Suggestion: Have Skype Groups for Every Season

[Yuni Shingyouji]

The fact that we don't makes things extremely, extremely unfair.

There are some people I can't stand, some people who are just a general *** that I'd rather not have to deal with. But I do like the MMGs.

When signing up for seasons, you know exactly who is entering. If someone you don't like is entering, you can freely decline the season and withdraw. However, this is not the case in skype.

Many players who don't even play seasons are forced to communicate, simply ignoring is difficult to keep up when you straight out don't like seeing the things the other person says and they're involved in the conversation.

It should be mandortory for skype groups for all seasons as this is extremely upsetting and unfair.

In a large community, it's reasonable for a few people to be disliked.

[yaes]

This was actually being done for the past few seasons, but Sea opted against it for DICE.

However, in response to the suggestion, I will agree that I much prefer when there's a separate group exclusively for those participating, it makes it less cluttered and overall more enjoyable.

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Makoto is correct in that we have had separate skype groups for the previous games. Season Zircon Zephyros and Season Fate. It is everyone's right to participate in the skype groups and leave them as they please, however leaving is sometimes detrimental to players in current seasons since they may miss announcements or events.

That being said, managing multiple skype groups can be more stressful on masterminds since they are already moving between all the players individual pms. Forcing them to check up on another group is additional work and before you say they don't need to check the off topic, yeah they don't, but it still alerts them when people talk in it. This does mean more of the recent column in skype is filled and attempting to draw their attention and focus.

I have converted this thread into a poll for people to express their opinions. I strongly agree with having separate skype groups for seasons, however I will not force a rule like this without first getting the thoughts of more players and staff. The poll will always be visible so we can see how people feel and if the dominant side agrees with this then I will add in a rule for seasons.

I would also like all of my past and future masterminds to post with their thoughts since they are affected on the management side of things and if they are alright with this. Thank you.

[King V]

I personally don't care much about it. I only didn't make a separate group for DICE because I didn't think it would be necessary. The only things that the group is required for are changes to the entire map, and alerting people to the pausing and resuming of the game.

For pausing and resuming of the game, I think there should be a separate system, something like a sidebar on the forums that the mastermind can change when they log on. Skype groups are only really for large general announcements, and I didn't have many general announcements for DICE, due to murders being reported in the news thread, so I felt like it was largely unnecessary. The group chat for DICE is generally just for seeing whether the game is paused or not anyway, and again I think there should be a separate system for that.

[Daedalus]

Coming from an outsider's perspective, and not having had direct experience with it yet, my thoughts are as follows:

I would definitely greatly appreciate a defined OOC chat for each season, based on what I know, for the simple fact that there's a lot of stuff in the general chat that tends to be right there surrounding or in some cases in-between a couple lines of important season stuff. This means that people who go AFK for hours for such things as sleep or work or travel either have to accept that they might miss important game info or have to at least skim through the often-times thousands of messages. Neither is a particularly appealing point.

Furthermore, a separate season chat could have a starting title of [Running] or [Paused], so that even those who have Skype off to the side or otherwise minimized would be able to tell at a glance whether the season is running or not.

In short, I think it would certainly help keep game info collected and organized, even OOC game info, and make it so that people wouldn't have to search through a bunch of conversations that they might have no opinion or knowledge on in order to make sure they didn't miss something related to the game.

[John Dark Souls]

『I strongly agree to this as well. Mostly from 2 viewpoints. 1 of player and 1 of mastermind.』

『Player viewpoint:』
『For me as a player its more about the sheer amount of spam in the off-topic chats and less about anything else. Even without active seasons, the off-topic chat is already filled with hundreds of messages in just few hours if you take your eyes off it. But during seasons, even more season stuff including few announcements from Masterminds like Sea's usual "You all feel tremors" or Eclipse's "You all hear BOOOOOOOOM!* for example that are done in those chats and that will most definitely be not noticed if you don't look through those walls messages. But to me, its really a pain going through like 2k of new messages just for that. I'm sure I'm not alone on this.』

『Mastermind viewpoint:』
『Regardless of their reasons, some players tend to leave chats sometimes. Whether it is because they were annoyed and they are sulking, or just because they are too busy and don't want to deal with the heavy rain of spam of notifications. Some potential players like Fear don't even join Off-Topic chats at all because they don't wanna deal with it. And thus when mastermind has to do announcements that I mentioned before, they have to take care to remember those players that aren't in groups and notify them personally. And I do feel that notifying people personally like that would be much greater pain than just making another chat solely for a season.』

『And well, there you have it~』

[Ravan]

Basically as I was just saying in our group chat, I think that the Skype chats shouldn't necessarily be required, so I'm pretty neutral on this. My reasoning for it is that I think that it's a sign we could just use the forums to communicate at some points instead. This would generate a lot less clutter for a host as well. Some folks consider that a plus or a minus, I can see both sides. On one hand, it'd encourage more in-character discussion on the forums within the threads, but on the other hand, it may just scare people away from talking in the first place because they don't feel like putting in the effort to create a post. I understand that people enjoy having a chat specifically for joking about when it comes to the actual game they're currently participating in. I don't mind having those, but it's very difficult to moderate at a later point as well.

Personally speaking, I'll definitely have my own season chat because I can understand how much fun it is to just mess around with the other players, as well as to announce things to every player at once. I'd just try to let everybody know beforehand that it's meant to be an in-character sort of thing rather than just going crazy with it. Would clutter the off topic chat a lot less, though it doesn't stop people from participating in it either. Having a choice is often the best decision, I guess.