Helloooo sorry for the delay in getting this in!
How many events did you participate in?
Let's see... 11, I think? Art Swap, Dress to Impress, Bingo, XIV Glam contest, Eevee's Arcade, Archipelago, Pictionary, technically one round of Pokémon VGM, some Movie Night, and the Trivias although I think I knew, like, 10 answers total across all of them lmao.
How close was this to what you planned on?
I ended up doing a few more events than I'd intended, although I wasn't super consistent with some of them.
Which event was your favourite?
Farm Merge Valley. (Okay that was a joke but only kinda, although I dipped out for my own mental health and productivity after a couple days of it, it was really fun having just a reason to vibe in the voice chat doing something pointless together, even if no one was actually voicing. I hope next year there's a similar nothing game with no barrier of entry that people can just hang out with.
I think Archipelago was my fave, though. It was really fun and I'm so grateful to James for helping everyone get situated with it. I honestly was overwhelmed enough at the start to not really understand the team vs team part of it or the GT points or what we were doing with the battles on day resets but hopefully next year I'll have a better idea of what's going on. I still had a lot of fun either way!
As always art swap was a huge highlight too. :D In the vein of Farm Merge Valley it's just nice having something to casually (or, uh, not casually for some people) grind in down time or when you're away from the computer. And having something with so many entrants that everyone is making progress on for the entirety of the two weeks is just a great feeling of camaraderie. I mentioned in the art swap thread too, but I absolutely LOVE the vibe it brings to the end of the GT. Instead of winding down, seeing the winner, and feeling sad like your summer vacation is over, everyone is still hyped because we know art reveals are imminent and then the joy of seeing what others drew for you and seeing them react to what you drew makes everything really positive. It's just such a great note to end the GT on now!!
Which events did you not participate in, but wish you had?
I had no idea what Hideout was until like a few days ago when they broke containment into the Team Aqua channel to request a photo of a fish which made me to look at their thread and the scavenger hunt style stuff that was going on seemed great.
I also wanted to do speed art but wasn't able to make the first time it ran and then it got cancelled. :(
I also also wanted to attend art streams but felt a lil intimidated by the themes for it and also I think I was busy and/or asleep every single time it ran so I just wouldn't have been able to make it anyway. Next year!
Did you feel like you had enough time to do everything you wanted to do?
I think so! I have way more free time than most, being unemployed at the moment, so I was able to dedicate a lot of time to this GT. I think I'd have felt a bit more stressed about fitting everything in if I'd been working a 9-5 but I also don't think it's imperative to participate in every event or even every instance of events you have signed up for and the more enthusiasm we get for GT the more events we'll probably have anyway.
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Art Swap
I gushed about it above and that's still my major takeaway. I don't actually care like... at all about the points (hence drawing a page of Pikachu that worked out this year but I would have done even if I didn't get extra credit for it). My goal is always just to try to draw at least one thing for every participant and anything else is a bonus. I would be fine with sketches getting a bit nerfed next time but I also don't really want to discourage people who feel that sketches or blank lineart is all they can or have time to commit to. So I think maybe diminishing returns on points for a huge quantity works out but I'm also not too bothered. I realized just now that although I sort of vaguely internalized the Art Swap scoring points (+10 for props, +20 for scene, etc.), I didn't actually realize that the final scoring is just the top 3 and then participation points lol. I think it might feel better if we could find a way to scale the points you earned for all of the art you did into your participation points without completely skewing the final points? idk. I think it just feels a lil bad maybe to do a lot of art and then get the same amount of participation points as someone who joined and did one piece. Even if it makes art swap kind of a high scoring event compared to others, I don't think people would complain about sustained effort over the course of two weeks netting extra points!
Dress to Impress
I actually really liked this one, although I did feel like maybe it was a bit restrictive in terms of colours/fonts/etc. I liked that Team Aqua had a thread giving some example flairs with extra help/resources for tweaking it to your liking. I do think for stuff like this it's important to remember PC's restrictions tho, since there was a lot of confusion from new forum users or people who are largely discord-only not realizing they needed 500 posts minimum to be able to use background images in their flairs. But I think this event is perhaps part of why we had a LOT more engagement this year re: people getting into the themes a lot more, even on Discord where people changed their names/avatars to match their team.
Bingo
10/10 no notes.... well, one note but it was fixed pretty immediately anyway. (That note being the request to not redo types/themes from last year when running bingo.) I don't disagree with the suggestion that we could have more than just types as themes, but I do prefer drawing Pokémon as the subject of each card. If we had gym leaders or towns or whatever, it's easy enough to put on a card if you're just doing text or images from other sources on the card but it'd be tough to draw something like that in a small square within a 24h (more like 12h because it always includes a sleep) time limit between rounds. u_u
FFXIV Glamour Contest
I enjoy this every year. Maybe next year I'll step up as a judge so that at least one of the current judges can participate. :') I really like coming up with glams and gposing for them a LOT but we have a very small community and it's unfair you judges don't get to participate too. Or I wonder if there's a fix for this, like we all submit but leave a week or half a week after submission to have time to all vote on each other's based on a rubric or something? Idk I just like coming up with glams and seeing what everyone else does! We have such a small but dedicated community to this that I would love to see if we can rework it into something where we all get to participate. If we grade on a rubric with a few categories and aren't allowed to grade our own we could take averages? idk
Eevee's Arcade
I mostly just try to get my participation marks in with this event, especially as this year I wasn't a huge fan of any of the games. But I get that they need to be arcade style games with an obvious score and likely infinite play, they have to be playable in browser ideally for both pc and mobile, and reusing games from years past isn't so much of an option so I am actually always impressed that games and/or replacement games are so readily found. I do wonder if perhaps instead of replacing games if someone finds a gamebreaking glitch we can just rely on honour system to like... not use it? I suppose it depends on the glitch, but it does seem really frustrating to get really good at a game and dedicate a lot of time to it only for all that time to go out the window when someone finds a way to break it.
Archipelago
I said above but I really appreciated the effort that went into helping everyone get set up. Having a test run the day before was really useful not only for getting that setup in but for acclimating people like me who'd never actually played archipelago before into getting into the swing of it. I was still having issues after that but they would've been tenfold without that trial run haha.
Considering how we were pretty much done after about 5-6 days, it might make more sense to have signups last a bit longer? But then there were only one or two people who inquired about signing up after the start and I'm not sure they would have asked if they hadn't seen people already starting up their runs so maybe it doesn't matter, hmm. And also it was nice to have this be sort of a week 1 event so that in week 2 I could focus more on art swap and one-offs, so maybe actually don't change anything at all in that regard? (Ain't feedback fun? LMAO)
Movie Night
I think this might benefit from the Bingo treatment maybe... is it possible to watch different movies every year? :') I suppose I don't mind watching the first 3~5 every year but I think there's room to remember what we saw the previous year and continue down the line if you have access to those films. Then restart from movie one every few years. I try to tune in where I can but I feel like for some of the movies my commentary as we watch is just gonna be the same thing every year so I tend to just be more quiet instead. However I don't think this is a huge deal, the first few movies are certainly iconic for older fans and it was kind of refreshing this year watching with people who'd never seen them at all.
Trivia
I am sorry to lump them all together!!! I am not actually all that good at trivia so I didn't get many answers this year but I am routinely impressed that these events run so well at all. That's like hundreds of questions y'all do every year with many of them requiring a lot more effort than just writing out a question and checking the answer. Cropping images, clipping songs AND adjusting them as needed... it's all so much effort that I supremely appreciate and I'm astounded it happens every year. Well done! ♥
I really liked the QOL update this year in VG/Pokémon trivia where we could just use our spreadsheets as our submissions. I don't think we minded pasting our answers cleanly over to the Pokémon one if having an official one is easier for judges but it was nice to be able to just highlight our answer column for VG. I think it's kind of awkward to assign who's going to DM answers especially when we try to leave it to the last minute in case anyone has final guesses to slot in. Being able to just set the answers in the sheet and not worry about the deadline in a "omg has anyone sent answers???" sense was REALLY nice this year and if it's possible I think it'd be great to extend that to E&M too.
Pictionary
Didn't expect to play this but I'm very glad I finally understood the word list lol (edit) Okay I started writing this one and just completely forgot OOPS. This was very fun and I like both sites because I think they both suck equally on my tablet so I'm drawing with a mouse anyway. I am not huge on the current meta of our games to guess every pokemon under the sun who matches the number of letters in the hint because the fun of this game for me is the drawing part and seeing what people do for the prompts and it ends the game so fast if someone guesses immediately. (I know I'm part of the problem guessing cherrim every time but i feel like having one or two pokemon you always guess as a meme feels different from genuinely trying to list everything off the top of your head before someone has even picked their colour.) But I always had a good time and I liked that we had additional rounds that weren't for GT points. It was fun!
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Permissions and Pings
GT Managers not having forum permissions to move/edit stuff in the GT forums was definitely a permissions oversight and should be enabled next year. I think I'd be okay with letting anyone from a team use the team ping and I think that's how it happened last year? It is probably a good idea to make a note of permissions for future events and just leave them in a guide thread for future setup so we aren't doing the permissions on the fly. That said, I don't know that I really liked the "omg there are sooo many team magmas in jackbox right now,
@Team Aqua please come show up!" or "We need more answers for trivia which is due in 2 hours!!" I think generally if people want to do an event, they'll add the specific ping for that event and maybe we can just ping that. I don't care that much about pings tho so if everyone would prefer more pings more often from anyone, it's not a huge deal. It certainly makes more sense to me to allow everyone to ping rather than hope each team has people who have the ability to do it AND the drive to do it because that can make or break a GT activity for a team.
Achievements
I like achievements and I think they're a fun addition to events to give additional options to earn points BUT I think if we're going to have a master list, it probably doesn't have to be a sticky thread/entire channel. I think just announcing that someone has gotten an achievement works in wherever we have the daily announcements happening and the master list could just be an extra post under the main information, wherever we have that. The reason I suggest this is on the forum it takes up a valuable thread slot on the default forum view of 30 threads which pushes an actual event onto the second page where it goes to die. Well, not literally die because if someone is interested enough they will find it, but as we get more and more events I think the ones where we submit behind the scenes will get less attention and that's a little bit sad. I don't think the achievement list is really important enough to take up front page space that could otherwise go to an actual event. As for the Discord... there were just a LOT of discord channels associated with GT this time around, especially as a staff/gt manager who could see them all. I almost think we could just have one big "GT-info" channel or something where the first post is the introduction, second post is list of events (maybe with their achievements? or have a master list in the next post), and after that do the post where we allow people to react for roles just so everything someone might need to reference is in one place instead of spread over several channels.
Again I'll live if this stays the same way because I can just hide channels entirely if I want to (which is what I did this year for some of them to get the list not so long) but I do pretty firmly believe we should consolidate what we can in the stickies on the forum so maximum events show up on the first page.
Discord vs Forums
It's kind of funny seeing people back and forth about this because I've seen it both ways all the time. Forum-only people hate that a lot of the live activity happens on Discord and Discord-onlies hate that they have to use the forum at all. I think we have a good mix right now and it's really not the end of the world to ask people to use the forum for things that are better viewed on a web page anyway. Discord can only do so much. But similarly, I don't think it's really possible to move the bulk of the activity back to the forums when team channels for live chat and built in voice/video options on Discord are just so essential to the modern GT, so our current setup is pretty good, I think. As others have said, Discord has gotten more and more mobile friendly and it's also simply available through the browser so it's not like we're making people download an app necessarily. That said as someone who uses PC like 90% discord and 10% forums, I'm never really mad about something being more discord-heavy. :x
That said, for individual events, I think it's largely fine having stuff like trivia or whatever be forum-only. Like I said, static pages are just better than trying to keep track of stuff or having a million channels for organization on discord. It may not really seem like it but it's actually a lot of work formatting just one post for the forums, nevermind doing it again for Discord. For Trivia I think it's fine for each team to adapt the questions into their working spreadsheets or figure out their own ways to work on things. I think the only way we'd be able to make things more Discord-only is if we had a ton of threads or channels for it and as I said above, I think we should actually pare that down so there's fewer and they're mainly used for more official high-level stuff. And if we toss them all in threads (which worked well for individual team things like Archipelago, Hideout, etc., then you're missing out on the general chatter that happens about it. Bingo is fun because we all do our bongos when it's time for the draw and you see everyone chatting about how many stamps they got to do and you go "oh, I wanna get in on this next round!" If we were all just doing that in a thread tucked away on Discord you wouldn't get that publicity and a lot of events thrive on the publicity.
Balancing
I actually felt like the teams were super balanced this year. Just about every day of the GT it felt like it could be anyone's game. I don't know if the personality quiz has a lot to do with the team temperaments besides the one year we sorted all the carefree ppl on one team and they like barely broke triple digits or whatever while the other two competed (rip aecor) but this year it felt pretty good. Aqua ran away with the points in the last day or two but (and maybe I'm only saying this as Aqua) I didn't feel like it was obvious it was going to go that way.
I think it might be interesting to have our "how active do you think you're going to be" question next year, perhaps add in a timezone question, and sort based on that and see how it goes? The personality quizzes are fun but when it's just two teams and most people know there's a form of autobalancing in the background, it kind of feels arbitrary to have such a long quiz to get something that may or may not have anything to do with your personality in the end anyway. I think I'd just like to try at least once not having the quiz and seeing how it goes maybe? I like wolf's idea of doing a game corner theme to keep the randomness of team assignment in the lore or something.
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I'm not sure I have anything else to add...? I've probably forgotten a lot but I've already said plenty so if I think of anything else I'll post again I guess.
Thanks again to all GT Managers and Event Organizers for putting on a fantastic Get Together this year! I think it may have been our best one yet, at least of the ones I've attended!
