Get-Together 2023 Feedback

[Devalue]

Eevee's Arcade: A good mix of games this year. Liked the inclusion of Rocketpult. Demanded more finesse than twitchy reactions. Required some thinking/planning with Crystals of Amalgum too. (Became very twitchy at the end, technically. Moved really fast.) Bets on that particular score being quite beatable by someone with mastery over color mixing.

Personally liked Burst the most. Rewarded risky play. Might have liked Rocketpult as much for similar reasons with more time with it (and no infinite score method).

Pokemon Challenge (Running Out of Time): Suggests fewer required updates. Squeezed 9 updates into a 15ish day event. Makes it hard for participants to finish and organizers to update. Could give one big rule or two smaller ones every two badges instead.

On points: Felt strange to earn only 5 Get-Together points less than Gears for losing. Perhaps add a maximum number of points for the losing team, like...250? Incentivizes a win in a close match like this.

Personally liked the Explosion rule and the combo Global rule of it. Cannot recall the last time willingly picking any of those moves. Proved quite helpful, oddly.

Pokemon Trivia: Liked those crosswords. Promoted some discussion.

Approves of the idea of Squirdle. Tended to fall into ruts, though. Gained so much information from a Generation 5, two-stage, monotype Pokemon. Too much, perhaps. How about rotating out some categories day-by-day? Guesses the standard one day. Deals with Type 2, Height, letters in name, and Gender Ratio another day. Keeps it a little fresher.

Trivia events as a whole: Views them as a good part of the Get-Together. Provides something to do on just about every given day. Cautions against very time-intensive rounds. Stacks up if multiple trivia events do it.

Also wishes for some way to not worry about submitting. Troubles teams every year. Typically waits until the last minute to allow everyone a chance to look at it. Lends itself to chaos if a chosen person is unable to make it. Proffers no great suggestions, unfortunately. Perhaps allow teams to submit multiple times, but only score the last one? Might alleviate the problem a little, at the cost of possible excessive submissions.

Escape the Lab: Had fun during the event. Felt like a slower version of a point-and-click adventure game. Mentions one odd thing: the Room 3 bookshelf. Usually provides all the clues necessary to solve a puzzle within the room itself. Could not have done that puzzle without looking it up.

Animal Crossing: Personally wanted to submit more outfits. Increases the number you see from everyone else too.

__________

Mind Read the Room: Did you at least try the Google Sheets feature? Might save an hour and be more accurate.

PokeCommunity Stadium 2: How did you nerf Snorlax? With a Leftovers ban? One idea: aces. Select one Pokemon to be 55. Allows Dragonite and Tyranitar in. Reinstates Lance's proper team with two aces.

Did you think about the scoring? Are you going to track healing from Giga Drain and berries again? Perhaps some kind of time multiplier? (Acts as an alternative way of nerfing Snorlax and Leftovers.)

__________

Third, noncompetitive team: Immediately worries about that killing all three chats. Also, what happens if the non-competitive user wins an event? Do they get points at all? Would feel weird to be a competitor and technically lose, but still get 1st place.

User Stats:

(An aside: I wonder what statistics we would arrive at if we tallied the points earned by each user. It would be interesting to see but I don't think we should be balancing around this)

Spoiler: Lengthy response

Shortcomings:

1. How do you quantify Trivia help, completing the Escape Room, or Pokemon Unite wins? Left those points out.
2. Others not included: 25 points on each team for Paint & Describe, Jackbox games (170 Apri, 145 Gear), Gartic Phone (105 Apri, 90 Gear), PMD&D (75 on both sides), Amiibo Casino (125 Apri, 115 Gear), and SWT team achievement (50 Apri).
3. Employed a shortcut for Forum Games: 1 point = 0.55 Get-Together points.
4. Shortcut for GT Challenge: 1 point = 0.22 Get-Together points. Could not account for all points, though.
5. Awarded points for 1st-3rd, plus their participation and achievement for the VGM Music Sharing event, but nothing for the other participants.
6. Comes out to 6043.05 points total. Amounts to only ~69.8% of the total points. Do not take these as official rankings. Excluded a lot of points.

                      User Points
1                  5qwerty 589.70
2                  Devalue 506.10
3                  Cherrim 395.00
4                     apro 376.55
5                 gimmepie 370.00
6                 Arcaneum 319.90
7                     juno 299.35
8                Aquacorde 297.65
9         Alex_Among_Foxes 287.80
10                 Eleanor 284.45
11                Tsutarja 206.35
12            LeGoldenWolf 160.00
13         VisionofMilotic 150.50
14               Jbsundown 142.80
15           TwilightBlade 104.20
16                    wolf  97.00
17                Panda280  95.50
18                     faf  85.00
19                   Kitty  85.00
20             X_K.V.Jin_X  82.95
21                    Groc  80.00
22        Explorer of Time  75.80
23          SteCisGreendog  75.00
24                  Cubeth  72.00
25                   Sammi  70.00
26                   Megan  68.50
27               saniachan  63.10
28             Mewtwolover  62.80
29          tenthcompanion  52.00
30                 Celeste  45.00
31              bobandbill  40.00
32              chr. draco  35.00
33                  Mersie  35.00
34                    Janp  32.00
35                     Kip  30.00
36                   mikey  30.00
37                Lavender  25.55
38                 Aleks93  25.00
39                     Bay  25.00
40                  ReKoil  25.00
41 Fact Checking Gardevoir  15.50
42                    Aldo  15.00
43                    Jess  15.00
44       _confused_piplup_  10.00
45                  Cowrie  10.00
46          GlitchedViolet  10.00
47            LonelyAzalea  10.00
48             Supercookie  10.00
49           Venia Silente  10.00
50                  Vulpuz  10.00
51                 Ddrox13   5.00
52              Gardevoir1   5.00
53           kaizodakitten   5.00
54                    Lozz   5.00
55                   Strix   5.00

Total users on teams: 133. Becomes an above average user by participating in anything.

Ranks 12th solely for winning a 150 point longform game with an extra 10 for participation.

Scored approximately 506.1 points. Owes almost half of them to the Arcade. Also amounts to roughly 10% of the team's points. Owes plenty to all the other Apricorns participating.

Event Stats

Points
Can someone do a comparison of points for each event from last year to this year? I feel like it's mostly the same for each year, perhaps the balance has become marginally better this year?

Cannot easily do that. Overwrote last year's point breakdown. Did not always announce point rewards in-thread. Said nothing about the point squish either. Mostly came down to small, continuous events (example: 1230 total points for 22 sessions of Pictionary), though.

Hm. What events paid out the most this year, though?

Spoiler: A list with fewer notes

                                    Event Points
1                     Running Out of Time    595
2                       Video Game Trivia    530
3                   Create-a-Pokemon Form    520
4                                Art Swap    500
5               Small Writing Competition    460
6                          Eevee's Arcade    455
7                                   Bingo    430
8  Forum Games & Pokémon Trivia Spotlight    410
9                      The Great Egg Swap    390
10                    Pokemon Movie Night    370
11                      The Random Rumble    365
12                            Fortune Cup    340
13                          Jackbox Games    325
14                        Animal Crossing    310
15                    Pokemon VGM Sharing    290
16                             E&M Trivia    258
17                         Pokemon Trivia    250
18                          Amiibo Casino    240
19                         Escape the Lab    240
20                       Paint & Describe    230
21                           Gartic Phone    195
22                     Mind Read the Room    180
23                   PMD&D: Paradox Tower    150
24                PokeCommunity Stadium 2    140
25                    Pokemon Unite Event    140
26                    Speed Art Challenge    140
27         Final Fantasy XIV Glam Contest    130
28                                      ?     45
29                          Daily Puzzles     30
30                     Team Apricorns DCC      1
31                         Team Gears DCC      1

Paid out the most with the GT Challenge event. Also probably had some of the least impact of any event (300 to 295).

Should be 240 points for Escape the Lab, also. Never rewarded the 50 points for the final room to Apricorns. Fixed.

Glean from this what you wish. Notes high points on some events because of high participation. Realizes it was not the question asked, of course.

Sliding points for participation: Sees both sides on this. Stings to lose Animal Crossing/Egg Swap/Final Fantasy XIV without good access on your team. Potentially discourages the team with less from participating with sliding points, however. Risks a lot by turning a low point 4v0 event into a high point 4v1 event.

Depends on the event. Makes no sense for Small Writing Competition, as previously stated. Might for others.

That said, imagine 50 point Bingo pots this Get-Together. (Says "pot" to prevent 8 people Bingoing for 50 points each.) Certainly had the participation for it.

 

[Alex_Among_Foxes]

I agree with you, a third team like that would be nice. Of course you can just ignore teams and stay neutral like I did in this GT.

The only reason having a non-competitive team be official would be nice is because then the team could have their own Discord room for chatting!

One last thing for the moment because this is getting long, but I want to say one final thing about the idea of a neutral team that has been floated. That is that if you really don't care about the competitive element (assuming there is one next year), then you're not going to be bothered if you aren't netting your team many points. So I don't know if I really buy that the same people who want a neutral team are also the people who don't care about the competitive side. But even ignoring that like... the competition is already secondary to just doing the events you like and having fun. Just doing what you enjoy doing is already passively adding to your team's score, so there's no reason to be hyper-fixated on "am I contributing?" And nobody is going to force you to do events you don't want to do. At most people are going to post trying to drum up activity in general which is something you can easily ignore/say no to. I think a problem is being manufactured here that doesn't actually exist.

That isn't true at all! When people in your team chat bring up the lack of participation from their team compaired to the opposing team, I would be very surprised if anyone who just wanted to play games wouldn't at the very least feel called out. Second of all, what if the neutral team people want to do stuff with friends? What if those friends get randomly yeeted to the other team? And how about all the talking about the complete unballance of the teams from a user participation standpoint? If there was an extra team, even if it had the majority of users on it, that wouldn't matter to the compitition teams because the (potentially) larger third team woulndn't get any points, and the competition teams would have a much better balance of super competitive and (hopefully actve) users.

Edit: Just wanted to tack this on because I think it's a really good couple of qustions.

Third, noncompetitive team: Immediately worries about that killing all three chats. Also, what happens if the non-competitive user wins an event? Do they get points at all? Would feel weird to be a competitor and technically lose, but still get 1st place.

The way I see it, killing the chats is a pretty valid concern that I have no good answer for because I honestly don't know.
And I don't think the third team should get any points at all, if a user wants to play for points, then they should join the competitive teams, or keep track privately. That being said though, I do think the users on a non-competitive team should still be allowed to place in events if they do well, the points just not getting added anywhere.

 

[5qwerty]

a

b

OK first of all, I agree with basically all of what you guys are saying. I don't think I properly communicated or emphasized what I now understand as the difference in our viewpoints.

First of all, I agree there are events that take less effort or skill than other events. For example, AC low effort vs SWC high effort. AC should have a lower point yield in relation to SWC regardless of the number of participants (in all cases except for a couple of edge cases). My point scaling points/comments were more geared towards these events (judged events) . One thing that I think I failed to communicate properly was that I feel even with the point scaling, the max cap for the lower effort events should still be less than SWC. So regardless of scaling these events or not, they should not have as much point yield as SWC.

Battling and Egg Swap do indeed scale with number of participants. I would be fine with these scaling with the number of participants, though I feel that ignores the rather uncompetitive and abusable natures of both of these events. These events, as they are now, are both heavily exploitable and probably need to have their yielded point totals reduced and keep them as fun events until something is changed with the rules of the events themselves.

The only real difference, as far as I can tell, is in how we view whether events (especially SWC) should be scaled or not (and even then I don't care too much tbh). As a disclaimer here, I definitely did not flesh out my thoughts in my first post in this thread, and I actually think events like SWC, GT Challenge, and Trivia should be considered flagship or super-standard events, in which their point totals are determined first and then all the other events will have their point yields adjusted in accordance with these events. However, when I mentioned scaling, I didn't think it was fair (for the purposes of consistency) to just have SWC exempt from any scaling. As in, if there is scaling on participants for judged events, it should apply to all judged events.

Now, I'm actually fine if events weren't scaled with points given that the appropriate points were given for perceived effort. My question, which no one seems to want to answer, is still this: what do we do when you get only low effort entries to an event? What happens if that event happens to be SWC? I understand that PC will probably have to be near dead for that to happen, but from a design perspective it seems asinine not to consider this case. If we truly value effort and want that to translate to points, then we need a failsafe or some sort of clause when you do get utter garbage submissions. I understand that people always bust their asses off for SWC and the like, but it's not completely wrong to consider the what if rare cases.

As an example, I was the only participant in the web game jam event in I think GT 2020. I had to put a fair amount of time into it and I ended up getting 150 points. Fair, right? I don't know because there was no one to compare it to. I could have also submitted something straight from my ass and gotten the same amount of points. Is that really fair to the participants of SWC, the winner of which had to create an engaging story and compete against many other skilled writers? If I made a trash game by doing nothing and the SWC winner wrote a masterpiece, is it fair that we receive the same number of points? What if game jam was 50 points for winning, would it be fair to give me that 50 points for still basically doing nothing? Maybe that's more acceptable in my eyes. How about if the roles were reversed and all the programmers came out of nowhere to participate in this game jam to create truly amazing games, but SWC got only one entry and it was trash? That's not fair either. Do we just cancel the events with few participants outright? I don't think that's completely fair to the host or the participants who actually joined.

I'm not saying that there definitely needs to be a point scaling system (wrt number of participants) in place. What I'm saying is just that we need failsafes in place for these edge cases. Effort is definitely hard to measure and there will always be certain levels of unfairness, but we could at least try to tackle the extreme examples.

 

[Juno]

It'd be cool if the rule selection was automated somehow, like if there was a list of all the rules and people could use an RNG to choose one. Maybe a Discord bot that provides a random number in a challenge channel so that the rule selection is public and can't be abused.

+1 to this, if the same challenge is used in a future GT I think that would help with the pacing of the event a lot!

I really loved Bingo and Escape the Room this year. Please do them again!!
For Escape the Room, I preferred the format of the last room with all the clues and actions until we hit 2 mistakes. But I'm also biased because I was on Gears, so there wasn't as many of us to submit investigations. It felt bad to pick out a dud for your daily investigation knowing that there aren't as many people to pick up the slack (rip me checking the potted plant).

Yes! Now that I've seen how it ran and the flaws with the setup, I already have some ideas for changes to implement that will hopefully make it more balanced and fun - starting with axing the investigations and going with something like the final room, where a team isn't disadvantaged purely by numbers. I also felt bad giving the duds knowing the odds were already stacked against you guys lol

LIFE IS LIKE A HIGHWAY-

KERCHOO

Mentions one odd thing: the Room 3 bookshelf. Usually provides all the clues necessary to solve a puzzle within the room itself. Could not have done that puzzle without looking it up.

Is that something that makes it less fun? Just gathering feedback for next year (this is an open question to everyone who has input on the escape rooms btw!) since I did plan on incorporating some more complex ciphers for future escape rooms that would probably not be common knowledge to most people without doing some kind of research, but unlike some of the other events I have no problem with people using the internet or outside help because of the nature of the event - it's not straight up trivia where looking up stuff would definitely be cheating, you still have to use the info within the context of the room to actually progress.

Real talk though, appreciate everyone's comments and feedback on Escape the Lab (wolf's comment about it being his new favourite event really made my day)!! It was something I spent a lot of time on but I was a lot more unsure of how it would be received, so I'm glad it did alright and people had fun with it too.

Also wishes for some way to not worry about submitting. Troubles teams every year. Typically waits until the last minute to allow everyone a chance to look at it. Lends itself to chaos if a chosen person is unable to make it. Proffers no great suggestions, unfortunately. Perhaps allow teams to submit multiple times, but only score the last one? Might alleviate the problem a little, at the cost of possible excessive submissions.

I wonder if it would be possible/an improvement to have an official Google sheet or something for each team? One that the hosts have access to and anything entered into it is considered the submission. There's timestamps and a history too, so it would still be easy for hosts to see if anyone was sliding in answers past the deadline.

Also, what happens if the non-competitive user wins an event? Do they get points at all? Would feel weird to be a competitor and technically lose, but still get 1st place.

Really good point I didn't even think about when going through the thread - I don't hate the idea of a non-competitive team in a vacuum but for stuff like this it just seems to create more complications than it solves, when you could, like a few others have said, just be on a team and not pay attention to the points if you are not interested in the competitive side of things.

But I think this varies from person to person since it just personally would not really change how I participate - while it is kind of a fun element I don't really take a lot of pride from being on the winning team so much as I care about my personal merits; I care that my story did well, I care that I had fun putting together a cute Animal Crossing outfit and my efforts were recognized, I care that I drew a lot - that some of this may have contributed to my team's win is great but I don't ever really push myself to do more than I actually want to, and conversely I don't think if I were on a losing team that the lessened morale would make me write a worse story or have less fun playing a game I already enjoy.

I understand nobody likes to lose, but I guess I'd say just have fun doing what you want and what you can control - I think if you did your best and you had fun, you shouldn't feel called out if you did your part, you know?

Should be 240 points for Escape the Lab, also. Never rewarded the 50 points for the final room to Apricorns.

I accidentally awarded it to the Bingo thread instead but I told Erica, that's why there is one random 50-point Bingo entry lol - I still gave the points to the right team though so it did not matter or make a difference to the overall total.

I'm not saying that there definitely needs to be a point scaling system (wrt number of participants) in place. What I'm saying is just that we need failsafes in place for these edge cases. Effort is definitely hard to measure and there will always be certain levels of unfairness, but we could at least try to tackle the extreme examples.

so what you're saying is if all nine other participants in swc dropped dead then you shouldn't get 150 points for Journey to the Center of Poopoo Island

I guess the only issue there is, like you said, effort is hard to gauge - I think if you are only concerned about having a failsafe in place, then perhaps for said events, having a clear rubric/internal scoring system like SWC does, can help with that and then we could say below a certain threshold it could be discussed if an entry should earn points? Even then, it does feel a little dicey to dictate whether or not someone put effort into that since it's possible for a newer writer or ESL person to have written something that doesn't score very high, but they did put effort into. But yeah, like it would be very rare for a) fewer than 3 regular writers to not participate and b) for someone to actually try and not get a "passing" score of like 50%+.

(I know there are other events this applies to but this is the one I know best lol)
(and I would have to be dead to not participate in Animal Crossing and SWC)

 

[Aquacorde]

there wasssss a point scale system I was contemplating for judged events that could effectively function as a failsafe but i'm not sure how it would work for events that don't have internal scoring. so like. i dont think it can really be applied effectively to most things lmao. but. basically it would be that the maximum score for an event would be, yknow, 150pts and the top three would recieve points for their team based on their scores within the event.

so for SWC, i got 82/90, karen got 79/90, and eli got 77/90. if you take those as a % of 90 and scale them up to a % of 150, i would have taken 137, karen takes 132, eli takes 128 (all rounded to nearest whole number). that does award a total of 397 points as opposed to the standard 300 from the other system, and potentially awards 450 for a maximum total, but 1) that can be played with and 2) it does make it so the amount of points is based on how well the person actually did the Thing.

but this isnt solving for an issue we had this year. and i would also like to think that we enough respect for each other as a community that people would not scum for points just because me and karen and venia died one year and nobody else chose to write. if it becomes that GT is a point-maxing game and we have to establish a million rules to counteract that... i dont really want to play lmao. i want to be in a community that can be silly and even competitive but still see the points as a fun overarching game. i want to be with people who will go "aw, darn" when they lose and "good game!" when they win. i want to be able to steam when we lose E&M by TWO POINTS and then laugh because wow! that was incredibly close! i want to play with people who are happy to participate, not seeking to game-break. and i think our community is already like that. so im not sure it's really necessary to implement mechanical failsafes for the event of people bein' intentionally terrible.

 

[Cherrim]

and i would also like to think that we enough respect for each other as a community that people would not scum for points just because me and karen and venia died one year and nobody else chose to write.

if u karen and venia all die within one year i'm going to start suspecting the other SWC regulars, just saying.........

 

[Devalue]

Is that something that makes it less fun? Just gathering feedback for next year (this is an open question to everyone who has input on the escape rooms btw!) since I did plan on incorporating some more complex ciphers for future escape rooms that would probably not be common knowledge to most people without doing some kind of research, but unlike some of the other events I have no problem with people using the internet or outside help because of the nature of the event - it's not straight up trivia where looking up stuff would definitely be cheating, you still have to use the info within the context of the room to actually progress.

Real talk though, appreciate everyone's comments and feedback on Escape the Lab (wolf's comment about it being his new favourite event really made my day)!! It was something I spent a lot of time on but I was a lot more unsure of how it would be received, so I'm glad it did alright and people had fun with it too.

Not really less fun, just confusing. Makes it difficult to know when to switch from inspecting the room to searching the Internet. Figured you made up the book titles (or adjusted existing names). Why would the Internet say anything?

Suggests saying in the instructions that searching the Internet may be helpful. Opens it up as a clearer possibility.

(Adjusted the event points, also.)

 

[Arcaneum]

Please bear with, I am trying to compile several conversations I've had over the GT into one thing! I'm also aware some of this has already probably been said, but please bear with me.

Going to just put a little grumble in about how because of how I had to spend my time (both in and outside of the GT) it felt this GT, the first week was really not enjoyable and as a result I missed out on a lot of things I actually wanted to do, which is annoying! But just means a few personal things for me next year to look at i.e. don't host so many events.

Points

So with access to something a lot of people here wouldn't have, the actual points and distributions from events weren't TOO bad this year. We didn't really change anything from last year. Like one team wasn't actually too far behind for the majority of the event (there were points where they were even ahead AND a fair few events were actually won by Gears), it was just the sweep in the larger events due to participation that did it.

That said however, there were some obvious outliers that we missed, and some things that definitely need to be looked at. Not necessarily as a result of GT2023, just things I think have kinda been there and not been brought up until now.

Firstly, yes I am also going to mention the AC event and how, despite being the same thing in effect, it got a lot more points than the FF14 contest. The easy answer here is that anything like that should just follow the same format as FF14, as that had points lowered due to the whole "lmao not accessible" thing from whenever it was.

Otherwise, I think simply we need to just look at points PER EVENT moving forward, and not just try to apply a blanket format for events to follow. Sure we can use it as a framework, or for events where it does work, but some events definitely need to be re-thought. Examples being:

• Movie Nights - I think only issuing participation points for active chatters or something similar would work here. I.E. don't award points to people who put it on and just disappear until it's finished.
• Trivia - Perhaps look at something similar to E&M, so score GT points based on teams' scores, not end results

I think this will stop weird point spikes in things that in reality should just NOT be earning that much at all, but also means that the big events like Trivia still act as the point linchpins they're supposed to - the events that after working on them for over 2 weeks SHOULD see that effort pay off and potentially swing a win for your team.

Team Distribution

All thing considered, I have no idea how this year's system managed to go as badly as it did. It really does seem like convenience/RNG put everyone into the same chunk for one team. Not much therefore we could've done this year, other than perhaps had a little reorganise in the first few days, once we realised how things were stacking.

Look at the suggestions in here however, there will be two things that won't be happening: manually sorting the more active people/splitting them up and there will categorically NOT be a third non-team being made. I am not having competing teams punished because one person wants to vibe in Arcade but takes all the top spots, therefore potentially earning no points as they're not part of the competition? It just doesn't really make sense. I think next year we are going to add disclaimers that there is a competitive element to the event (and therefore to expect that from people, NOT to force people in to being like it, but just that it may come up) and that pings will be expected.

In terms of the actual team sorting, there was one thing we did speak about which I think - thanks to wolf's suggestion - we could look into.

So for this, firstly I think it would be a good idea to include some form of activity-gauging question in the quiz/whatever, but that we should also do this a week or so before the GT starts. Based on your activity response, you'll then be sorted into group A or B. Let's say Group A are for all the super competitive, mega active GT participants, and B are more the people joining to vibe, maybe look at a few events, they're just there for the ride.

Then we randomise the splitting as we did this year, but this time we do this for both Group A and Group B separately, and then assign them to each team as needed. We can still do the balancing in those two groups, but at least then it will be splitting the more active people, so each team is benefitting from this.

New Events

Bingo

This was such a roaring success, I'm glad this found its way to GT. It brought loads of people together and it felt like just a great vibe? Everyone coming together, comparing their cards and bingos, the mukposting, points not feeling too outlandish, honestly this is like the perfect example of what a GT event should be like. I hope this returns for many future GTs.

Escape the Lab

This was a really adventurous idea and I'm glad that it generally seems to have paid off. It did feel a little bit like its intensity along with the GT itself caused you a little burnout Juno and that's why the third map was delayed. That said, as part of Gears I really liked the format for the last room. However I am wondering, if activity was somewhat more normalised, would the first format be better? I think it may even be swings and roundabouts - it's either more people getting initial clues to then put together, or more people brainstorming/inputting actions at a time. I think both ways work, and I hope this comes back bigger and better next year now that we've got that valuable preliminary data!

Pokémon Unite

For an event which was literally cooked up last minute and organised thus, this was actually really fun! Same as Escape the Lab, now that you know what works and what doesn't, this can be streamlined for next year. The big thing will be to try and cut out any fluff to make it shorter, as these ended up being 3+ hour sessions unexpectedly and for what it is, that's quite a big ask from participants.

Pokemon Trivia

This just went way too hard. We overestimated way too many things here. Overall I liked the format of the rounds, I just think less is more in this case, especially with two other similar events as well. Definitely want to look at more things like the crosswords, using the TCG cards as clues, etc. next year. NO EDITING MUSIC 5QWERTY WE KILLED EVERYONE DOING IT.

PokéCommunity Stadium

This was also a really great event!!!! Again I loved that in theory it was kind of low effort, but I was still really excited for the outcomes?! I know you've mentioned balancing tweaks and stuff Deva, but I am really looking forward to this coming up again hopefully, this was really fun.

Existing Events

Fortune Cup

I know this is your baby GP, but I think this needs to go. Or needs to be re-built from the ground up. I think the battling crowd of old that would relish in spending the time to build teams and the such just isn't around anymore. I know a lot of my issue was time, but I won't lie when I came in and saw that qwerty had built up the lead, I just didn't want to really bother as much, especially when there was another battling event where I can - albeit in the last day or two - just battle and not have the team side to worry about.

Random Rumble

Makes sense to move onto this - I enjoyed this a lot more. I guess the only thing is maybe, a bit like the forum spotlight etc. we could put a cap on amount of games that are valid for points. Otherwise I really enjoyed it, I'm just gutted I didn't get to participate in it more.

Trivia

I think maybe things are slowing down a bit and as a result, am considering cutting down at least VG Trivia. Or maybe doing something different - I have had a look back at mine (and Juno's) older events and I'm seeing things which I thought might make it too easy nowadays for me, but I think actually might help make this not so tiring for people. Ultimately I don't want to be putting in the time/effort I do only to see people potentially not bother, so going to try and revamp my events for real!

I did also consider maybe all of the trivia hosts next year making one larger quiz next year? So still do the areas we normally do, but maybe we can then look at say IDK 5 questions each? I'm not sure if that's too limiting and I know this then really detriments Taylor's event that always does well and has no complaints! Will see.

I also think I will cave to the idea of making a sheet for people to submit answers too - if nothing else, me and qwerty AND taylor were stressing about people cheating way more than we should have done, so if nothing else I am wanting sheets which force people to sign in, so that if we are unsure we can at least trace it back to whoever had made the edits.

Pokémon Challenge

I think we need to have a sit-down next year and try to get this simplified and make sure you are both on the same page. I think we need to maybe get the format down first and I know time is pressing for you both, but we really need to get rules etc. in place AND read through before the event starts. I think this will help with a lot of the queries at least, as a lot of issues just seemed to be around semantics, and we could have eliminated most of this potentially.

I also think that we need to be doing something that isn't reliant on one host update a day - like once I was done with the challenge, I would've like to have been able to maybe start another run to then score more points for my team, but because of how the updates were it just wasn't feasible. But even on that front, it just made things a little difficult for people and it only really benefits anyone starting on Day 1, because they will always finish first.

I think something like the relay one we did, or something with save swaps, would be really good!

Pokémon Movie Night

These seemed to do really well again! I'm just wondering if we wanted to maybe expand the horizons a bit with that in mind - more hosts, more broader reach of movies maybe???

Speed Art

I wonder if, depending on your availability Draco, we maybe set up a poll for the first few days of GT with some timeslots in mind, and got people to almost sign up for them? Or something that at least you know when the most people are going to be around, to be able to then look at hosting your event, because I know this has done well before and people were looking forward to it!

Art Swap

EVENT OF THE YEAR 2023. I am only gutted that I didn't get to do everything I had planned (and submitted rubbish), because this exceeded my expectations so psyducking much it was unreal. 160+ or so pieces of art in the end? Absolutely incredible. The engagement was great and I think honestly it's because you don't have the like, team involvement as it were. You can just vibe in your own time, doing something you enjoy doing and just plug way at it. Honestly even the points side of it I'm not fussed about, like I feel it was all fair considering what was submitted in. Really good job from both of you here!

Other stuff

So some other things, mostly from a conversation I had recently with other GT Management peeps.

Starting next year NOW

There are some things which at the moment stop us from physically making some of the stuff for next year's GT, but with all of this feedback in mind, I think it is a good idea for us to start looking at some of these things now. Or at least if nothing else, putting together stuff so that when we are near GT time next year, it's not as much of a bother. But primarily, so we don't forget half of this feedback!

GT Management

I also want to put a suggestion out there for anyone who may want to help with the GT in a management-style position. I.E. take these bits of feedback etc. you have suggested/seen and put it into fruition. Just want to see what that would look like, but please get into contact with me if it's something you want to do! It doesn't have to be just with just anything mentioned here, but helping with the theming/points/art etc, of the GT too!

Management TLDR

So basically, things we'll be looking at:

• Revamp quiz to try and sort active GT people into one group to then split, and passive GT people into another
• Do points per event, tailor things so that we don't end up with weird point anomalies
• Open GT quizzing EARLIER so we can organise teams manually if needed
• Open out GT help to anyone (potentially)
• Prep 2024 NOW
• Making things easier so poor Erica doesn't have to try and trawl through ancient spaghetti code to just get the GT working

 

[Venia Silente]

Is it still possible to answer to this thing? Because honestly I was thinking about it for a few days but then, ya know, life, timezone change, stuff, and my PokéCommunity mind kind of fell by the wayside doesn't help that I just got invited to a long-term RP.

In the general view, I want to expand a bit on something I said in the Discord rooms: I really liked the GT this year, I had lots of fun and some of the contest felt a bit more engaging (VGM Sharing is IMO Best Idea Ever™ it just needs the adjustments that were already discovered). But, and this is a big but from my perspective, it also felt noticeably more tiring and "expensive" than previously.

To expand on this feeling I got: I guess part of it is that I'm not exactly becoming younger, but that applies to everyone here (unless some of y'all has some secret to share). Rather, I feel most of it, comparing to the last two years for example, is that the progressive events such as VGM & E&M Trivias felt like they were harder and tighter to commit to for a lower "feedback". As if it cost more to communicate and maintain participation and contribution, despite we having the team Discords and whatnot.

We also have some ongoing issues with internal team organization and delivering the team's answers to the trivias on time, for some years already, but I feel that can be at least solved from a mechanical sense.

but this isnt solving for an issue we had this year. and i would also like to think that we enough respect for each other as a community that people would not scum for points just because me and karen and venia died one year and nobody else chose to write. if it becomes that GT is a point-maxing game and we have to establish a million rules to counteract that... i dont really want to play lmao.

if u karen and venia all die within one year i'm going to start suspecting the other SWC regulars, just saying.........

Ayyyy thanks but how do you even get to know I didn't die and wasn't replaced by a serial ghostwriter who likes Pangoros instead of Nidos lol.

That said I do hope that if I can't be around to write one year, people will still want to write. I really like using the SWC thread to just... invite people to write? sometimes. It's a good event call. I still have those reviews pending because of Life™ but, yeah. It's good to have participation.

Speaking of SWC. It's true the event is one of the "heavies" in GT overall due to factors such as lasting the entire run. I'm just gonna say that I feel because of its idiosyncracies compared to other events, it is a bit maybe too much of an outlier in terms of event design for the discussion regarding points and team assignment, scaling, and what not. Applying corrections "from" SWC for scoring / scaling would be very difficult to perform, having to take place either at the very beginning or after the end of GT as a whole. Having an internal scoring system already takes charge of most issues such as the potential for troll entries; and there are factors that can only really be compensated for in the context of the larger GT event such as lack of participants, such as what happened in (IIRC) 2021.

In terms of other events, I feel like one issue of team balancing that needs to be addressed in more depth than has been done already is that of some videogame events not only requiring the external hardware to participate but also require an upfront or subscription payment to their external service (FF XIV comes to mind). I think this availability should also be factored into team selection, but I'm not sure what are good variables to take into account (for example, even if "do you have [name of console]?" looks like a good starting question, it doesn't really deliver anything useful except for the case where the events involved are for the mainline Pokémon games, that tend to be more console-restricted / "exclusive").

And... I think that's about it, for now. I guess if I have some more to say, it'll come up in due time or as a result of more feedback.

Thanks for events btw, it's fun to have this sort of community gathering.