior to GT starting. I don't care if it's all EDT like this year, GMT+0/UTC+0/etc.
  
  I realize that everyone is basically in a different timezone, but it's important to try to put everything in writing in one specific timezone just to avoid any potential conflicts. Cherrim suggested maybe using Google Calendar or something, which seems fine to me.

@Dusk & @Tsutarja

Kudos to the two of you for being absolute team players and taking over the Among Us event.

@Rabinov

You did a marvelous job with your events! The trivia especially was very fun and challenging. Thank you for working with us Caelum peeps.

Misc

If we do another Animal Crossing design challenge, I'll open it up to all iterations of the game instead of just ACNH. The logic behind having it only ACNH was:

1. There is (or was) a strong ACNH presence on the community - we had a channel for #animal-crossing on the main server at one point, and kept things organized in a shared Google Sheets document.
2. There are more opportunities to decorate indoors what with Harv's island allowing you to freely duplicate items, place villagers with emotions, and a lot more.

 

[Gardevoir1]

This was my first event of its kind here so I'm not sure what's new and what's not but all the events here were quite fun. While I was unable to participate in the Baton Pass challenge due to irl commitments this time, I loved the concept of it and would love to see it featured again.

 

[budube]

• I'd say this was a succesful GT over all. Compared to the other two I've been in and the Discord Anniversary event, I noticed quite a bit more of participation this time, which is amazing.
  
  
• Regardless of what I said above, I agree that two teams work better on practice. I see it like how there will always be innactive members on a team (I know Aecor had a few, and I'm guessing Solum did too), but it's more difficult for all innactive members to end up on one team if it's only two and therefore would be more balanced. And while it's true we can't (and won't) force people to participate, I can understand how it can be discouraging for EOs that one team doesn't show up much or at all.
  
  
• I'd like to congratulate all the Event Organizers for this, I think everyone did a great job,. However I will also second the suggestion of having pingable roles for every live event. Picture Phone and Speed Art Challenge definitely needed one in my opinion, especially the later one.
  
  
• Also a special congratulations to Eleanor and Janp. While I couldn't participate on Baton Pass, I know you pulled up quite the experiment there and would've loved to participate on it. I don't know how you feel about the turn out, but I'd say it was succesful considering the amount of participation the challenge had compared to the other years in which I participated.
  
  
• And finally I'd also like to congratulate Dusk and Tsutarja. I believe it's not easy to host your own event and it's definitely not easy to pick one up three days into GT. While I also couldn't participate on Amogus for more than one round I think you two did a pretty good job with it.

 

[Duck]

Building on some of the suggestions and feedback given here before (i.e.: mostly stealing the structure from professor plum's post <3)

Management and Admin

• I agree with the two teams suggestion, although I do have another perspective that wasn't mentioned: it felt that besides a couple of people just disappearing into the night or chiming into chat but not really doing anything more (that I can see), a lot of the Event Organizers for events where the organizer had extra knowledge and thus couldn't participate fell into Caelum.
  
  Which means that a lot of the people who would participate and lead the conversation in certain events, couldn't. For example, when someone started to guess stuff for Daily Puzzles, the other interested people usually chimed in or at least copied the answers, but I couldn't really start this conversation for Pokémon Riddles (nor could Ash for E&M for example).
  
  I don't really know if there's even a solution to this but it's definitely another reason to go with only two teams next time, I feel.
  
  
• I definitely agree with Team Leads, I feel that a lot of the issues Caelum had was that we weren't really organized as a whole. So like, when we needed to make (relatively quick) decisions as a team such as sending stuff before a deadline it was usually very messy.
  
  They'd also be important so they can pin messages. We happened to have professor plum in the team, who can pin stuff as a Moderoid, but if he wasn't there things would have been even messier.
  
  
• The one problem I can see happening with encouraging Google Docs is that it's hard to see when it goes stale (e.g.: it's time to update the answers) and that information will naturally get buried into the text / pinned comments section.
  
  I don't have any suggestions for the first problem, but for the second, maybe have a template document available to the teams containing a list of all the events in a Document so they can just have them link to the new Docs and use that as a summary so stuff won't get lost as easily?
  
  
• I feel that the points weren't explained as well as they could to the Event Organizers. The explanation given in the EO Information thread was a dichotomy between "Daily / Short" and "Longform" so considering the two ~ three days timeframe of each Pokémon Riddle quiz, I gave it points based on the short recommendations.
  
  This essentially caused the event to become irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, even after getting a point bump. The most anyone team could get from participating in that event was 150 points, which is somewhere between 3rd and 2nd place in a longform event.
  
  So, I feel the point system could be tweaked a little more, I don't know. Especially since it felt like not participating in some events in particular (like Among Us and Jackbox) was essentially giving away your chance to win, since they gave big payouts for a relatively short time. Like, looking back on the scores, some sessions of those games had scores go as high as 50 or 70 points whereas events I really enjoyed and exceled in (like Pictionary) only gave 15 points at most, even though they're all conceptually party games.

Event Organizers

• I'd like to congratulate everyone for the great job! In particular to Eleanor who consistently scraped the #gt-challenges channel to update the scores (it wasn't easy), Dusk and Tsutarja (who took over an event, so major props to them), and Rabinov who was hosting like 5 different events.
  
  
• I felt that some events, mine included, could have used some workshopping. Make some things less ambiguous, work out a few kinks and major UX problems. Maybe have some time for that built-in for the next GT, so Event Organizers could ask other Event Organizers on tips and some basic "proofreading"?
  
  
• We needed to have a calendar before the EO started - I'd recommend having it be on UTC + 0 (or at least always mention time in terms of a UTC offset) since as a non-American if you say something like EDT I have no idea what time zone that is, but I know how to do the proper conversion between UTC-4 and my time zone.
  
  I'd also recommend strongly encouraging events to have deadlines visible in any new posts (such as new puzzles or trivia questions). Because even if it's on the schedule, and even if it is a perfectly regular interval, having it clearly stated in the post is a major UX improvement that shouldn't be too much of an imposition in the thread maintainers.

Re: $SOME_GAME Events

I'd suggest not even having events depend on any one particular game unless the game's free, gives you everything you need when you begin and the event idea is central on that one particular entry.

For example, I'd have liked to design an Animal Crossing house but I couldn't because I don't have a copy of New Horizons. And even if we expanded that to any Animal Crossing games, for that to work you still need people to go quite far into the game (and in game that advances in real time, unless you're time travelling) before they can get enough furniture to be able to pull designs on par with what the winners were.

Likewise, the FFXIV event was both locked to me by price and the fact that even if I'd bought it, I'd likely need to spend quite a lot of time in the game to get the clothes and pets and whatever.

I get that those kind of events are fun to the people that have the games and put a lot of effort in them, but it can effectively feel like a paywall to a lot of younger or poorer people (which I feel makes up, if not most, at least a sizeable chunk of the audience here at PC, but maybe I'm wrong).

Conclusion

All in all, for all that I've nagged for quite a lot of text, I did enjoy my time here, I've met and interacted with quite a lot of nice people and fully intend on participating / hosting events in the next GT, if I'm still around by then.

I also appreciate all the work that was put into it by both the Organizer Organizers and the Event Organizers and despite all of the things that I've said, I understand that when we're dealing with something with this many moving parts it's easy for things to get a little messy.

 

[Mewtwolover]

I'd suggest not even having events depend on any one particular game unless the game's free, gives you everything you need when you begin and the event idea is central on that one particular entry.

I agree with you. Someone could argue that allowing events that depend on games that aren't free like ACHN or FFXIV creates some kind of double standards because one event approval criteria is that the event must be accessible without having to get specific programs. Limiting events depend on any one particular game like you suggested would practically remove those double standards as long as the game is also so popular that there's enough participants.

 

[gimmepie]

I feel that the points weren't explained as well as they could to the Event Organizers. The explanation given in the EO Information thread was a dichotomy between "Daily / Short" and "Longform" so considering the two ~ three days timeframe of each Pokémon Riddle quiz, I gave it points based on the short recommendations.

This essentially caused the event to become irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, even after getting a point bump. The most anyone team could get from participating in that event was 150 points, which is somewhere between 3rd and 2nd place in a longform event.

So, I feel the point system could be tweaked a little more, I don't know. Especially since it felt like not participating in some events in particular (like Among Us and Jackbox) was essentially giving away your chance to win, since they gave big payouts for a relatively short time. Like, looking back on the scores, some sessions of those games had scores go as high as 50 or 70 points whereas events I really enjoyed and exceled in (like Pictionary) only gave 15 points at most, even though they're all conceptually party games.

I'm honestly not sure how much more we can refine points. We actually spent some time working on this because it was a huge problem last year that short daily events like Jackbox and Pictionary were effectively earning a lot more points than the long format, high-investment events like SWC and the Arcade. We tried to calculate the points this year to make it so the cumulative points from those short events would be close to value to the one-off large point dumps from long events.

I suppose we could try to further divide things up and have the short events split into two again. One tier for short games that do a single daily run (Pictionary, Gartic Phone) and one for events like Jackbox and Among Us that run multiple quick games each day. I'd definitely prefer that method than reverting to doing points on a case-by-case basic because that just gets messy.

What do you think?

I felt that some events, mine included, could have used some workshopping. Make some things less ambiguous, work out a few kinks and major UX problems. Maybe have some time for that built-in for the next GT, so Event Organizers could ask other Event Organizers on tips and some basic "proofreading"?

This is what the period of time between the EO's being accepted and the start of the GT is for, when you are given access to the EO forum. We actually did spent time going into EO's threads and helping them figure stuff out. Do you feel like your event was overlooked? Or is it more that we needed to be even more present and engage in more discussion because things were missed?

I'd suggest not even having events depend on any one particular game unless the game's free, gives you everything you need when you begin and the event idea is central on that one particular entry.

For example, I'd have liked to design an Animal Crossing house but I couldn't because I don't have a copy of New Horizons. And even if we expanded that to any Animal Crossing games, for that to work you still need people to go quite far into the game (and in game that advances in real time, unless you're time travelling) before they can get enough furniture to be able to pull designs on par with what the winners were.

Likewise, the FFXIV event was both locked to me by price and the fact that even if I'd bought it, I'd likely need to spend quite a lot of time in the game to get the clothes and pets and whatever.

I get that those kind of events are fun to the people that have the games and put a lot of effort in them, but it can effectively feel like a paywall to a lot of younger or poorer people (which I feel makes up, if not most, at least a sizeable chunk of the audience here at PC, but maybe I'm wrong).

Hard agree. That is all I have to say to this one.

 

[Duck]

I'm honestly not sure how much more we can refine points. We actually spent some time working on this because it was a huge problem last year that short daily events like Jackbox and Pictionary were effectively earning a lot more points than the long format, high-investment events like SWC and the Arcade. We tried to calculate the points this year to make it so the cumulative points from those short events would be close to value to the one-off large point dumps from long events.

I suppose we could try to further divide things up and have the short events split into two again. One tier for short games that do a single daily run (Pictionary, Gartic Phone) and one for events like Jackbox and Among Us that run multiple quick games each day. I'd definitely prefer that method than reverting to doing points on a case-by-case basic because that just gets messy.

What do you think?

I think this division could work. Another suggestions I think could also work is making these shortform games essentially behave like longform by having their own leaderboards and having longform points being given to the Top 3 (+ possibly novelty categories) later on.

An example of that this GT was Daily Puzzles, each day is essentially a daily shortform event but the scoring was made in a longform technique by building their own leaderboard.

It's how I would have done Pokémon Riddles if I were to host it now, and we were still doing three teams.

This is what the period of time between the EO's being accepted and the start of the GT is for, when you are given access to the EO forum. We actually did spent time going into EO's threads and helping them figure stuff out. Do you feel like your event was overlooked? Or is it more that we needed to be even more present and engage in more discussion because things were missed?

I don't think necessarily that I was overlooked, per se, but I think that the parts that could have use the more workshopping, both on mine and a couple of few other events weren't the parts we were showing on the EO forum, because they were kinda secret?

Like, some of my riddles were too obscure or had too many possible answers, some others were possibly too easy. I'm not saying this is the kind of thing we would necessarily be able to gage with a conversation but having a kind of pulse on this reaction would have helped.

Another event I felt was a little rough was the Challenges one (don't get me wrong, I loved it, I could just see a couple of warts) and I see that on the forums you did a lot of workshopping, but the part that was still left were some of the rules that were assigned to people and some of the main rules:

The no trading ban (because of perceived technical difficulties) was one of them that could have been answered without much effort. I know of 3 possible alternatives that are fairly low tech to use, and so do a number of other people (so much that these were pointed out in the #gt-challenges channel when this ban was brought up).

Some of the rules were fine conceptually but were a pain to even check how to do them ("What Pokémon can I catch that learn one of these 5 moves?") and a pain to execute ("Now I have to grind Poochyena from Level 5 to Level 38").

I think that these are the parts that would have benefitted from some workshopping, and I do get that to a certain extent this is more suited to a cohost, but at the same time, a cohost isn't perfect because a person willing to set things up has a much higher pain threshold than the average person.

I'm used to having like 10 different Bulbapedia pages open and I'm used to having long grinding sessions, but if NewUser302232 came to an event and felt like they had to all of that, be it to find a riddle or to check whether a Pokémon can learn X or just grind that much (on one Pokémon), it can easily be discouraging and cause people to just drop the event / GT, which can cause other problems.

I'm not sure my suggestion would even work, or be appropriate, it's just my bumbling attempt at dealing with this problem. And, for all it's worth, I think most events did well enough so, I don't know, maybe I'm making mountains out of molehills here.

 

[apro]

I was new to this event and Pokecommunity (although my account is older, I didn't use it much). The event was amazing by any means, but at first I had difficulty discovering all of the events in the GT, mostly due to my lack of experience. I advise that there would be a list of all events somewhere, which list would also be frequently recommended to newbies like myself. I found a list of threads about GT events by clicking on the picture at the top of the page, which is probably meant to fulfill this role, but I somehow still managed to miss some. It'd be better if there was a list on the event's welcoming page. Oh, and maybe pin a similar list (with links) on Discord as well.

 

[Devalue]

Enjoyed the event overall. Looks forward to next year.

Pokemon Riddles
Preferred this as a solo event. (Speaks as a typically solo player, admittedly.) Did a good job making tough riddles. Recognizes the difficulty in making specific, but hard-to-guess Pokemon riddles from the earlier riddle event. Draws from the vastness of Pokemon lore. Inevitably overlaps in spots. Appreciates the reasoning alongside the answers.

Who's That Pokemon
Offered a good level of challenge. Always attempted to guess the Pokemon at first glance. Hit the mark only twice (Shiny Hydreigon and Shiny Solrock).

Advises being careful on the images, though. Becomes very difficult to identify with little color variation and lines. Names Alolan Raichu for this. Combined white with generic electric yellow. (Sidenote: In retrospect, did you mainly focus on the Pokemon's head? Remembers a lot of mouths and eyes. Liked the more novel location for Alolan Raichu, if nothing else.)

Praises Shiny Luxray (the final bonus puzzle) as possibly the best. Displayed very distinct colors and shapes. Interpreted it as a Pokemon with red teeth/fangs, much like Shiny Manetric or a differently colored Mawile. Felt tough, but fair.

Daily Puzzles
Reskinned the Professor Layton puzzles excellently. Loved the artwork. Saw more character in them than in normal Pokemon games.

Grumbles a bit at some of the puzzles. Relied on tricking the reader several times, such as with #3. Mitigated this somewhat with the team element. (Admits a bias against puzzle games in general, also. Established a distaste for them elsewhere.) Preferred puzzles like #6 and #9. Depended on visual scrutiny and logic, respectively.

Video Game Trivia
The best kind of torture. Listened to those victory themes several times. Crawled through memories. Came up empty. Found it fun to stretch that gaming knowledge.

Was not put off much by the occasional shaky clue. Pointed out the difficulty of crafting hard, but fair clues several times above as well. Forgives that here, as above.

Hopes for fewer repeated game answers next time. Picked Zelda, Tales, and Final Fantasy games multiple times (even within the same round). Spans a lot of games each, certainly. Could have gave another game a second question instead, though. Brought up a good variety of games overall, for the record. Worked within your confinement of well-known games well.

 

[professor plum]

I'd suggest not even having events depend on any one particular game unless the game's free, gives you everything you need when you begin and the event idea is central on that one particular entry.

For example, I'd have liked to design an Animal Crossing house but I couldn't because I don't have a copy of New Horizons. And even if we expanded that to any Animal Crossing games, for that to work you still need people to go quite far into the game (and in game that advances in real time, unless you're time travelling) before they can get enough furniture to be able to pull designs on par with what the winners were.

Likewise, the FFXIV event was both locked to me by price and the fact that even if I'd bought it, I'd likely need to spend quite a lot of time in the game to get the clothes and pets and whatever.

I get that those kind of events are fun to the people that have the games and put a lot of effort in them, but it can effectively feel like a paywall to a lot of younger or poorer people (which I feel makes up, if not most, at least a sizeable chunk of the audience here at PC, but maybe I'm wrong).

I agree with you. Someone could argue that allowing events that depend on games that aren't free like ACHN or FFXIV creates some kind of double standards because one event approval criteria is that the event must be accessible without having to get specific programs. Limiting events depend on any one particular game like you suggested would practically remove those double standards as long as the game is also so popular that there's enough participants.

I can understand where y'all are coming from on this, but PC's Get-Together has had non-Pokémon video-game based events on and off since 2009:
Examples: Team Fortress 2 (2010 & 2011), Minecraft (2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015), Overwatch (2016 & 2017), Mario Kart (2014, 2017, & 2018), and Splatoon (2016 & 2017).

There have also been larger multiple-video-game based events (Gaming Event (2009), 7 Days of Gaming (2012), and Video Gaming Event (2013)). (I realize I probably missed a few lmao -- here's a public archive of all the previous Get-Togethers)

These events are typically centered on games that are popular within the community at the time, either on the forums, IRC Channel, Skype, or Discord server. Participation in these events is not mandatory, and considered just for fun for people who have those games. Re: this year's events, both Animal Crossing and Final Fantasy 14 had/has a dedicated channel on our Discord Server. Animal Crossing's channel was recently brought back earlier this year due to renewed interest, and was later archived as interest fizzled out, but FFXIV's channel has been consistently active since it was created last year.

I can definitely understand wanting to try to make events as accessible to as many people as possible (and, as mentioned, I'll at least open a future Animal Crossing design challenge to other entries in the franchise), but GT has always been about catering to multiple facets of our community. And...on this community, we have a lot of competitive gamers. I think going forward we can try to make sure not to have too many in one Get-Together.

 

[Duck]

I can understand where y'all are coming from on this, but PC's Get-Together has had non-Pokémon video-game based events on and off since 2009:
Examples: Team Fortress 2 (2010 & 2011), Minecraft (2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015), Overwatch (2016 & 2017), Mario Kart (2014, 2017, & 2018), and Splatoon (2016 & 2017).

To be clear, I don't object to something "non Pokémon games" in general. Even though it's not my thing, I think Among Us, for example, fit very well with the criteria I had mentioned before despite being a non-Pokémon game.

All I'm saying is that making these kind of events is effectively making a choice. Whether that choice is the right one to make or not, is up to the GT Management and the Event Organizers to be.

There have also been larger multiple-video-game based events (Gaming Event (2009), 7 Days of Gaming (2012), and Video Gaming Event (2013)).

These events are typically centered on games that are popular within the community at the time, either on the forums, IRC Channel, Skype, or Discord server. Participation in these events is not mandatory, and considered just for fun for people who have those games. Re: this year's events, both Animal Crossing and Final Fantasy 14 had/has a dedicated channel on our Discord Server. Animal Crossing's channel was recently brought back earlier this year due to renewed interest, and was later archived as interest fizzled out, but FFXIV's channel has been consistently active since it was created last year.

Especially since, as you mentioned, there is historical precedent for this kind of thing and (at least in theory) possible interest in the event.

That said, from the limited data I have, all I can say is that Jackbox, Among Us, Arcade, Pictionary and Picture Telephone which are the videogames events we had this GT that are pretty accessible, seemed to do pretty well, and at least the events I participated in (Pictionary, Picture Telephone) and those who listed the participants (Arcade) seemed to have a pretty large amount of the people that were actively participating in the GT.

FFXIV had, as far as I can tell, 6 entries registered for the Get Together, and ACNH had 8.

Now, I'm not gonna say that all 211 people that registered for the GT were being active participants, because we all know that isn't true. But considering the fact that other relatively low entry events (not real time, no need to voice chat / discord) like Arcade, Daily Puzzles and Who's That Pokémon had significantly more engagement, and that I count at least 15 people talking in the FFXIV chat in the last two days, I do wonder if the part of the community that are avid gamers are interested in participating in a competition.

And since the Internet makes everything sounds harsher and drier, I just want to make it clear that I do appreciate the love and effort that the Event Organizers put into these events, and I'd like to congratulate and thank them for hosting. These events clearly had a lot of care put into them all the way from presentation to judging.

All I'm trying to do is present my point of view and, should the powers that be decide that Video Game Events are perfectly cromulent and should stay, so be it. For what it's worth, I do agree that opening up to wider franchises instead of just one particular entry is a good idea if we keep having those events.

 

[JK0JK]

I wrote this in the Caelum channel in the pokecommunity discord, and was told to post here (not really sure why, but ok); I'm too lazy to write it again so... here's a Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V of what I wrote, maybe it will be useful for the next one

JK0JK: "I didn't even know most of these activities were going on
I guess that applies to many of us as well, and since they made a personality quizz thing to get us into groups, I wouldn't be surprised that it was a constant between most of our members"

Daichi: "I'm going to go ahead and say this is mostly on you for not checking the forums where most of this was present :P; As well as the announcements channel here where LOTS of EOs were posting thread links etc"

JK0JK: "Yeah, true, I tend to not check the forums a lot ^^""; what I'm speculating is that maybe that applies to a lot of us, based on our results in the quizz they used to make the teams"

Maybe this is a lead for what should be improved? I honestly don't know. Take all of this with a pile of salt, seeing as I'm not exactly the best reflection of the average pokecommunity member. Still, Caelum lost by a large amount of points. Maybe it's related to the personalities of its members? Maybe it's related to something else entirely? The staff will have to crunch the numbers to figure out.

 

[Arcaneum]

So to mostly close this down as it's clear that it's very much a tale of two camps that will currently never agree, the points regarding events and their accessibility has been taken on board by GT Management and although personally it's not something that I see as an issue in any way, shape or form, it will be something that we make sure to look at in Get-Togethers moving forward. I already know for example that Tyler has mentioned about allowing all iterations of Animal Crossing for the contests and for other similar events we can also explore the options.

However, regardless of that these events will likely still run; after all as much as it is about accessibility (not 100% accessbility for 100% of all participants, IMPORTANT), denying people said events too just because not every single person can participate in them defeats the purpose. NB - this doesn't mean they'll be running exactly the same, however I refuse to let these events not exist at all because of something that's been brought up after a decade of no issues.

That said, I'm glad to hear that you especially Radio have enjoyed the Get-Together as a first-timer.

Before I get to the comments/criticism of some things in the GT, I just wanted to mention the following:

GT Staff (Management, EOs, etc.)

It's definitely been a bumpy ride, but we got there! Just a massive thank you for once again another great Get-Together. A really amazing slew of events across the board and, generally, fairly seamless in execution! It was super fun putting all the themes and everything together (probably one of my favourite parts tbh) and seeing this all come to fruition. My only gripe is why do we have to wait another year?!

Loomie, Janp, Zach and Dusk

As much as every EO did a cracking job, I have to mention you four specifically.

Loomie/Janp, I tip my hat to you for probably one of the BEST events the GT has seen to date and definitely my favourite in the 4/5 years I've participated. Considering just how grand the idea was, how much it exploded in popularity and the hiccups along the way, it actually ran pretty well for its first try and you handled everything so well! Please please PLEASE return with this next year <3

Dusk/Zach, thank you once more for coming in and saving the Among Us event when it was literally left for dead and not only that, but Dusk in particular for going through hours of pain to try and fix the points system to stop the event breaking the GT. I know towards the end numbers got a bit ropey, but you didn't have to take time out of your weeks to do what you did, but you still did it. May I... tempt you into running it next year perhaps? :pleading_face:

Ash Ketchup

Thank you so much for your help with E&M Trivia! You came up with some awesome questions and I'm really glad that I had them to be honest, they made for some fun rounds!

In terms of comments I wanted to make regarding the GT this year:

Changing up team composition

So this will always be something that comes up in hindsight, as we can't foresee issues coming up, but I think that three teams will be something to stay away from moving forward. As much as the number teams was not the sole OR major factor in the issue of Caelum's lack of activity, with three teams it seems apparent there will always be one flagging behind and what we want to avoid is a lack of motivation and therefore enjoyment for everyone. For me I'd like to see one of the following:

• Two Teams - Lowers the chance of inactivity by lowering the amount of division of users. However points will need to be looked at and potentially restructured as the current model doesn't really sit too well I think. HOWEVER this is something we have done before, so past experience should be able to help set this up nicely.
• Four Teams - Allows a lot more diversity and also imo helps with teams just throwing everyone at everything for participation points and therefore even when coming last, you're still potentially netting a lot of points for your team. However this does also mean there's more potential for active users to be split few and far between, so there's a higher risk of replicating the same issue. However once again we have done it and it has worked really well.

Schedules and sticking to them

I will admit a schedule is something we had put into place and I believe was not wholly implemented, so that is partly our fault there. But yes moving forward, a calendar of events (both accessible on Discord and forums) will be really beneficial for everyone. More importantly it means that if circumstances cause Event Organisers to need to change their times (it happens!), then they can easily change it or let others know when it's moved to, so that if needed other events can adjust.

Oh and all in one timezone would be handy too. As much as I don't want to give the US the pleasure, I guess EDT/EST does make the most sense :P

Pingable Roles and their success

This was an absolute godsend and I am so glad that we got these put in. One issue last year was how it felt a bit like harassment when EOs were needing to ping regarding their event updates, because there were so many. This is something definitely being kept in and in fact, next year may just include a role for every event to make things a bit easier (as I did note some issues where some were not present).

I believe we may also be looking to add one of the fabled reaction bots on Discord, so that setting things up are even easier than before, but I'll leave that one to the Moderoids to handle <3.

Comments made in team channels

Not to be a sourpuss, however I could not help but see a few unsavoury comments towards EOs and their respective events. Nothing completely out of order, but definitely a few things which if the particular EO could've seen, would not have been very nice.

I appreciate the competitive spirit and whatnot of the GT, however please don't let that take over! Remember if nothing else, ALL of the work the EOs put in is phenomenal (some almost working solidly for a fortnight to set up their events) and some brought huge and new ideas to the table, so there are probably going to be mistakes and things you don't agree with! However just keep that in mind, as it can feel like a kick in the teeth when seeing feedback that your own and others' events are "bad" when to be honest I can't think of a single event that had any real issues this year.

Fortune Cup

I am going to bring this up specifically because I want to feed back on a small gripe of mine which I've never had the opportunity to properly air.

As solid as the event is and the idea is great, one issue I have is the ability for participants to be able to just spam battles with members of the same team. What I was mostly seeing from this was basically one team just organising in their channel to play each other and when others tried to join, they were getting 1, maybe 2, battles and not much else in.

Arguably yes the teams could all do that but then... does that not defeat the point kinda? IDK I feel maybe something like a limitation on battles with the same team or something means people will hopefully do less of the organising mass same-team battles and play against the other teams. Especially if we move to a two-team system, I think this should be something looked into next year.

 

[TwentyExEx]

Unfortunately I have empty head syndrome and don't have as many pointers as others but I do have some feedback.

Overall this was a very impressive event and I would like to thank everyone involved for selflessly creating such a varied and entertaining event for all! The dedication to the community is unbound and it is awesome to see.

I do agree with the sentiment that three teams may have been cutting participants a tad thin.

Something that I'm sure was considered but was simply unreasonable to satisfy is live events with people outside of traditional timezones. Among Us and Pictionary were able to satisfy those conditions a few times however!

A brilliant solution to the timezone problem was achieved with the Baton Pass challenge. Having a non-live collaborative effort like this was really incredible! I immensely enjoyed the segments I completed and was itching to complete more. The only feedback I can give is that some of the rules given were so restrictive that in some games it made it near impossible to pick up someone elses save files. (For example, no backtracking and no physical and special moves on the same Pokémon meant that in some instances, I was not able to use half of the team due to HMs being on Pokémon and the Move Deleter being in a past or future town). Otherwise, Baton Pass was a absolute success and I really hope we see more events like it in the future, that can be completed gradually by anyone around the world or even people with busy work schedules.

final note more switch online games in the future would be awesome (smash, mario kart, mario party etc)

Once again, thank you to everyone who hosted the event!

 

[Sammi]

As someone on Caelum, I agree we really could've used a real team lead. The three teams may have been on more level ground if we had a bit more coordination in our team chat. Tyler did a great job with the time he had, especially with coordinating baton pass saves, and I... sometimes tried with VG trivia since that was the only quiz I was confident in answering. But both Tyler and I are busy adults and couldn't spend all day trying to wrange people in team chat to look at questions and do submissions. It would have been far worse had Tyler not gotten that Google Doc together. So seriously Tyler, thank you so much for the work you did for Caelum. :pleading_face:

I'd like to still see other video games in GT, but I also understand the misgivings people have about those events. A good compromise might be to have them worth less points than stuff that doesn't require buying a game. That way, people don't feel pressured that their team might lose because someone doesn't own a game, and the people who enjoy those events still get to play them.

Also, I hate to say it -- as much as I enjoyed the FFXIV glamor contest, even though it does have a channel on the Discord, I'm not sure why y'all picked it as an event. Only one entrant wasn't a regular on the channel. It feels like y'all were pandering to a very small part of the PC userbase with this event, whereas most of the past games at least were either free, huge games like Minecraft/Overwatch, or Nintendo games, which people with a Nintendo console/handheld are more likely to have. I think that's a reason why this year, people were really feeling the 'paywall' of some events.

That said, if you do a FFXIV glam contest again, it might be worth trying to impose restrictions that would put trial players on the same level as those of us in endgame -- maybe like ARR vendor/dungeon/job gear only. I wonder if we would've had a few more entries had we tried to adjust for new players. I wouldn't blame anyone on the free trial that looked in #final-fantasy-xiv and decided to pass because all the regulars are at endgame and can access basically anything to make glam.

Overall, even though I didn't participate too much, I had fun! Loved seeing busy VCs on Discord when events were running. And it can't be said enough: great job of Dusk and Tsutarja to pick up Among Us on short notice.

 

[Aquacorde]

I was highly unprepared for this GT by way of not having any sense of time nor paying attention at all, go me @_@ So I wasn't super around for much but I did the two things I felt I had time for and it worked out alright (b' v ')b sorry in advance for this mess of thoughts from an extremely limited perspective though

- I wish I had paid more attention to trivia and riddles and puzzles because they looked very fun! That's on me for not lookin' in my team chat much though. My team was very into figuring them out together from what I saw and that was cool. It was great to have docs for 'em too, that was a really nice organizational tool.

- I am traditionally a lurker, but I enjoyed the vibe from my team when I did pop into the Aecor chat! A lot of teamwork and chatting and hype and motivation!

- Wasn't fond of the SWC prompt, as evidenced by the fact that I had literally no ideas for it until the day of the deadline. I felt pretty locked into a mood, and after the fact with reading the other entries I felt that I often just. Knew exactly where the vibe was going, and I wasn't as engaged with the story because of that. Mood is everything in short pieces, you know? Last year's more tangible prompt of "home" felt like it allowed a broader range of interpretations in terms of tone.

- I was Big Mad at Fortune Cup lmao but mostly because my luck was crappy the whole time rather than anything about the event format. Last year I had great luck, this year I had crap. It's aight, and I never gave up, just got frustrating to be a non-comp player with a mediocre team against real players with actual skill and hugely powerful teams. But that's just the game!

- I wish I had seen more people playing FC? I know I popped on kinda at random, but even when I went when someone pinged the role in gt-general, I never saw many people there for it. Like I pretty much only got to play Shawn, Cube, and 5qwerty. It would have been nice to see more teams and not just get smashed over and over by the same teams I could never get through -3-;;

- I would have liked more FC random luck events I think. I just think they're neat.

- I think FC could take a coins adjustment for inter-team battles and that would be fine. I wouldn't want to disallow them entirely simply because considering what I said above, I pretty much only would have ever been allowed to battle Shawn. I can't speak for anyone else, but I tried to cycle my matchups and not do the same person constantly, 'cause that's boring, right? (Unless you have enough Pokémon to build multiple decent teams, which. Most people don't really do.) But often I couldn't cycle my matchups, and I basically wouldn't have been able to at all if there was no inter-team battles. So maybe a coin cut for same team, if that's a problem. I was out here desperately trying to win (never happened) or lose enough to improve my team via RNG (also never happened) and I couldn't have done either if I was just waitin' on other teams, and then I wouldn't have been playing the game at all, because I'd get tired of waiting, so that would have harmed participation by reducing the number of people avalible for other teams to battle, especially if more people feel the same as I do.

- am I even saying anything anymore sdghj

- Anyway I genuinely like the three-team idea, or at least I like more than two. I don't know why two teams feels dull to me. But I also don't know how to fully solve the potential struggle of many inactive people sorted to one team, nor how to motivate a team that falls significantly behind. From what I saw, Aecor seemed very organized and there were instances of certain people heading up certain events or trivia segments? It's definitely nice to have some motivated people driving the action. Assigning team leaders could be a solution, but I worry that would put a lot of pressure on people. Or we could end up with people who want to be leaders but just aren't the type people want to follow. It happens. I dunno. Definitely having someone active who is able to pin things is super helpful at the very least.

- Loved being able to be pinged for things actually, that was v helpful.

- I may just be Straight Up Wrong due to not being attentive to all of the things but I felt like points were super fair across all events this year, so that was great.

- giving a +1 to having a proper calendar, that'd be helpful!

- was confused at the FFXIV event's existence tbh lmao I didn't even know it was that popular. the characters were cute tho! I think I feel weirder about it because it's not a Nintendo game and therefore it feels like something that not as many PC people would be likely to have as, say, ACNH which is in the same kind of boat for design contest type thing.

well thats all unless i think of something else, thank you for reading and thank you to everyone who put their time and effort and care into this GT!

 

[5qwerty]

I didn't want to post my thoughts until every event was completed, so here goes.

Regarding ACNH/FFXIV, I, like many others, do not feel like this accessibility is completely fair. I think this has been addressed above and I think there are good arguments for the inclusion of these events. I personally think that the point total for these is a bit high given the accessibility requirements (not only do you have to have the game, you have to have a certain amount of progress to be able to compete). I think the GT Management did a good job this year with tweaking the Jackbox points in response to last year's feedback, so I think given this year's feedback they will be able to figure something out for next year that's fair to everyone (the ones who have and don't have the game).

Another thing that's related to these two events is how these "judging" types of events are coordinated/presented. I think that the SWC does a good job of laying out who the judges are and which metrics are used. Then when the results are posted, they post the scores of each contestant and give some feedback. I think this is transparent and healthy for the competition - it shows that the judges are scoring based on their predetermined metrics and also helps contestants understand what they could work on more. I think if the other contests used a similar style it would be of benefit to the contestants so that they could better know what to go for or what to avoid the next time the competition occurs. I think especially with the mapping contest, since the 2018 map-off had public scores that everyone could see. I think it does good because everyone can see what everyone else did well on and learn from that.

I think Team Leads (which perhaps could be given to some active team members throughout the event) are for sure needed for next year, since basically only a moderoid could pin stuff and ping people this year, which was a hassle if there was something that was due or was a collaborative thing. I think no matter the number of teams there are, there should be some way to manually sort to EOs into fairly even teams first, to avoid the problem where all the EOs are RNG'd into one team. At least this guarantees some amount of activity for each of the teams.

Also maybe FC should have some sort of restriction of some sort. I dunno though, I'm just a dirty farmer.

Shoutouts Radio (I guess you're Cubchoo now) for hosting a pretty neat event in your first GT. It was an interesting new event and it was very punctual in regards to results, as well as having adapted to the request to open it up to teams to discuss amongst themselves.

Shoutouts also to Aldo, I think you did a great job (again) with your events this year. The Pokémon drawings and puzzles were nice and it was also an interesting event. I think you put a lot of effort into making sure that your thread and all that looks polished.

Also having a meme thread next year would be nice.

 

[Cherrim]

General Running
I definitely agree with both sorting EOs into teams ahead of time to ensure an even distribution on teams and also picking team leaders or something of that sort. Things go so much smoother when there's someone enthusiastic keeping track of things and it's definitely a morale boost when more people can and will participate. To that end, I do kind of agree that maybe two teams is the sweet spot, but I'd be willing to try three again if we as staff/event organizers made a conscious effort to split evenly into the groups beforehand in case we need to be the ones keeping track of everything. I'm not sure I can speak for everyone, but I know I felt a little bit bad when Aecor and Solum just left Caelum in the dust, never to recover. If I'd been on Caelum I'm just not sure I would have had the enthusiasm to keep up with trivia everyday or make the extra effort to push out of my comfort zone and try an event or two that I was on the fence about. I'll have to think more on possible solutions for this outside of just stacking the deck ahead of time.

Pings were GREAT this year. A role for the major events is definitely the way to go. It was really nice being able to ping @Trivia whenever needed to get some last minute answers and also receive a ping when new questions were up. I think literally every single event that has any sort of live event or deadline should have a ping role. Even stuff like contest submission deadlines would be nice to have reminders for. Dak says that by next year, pory will probably have the react functionality for adding/removing roles so I think a static channel where people can add/remove them at their whim would be great for this. I think maybe it might also be good to have two team roles, just the general one for allowing people into their team channel and a role for pinging the whole team that might be opt in... although, now that I think about it, if we had a ping option for basically every single event, I suppose we probably wouldn't even need to ping the role much at all. hmm.

Events
I think maybe lowering point totals for the events that may bar entry to everyone might be a good compromise over not including them at all. Given that XIV is arguably the most popular channel on discord outside of general and... well, actually, that may be the only channel more active than it... I think it was a valid event to include. It doesn't feel too different to me from other games we've played in the past that also require ownership. It's, in part, a way to reward an active section of PC's users with an event they wouldn't normally have. So long as the majority of events remain accessible and, hopefully, the majority of the point distribution, I wouldn't personally worry too much about events like this being included. Not every person needs to be able to do every event—some of the beauty of this is that it's a whole team working together to cover all the bases and I think that counts here too. It's not like the AC or XIV events really had more participants than, say, the writing or speed drawing events and neither of those technically had prerequisites, so game nights or contests in games that do require a bit of money or time commitment don't seem too invasive to me.

Trivia was great as always. I gave feedback on VG Trivia in private and in #Solum, but I think the difficulty levels were perfect this year and the spread was well chosen. On Solum, we were pretty consistently able to suss out all the answers after some deliberation and back-and-forth of idea pitching and I think that's just the perfect way to do it. It's no fun if it's so easy you get it all in an instant or wrack your brain the whole 24 hour and come up with nothing, so it went really well. For E&M, I admit I know basically nothing and couldn't really help much at all, but I really enjoyed the spread of categories and the questions were interesting ones. Well done both April and Ash. :D

The other event I really love is Speed Drawing. It was fun as always because I love sharing the stress as we go AAAAA on voice chat while we draw and then seeing what everyone came up with. At first I was a little iffy on the addition of the theme, but I think it worked out really well because the stuff everyone came up with to hit that theme was hilarious. I think some feedback I have though is the legendary round was a bit... too scary, ahaha. I was really looking forward to the pseudo-legendary round where we could pick anything from the evolutionary line and would like to see that next year, if the event returns (and perhaps making the "choose from the whole line" an option in general might make it less intimidating, at least for the early rounds). And I think maybe the voting rounds could last a little longer. Frankly I'd even be willing to add a channel, even temporarily, for crowd voting on that (or other events!) so that it could go a little bit longer and so our lovely, weird artwork is on display a little longer, perhaps, but that's maybe a thing for discord staff discussion ahaha. But yes, very fun activity just like last year, Chr. Draco! Thank you for running it and sorry I didn't get that last challenge art in. :'D

As much as every EO did a cracking job, I have to mention you four specifically.

Loomie/Janp, I tip my hat to you for probably one of the BEST events the GT has seen to date and definitely my favourite in the 4/5 years I've participated. Considering just how grand the idea was, how much it exploded in popularity and the hiccups along the way, it actually ran pretty well for its first try and you handled everything so well! Please please PLEASE return with this next year <3

Dusk/Zach, thank you once more for coming in and saving the Among Us event when it was literally left for dead and not only that, but Dusk in particular for going through hours of pain to try and fix the points system to stop the event breaking the GT. I know towards the end numbers got a bit ropey, but you didn't have to take time out of your weeks to do what you did, but you still did it. May I... tempt you into running it next year perhaps? :pleading_face:

I completely agree with all of this and couldn't have put it better myself.

I may not have participated in the Baton Pass event but watching Solum coordinate it was an absolute treat. Everyone was having so much fun and once I realized what they were talking about, it was a pleasure to watch. I didn't actually realize this was the first time the event was run because everyone took to it so readily. It was definitely one of the highlights of the GT, I think!

And Among Us... I know taking over it was not easy but both of you stepped up to the plate admirably. I really appreciate the effort that went into not only setting up all the timeslots but coming up with a sustainable points system, which I know was a big struggle. It was a lot of unexpected work and I and many others are extremely thankful for it. I'm glad the event had a successful turnout after all that extra effort. :)

I also did not participate in Daily Puzzles, admittedly, but I'm astounded by the effort that went into it! The art and css was so cute and the Layton music embed was a nice touch. Very good job, Aldo. I'm sure it was no small feat to put that together. :D

 

[Juno]

Gonna start with an unpopular opinion, it seems, but I wanted to add my two cents on the game thing
(and it seems like Cherrim hit most of these points in fewer words lol, but anyway)

In defense of paid events

So obviously I'm biased since I love ACNH, and bear with me here because I know it's going to sound like I am solely defending this event, but I promise the point I am trying to make pertains to all paid games, and kind of all events in general lol

While I do understand the concern of not everyone owning the game and I think it's a very valid point, I don't think it's really that unfair, nor did any team have a huge advantage over others. There was a pretty even split in participation between all teams in ACNH (S:3 / A:3 / C:2) so while the turnout wasn't huge (although actually, it's exactly on par with pretty much every other longform event, but we'll get to that), no team had the advantage there, and this is actually a much more even split in participation than a lot of completely free events. I do understand there are some people who do want to join everything, which is why I say it's also a valid point - it's a bummer for people like Radio and 5q, who did want to participate, but did not have the means to.

But aside from the more enthusiastic few, not everyone is going to participate in everything anyway, regardless of whether it's free or not. It's free to write, it's free to map and it's free to draw, yet all of these events had a very similar turnout rate:

SWC - 8 participants, split: 5 Aecors, 2 Solums, 1 Caelum
Map-Off - 7 participants, split: 2 Aecors, 2, Solums, 3 Caelums
Speed Art - 8 participants, split 2 Aecors, 2 Solum, 4 Caelums

Because at the end of the day, not everybody wants to write or map or draw, and that's okay. And it's the same reason why I personally have no problem with the FFXIV event. It's not for me, but it clearly is for enough people to warrant its own event and I just don't see a problem with pandering to certain members - if you know there is a good chunk of players on the server, why wouldn't you make an event you know will get interest and participation? The turnout, again, is really not that much different from the rest of the long-form events - as niche as FFXIV may seem, it had 7 participants (A: 2, S: 1, C: 3), which is the same as the Map-Off and just one less than the SWC, two events that are highly accessible to everyone.

And that's mainly my point, most of these longform events require a substantial amount of interest or investment that isn't just (but can be) money, and if you weren't interested in it in some way already, you're not likely to participate regardless of whether it's free or not (though again, I do want to acknowledge that I know and appreciate the members who did want to participate in pretty much everything, and I understand it's most frustrating for those who wanted to try their hand at all the events but did not have the means to. But I think the numbers speak for themselves in that the majority of GTers will gravitate mostly towards what they know and enjoy regardless, especially when it comes to the long form events).

So I think the opposite is true, instead of banning paid events, I would personally prefer to keep encouraging a wider variety of events so that there's something for everybody. That's why we're in teams, after all - I suck at competitive battling and have no real interest in it, so I did not participate in the FC even though I could have. But I can write, map and design, so I joined activities pertaining to those interests I have instead. And another reason why I think interest dictates participation way more than money does is I know quite a few people on PC who were involved in the GT that do own ACNH, but chose not to participate in the event anyway, probably because they would have rather spent that time doing something else in the GT, and that is perfectly fine also.

In the grand scheme of things, the 600-odd points in total plus participation for events like ACNH and FFXIV is really not a huge game-changer when you stack it up against everything else. And there's bound to be enough people from every team to participate in said events on behalf of the team. Hence why it was such a nail-biter between Aecor and Solum at the end, when we were waiting for the longform event results to come out. Which brings me to my next point, the heavily discussed

Team balancing issue, if you can call it that

I know I memed on Caelum a bit in chat, but I do think it was just a stroke of bad luck that a lot of inactive people happened to be sorted into the team, thus bringing down team morale, and I'm not sure if that's really something having a team lead could fix. Or, rather, if the initiative is there, any team member can do exactly that - organizing and reminding their teammates to participate in things. From the sound of it in Sammi's post, Caelum did have a team lead in Tyler at the very least, but if people don't want to participate, they don't want to participate even if you ping and remind them.

I don't have a solution that hasn't been proposed already - having two teams will certainly lessen the chances of this happening, but as we've had GTs in the past with 4 teams that ran with more success (team division-wise), I really do think it was just bad luck this time around that it turned out like that for one team.

I'm glad Anna brought it up and feels the same way, because I also enjoy having 3-4 teams rather than just 2 - I didn't know if that made sense to say because I'm sure it's the same amount of people being sorted into these teams regardless of how many there are, but it just feels livelier and less dull with more than two, lol. I suppose it's going to largely depend on the organizers if they want to play it safe or chance it again next year.

And, because I want to end on a positive note

I had a lot of fun with this GT, arguably the most fun I've had with GT ever!! This is probably in part due to both the kinds of events hosted and just me actually branching out and participating in more things than I have in the past.

I really loved all the live events I participated in - I think the last long GT I joined was like 2017 or something and we either didn't have as many live events, or I just didn't join because I wasn't on the PC Discord very much. But having our own channels rather than the private team threads we had before definitely helped foster a sense of community and team, made pinging/talking to each other and coordinating things much easier also.

And truly, thank you to all the EOs who helped put this together! I want to say, even though I simply didn't have the time to participate in everything I wanted to, I could tell how much effort was put into them, and I'd say my biggest regret was not participating in stuff like the riddles, puzzles and WTP. Trivia was great, and I really liked the twist of using representatives for tiebreakers, had a lot of fun answering questions for a game of my choosing - maybe there's a way to incorporate this in the rest of the event, some way for general participants to give a bit of input on the kinds of games that will show up in trivia.

But yeah, overall, I had a lot of fun!