How many events did you participate in?
Art Swap, SWC, Hideout, GT Challenge, Dress to Impress, Battle Bash, Bingo, DJ Battles (kinda, my songs somehow didn't send), PMD&D, Arcade, VGM Sharing, Movie Night, Trivias, Pictionary, PS2, TCG, MRtR, QueUp, Archipelago, Gartic Phone, Jackbox
Which apparently is 21?
How close was this to what you planned on?
Yeah, probably. I tried to participate in as many as I could.
Which event was your favourite?
Uh, hard to say a definite favourite. I would say Pictionary/Jackbox/Hideout were things on the schedule that I looked forward to most. I think anything where people were just online at the same time to chill or to achieve a common goal was more fun for me. I enjoyed Archipelago a lot too but we went too hard and ended up finishing before the second week and I was left feeling empty.
Which events did you not participate in, but wish you had?
Create-a-Pokémon (I didn't come up with any good ideas). The rest of the events I just don't have the games/resources to participate in.
Did you feel like you had enough time to do everything you wanted to do?
Aside from not participating in CaP, yeah. I wish there was a bit more stuff to do sometimes.
For newcomers or people who haven't participated in a GT for a while, what drew you in?
N/A
More Specific Stuff:
Theme/Teams/Balancing:
I would like to preface this by saying that the theme doesn't really have a huge effect on my own personal enjoyment or participation in events. That said, I think that the theming being closer to the Pokémon canon gave us more to work with and made things more "relatable" in a way. And because the ideas were more familiar to everyone, the memes were also more abundant. The ideas for each team were a lot more easily distinguishable from each other (water vs. fire/ground, brain vs brawn, chads vs virgins, etc.) compared to prior years - Apricorn vs Gears was future vs past but it was just two old dudes, just one guy is "cool and hip". The year before that was just a Grass/Ghost vs a Fire/Ghost which was also kind of future vs past? Not trying to play down the prior years' lore writers' efforts, but it just seemed like this year's rivalry was "easier to get into".
As for team balancing, I don't really know if I have the right to comment on whether teams were balanced or not. It feels like every year I just end up on the team that is more active (just by discord messages, it was 15k to 7k - do we have the number of messages statistics from prior years?). I'm not sure if there's an element of morale compounding over the two weeks or of something else. Either way, I'm glad the sentiment is that the teams felt more balanced this year.
Pictionary & Jackbox:
In regards to the scheduling, retrospectively speaking I do feel like we could have had a few more sessions. I echo gimmepie's sentiments as I am also perplexed by the turnout, especially since there were actually no points given out for 2nd and 3rd place this year for Pictionary. On paper it seems that there was less incentive (for points) to participate, but perhaps the environment being less competitive was a good thing and allowed more people to come in and chill.
About the "guessing quick" thing, well that's frankly just the point of the game. On top of what Inky said about this, I think it's very hard for "the moment a drawing is done" to be defined very well. How are people supposed to decipher when the artist's drawing is finished? Do they have to write "DONE" alongside their drawing? At that point it just becomes a speed typing/spelling challenge instead of what it actually is. People throwing out guesses is also really funny and it's cool to see the memes/jokes that have come out of it.
Pokémon Trivia:
With Pokémon Trivia, me and Aaron's whole goal when this event was conceived
in Lt. Surge last year was that since we were a Pokémon community, we'd have to up the difficulty on the questions because our understanding was that everyone would have a much higher base understanding of what could be asked. That said, I feel like a lot of the "hard and technical" questions this year came from me - my philosophy was that some of these questions allowed you to use your existing knowledge and try and go through the possibilities/lists of what the answer could be, so that even if you didn't know the answer upright, you could perhaps figure it out (especially as a team) and get to the correct answer. I think that this at least feels better than to do a "know it or you don't" kind of question. However, I do agree that this may not be for everybody and we'll be looking into further refinement of questions for next year.
Please do keep in mind that difficulty and what people know is very hard to gauge for us. We don't want to make things to easy or too hard and it's not exactly obvious what people will or will not get stumped on. It's weird because generally things are perceived as easy or trivial if you know it, but hard if you don't know it. But a hint system is something to be considered and we'll definitely look into that for next year.
Pokémon VGM Sharing:
For this event, I did consider only allowing mainline games only just so that we could get a more refined list of songs by the end, but I felt that was antithetical to the purpose of the event. I also did not want to make 2 changes (song weighting, only mainline games) at the same time, but I think allowing only a certain subset of songs is something I can consider next year. This event also doesn't really work if we don't get enough participants submitting their song choices (the weighting doesn't even matter given enough entrants), so I either have to think of a workaround or scrap the idea.
Hideout:
This was really fun! The only problem I had was that there wasn't more... Also I wouldn't mind upping the complexity of the puzzles, seems like a fun challenge.
Archipelago:
Really fun as well! It was my first time participating in a multi-world and I basically no-lifed it. The least fun part of it was at the end when everybody was releasing their games, which I guess felt kind of sad because it was ending. It also felt like the fruits of my efforts in doing all the checks were in vain because chests and the 2pts were inconsequential to just finishing the game outright. If I were to make a suggestion, I would ask that there be some system put in place to disincentivize releasing without doing all of one's checks, though whether that is possible or not, I don't know. Perhaps at least just having the chests go beyond four, which would allow keys found later on to be worth a lot more.
Battle Bash:
I did enjoy battling with friends again and just chilling and watching dumb stuff happen (there was a Monotype random game where I got the entire elephant genealogy of Great Tusk, Donphan, and Iron Treads). I did not enjoy getting ladder PTSD for a meager 400 points, which ended up being worth the same as losing 20 battles to someone of my own team in a highlighted format. Despite the points system kind of needing a rework, I can see the effort you made in trying to make it more balanced, wolf. You addressed some of the issues in the prior years with banning 1v1s and same-team battling, but I'm not sure if a freestyle battling system is ever not just going to a giga grindfest (between members of the same team, I might add) given that the battling demographic isn't quite here anymore. I was going to suggest making acquiring GT points based on how many battles you played, up to a threshold, but people may not play once they pass that threshold (and the point payout may not even be able to be that high in order to be balanced with other GT events). Overall, fun event, wish we had more people battling, and wish we could have things be a bit less "I need to grind enough to beat the other guy on the other team".
TCG:
I agree with other users suggesting that TCG could have more judges and the comments for judging were made more public. Otherwise, fun event and a better scoring metric than the one that was run two years ago.
Bingo:
"Unfortunate" doesn't begin to describe my bingo draws, this game rewards blind luck and nothing else, I am beyond convinced at this point. After getting completely tooled by scheduling with my host changing times on me last minute and refusing to provide confirmation prior to the day of the bingo as to draw times, losing this way somehow felt even worse than I had thought possible. My preparation was superior, my ~~play~~ bribing was superior, and I lost, so I don't see a reason to continue engaging in an activity where what is within my control is overwhelmingly outweighed by what is not.
I am done with competitive bingo, and you won't get a fond farewell. This community is infected to its roots with a degenerative disease that grows stronger over time but stops short of killing its host. Bingo draws used to have a competitive spirit at their heart, this has been transplanted and replaced with an artificial organ that feeds on vitriol and mockery from insecure little boys that heckle by the sidelines and tear each other to shreds over scraps of attention. The environment we fostered has trapped us all like this in a vicious cycle, and escaping it requires acceptance of the harshest reality we all scramble to explain away, that none of the countless straining efforts we put ourselves through here will ever amount to one single shining glimmer of significance. I would make this the end, but Art Swap is still ongoing, and I would never leave so many great friends out to dry, so I'll suffer through a few more artist's blocks for them.
One last thing before I leave you all to react with disdain, ridicule, and self-righteous fervor, before you do everything in your power to minimize my words and thoughts, box them up and shove them to some cobwebbed corner of your memory, and hope they disappear forever as a stain on your finite time ground to dust. From this moment on, nothing you say matters to me. The foulest insults you hurl with intent to wound will calmly settle at the earth before my feet, and the venom you spit will bring all the pain of a warm summer breeze. You are less than anything you can conceive, while I carry on, brimming with joy distilled from detachment.
Agree with other users about adding in other possible pools of choices. I also think it needs to not be rigged because it's been two years and I haven't even bingo'd once (not even on the blackout one where everybody else bingo'd)!
Farm Merge Valley Other Events:
I pretty much enjoyed everything else, I don't really have that much else to say. Farm Merge Valley was a cool impromptu thing that took off and there are definitely other games that we could look to do on Discord. Gartic Phone is already implemented as an activity and that would be interesting to try.
Other Stuff:
It's really good to see that activity has picked up a lot for this GT and that many events experienced bursts of participants, it makes me hopeful for the future of PC and GT. I won't pretend that my activity is that high outside of GT (crippling TFT addiction), so I don't think I'm the most qualified to comment on the Forum vs Discord thing. Discord seems a lot easier to check for most people, but I also feel like the forums are better for having presentable information in a stable place. It would be ideal if everything could be more accessible to users of both platforms, but perhaps the technology isn't there yet.
One other thing I've noticed in reading a lot of these feedback posts is that people are very much drawn to the community hanging out aspect of GT, which simultaneously makes me happy and sad. I'm happy that we have a community that is willing and excited to engage with one another in these group activities, but I'm also sad that, since this sentiment usually exists each year, we haven't done much to capitalize on, foster, or grow the community's engagement. A lot of the comments in the GT Discord chat near the end of GT were mentioning hosting Pictionary, Gartic Phone, Movies, or even Farm Merge Valley every so often, and I think that's a great idea. Whether it's from GT Management or Forum/Discord staff, I hope there can be continued efforts to help our community to have smaller events or activities to participate and come together in.
That being said, the magic of GT is that it only happens once a year, so we ought to be careful to not over-dilute the calendar with a bunch of stuff. For a similar reason I also don't think GT needs to be longer, especially since many participants and hosts already experience some burnout by the second week. It's definitely not a trivial task to find a balance between continually engaging the community and keeping our events special. Perhaps this crappy meme I made can help explain some of my thoughts:
Lastly, thank you to GT Management and the EOs for making all of this happen! Especially Arcaneum, Aquacorde, and Gimmepie, who all worked a lot behind the scenes to get everyone whipped into shape and for keeping us (mostly) organized.
