Phantasm and PvP Rant

[Chatt]

My issues with the season can be boiled down to about 2 reasons. The first is PvP.


Our community as a whole does not seem capable of handling PvP in a mature and sensible way. Everyone feels bad about losing. This is a fact. And in a PvP season like this, everyone but 1 person is going to lose. Another fact. But what does not need to happen after someone loses is people ganging up on that person.

I had multiple fights where after the fight itself ended, both players involved were happy with the result. One of them a little bitter, but they felt they had done all they could. Only to be procedurally destroyed by everyone watching, making comments such as “I pity you” on losing first or second. I should not have to comfort players, especially after they actually had fun in a fight because some of us cannot hold their comments.


Which leads directly into the second issue, and slightly connected to the first. Everyone wants to be the MC. Everyone wants to compare themselves to each other. In a season like phantasm, I designed everyone’s kits to have a counter somewhere. To have separate playstyles. To be able to get around their counters through knowledge and good strategy. I did not design these counters to have player lord them over others. I had numerous reports of individuals comparing themselves to each other, and attempting to belittle each other because of it, especially trying to lord over the people they happened to counter for no reason.


Everyone wanting to be the MC lead to other issues as well. I try my best to design PvE fights where people can do things. In the Church fight against Lucia, the Church themselves were designed to fight that boss. When fighting Informa, I simply lack the skill to make all of their servants actually useful in a fight against one person. So in that case, I made it one where people could use their brains. I gave hints to figure things out, and people still complained about being useless, despite the fact they could simply add to the conversation of trying to figure out a person’s power. Being able to deal damage in a fight is not everything.


Phantasm has been the worst experience I’ve had MMing. I honestly had more fun hosting LIFE because then it was about 3 people, and I got treated with respect by them. I can handle complaints. I can handle you requesting for me to rework your servant. Eclipse alone had about 4 reworks to his servant. What I cannot handle is constant passive aggression when I’m already stressed from dealing with multiple other people, and constant questioning from people who obvious didn’t even read the rules. No names will be mentioned here, and I believe most of the issues of this season stemmed from it being PvP, which brings out the worst in all of us.


I should have seen this coming from Tower, where the worst times have been the PvP times. I will never host another PvP focused season again, until we actually have a system that proves that this community can handle it without getting salty, demeaning each other, and lashing out at the Mastermind. That is all.

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Just to toss my own thoughts in on this.

We certainly have some issues with people being angry or acting in inappropriate ways when stuff goes wrong. I am certainly no stranger to this as I have been on both sides as a mastermind and player in games. In some cases its a legitimate issue the MM caused(Thanks Sova and those landmines) while other times the player is being unreasonable about things(thank you players trying to pull off magical tricks like SLITTING THEIR THROAT AND NOT SPILLING ANY BLOOD). I don't think its simple to have people change since we all get angry and salty for good and bad reasons. Instead we need to get better as both players and masterminds at directly and calmly confronting the issue.

Most MMs are willing to work with players to help make things work and make things fun. Most MMs also will help if players ask. Most times MMs are frustrated already and stressed hosting, so when players don't calmly ask for help and instead bite back or cause further stress, the MM either ignores them or bites back. This chain of stress leads to alot of host burnout and season cancellations in my opinion(Hello Starless Dusk). The mastermind needs to address problem players directly and players who aren't having fun, need to directly talk to the mastermind. Biting the MM passive aggressively, or the MM doing it in the reverse by ignoring them is just going to cause the wound to fester and grow worse.

The MC syndrome is really difficult to deal with. Everyone wants to be cool and have their day, but its tough in a game where its all PvP. Maybe if people had some more PvE stuff to use their skills and have fun before diving into PvP where its possible to lose immediately it may have went smoother. The game/grail war started REALLY abruptly with us just dropping in, though that is probably different from the faction starts. This probably attributed to everyone trying to be the MC since they had no other figure to take the role. Plus everyone just wants to be cool. I do think tweaks to the flow of the game would help alleviate this.

I do think there are a few things that could have helped Phantasm run smoother and potentially be a little less stressful, but these are more for feedback on season ideas than the rant so take these next things as you will.

Features included for no reason: Be careful adding in features that serve no real purpose or addition to gameplay, and if you have too, downplay the segments so they aren't stressful. Easiest comparison is that the map and movement posts in Tower are basically non existent as we warp around to various places to interact. The map in Phantasm served no real purpose beyond being an area for us to find one another and fight. The movement mechanics add little to nothing to the system and having areas that require MM PM responses when those are fairly slow can be frustrating. The stat gaining process in Phantasm is another unnecessary mechanic. Players gaining stats occurred 100% outside of combat and exploration, just being an almost random thing at the end of the session. It added very little and just resulted in players getting frustrated about falling behind later on.

Don't leave us hanging!: Phantasm had slow MM response times....like, REALLY slow. This is partially because Phantasm has really complicated combat with two controllable characters per player, not counting NPCs, and huge character sheets and skills. So while I don't blame Chatter for having long response times, I do ask that anyone who hosts something like this consider a maximum response time for players. Saku and I got into a fight on session, which concluded as we were about start the fight. Chatter had the entire time between sessions to set us up, problem is it was at the same time as the raid boss. While I understand that had you busy, me and Saku ended up taking four hours for three turns of combat which boiled down to auto attack, charge up, auto attack, charge up, skill, attack, Both players run away. It wasn't a complicated fight and you had prep time. Set some time where you have to go deal with those side encounters because them dragging out causes further problems, even if its just a, HEY GUYS DEALING WITH THE MEMES IN THIS RAID BOSS, GIVE ME 10 MINUTES. By the time our fight actually finished, Saku and I had identified 3-5 instances of combat going unexpectedly and neither of us were invested at all.

Commit to the Rules: I know this happened with me and I know alot of numbers were fudged to try and save time, but it got really frustrating to not see my numbers add up to the same thing when I did the same things. For me specifically its very hard for me to get invested in a combat system where I dont feel like any of my decisions matter, and in this case I felt that way for awhile since I auto attacked like 5 times over the course of the game and never got the same damage result. After talking with Chatter I learned that none of those numbers were right and that each one had different things taken into account. This ended up resulting in a rework that helped my servant feel more straightforward and effective, but I do warn anyone reading this to try and stick to the number religiously if the player knows them. If you have to rework them later due to balance thats fine, but the player has to be able to trust the numbers and you by extension or they are inevitably going to get frustrated when they end up losing when numbers don't line up.

Stick to your plan: If you tell us its going to be a heavy RP season, try to stick to that with your mechanics as well. Phantasm had a super in depth combat and skill system, but the rules almost never touched on when you should be RPing with your servant to learn info and was pretty much just player initiated. For future games I would say make sure to include obvious times for certain game play styles or at least help players recognize when to do this. Players not realizing RP was an option results in further frustration as they 'miss' information and feel unjustly punished due to not being told how to go get the info that was right at their finger tips.

TL;DR
The main take away from all this is that its important to be crystal clear between players and mastermind. Especially in a stat PvP season where the slightest missteps can result in players feeling unfairly treated. If everyone understands that and is willing to address problems directly instead of linger, I think we could have a solid mostly PvP session.