Chaotic Revisit Feedback Thread

[Yuni Shingyouji]

As usual, here is the feedback thread.

A final CR3 is very possible, still a bit undecided.

This marks the end of my first ever real season, and I have to say quite a bit was a mess, and was entirely my fault.

What did you think as a whole? What did you like or dislike?

Please give me as much feedback as you can to help with a second game should I host another. Thank you!

[The Viscount]

Too much Chaos, not enough Viscount.

(Read: I couldn't play for most of the game, but I loved what I did. However, the game was way too chaotic, and needed to be a bit calmer for the mastermind's sake. That's about all I got. *goes to get naegi picture*)

[V0ltage]

I really enjoyed it! I ended up missing what seemed to be the most important part of it, but the rest of it was really great. Favorite part was puzzles and dungeon crawley moments, as well as a mastermind who truly interacted with the players. If there is another season, I'll be playing it.

[yaes]

It was a fun well-made game that could cater to the interests of each player, if they wanted it. I noticed other players were unhappy despite all the advantages they had, and I can only say one thing: Stop being idiots. Anywho, it was a great and fun world, I like how most of it was handled, there are a few quirks that I'm neutral about, such as the ticking time bomb that was the death of the mastermind, but that was intended, I suppose. I have nothing negative to express about this season, and I look forward to next time.

[Yuni Shingyouji]

In response to Masuno:

This is something that does tend to happen, this is due to the fact it's difficult to balance so many players in their actions.
Chaos I felt would have been fine if there was an equal balance of puzzlesolving/exploration and chaos/fighting.

But here's how this season turned out:
the few hours people decided to solve stuff, EVERYONE decided to solve stuff all at once.

the few hours people decided to be chaotic, EVERYONE decided to be chaotic, and I'd be handling 3 fights at once.

A bit unpredictable. I feel the pacing of the season would be the issue in this case, not the chaos. However, I won't sway your opinion, it may very well be correct in that I had too much chaos. However, this is my defense.

Glad you enjoyed it!

[Monika]

I did not enjoy it. I quit for a reason.

Considering the power I started out with, it really made me feel inclined to go a more store route because the power felt so... underwhelming... and boring. So I had a store with nothing to hook people. It gets buffed later and still no one cares. There was no real reason for anyone to care honestly and it made me feel totally useless.

Then even though we've been trying more and more to avoid the "there's no counterplay situation", or at least I hope masterminds have been trying to go towards that, it still happened to me in front of pretty much everyone. Not to mention I was told by the mastermind I should go to the place (that I was killed) to make it easy to get my next power to only die. After that I just quit and gave up, so as I said I didn't enjoy the season personally and I don't plan to play CR3 if it happens.

[King V]

I think CR2 was a good game, although some features felt unwieldy and unnecessary, like the option to buy buildings or stores. Some things on the map didn't seem to fit logically either, like the outdoor series of puzzles, the chaos maze within the city, and the puzzles felt a little forced. Overall I'd say hosting was great, design felt a little... stale?

There were a lot of power issues of course, but I feel like this is backlash from CR1 where all the players had powers that literally made themselves invincible. Balancing was also a little iffy, but in a season with superpowers this will always be an issue.

I played the game in a way that I didn't enjoy due to the character I chose, so that's ultimately my fault. From an unbiased viewpoint though, I'd give this game a thumbs up.

[Satori]

CR2 was a lot of fun for me especially with all the superpowers despite being imbalanced but that is expected and unavoidable in a game like this. Although I didn't have much problem with the game itself but I feel that the game progressed too quickly due to almost everyone solving all the puzzles very early on to obtain the plot docs. I am aware though that the game was originally designed to cater a smaller player base and the MM wasn't really expecting to have a large number of players which would explain why the game progressed faster than it should be. 

Overall. I really enjoyed CR2 and will definitely join CR3 if you do decided to host it. ^_^ 

[Pokedude12]

Plot: Fit surprisingly well given that CR1 was just a one-shot deal. However, I cannot comment on the process of learning about the lore of the world, as I've not investigated as much as I usually do. Those who focused on investigating should be able to discuss much better in my stead... unless they want a repeat of the Final Trial. In which case, I demand ALL the VBs!! *Laughs manically*

Power: I enjoyed my powers, despite how little I used them. The fact that you knew me well enough to find powers that I would find amusing and well-suited to my playtsyle is a definitely plus. On the other hand, I worry how obvious I am in my goals these days... But yeah, the powers were comparable and even OP compared to some of the others (Magician? Who needs that trash when you have Inverse Magician and *ahem* The Most Useless Power Ever. Sova and Makoto can attest to its use and potential hilarity), especially since the ones I actually had meshed together beautifully. If there was any lack, it was in my hesitation to get started on my plans. Which means I need to just step up to the plate next time and actually put them to good use.

Also, people, powers are good if you think outside the box. Like Makoto said, think about how you can use them. I had literally three powers on the last day (excluding my SHSL, which I made only one opportunity to use and even let that chance go), and lasted seven turns against Sova, who was later joined by Makoto halfway through. Apparently, Sova even had my list of powers down too, due to another power; and both saw me use one of my powers too. Even though I lost to them, I put up one heck of a fight and almost even escaped from them. Even though that fight was my one gripe with this season, it was my crowning achievement too.

Purchase: Enjoyable and useful if the player can play his cards right. I was fortunate in obtaining the Bear-Spawning Life Power and in buying the Grocery Store, as they both complemented each other. On the other hand, I had also purchased the Library, which I assumed was a treasure trove of information. It was actually support for puzzles and possibly relevant in terms of plot. Since I had not aimed for plot, it was only a hiding place for me. However, I did purchase it without considering what it could do. As such, any dissatisfaction on my end would be my fault. On another hand, there were numerous things that the Monochi Shop held that complemented both plot and murders. Holidays were intriguing, only limited by the buyer; I'm not sure how to balance it though. A gimmick for each day sounds interesting and doable in the right hands.

Pain (Running): I cannot comment on the first day's battles, as I was not there. However, having fought on the last day, I did get a look at the running system (albeit too brief to give a full feedback). I used seven phases to attempt to escape from an area and still failed, though I was apparently significantly disadvantaged. To my knowledge, time was not used to interfere with the battle directly. As such, the main interferences would be my opponents, my position to the exit, and the size of the area. I will assume that these factors were the main points that determined the number of turns to flee the area. However, given the difficulty in escaping the one area, I cannot see runners being able to survive up to five areas of phases, only to get pre-empted the phase after.

Again though, this was only one fight; and I had not escaped to another area, so I cannot say how things would have turned out if I'd lasted one more turn and escaped. Do note that I am biased due to having lost that fight, so my judgment is extremely likely to be off-balance here. If the three above factors of that fight (or even more) were taken into consideration, this point should be considered null. Running just may have been out of the question for me due to circumstances.

Pain (Reaction Mode): As someone who plays passively (or rather, reactively), I really liked this set up. Normally, fights would be two sets of actions going against each other and hoping yours got through. For those fights, I stuck with the minimum actions to keep from getting screwed by opposing actions. This system is lenient enough for me to make my one or two actions and pass (Because we all know how long and tedious complex actions are, and how disruptive they get in terms of murder), while keeping me on-edge enough to not let up. Let me say that being super close to getting a suicide-kill was really enjoyable. Like, even when I was supposedly disadvantaged, I never really was unless I pushed myself into a corner (See: Beach Party, in which I still forced my opponents' hands before dying). I would really love to see this sort of strategy battle return in CR3.

Pverall (*Thanks the convenient placement of two certain letters on his keyboard*): During the times I played this season, I generally enjoyed it. As a Mastermind, you knew what made me tick (or at least made me feel like it) and gave me the tools to do something great with it. As stated before, I did not make use of these tools as I should've, so I can't legitimately complain. The game had enough crazy things for me to tinker with and think on (Pokedude actually thinks!?) that I can say this is one of the better seasons I've been in. 10/10, would suicide-kill again. Except I'll be the one to pre-empt you all ;p

[Ryohei Sasagawa[Hero]]

I honestly wish I had played more but due to circumstances I didn't play, if anything I learned that clarity is Important when dealing with Masterminds, I found this season had a ton of little pieces that were cool. Although over all cohesion of the season was low, although I didn't play long I felt that the create everything theme was more made so that the players would build part of the season for the Mastermind. I believe if these sub-systems had been better thought out the main system would not seem like partially hidden laziness, although the system was not completely hindered by its lack of completion as it did succeed in providing us things to do.

The Masterminding in itself was actually decent for what I experienced but I missed Phase II completely so my lost. This may be bad but super powers felt like asking to make the game unbalanced but as most people mentioned and the MM says superpowers is this games core so chaos and being unbalanced is CR. If anything what I found unsatisfactory was the room descriptions as I felt no urge to investigate anything as they seemed to tell me everything I needed to know, I am still relatively new and have yet to get a good idea of how to investigate so I think I should have brute force investigated then investigated what I thought I needed to. The previous sentence explains why I felt a lack of plot although the MM assured me there was a lot around in phase I area.

The Map oh my I loved the Phase I map it was so simple it was like I was walking on sunshine whoa oh...and I know it felt good. after 2 huge monsters of maps I have to say it cleansed me. I have no idea how huge phase II map was but supposedly with the right power it became small, due to shortcuts.

at this time I am leaning towards playing CR 3 but hope that more planning for cohesion of the systems occur in the season.

[John Dark Souls]

『Hmmmmm... Guess I'll write up some feedback too~ It might be a little bit biased since I kinda won the game (and I must note this was first game I won) but I'll try not to be xD Well then, going to go from point to point~』

『Powers:』
『Well, as expected from this game, there were all sorts of powers and while not as much as Makoto, I have seen a great share of powers with my own ones and the ones I got during Beach Party. My powers as Goddess of Death allowed me to know and use every dead players' powers so while somebody was dead I was free to use their power however I wanted to. Thats why by the end of Beach Party when almost everybody was dead I knew of at least 10 powers of other people. While some are saying that some powers were underwhelming or didn't have much places to be used in, I do think that ALL powers could be used to have fun. Or at the very least I am absolutely sure I would've found use for every single of those powers if I had them. The only real powers that broke balance for good were the powers obtained from NPC Gods like Sin Sight that allowed me to see any player's sins at any given moment or Technology Manipulation that allowed me to control any technological thing including the 6 billion Monochis that were around allowing me to blow up the whole school in 2 finger clicks. But otherwise it was all about player imagination and your will to try. Anyhow, I had great fun with all of my powers, my only regret being not growing that dinosaur of mine to full growth or not trying out my Explosive Fists. xD』

『Battle』
『Okay, I had my good share of battles in this game, from the Cafe Battle in the Ai's Cafe where I was exploring loopholes of her rules and random other useless battles during invincibility day to Beach Party and npc god and Poke fights. And I gotta say, the farther the game got from start, the more fights turned from the normal weapons and actions being used to super power battles. I experienced both so let me give feedback on both fighting systems:』
『NORMAL FIGHTS: During the Cafe Battle, nobody had any powers other than their own character ones and so I had to battle using only my body. It was great fun with you actually being able to block the opponent's attack if you just predict it and do something to prevent it. But I feel like either the conditions for predictions were too broad or that it wasn't done too well, because there was a moment in the fight where I predicted Bern swinging her Baseball Bat at me and dodged to behind her to push her at Yue only to then have myself kicked by her because she apparently predicted me doing that too? Even though she just done an attack and missed and I should have an upper hand? Just because she predicted me doing that? So while I think that prediction system is nice, it should have some correction done to it. Maybe that the first person who predicts first action has an upper hand afterwards or something like that? I was just playing around and everyone couldn't be killed so it was fine, but if it was a fight to the death and I died because of that I think I would've been upset. I also was very rushed by Mystio in the end who kept telling me that my last action didn't matter anyway (because Ai's rule of no violence went in action which I didn't know) and I should do something quickly to end the fight which made me a bit unnerved thinking I might die 100% too. Even if you know the battle will end like that, I wish you don't just do that. xD』
『POWER FIGHTS: Pretty much all other fights were with use of powers. These can easily get out of hand and unbalanced because it is all up to how players decide to use their powers which creates a great room of action and unpredictability to people's actions and thats why I think the Mystio did turn it into more of reaction fights with "A did that, B reacts like that." and such. This made it much easier to react than if it was the system from normal fights where both sent actions at once and better actions and predictions. And knowing the people's powers, I could agree to everything in the power fights except for one part during Beach Part. Me and Cheshire were both in mid air with his limbs tied with my hair in ice. Then Cheshire suddenly made a sudden set of actions of freezing all my hair and my body with it, ripping the ice hair tied to his limbs, creating an ice chunk in her hand, going in to attack with it, taking one of my arms, breaking it off, and then grabbing my leg next and attempting to break it off too all before I could properly react to stuff. In the end I managed to only get my jaw breaking the ice around my hand creating a propeller with it in... Judging from Ghost's playstyle he probably just sent a large battle plan of what he wanted to do action by action in one message and Mystio just made it happen one by one altogether as 1 action or something. I do think I was taking long thinking what to do and asking what I could do or couldn't, but I still feel that part was a bit unfair. Otherwise, I think I don't have any real complaints about combat.』

『Puzzles』
『While I did encounter mostly only the Chaos Maze puzzles and only few outside. I do think that most of them were simple enough and did require you to do only examinations and simple actions. Although Chaos Maze's puzzles were all connected and was more like 1 chain puzzle. You first had to get key in School from pool, then you dived to the black side of the room, then you solved room of belief puzzle and got items that led you from one location to another, from one to another till eventually you solved everything and got the Monochi Mansion Key. All you had to do was just figure what to do with what and that was it. Though it was very hard to do if somebody took puzzle parts and stopped solving or if any other people got in your way or you didn't know you had to go to school for key to start the whole thing. Other than that, only puzzle I remember was the School puzzle that was supposed to be very easy but became very challenging due to little amount of hints and myself overthinking much stuff. The puzzle was a password puzzle, I had to get the password of principal's PC based on few hints. The hints were papers in the principal's office that Had "H51 and H52 written on them" and password hint on PC that was "E". From that I had to notice that message in Classroom 101: "Can todAy's lesson will Be helD outsideeeeeee???" there were too many e's and use the number of them along with the previous too hints to get the password "H51H52E10". But due to myself looking for something leading to the exact answer other than just trying all sorts of random stuff without any special reason and me very overthinking stuff, I didn't even notice that password's format was supposed to be like that until Mystio gave it to me as another hint. Overall, I think it would've been much easier if I just tried inputting everything in all combinations however, but I really wanted to find the answer so after an hour or so of fully examining EVERYTHING in the school I finally figured that it meant the number of letters in the end. While I do blame myself for being dumb and not noticing till now, I do think it would've been better if H51 and H52 had some relevance to their placement in the password and there was the clue to password format originally and not given by MM if player fails much xD Yet again, I do think it is just my habit of making it so that every single thing matters in my puzzles that I tend overthinking what should be very simple~』

『Holidays』
『Mixed opinion about this one, very mixed. While it is a great way to spice things up, like done with the must murder once day or with Beach Party, it could also turn the day into hell of carelessness like done with Kirigiri day. Hail Kirigiri Day turned everyone invincible preventing any murders happening. And it also happened after all the puzzles in the Chaos Maze have been solved that day locking everyone away until tomorrow. So, in the end this turned into a day of no progression with lots of bored people walking all over trying to do at least something. 0 sense of importance, 0 danger, 0 motivation. While Mystio did say that that day had most activity in the game, I in no way think that it was good... The game had time limit and the game's only 2 ways to win were via murder or via mystery. This day was done at a timing that locked out both progressions. I think it wasn't very good idea to allow it in those circumstances. But otherwise, its not mastermind thinking those up but players, so I will mostly blame the player who wished it for that than Mystio who simply complied.』

『Time Limit』
『I can only say 2 words: TOO SHORT. With how much the game lasted and with as much stuff as was happening in it, I feel like it would have been very hard to win game via murder. Of course, it became like that mostly cause of Bern killing Marika, but still. Original way to win the game from how I felt, was to first solve the plot alone and then figure out that the only way to solve the situation is Marika's wish and then win via murder. But with how big the area was and how little time there was, I couldn't not only kill 2 people, but even explore whole map once... Again, it was because the game ended before planned and I think there should've been 2 more days if not for Bern, but what I think here is that Marika's death and time to resurrect her were TOO SHORT. Marika was accessible from Phase 2 and anybody could kill her by just poking her to death if they wanted to. And people didn't even immediately knew what her death entailed other than "You won't get the wish from her". And only 15 minutes to figure out she was dead by looking at Monochis and seeing them inactive, get to the Monochi Mansion or find her wherever she is from wherever you are and resurrect her was TOO LITTLE. It was planned like that, I know and I did enjoy the feel of despair it made me feel for a bit in-character. But I feel like it was a bit too much of a big red button trolling everyone even though you could win still with that happening. Just thinking that it would've been nicer if you allowed a bit more time till she could be helped...』

『Immersion』
『I chose the character from the CR1 that I loved a lot and during whole game I immersed into it very much. Countless Monochi interactions and other players like Ai in her Cafe rping also helped me get more into the game. All the Monochi Shop building purchases and sandbox interactions with the world kinda made me feel more into it. As my character, I was very interested in what exactly happened, why did CR1 end abruptly like that, why was I here and why did I not remember anything that in turn led me to more exploring and figuring out the story and solving puzzles. But even then, you could literally have Monochi suddenly appear and comment on everything and anything there was which encouraged me to RP more (though most of the times I just commented about how annoying the cat was or stuff like that xD). And then there was Monochi Mansion that led you to Mastermind Marika and then even more RP stuff happening. Overall, this was very RP-friendly game and I enjoyed RPing every bit of this Sova ^_^』

『Story』
『I kinda solved the story and won via mystery, but even if I didn't, I still loved the story. My main drive for the story was being my own character. It was her/my world and I had no clue what was happening or even why was I god now. And so I searched for answers and then figured out Marika's plan and attempted to stop it by pulling out gears out of her mechanism the forceful way. In the end though, she just died and I regretted wasting my time hunting gods trying to buy more time instead of just looking all over for plot. By the end of game, I literally had only 2 plot documents on myself including one Mystio gave me for being active. So this made me mostly rely on other people's docs and points and my RP conversations to piece everything else together. And I did manage to using that. I solved all the plot from the random small clues that were given to me by mastermind during RP interactions with NPCs and world around and I gotta say I love this fact a lot. Well, I did also get a few hints during my solving attempts and theory writings too though xD』

『Overall:』
『I loved it. Enough said xD There were very few moments I was displeased at, and all other moments of the game I found myself greatly enjoying everything that was happening and what was doing. I also loved the character I picked greatly so that might be the part of it though ^_^ Hope this wasn't too biased xD』