Season Binary Distortion Feedback Thread

[King V]

Post your thoughts, experiences, and suggestions about the season here.

[Uzuki]

I wasn't a part of this game. But good job anyways, Sea! Keep up the good work! I'll be cheering for you and the other masterminds! (((o(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)o)))

[Pokedude12]

Sigil/App System - Probably unbalanced with looting, given what I had prior to exiting the game. Alternatively, logic, requirements, and seeing what players started with helped mitigate the imbalance, as seen in Trial 1. I can't say what would make it work though, since making certain changes would make the Sigil/App System too restrictive. Having more active players would have mitigated the abuse though, which I assume was the intent.

Plot - I gave up plot to attempt the Murder End orz.

Killing - As for the actual attempts, the MM was generous in answering questions about "What would happen if so-and-so happened?" and still was strict enough to let me mess up when I did. So he's helpful to new potential culprits, and he's nice enough to investigators to not make culprits too OP. There was even evidence that no one bothered to find that would've incriminated me just about as much as the decisive evidence. Hint: Thick fog.

Powers - Mine was useful, as well as two others' that I at least vaguely know. I cannot say anything about the others' powers; but these seemed relatively balanced, neither being useless nor game-breaking. Though one was influential enough to affect later murders. However, the abilities that I know of were well-suited to the individual and either mitigated their play-style weaknesses or supported their strengths. This MM does know their players well, which is always a huge plus.

Overall - This season was hit with a severe lack of participation. Had there been more players, things would've ended very differently. It was, however, a good opportunity to take the learning experiences I had. I enjoyed trying a trial from the culprit's PoV again and trying to cover up my acts to the best of my ability. I can't say for certain what to change though, given that there were few participants this season.

have to go now orz

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Eclipse's Turn

Pokedude nailed some good points so I will try to avoid being redundant when I agree with him.

Sigils and Apps- Very cool and let us augment out styles based on how we wanted to play *cough*movies*cough* but like Poke said, looting made this really on the OP side. Similar to Fate's arcanas to a lesser degree here. Essentially by stockpiling the items you could get really OP really fast, especially if you made it to the fourth quarter. Making the SUPER ASSIMILATION APPS destroy all the others was a good decision, or we might have had one of us ascend to godhood on the spot. I would make looting these more punishing on the looter, one weight simply wasn't hard to work around. The ease of robbery of these sigils also probably broke some of your puzzles. Sigils like Life/Death and Light/Dark were used to solve entire quarters, and if Saku looted those off you earlier you are kinda just SOL. My thoughts on it anyway.

Qionraem vs. Lord Hard to Spell- I liked the plot premise behind the battle and how the facility was constantly shifting who really had control. The notes were kind of....well pointless. Yeah it hinted that some of us were A OK with rift energy while others were not, but the premise of stirring up competition just wasn't there. Even if both notes were signed by different people the notes basically had the exact same goals with minor differences (at least I was led to believe this). Neat Idea, I would try and add a few more points that encouraged us to actually look at the notes. I kind of just bypassed it as a "oh my motive to murder, cool" and moved on.

Gods, Demigods, Chimeras Oh My! - Chimera twist was really well done. I kind of imagined ONE of us was the chimera, when you actually twisted it to be the other way round. One wasn't a chimera and the others were ALL chimeras, it just turned out one of said chimeras was crazy. Darius felt tossed in though. His being there helped no doubt, but he just kinda felt like a screen through which to work with HQ. Speaking of which, HQ and LI both felt distant, which was good as they were both mysterious figures. I missed the whole meeting with LI in the boss of quarter 2, so I wont talk about him more.

Boss/Puzzle Battles: All the bosses felt more like puzzles than bosses, which was fine and probably wise since plenty of people were gone or specced with non combat apps. Would have been hard to predict the bosses strength. I feel like you kind of just gave us the boss battles with the exception of the finale(where we died). Might just want to tone these down a little to be less specific in their success scenarios. Final boss having one or two weakness is fine, but to beat the other bosses we just got magic fire and infinite bullets. These need to be tweaked if you want them to be mechanically successful, in terms of the feel of the boss fight, tension and stuff, that was handled well.

Final Trial- Felt kind of....tacked on? I mean we finished it in 1.25 pages or so. Zircons was similar since plot was pretty basic once you had ALL the documents. Only one or two things that really needed to be put together. Not really sure best way to change this. Removing it or just not calling it a final trial seems like a good bet, since the trial didn't have any weight to it. Perhaps if you had some kind of visible pressure on the players. I plan to do this in Azure, where in the final trial the players have this joint "LIFE BAR" that raises with correct plot points, and goes down when you fail. Very DR esque. Perhaps the tension of potential failure and death looming overhead would at least give the short trial a little more tension.

SDGL Abilities- Neat, I never knew more than like 2 or 3 so my ability to judge balance is potentially nil. Personally the Pebble Plot Train felt underpowered in that almost everything I got from it was like "These were for chimeras" "This is about Rift Energy" "Gaiaphage will probably eat your face." And most of that info was readily available on a document in the room next door. I enjoyed my plot role, but no idea how my power balanced against the others. I would go so far as to call my power useless, not unless you augmented the documents I saw so they were different from the others. That didn't seem to be the case based on all the stuff I was copy pasta'd. Not that I needed it and managed to roll through the entire game just fine. My only warning is to just be careful if you have powers like mine, since its very Hanged Man esque and I only get a slight view of the masterminds PoV that you basically already told us. Against powers that Poke says could affect late game murders, those always feel REALLY underwhelming.

Overall- I had alot of fun and I really enjoyed all the little plot twists thrown at us over the course of the game. Giggled that my DEAD END reads DEAD END? So now I have two characters stuck in limbo. Even though I said the plot in the final trail was underwhelming, this is actually one of my favorite plots you have had in your games so far. All the twists felt unique to me and stuff. I was never in combat so balance never felt like a problem, but obviously Saku was running around and there was lots of KOing, which I saw none of. Dont know how that happened. Excellent Job C, Well played!

PEBBLE CAT AWAY!

(For those that missed it, Yes Ghost actually enchanted my cat transformation with lighting. This image is canon.)

[Indrid Cold]

I feel that many of the points of the game were already hit, so I will be brief.

plot was good and developed well, and I understood it fully without having to have played the other related games
the map was pretty nice. I really enjoyed the imagery, though the movement system was a little tiresome when moving a long way away (this probs just happens and I am too new to see it)
Mastermind was cool, pretty fair to the players.
etc.
overall, I give this an 8.5/10

[Satori]

Although I didn't accomplish much this game but I could comment on a few things.

Afterlife - This was my first time experiencing Sea's Afterlife and I would say at first I was pessimistic about it due to the implied difficuty of completing them but Sea convinced me to give it a try. In the Afterlife, there were 3 routes to choose from (Vengeance, Redemption and Ravan XD) each with its own challenges and rewards. I went with the Vengeance route for obvious reasons and went on an adventure facing giant spiders, zombies, vampires, werewolves and getting myself rekt numerous times in the process. While I can't say much about the other routes but with regards to the vengeance route. I could say it wasn't too difficult but not easy either as it requires a bit of skill and some luck but I still had fun. My only complaint was I didn't get the vengeance I deserved. (Cuz the facility was destroyed before Nir could arrive to destroy it and that he was too lazy to hunt down my murderer who was wandering endlessly in space. >_<)

Overall. I did enjoy the game though it would have been better if more people were active.

[King V]

Feedback from the mastermind's point of view.

I designed the season with the premise that there would be around 10-15 active players. This didn't happen, there were more around 6-8 active players.

Sigil looting was a problem I had to deal with for the entire game. For the most part, I expected people to be active and protect their own sigils, but that didn't happen, and I had to kill off many people who dropped out with curse murders, leading to even more looting. Overall, I thought this would have been balanced by more activity, and the large drop in activity from what I had expected put me in a difficult position with these.

HQ vs LI was a very fine line, mostly because their names were passwords that could unlock win conditions. In order to keep the plot consistent (neither god can put much influence on the facility due to Chimera No.0's presence), I didn't have either of them play much of a role personally. In the final trial, the inactivity hit hard again here. Overall, the plot was about as much as S. Fate quantity-wise, but I had only 3 people, and everyone had already found most of the important points already. The plot was just solved too fast to thoroughly discuss.

SDGL Abilities were meant to be weak, and I made most of them fairly weak (except Hinaichigo's, but she never played). I was too afraid of power inbalance due to sigils to add more power to SDGL abilities (just imagine if Mystio had collected every single app and ran around being active, the horror).

As for boss battles... I never intended these to be battles. Nobody was supposed to die in them, and their weaknesses were supposed to be figured out gradually (for the vampire swarm in area 2, I had planned for there originally to be only 10 vampires so the gun app would be sufficient to kill them, but for the sake of being dramatic, I made a lot more). But, once again I overestimated the players, and nobody actually spent time figuring out their weaknesses. Mostly just shouting and throwing things at them.

For the game overall, I feel like the lack of player activity made many of the issues in the game more pronounced. This might just be me, since I have to constantly look at all the players, but the player activity levels really made the game difficult to manage. What do you do when one player suddenly decides to go around ko'ing all of the afk people and taking their sigils while the afk players aren't there to fight back?

As a side note, Hinaichigo's SDGL Ability: SDGL Living Doll – This character is actually a doll and is difficult to kill as a result. Only injuries to the head or heart will be fatal.

[Daiwa Scarlet]

Hmm... my ability was to dream... so I guess I took Ravan's role of dreamer for a game xD It wasn't really anything I used since I was never in the afterlife to use it... I guess I couldve gone ravan route though ;p It had little relevance otherwise...

Both gods ended up seeming... evil... so that affected our end game decision... I guess something hinting LI was not as evil would've been nice? Mightve still gone for the boss though xD Fight was amusing at least~

Im not sure if this was because of the inactivity, but I actually managed to search everything I wanted this time... but that may not have been the case if we had the two trials so dunno... I like plot though so this is positive to me at least xD That key sigil though @_@ 30 minutes of searching... *shakes a paw at poke* And didnt get to use it in the end T~T Is also nice that I was able to catch up fairly easily though I missed half the game xD

I cant say much for powers since I went from having nothing to the strongest (possible to achieve) ability in an instant... xD Mightve even created our own ending if we realized that we didnt need to breathe =/ *teleports after poke and initiates Operation SNEBA on him*

(I thought Pebble ended up as a flaming thunder cat? o: )

Oh random last thought~ Perhaps it wouldve been nice to make the victim's abilities stronger if sigils are stolen from them? Since the reason theyre weak was because of the sigils giving the potential to be powerful anyway~ Something which makes it so there isnt a total loss would also be less likely to discourage the victims from continuing~