Season Paradox Feedback Thread

[King V]

Post your feedback on Season Paradox here. How was the season? What parts of it did or didn't you enjoy? etc.

[Giorno Giovanna]

First game on the site! Even though I got really busy I still enjoyed it. Kind of disappointed we didn't get to use that machine gun talk feature though, that seemed really interesting.

[Falin Touden [Ven]]

I really enjoyed this season, I found the puzzles hard, but I'm just going to get better at them. Shame I missed the ending cause of RL, but great game Sea!

[Satori]

My feedback on Season Paradox~

Plot: The plot was surprisingly simple and straightforward. At least most people were able to get a good grasp of it with a bit of analysis.

Time Abilities: While I never got to use my time abilities but I was able to mess around with the PTTDs (Portable Time Travel Device) early on which were pretty neat and I was able access certain areas before everyone else and could have used them for murder but never got the chance to. As for the time abilities in general. Some were OP, others were just okay and a few were just meh (My first power kinda felt UP imo but the very short cool down time made up for it. 1 min OP)

Past, Present and Future Timelines: The idea itself is pretty cool since you could mess around with stuff that would have an effect on other timelines but it can get pretty confusing for both players and the mastermind since all the timelines are nearly identical to each other and its very difficult especially on the part of the mastermind to manage changes in the timelines coupled with the use of time abilities and control the flow of information between players who are in different timelines.

Puzzles and Riddles: While I didn't really do most of the puzzles and riddles. I could tell that most people had a difficult time with them (With the exemption of Sova) I think they were too difficult especially for the newbies who were still trying to get the hang of the game though there were a handful like Hitomi who managed to break solve one of Sea's most difficult puzzles.

Murder Motive: Unlike Sea's previous seasons, this one required us to have a motive to murder which I was kinda worried at first since the last time we were required to have a motive to murder, no one ended up killing each other. In this case. There was already a murder motive set up in the form of a book written by Xinei and those who understood it would acquire a motive to murder. However. Only a handful of people (Most of them veteran players) understood the motive early on and were given the ability to murder and forces other players who didn't understand the motive to focus on plot and other things. (Though I think even if everyone understood the motive, most of them still would have focused on plot anyway)

Veterans VS Newbies experience gap: This one was already brought up by Sea and I agree that this game really showed the gap in experience between veteran players and the newbie players. While you can try to balance our abilities but its impossible to balance experience which is a problem since this means that the veterans would always dominate while the newbies and those with less experience would always struggle to keep up. Despite the difference in experience though. I still admire the efforts of some of the newbie players here most notably Hitomi who as I mentioned earlier managed to break solve one of Sea's most difficult puzzles, obtained a win condition and tried her best to accomplish it. (Even though it was nearly impossible even for most veteran players to accomplish) The rest also did well even though they didn't accomplish much in the end and that makes me feel proud of them since I was the one who kidnapped brought them here and they have proven themselves to have the potential to survive in our games and become regular players like us.

Special roles for dead players: While there technically wasn't an Afterlife for Paradox, a handful of players like myself who have been murdered were given special roles as final bosses for the Secret Ending which was pretty awesome since we still got to do stuff for the Endgame rather than just sit around and watch and gave us a shot at redemption. Even more so when we were up against the very person who murdered us in the first place though we still got rekt in the end. (Sova 2 OP)

Overall: This season was pretty fun even though I still feel salty about being killed off early but it was definitely better than Binary Distortion despite being a filler season. (It still felt like a regular season though)

[Deleted]

The season was fun with the new players and they were the ones who tried really hard to solve your puzzles.

The plot was simple it seems. However I felt really interested in uncovering the story behind our future deaths before knowing we're actually randomly killed by each other, wish there was something more behind it.

Map was great because multiple timelines confused people which helps people who want to commit murder.

These time abilities the players had were pretty cool too bad not all of them went mad with it and created havoc.

I believe the puzzles were alright actually good for our level even though it was difficult.

Obtaining murder motives were pretty easy for me since frieza hates earthlings and I'm his underling.

I think that machine gun talk should be tested but fortunately for the murderers they managed to trick people .

I feel it was unfair to be summoned as a piñata for sova at the end not that it was a 1vs3 battle but I was pretty much useless in the first place since I didn't get a weapon but was useful to sova for becoming his meatshield =/ .

Overall the season was fun and good hopefully it was too for all the new players.

[John Dark Souls]

『Well then, I think it is time for my feedback... Now then, what to feedback on first... It might sound quite biased seeing as I was closest to 3 different win conditions and won via secret one, but I will at least try not to sound as one just list opinions on stuff anyway. Guess I'll just go through things as think of them like I always do:』

『Plot and Mystery Route』
『Plot in this game was pretty straightforward. You needed to only find so many clues and RP with the rooftop barrier for so much to get the basic understanding of the plot. Plot documents were pretty easy to find and easy to understand (at least they looked easy enough for me). But, even understanding the plot behind the game and what was going on globally still didn't allow you to instant trigger the final trial and win the game via mystery. You had to also understand what exactly was going on in the previous instance of Paradox AKA how did things come to what they came in future. But that wasn't too hard either since I had figured most of it in my free time while charging for murder victory. I think it was moderately difficult. Future was available from like 2nd day and you could easily get around all of future and what happened to everyone in it there and then if a certain person didn't hoard all PTTs to herself and blocked people from discovering them and time traveling to blocked Left Wing. From there you only had to figure out how to start ordeal and throw the info at Xinei.』

『Murder Route and THE MOTIVE:』
『I actually liked a lot how the murder motive (THE MOTIVE) was hidden among the plot documents and you had to find and figure it out. That didn't mean that you couldn't kill people if you had any IC grudges or whatnot against them. But in game where having 5 murders done meant the game ending and only person who did 5th murder winning, I think it was very good way to balance out the unnecessary random murders out. And it inspired you to have at least some understanding of the plot and what was going on meaning you weren't just randomly killing people to find out what you are doing it for later and you had a certain definite goal in mind that you knew was part of the plot. Usually murder route in these games has it's own plot but in most cases it works like this: all people get motive -> you follow it and finish murders and survive trials -> you enter murder route and receive murder route specific plot and then you follow it and win. In this game, having you understand murder plot before you started murdering, made it feel more fulfilling to me. You could do 5 murders right away but then Cranberry would punish you and history would repeat itself, you could wait until 9th day and do all 5 murders, but then one of corpses could be found, investigation triggered and you locked out from murdering anymore, you could spread your murders through 9 days but you could still have your victims found and trials started and get convicted. So in all cases, murder route was still pretty difficult too. But it still allowed you to pursue plot and get it in free time between murders so it was also nice.』

『PUZZLES!』
『There were quite few puzzles in the game. One of the scientists, Jayce, was a mean prankster (everybody hated him, even his students and colleagues and me) and so he was placing puzzles and mean things like PTT's red button all around making these pretty IC and not feel forceful at all. Like the tile puzzle in basement, the different passwords around the place, random riddles for those passwords, the math puzzle to get through barrier. I never go to them password puzzles because everybody solved them all before I could get to those, but I still had tries at riddles and other puzzles. Tile puzzle was mean. Very mean. Me and Tsurugi ez solved it and covered all the tiles in red with red and green orb and it just reset with Jayce sounding something akin to "NEVERMORE!", there weren't exactly any clues to 2 red orbs needed and only a single "CHEAT!" note in the future so I doubt I would've understood you even had to have those unless Sea hinted it. Riddles for logging into PC, opening the Darius's Desk and such were fairly easy and you could get through them with just few tries even without hints. And lastly is Math Puzzle. It was fairly difficult to understand what you had to do at first, but then Sea's hints more than help you through. I bet it would've taken a whole lot of time without Sea's hints. So overall the puzzles were difficult, but Sea's numerous hints more than made up for any of them.』
『Note to self: I FINALLY GET IT! Why Eclipse's and Sea's puzzles are solved and mine aren't! I AM NOT GIVING ANY HINTS! *notes to keep the difficulty of the puzzles where it is but start giving hints directly and not hide them in obscure places*』

『Time Abilities:』
『My time abilities were mostly usable to troll people or to fight/murder/subdue them. Basically for what I do best already. So I was pretty satisfied that I would just be able to use them for what I'm gonna do anyway and make my job easier. I didn't get to spam my first ability which was to teleport people 5 seconds in future to make them unable to move but make them appear in that exact same spots 5 seconds in future. I could either use this ability to make myself teleport to dodge stuff and then confuse people as to where I have gone to, could also be very awesome in chases. In the end, only real thing I used it for was to kill Raspberry. I made him travel 5 seconds into future came up to spot where he would appear at and planned to put my hand to where his heart was and then make him reappear with it in my grasp and then gloriously squash it like that, but Sea said it would've been 2op so instead I had to take ruler, place it where his heart was and then once he appear with his heart stabbed out by ruler, pull it out. In the end, it ended up with me stabbing out a person's heart with a ruler which is still glorious, so I am still satisfied either way. And my second ability, that put all abilities of all people in the same room as me on 5 minutes cooldown (including my other ability), literally made my last boss fight much easier, so I still had use for both, had fun with both and overall was pretty satisfied with both of them. Because of these, I never had to experience other people's abilities on me so I might be a bit biased here though...』

『Different Timelines and Map:』
『The game had a map split on 3 different timelines. While at first you would think that made the map considerably huge and would make people meeting each other quite hard, it wasn't really like that. Different timelines unlocked step by step after other ones were pretty much fully explored, so it was easy to predict where players would be through the plot progression and murders. While PTTs did allow you to travel from whatever room you were in to the other timeline version of it, PTTs had time limit to how much you had to stay there. The layout of the maps with people having to pass through the basement if you wanted to go through portal to stay in the timeline without a PTT time limit also limited the player traffic. So finding exact players I had marked with "WILL MURDER" was extremely easy overall by just thinking where they might be and walking through basements. I also found it fun how there were locations like future Left Wing or past Storage Room that you could only visit with PTT. I was pretty surprised nobody visited past Storage Room to get the handgun before me. Well, more win for me~』

『Secret Conditions and Final Boss』
『So, after I finished off Klea and was like the past Storage Room looking at handgun that weighted 1.5 while holding my Sword of Truth that held 4 I started pondering how to hold them both. And then Sea was like "NOPE! TOO OP!" but I was like "How do I fight Cranberry then? I wanna fight the god with this sword because Wine is totally not the time that would be forced to do stuff by God without getting back at them! But I also think handgun will help so I wanna dual wield pirate style!" and Sea was like "Secret Ending still available" and then I got to thinking and remembered how in Dice if I stabbed Godsuno with sword of truth he would've went boom and started thinking of how and what god did I need to stab with the sword for them to go kaboom. And then I when I was listing my stabby options including the umbrella, Xinei, Cranberry himself, Xinei's barrier, red sphere, Sea sliiiiiiiiightly hinted it was the sphere. And so I was like thinking very hard which I should go for and which would do more harm to Cranberry. And so I was still thinking that even as I've done 4th murder and dragged Kanji around (screwing the game by putting my sword into him and going to take the handgun for myself to have both in the meantime) I reached the rooftop and started RPing with gods somehow making Cranberry summon 3 spirits of people I killed and start epic 1vs3 final boss fight on the rooftop. At that point I was like "I should totally wreck them 3 and go for secret ending now!" and so I did and won and it was hella satisfying. Never got to fight Cranberry himself, but I think it is more fitting like that because obviously Gods prefer to use their underlings to do dirty work for them in 90% of cases.』

『All in all, I think I liked pretty much every part of the make because I can't even think up of any things I didn't like immediately. And the game didn't even feel like a filler season to me at all. I mean, there was so much stuff in the game to do. Gotta totally give Sea respect for putting up such a good season in a really short time that he did it.』

[Ryo Asuka]

Wait, what was this about a special role for dead people? I really liked this season, even if I had to watch from the afterlife!