『Okay, this season had quite a few points that stood out. Some were good, some were pretty bad. I'll just write them up in a random order as I think back on the season. I'm honestly surprised at how much I managed to write and from where did it all came... But its mostly my honest opinion and how I felt about the season...』
『First and most pressing issue imo -
The Conflicts Between Players. In this game, in order to attack another player you have to go through these thingss beforehand:』
『
1st is Motive. In order to attack anyone, you must first have a valid motive to kill a person. The other players are fellow human beings who have ventured together to solve the mystery and get 1 billion $ as a reward or simply collect whatever gold they've found. You just won't be able to attack them out of nowhere for no reason. And of course, you cannot use assumptions like "He surely has more gold than me though I have nothing to prove that!" or "He most likely served all of the mystery and will get 1 billion instead of me though I have nothing to prove that!" for reasons either. I haven't tried but am most sure that framing also won't work since mastermind will object it to "You know he isn't" and if you still frame someone and then other person find that out mastermind can just assume you ooc-organized the frame. You are unable to check if person knows more of the mystery than you because pages of the diary aren't collected by players physically and are instead only remembered in their head. If you got to the peak and saw people already solving the mystery and throwing theories at mastermind you would've had proof of players being able to solve mystery, but trial arena was non-combat area. Thus using mystery as a motive is
NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE. As for gold, all players are unable to interact with other player's stashes in ANY WAY (I will come back to this late) so you cannot check how much gold player has collected in total and use that as a motive. Gold doesn't leave any marks on players as far as I know (but I'm not quite sure since I haven't checked) so knowing that they stashed gold before is pretty much impossible unless they say that. So to use gold as a motive, you would've actually had to witness player having the gold with your own eyes since I'm pretty sure telling other people that kind of info would've been possible only if it was true since mastermind would assume it was ooc-organized if it was lie. Another motive would be being attacked by someone or witnessing 2 players fighting each other. And lastly having another person witness you attacking someone.』
『In the end, we have these 5 motives of attacking someone: 1.Having person say they collect or have gold. 2.Seeing person have the gold on themselves. 3.Being attacked. 4.Seeing other people fighting. 5.Having someone witness your crimes. But since last 3 can be initiated only by someone fulfilling first 2, you can pretty much say that those 2 are the only motives, both involving only gold.』
『Countermeasures: -You can always ask the person how much gold they collected and whatever they reply (if they say 0, assume its a lie), attack. This way could be just "Nope!"d by mastermind since its forcefully initiating the wait. And it goes without saying that it is completely dangerous since you are attacking person had on giving them all the time they need to react. This plan also needs to be thought of first and I honestly thought it up only as I was writing this.
-You can always stalk the person and once you see them collect much mystery documents in short time you will have the motive of them clearly being further than you in it and might be able to use mystery as a motive
-There might be more, but I can't think of more at them. And ME not being able to think of such clearly makes it much less likely of anyone to think them up easily.』
『
2nd is Governmental Punishment. When the game finishes, all living players will be assembled and a final trial on each player's murder will be started. If player who killed anyone was voted down for the murder they committed, they will "be thrown in jail and have their money count reduced to Zero! This will be the case EVEN IF THEY GOT THE BILLION from the mystery.". Of course, this worked only if player really were the culprit and if they weren't or were voted for wrong murder they would've escaped punishment. Though last part wasn't explained from the start in rules, it was still easily obtainable from mastermind if you just asked so this part isn't that punishable and is totally agreeable.』
『
3rd is Redemption. An invisible on
Game Rules's thread rule, but that was mentioned more than once on different skype chat. Mastermind clearly told that "Hunting down players with no motive besides killing them to remove them from the running would trigger Redemption" and that "there is a 0% chance of triggering redemption and surviving, if redemption falls on you, you are dead, no questions asked". This basically implies that only simply killing without motive can trigger Redemption. But if you tried to kill without motive you would first be just not be allowed to do that action and since killing in order to get gold or because you know they have gold is not very different from "killing them to remove them from the running" as well as the fact that Redemption was only ever mentioned in chats made it VERY DIFFICULT to understand what exactly invoked Redemption and how exactly you had to kill in order not to get 100% punished by it.
Countermeasures: -Of course, it could also be that if you properly asked mastermind, they would explain it to you, but it is surprising how difficult it is to realize this point at times. This is the "You've never asked." logic that really is just mean imo.
-If you were attacked or saw someone fighting, I assume that killing those because they are dangerous would be a motive not falling under the Redemption, but its still is no different since beforehand someone had to use other motive to start the fight.』
『
4th is Ammunition. Only weapons in the Wind Wall you had are guns. Each had limited ammunition with amount depending on the kind of weapon you had. No ammunition could be located on the map unless you spent some and even then it would've needed to be found. You couldn't loot from most players since there could be different compatibility between rounds. You could also leave the Wind Wall to resupply but that would cost you half of your current fortune which is likely more than a lot if you are aiming for collecting gold. The amount of ammunition spent on single person varied depending on in what condition you fought and how you fought as well as location and ultimately luck. It is quite possible that you could've started a fight, spent all your ammo and in the end never finished your target with it surviving.』
『
5th is Gunshots. All guns except ones with mufflers made loud enough gunshots to be heard from nearby areas. Thus if other people were active and nearby. The moment you initiated a gunfight, a horde of harpies could rush at you from all directions and you never could know what they would do. They could either help your enemies, join in as 3rd force against both of you. Watch you fight and then kill you both when you run out of ammo, simply escape after seeing your faces.』
『
6th is Campers. You never knew if there were people with long-ranged weapons in hiding, camping and watching your every single step waiting for you to give them a motive to shoot you down.』
『
7th includes all kinds of troubles that are already involved in the act of murder such as ooc alliances, brawls, witnesses, wounds, fails, etc.』
『Thus, with all of these 7 thingss combined. We get:
- The profit you get from killing other players: 1.1 less player who can win in your stead, 2.Gold, 3.Possibly Bloody Money ending, 4.Fun.
- While on the other hand, the demerits are: 1.You have to go through the super pain of getting the motive to do so. 2.You will have to deal with Government Punishment in the end. 3.You have to worry not to get caught on mysterious Redemption's radar. 4.You may have to deal with ammo shortage. 5.You may have to deal with gunshots. 6.You may have to deal with campers. 7.You may have to deal with all kinds of murder-related problems.』
『Lets go through all these merits and demerits one by one:
Merits:
1.1 less player to win is awesome and all. But while you are taking 1 person out, all others continue moving forward. In order to kill you will most likely have to ignore most of own progress in order to remove 1 other person's progress. And since stalking is pretty much only method to kill someone only aiming for mystery, it will take a ridiculous amount of time giving all other players armor to aim for plot in the meantime. This is IN NO CASE an effective method to try to win.
2.Killing players to get their gold is a very quick and nice way to kill someone and progress towards your goal. It is an undeniable profit. Although you still might fall under Redemption for it.
3.In order to get Bloody Money you have to kill at least 1 player and then have nobody solve the mystery while having most gold. But of course, you almost completely can't kill those who are aiming to solve the mystery and you can't use stopping them as a valid motive so this merit only works if you kill for gold or doing the first murder.
4.Now tell me? Can you honestly look at the gun at your hand and say it isn't fun to use it to shoot somebody? I would love to just move on, but considering how much fun demerits can reduce, the amount of fun you get from murder can more than easily fall into minus in this game.』
Demerits:
1.All that rush to get motives on person will get you busy from solving the mystery or looking for gold yourself. Even if you aim only for gold, you can still accidentally tail a wrong person who couldn't care less for gold and thus not get any at all. And tailing person who aims for mystery and killing them in order to stop them from solving doesn't stop any other players from searching. In all cases, it might be much faster to just search for both gold and mystery yourself than go through pain of killing someone for it.
2.Government Punishment. From one glance it looks considerably fair and normal rule. Now lets combine it with Ammo that might leave your target living after encounter, Gunshots attracting vulture-players from everywhere and any other problems such as wounds, blood splatters, etc. All these could point that you were the culprit and work against you.
3.Even if you tail person who aims for mystery and is likely to solve it and kill them, you get on Redemption's radar! Hell, even if you just kill them for gold, you might still get on that radar!? If you get on the radar, you have no way of surviving! Even if you manage to get some more gold or stop one player from advancing, whats the point if you don't stand even a 0,0000000001% chance of survival if you invoke Redemption's anger?
4.You may have to deal with ammo shortage if you are bad with guns or is just simply unlucky. You can't stack more ammo than your standard amount because no ammo spawns while you have your standard amount! So if you don't manage with all you have, I don't see you having any other option but to hide or run. And then the person attacked by you might still have his and chase and kill you or just spread to everyone that you attacked them and give every single other player motive for kill you. And the motive they will have, unlike yours if you started the fight for gold or such, will likely not trigger Redemption.
5."You hear a gunshot coming from west!" What do you think most of the players who get this message do? Of course, they will run to check it out while secretly cursing themselves for not having any popcorn! And thus they may have the chance to see the corpse or fight in progress and know what happened is happening and have different list of actions in front of them.
6.You start fight to get some gold, you finish a fight with 1 corpse in front of you, you pick up the gold, you get shot in the back of the head by a camper, ggwp. Of course, there aren't many people who will go through the pain of camping, but if you combine it with fact that someone might be spawning gold, it might be a good strategy to camp and look at locations to which blasts of mastermind's gun fly and then kill whoever gets gold from those. Or they could hear a gunshot from your fight and then move in a suitable position to camp afterwards too. These could make your life much worse.
7.The general reasons such as ooc calls for help, wounds you suffer from fights, having been killed in the fight you started by a person who won't have to deal with most of these reasons because self-defense op, etc are commonly faced problems and I don't even need to bother explaining them now.』
『Okay, based on all of these, do you still think its favorable for anyone to try to kill anyone? You won't even be able to kill just for fun and hope you win afterwards with this many minuses... This game has too many punishable factors for murderers. And overall there are only 4 pluses? But wait, thats right! Doesn't something from this not makes sense? Lets look at the next point:』
『
Bloody Money Ending:』
『Bloody Money is ending I already mentioned before. It involves having murdered 1 player, collected most gold and finally... Nobody solving solving the mystery. Lets look at the name of this forum: Murder Mystery Games. Of course, most of the games have mysteries to solve (sometimes not exactly involved with murders) and I'm pretty sure all mysteries though hard at times are made in a way that they can be solved. Seeing as Zircon was won by mystery solved ending, it is in no way an exception. But lets look closer at how it was one. A single person single-handedly solved the whole mystery in 1 day after having collected all material. And I don't mean to be very mean to the other person, but they weren't even the best mystery solver if my memory is right. And in a game like this where mystery solvers couldn't be killed be murdered by other players, you had to wait for unknown period of time in the game until story fails to be solved and game ends in mastermind angering or something. If 1 person could solve it in a single day, then there is no way all remaining players wouldn't have been able to if they were warned of the time running out beforehand. Thus I assume that
THERE IS NO WAY THE MYSTERY WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN SOLVED,
THE POWER WON'T SHIFT TOWARDS CERTAIN FORCE and
BLOODY MONEY ENDING IS UNATTAINABLE. Sorry for using red truth though it is an assumption, I just couldn't hold myself from doing it ^_^ In any case, lets return to Player Conflicts.』
『Seeing as how Bloody Money endings isn't even achievable this also removes Bloody Money from merits and adds it into the demerits because it is a false promise. Now act of murder has only 3 small tiny merits while has 8 large stabbing demerits. But, there is still 1 merit in to killing if you solve another small mystery of how gold is made. If you learn that making mastermind shooting wood turns it into gold, you can collect much gold. But if you also find out that someone else knows this, you will absolutely want them dead, which caused 1 fight in the end of the game. Would've still had to witness person doing that in any case...』
『All of these HUGELY discourage player from killing. BUT! After I read through the discussion on the mountain, I realized 1 thing! There might actually exist a single way to get a motive to kill every single player! There might actually exist a way to obtain Bloody Money ending with your own 2 bloody hands! What is that way you ask? A deal with Vindr the mastermind! Once you solve the mystery, you find out that Vindr needs bodies for experiments but doesn't leave the mountain on his own. Thus you could ask for a deal. He would give you a whole lot of money if you kill and collect corpses of all players to him. This could've given you the absolutely clear motive to kill everyone, get the money and shift the balance towards the Stein faction! (oops, am I spoiling something here?) I must say that now that I understand it, it sounds like a very cool and awesome thing to do! But! BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT!!!!!!!!!!!!! In order to get the objective to kill, you must solve the mystery yourself! Mastermind didn't give you even a single clue about this even after being pushed by people who absolutely hated motives! It is very difficult to realize this fact! Thus I honestly can't call it a plus no matter how I try. If there was even a single hint towards this in mastermind's explanations, it would've easily flipped the table around, but without any kinds of clues, sorry, this isn't a plus, only a minus that makes you feel so much regret. For me, the game is Murder-first Mystery-second Games, I want to at least get a single hint that I might need to switch those over :/ If I am completely mistaken and this isn't the case, its still a minus, because making it this way would've been cool...』
『Okay, 3rd point is about the
Difficulty Difference of Gold-aimers and Story-aimers and Alternative Objectives:』
『The game was pretty much split in 3 ways. 1.To win by solving mystery and getting billion rewards. 2.To win by screwing mystery and getting even more than 1 billion reward. and 3.To win by completing Alternative objectives. The difficulty of all of these are pretty different. Lets go over these 1 by one.』
『Firstly, the easiest are without doubt Alternative objectives. These objectives are easiest simply because they don't require you to collect any gold or doesn't require you to completely solve mystery. Thus you have not a single reason to get into any fights with any other players. The alternative objectives that were in play are:
1.Attain a new great power to stand against another Walpurgis Night.
2.Elie will achieve victory in Zircon if they can successfully rescue a survivor from the wind wall prior to the current group.
3.Masuno will achieve Victory in Zircon by successfully rescuing a survivor from the wind wall prior to the current group or by solving the mystery of what happened to the people who vanished inside the wind wall.
4.This character wins if Asagi either survives through the entire game, wins the game, or flees the wind wall to never return. Forcing Asagi to leave is forbidden and causes the character to forfeit their goal.
5.This character will achieve victory in Zircon by successfully rescuing a survivor from the wind wall prior to the current group or by solving the mystery of what happened to the people who vanished inside the wind wall.』
『Most of these only required you to examine certain areas and then to follow the trail and you will win like Edgar/Hero did. Only single one of these required you to survive until the game ended and even then that was pretty much the only thing required at all, others required you to only complete yours and then leave. And even if you somehow failed, you could still win by one of the other goals. The most difficult here might be 1st one which required you to obtain great power, but it was made for duo team of 2 characters who had absolute trust in each other and who could always work together. Even had they failed their original objective, the 2 of them had shared their gold value and could split and collect gold twice as effectively. Undeniably, those who had alternative goal could win easier if they followed their goal.』
『Secondly, mystery solving. It might sound like a painful task, but all you had to do was just visit and in-depth search around all the areas for all the clues. Due to the motive armor that is even sturdier than plot armor, you didn't have to worry about a thing if you just didn't touch gold with your fingers. Then, after getting them all, go to the mountain peak and put them all together with a kind and shy mastermind who won't show his true form but would reply to all your guesses and kindly say whether you were right or wrong. I wasn't there during mystery-solving but from reading the thread, it didn't appear like mastermind would blast you away if you guessed wrongly few times. Difficulty fully depends on your solving/guessing abilities. Well, maybe you could worry only a little bit about someone getting more than 1 billion in gold, but oh come on, whats the probability of that all things considered?』
『And thirdly, gold collecting. The starting gold on the map was limited. In total, there were 13 players. Even if player aimed for mystery, there was still small possibility of someone getting more gold, so they would still try to grab some gold creating more competition for gold collectors. Once gold is removed from map and stashed in the player stashes, IT CAN NO LONGER BE REMOVED BY ANY MEANS. YOU CANNOT SEE STASHES, YOU CANNOT TOUCH THEM, YOU CANNOT REMOVE GOLD EVEN IF THEY ARE OPENED, YOU CANNOT EVEN THREATEN PLAYER TO TAKE ANY GOLD OUT. HELL! Even owners of the stashes probably couldn't take their own gold out! In other words, you had to find gold in the open, while everyone could be your opponent and you couldn't take them out unless you had to go throw a world of pain that is murdering in this game. Of course, there was a mystery behind gold that gold is wood turned into gold by mastermind. But unless you seen at least a single gold piece or saw bunch of wood turned into gold in front of you or solved story, THERE WAS NO WAY you would know that. Mastermind on the mountain created gold by shooting his gun, but if he was busy talking with random people who come to mountain peak, he just won't have time to do that! But that also required some mystery solving to be done! Not to mention that collecting gold is the only real valid murder motive so by just collecting gold you were painting a target on your face and then using shine of the gold to say "Shoot here". And if you found that way and made mastermind make you gold, there was a chance of you being found and murdered and silenced on spot by other gold collectors who found a motive on you! Mystery-solvers would also rush to solve mystery and thus shorten the time limit you had. If a player won by alternative objective, they would return as invincible mystery-solver NPC that will further increase speed of mystery solving and further shorten time limit. So all in all you had to collect over 1 billion with every single player working against you in one way or another.』
『Thus, I think it should be more than obvious that scales of difficulty are quite unbalanced in here.』
『Next in the book is the main point of the season -
GUNS』
『Everyone loves guns. This pretty much sound like that is all. It was very fun having the guns. It was very fun pointing guns at people or NPCs. It was very fun shooting them near the end too. But... Even though the beginning of the game says:
"Now for the most valuable advice I can offer you if you hope to return from that place. *epic pause* Bring a Gun", even though the game says that... EVEN WITH THAT! There just wasn't anything to shoot at! D: Mastermind is hikikomori sitting on top of the mountain, picking fight with him is most certain death, shooting and killing NPCs isn't allowed, shooting other players pretty much meant killing meant all my previous rant, we didn't have to worry about hunger so no need to shoot animals, there were no shooting puzzles or anything of that sort, the only animal that could be thought to be dangerous was Zwolf the Bear but he was most certainly well-fed and not hungry since he didn't look hostile at all. In the very end, what was thought to be the main point of the season, guns, were used least... There were only 3 or so gunfights in total over the whole game... All with players. Players and mastermind were the only targets to use guns on. But one were protected by motive armor while other could turn you to dust and golden one at that. Definitely not something worse an epic pause in the intro... Though I might want to add though even if it was for 1 fight in the end, that single fight in which I had to use my handguns was the most fun moment I had in the game. Though I did miss more than 80% of my shots. Still great fun xD』
『Another point is -
EXPLORATION!』
『Zircon had a pretty large map that had different kinds of surroundings. Going all around there different forests, deserts, plains, rivers, swamps allowed you to feel like an adventurer in the field or a person on a picnic if you were only aiming for mystery only. All in all it was fun traveling around, but maybe because I was doing the automatic searches after I finished first 2 zones, it didn't feel very interactive... In-depth search all over -> next area -> in-depth all over -> next area -> repeat. Some areas like clearing in the Heavy Forest, The Crater in Crater Desert, Lake, Cabin in the River Forest, Forest Pond and ultimately the Mountain Peak had some stuff to interact with, but these were pretty much only interactions except for few other spots and page locations which had limited interactions. Of course, another great interaction was with gold! Finding gold in the wild really allowed me to feel this "I'm a greedy merc and this gold is mine and only mine! Muwahahhahaha!" feeling which was pretty great. ^_^ But otherwise with no real reason for player interactions which also felt rare due to the size of the map, the map felt a little bit empty...』
『Next point is
Abilities.』
『I never really felt that I was oppressed by other people's abilities or thought mine were too weak. It was fun reading the "This character is in denial..." bit and getting the: "you explore this area because as the main character **** **** like getting lost" xD So I actually felt like my ability was useful without being op. Otherwise, not much to say, can't say there were any pressing issues with abilities.』
『And another point is Convenient Help from Mastermind.』
『It was pretty nice and fun when I needed rain to check the Crater and I just said "Summon the rain!" and with a single BOOOOOM! it was raining ^_^ It was mostly done to help people exploring and wasn't really damaging for anyone, but just nice. Though I feel like it could've been used for bad purposes if not for the nature of this game...』
『And the last point that I didn't very like:
"I don't know about it"』
『There was a point in the game where I just got the "But I dont know about it so it wont work here" message before I even explained how I planned to do it. I really didn't like the fact that when I was about to explain how I will achieve what should logically work I just got that I won't be able to do it because mastermind doesn't know how to do it. Even masterminds don't know everything. Its one case if player can't tell you how they want to achieve it but is telling you some random stuff like "somehow!" or "dunno!". But if player can properly explain, rejecting a completely possible idea for a solution to your puzzle or something only because its a pain to read explanations and take few moments to think if it is possible isn't a something I think mastermind should do. I know it takes time and toil on the mastermind, but you've gotta admit that most genius murder plans in these games likely include those. Blindly rejecting these like that is in no way a good thing if you ask me :/ You can always reject idea in the end if you really aren't convinced or see a flaw in the idea. But you should at least give person a chance.』
『Okay... This should be it... Thanks to whoever had enough patience to read through these 5k words of ranting... And sorry for ranting so much Eclipse... *sigh* How did I even bother to write so much... I didn't feel myself that pissed off near the end too...』
![The City [EclipseZwolf] Avatar](http://storage.proboards.com/5517960/avatar/YLlib0SIkbSDPNtLswoM.png)
![Ryohei Sasagawa[Hero] Avatar](https://38.media.tumblr.com/avatar_6403eee239ec_128.png){kind=avatar}
