Masquerade Inc. Season 1 Feedback

[Funny Valentine [Silentgod]]

The official feedback thread for Masquerade Inc. Season 1! Be sure to put your thoughts on the game and how to improve it for Season 2!

[Chatt]

I had like 4 pages typed up, but this is easier to digest. I can go into way more detail if any of these are unclear.

⦁ Understand the systems you are using. Too often, Sea would say "It works this way" and the entire fight would change and be retconned

⦁ Don't retcon so much. Acknowledge a mistake and keep trucking unless a major thing happens. Retconning makes players feel extremely unimportant

⦁ Scheduling needed to be more consistent. Understandable that your work was in the way, but too many times it would randomly be freetime at 2 am.

⦁ Plot felt supremely not-cohesive. The first 4 chapters felt like you were trying to tell us Masque was evil, then some sort of lore bomb involving humans being bombs was dropped with no lead up. Forshadowing is nice

⦁ Making one player a safety net is not good design. It feels bad for the player who is the safety net since they're basically god, and it feels bad for the players that aren't because they're simply meatshields for the safety net

⦁ Balance in general was ... poor. For instance, Eclipse's build was what it was ... and he wasn't even allowed to do what he was given by the MM, while I had the equivalent of a floor 20 build on like floor 4 or something.

⦁ Too many npcs, some of which had no business doing anything with us

⦁ Deus Ex Machina happened way too much. It honestly removed player interaction

⦁ Most "tests" devolved into cutscenes. In chatper 4, I think they went about 2 hours without any direct player actions. This isn’t particularly fun for the players, when the point of the season is to play the game, not watch npcs do cool things.

⦁ Too many ranker level enemies, making players feel pointless. The tests devolved into us watching 2 rankers (npcs) talk/fight/do whatever for like 3 hours while we fought nameless mooks.

⦁ Do build up. Our characters should not have started off in universe scale events from the first arc.

[Zote]

Nov 8, 2019 14:14:18 GMT -8 Chatt said:

⦁ Do build up. Our characters should not have started off in universe scale events from the first arc.

I really agree with this one! I expected us to be fighting relatively minor demons for the whole thing, but by the end we were fighting an actual universal-tier threat. For characters that really are just meant to still be in training... that's a little weird! I think power scaling, from a lore perspective, should definitely be worked on for Season 2. 

I'll make my own points now!

• I had various issues with freetime, ranging from not being able to make it to the majority of them (Even the sessions specifically for EU folks tended to start at about 5am and end at 7am) to just not being able to do much, which in part was due to that first option. Like when my Chapter 2 plot with Future got stolen from me! I wanted to fight a big robot, but by the time I got there it was already dead!
• I think it's technically fixed already, but activites in the earlygame were YIKES. It was very demotivating to fail so often, for me personally. I think I ended up failing, like... 6 in a row? That's two Chapters worth of activities, and that's especially bad considering the game was only had seven chapters where activities were useable.

That said, I especially enjoyed the earlygame, Chapter 1 was very fun imo. The demons actually felt dangerous even though they were incredibly minor - which was a pretty cool and fun way to highlight just how much stronger they are than humans. Even Walter almost died there LOL.

Except one chapter later they stopped being threatening.

Make demons dangerous, even the mooks! They're fun when they're hard!

[Xaniks]

    I chose to drop out of the season because I perceived clear discontent among some of the players. The issues they brought up were hardly addressed over the course of the game. My experience in the game met the expectations I had for my weak character—it was the mood of the playerbase that gave me reason to quit.

    I think it's accurate to say that some of us lost confidence in the host's ability from fundamental mistakes like faulty rolls and "retcons" due to his misunderstandings of the system. It's not a surprise if players subsequently take the game less seriously and lose interest. The game becomes incredibly less engaging when major sessions are comprised of stale "macro battles", where it essentially devolves purely into a game of numbers devoid of strategy or meaningful interaction. The loss of faith in the host is only exacerbated by disparities in player character impact. Coupled with the reliance on select player safety nets and an influx of NPCs, lower impact becomes overwhelmingly obnoxious for individuals who can't exercise a role in game events.

[John Dark Souls]

『Guess I'll throw in some feedback of my own as I think things up:』

『On the free time 'ending early':』
『Before the game even started you mentioned on many many occasions how free time could end early based on one single player's actions, and every single player in game in fact accepted that for a fact and was prepared for it. But as soon as game started and game got to point where free time could end early, you started going back on your word and doing all kinds of deus ex machina and retconning in order to do everything to make events and player actions leading to free time ending early not to happen. And it happened on more than one occasion always doing nothing but just limiting player actions and leaving all players with bad taste in their mouth.』
『Suggestions: I guess you could also think around and make some system where you end it only for the player that set it off, and have the player stuck in the event they triggered until rest of player base catches up or the date of the 'test' arrives.』

『On the economy:』
『Economy in the game was twisted and broken beyond compare. Ghost counted up and on average 1 activity in the game gives you about 200 credits. In a game where in total player-base only gets 21 activities. On 2nd chapter Eclipse got a skill that "Gave him 100 credits for every enemy KO'd around him and 500 for enemy killed around him." It was also on the chapter where there were literally 10 million enemies player base had to kill. There is a limit to how much you don't plan ahead. He decided to limit it to only 5k obtainable per chapter. But that is already far above what you normally get. Meanwhile gambling just outright doubles your credits if you succeed the activity. And what put the nail in the coffin was existence of bank starting from Chapter 4, a facility that has guaranteed success on activity that you spend to put money in bank and gives you 50% interest per chapter. I started game with 1k points because of starting activity, did 3 gambling activities and threw it all in the bank. By chapter 7 I got 10k credits, could've gotten 15k if I waited one more chapter and took it out on chapter 8. Meanwhile Eclipse could've obtained 15k by chapter 4 from just having 10 enemies killed a chapter, threw it all into bank on Chapter 4, and by chapter 8 had 20k he got from his passive plus 15k from earlier that by now transformed into 76k making it 96k total + anything he had before getting the skill, and that's assuming he didn't spend any more activities than 1 to place additional funds in the bank and only put 15k at start. Meanwhile half the prices in workshop have been taken straight up from Tower while other half put at much lower price.』
『Suggestions: I understand that making up prices and money gains and balancing them around with values is hard, but I think this is one point where you should've just faithfully followed Tower economy to the core and not have tried to do something new without thinking ahead. Banks themselves are fine, but I think interest should be something like 5%, maybe 10%, but most definitely not 50%. Gambling should also not allow players to cheat and prevent themselves from losing credits.』

『On the Masq. punishments:』
『The game itself was formatted in a way where fighting between each other was counter-effective and everyone had to cooperate every time, but no player conflicts were stopped, and in some cases it felt like they were further encouraged instead. And after the conflicts, NPCs would snitch on players and players would get punished and really severely and unreasonably. Two players in caves with no internet or connection to outside has a small conflict (which wasn't supposed to happen but was retconned into happening because of misunderstanding I must add) After it was over, 1 npc involved went over to workshop and bought internet from owner and snitched on both players. One player's character had whole personality was based around being unstable violent shut-in demon with twitter being her only place to escape, her punishment was to either die or get twitter taken away from her by force which makes it not hard to imagine that she would either go on rampage against whole of humanity or suicide or both. Meanwhile other player was a mercenary in a contract with my character, his punishment was also to either die or to get absolute removal of their free will so the player could no longer control their own character without asking me permission and I could in turn make them do everything I want.』
『Suggestion: I could suggest things here, but you should probably think on your own what is wrong with points above first.』

『On boss fights:』
『Boss fights became completely underwhelming starting from chapter 3 and all into last chapter. Only actual fights where strategy actually mattered and there existed a chance of loss were chapter 1 and maybe chapter 2 (though it was already easy back then). After that the difficulty immediately disappeared. Chapter 3 boss died in 2 turns to a single character without being able to actually do anything, it just killed itself. I was absent from ch4, ch5 and ch6, but ch7 was pretty much made to kill itself again, and ch8 one became easy because his main mechanics went into preventing him from killing himself as well. It just felt like regardless of the fight I could either exist or not exist and I would make no difference because that one character could just solo every fight by saying "I use my skill" if they are left alive. Last turn in last fight in the game was literally shortened into "Players all do same attacks as last turn" and was extremely anti-climatic.』
『Suggestions: Either not give players skills that literally make bosses literally kill themselves, or make bosses fully immune to stuff like that. Maybe try making the enemies even more bs and then a couple of simulations imagining players fighting against them and doing both optimal and suboptimal actions. If players can completely annihilate the boss without ever getting damaged, then the fight is way too easy.』