wankgate | 178: you all need to touch grass immediately

Part of it is multiperson threads. If someone's dragging their feet it can kill everyone's enthusiasm. Subject matter is a big part of it clearly, but outside that the thread mechanics can be rough.

this. pick a game, any game, and threads with more than three people will suffer and die pretty quickly.

three person threads don't always do that well either, but at least with those there's some chance of communication happening.

It seems like the obvious answer is to track plot threads you're in, which is something I've started doing just so I don't forget about it when I haven't gotten notifs.
I wish there were a better way to do it only for your own interactions though, and not the entire post.

not really. threads only rarely die because someone's forgotten whose turn it is. usually they're just more frustrating than they're worth.

if you have paid accounts you can track individual threads rather than the entire post.

The feet draggers should stop signing up for these plots. I don't mean the people who have to hiatus suddenly because of a family emergency. I mean the people who are sitting on their ass all day everyday on Plurk or Discord talking about their characters but never participating in the plot they signed up for.

this is probably it, because i've noticed that when plots have some one-on-one and some group, the one-on-one tends to go further. the one and only group thread i've ever seen really take off and do well was the one with a kid-abomination. and it was fucking magical tbh, so i can understand why people keep trying that same formula, but it's mostly not working out very well.

it might make for more successful plot posts to have like one thread with opportunity for group stuff, and then tasks that can be broken down into two-person threads.

i'm thinking about the comtesse post here as a successful one, though of course that level of npc-ing is a massive undertaking and can't be expected as a regular thing. but giving players some details to start the thread with/pm-ing them as they hit a crucial point or whatever would allow more of that.

The still-ongoing one with the apostate town and the Wardens has been really really good, though even it has several people who signed up and haven't tagged even once.

I'm not gonna lie, that pisses me off. Way more people signed up for this than got in, so flaking isn't just rude to the other players in the plot, but also to the people who didn't get in but enthusiastically wanted a slot and are now watching someone else throw it away. That's just not fair.

It's bullshit. People need to stop shoving their characters into things when their track record with tagging is terrible.

I've contemplated signing up for certain plots but then saw all the flakes who have signed up and decided not to bother because I knew the plot would never get finished. I'd get nothing out of it but wasting time by tagging and no one else would get their ass in there to play.

You can always just tag around them and pretend they aren't there until they actually show up in-tag. Then they have only themselves to blame for not getting anything interesting out of it.

It's impossible when that's the majority of the people in the plot. I've been in plots where I tag, then the plot runner tags, then I wait a few days for someone else to tag and they don't. Then I tag the plot OP again and wait and that's it. No one will fucking tag. They want the brownie points for their character being involved but don't actually want to do anything.

Fair.
I don't get it, isn't the whole point of the thing just to play pretendies? And not just... pretend you're pretending? Where's the fun in that?

I know. Some of the most fun I've had in this game have been the times threads have started out and then turned in a completely different direction because nothing was planned in advance. It makes me shake my head to see people say they have such deep CR with certain characters but then you look at their closed threads and there are always maybe four comments before they dropped it. They handwave everything and find the planning stages of CR to be fun instead of writing it out. That ends up screwing over the rest of us when those people take up slots in plots and drive the plot straight into the ground by never tagging it.

If it was just a few people who had a tendency to flake out on plots, I'd say HMD them or have RNG mysteriously never pick them for any future plots until they start to shape up. But it seems like a huge chunk of the game is guilty of this, and I don't see anything changing anytime soon. It's become the status quo.

So what's the solution? Don't sign up for anything? Stick to personal plots with handpicked people you can trust to stay involved? (I don't even know who I'd pick at this point, honestly.) Or maybe it's time to rethink how plots are done in the game altogether. Taking the focus off huge multi-person threads is a start, but I'd like to see more open plots (and please something besides another fucking ball or party post) that let people do their own planning and figure out how to get their character affected/involved in a way that is interesting to the player, and fewer closed plots with limited sign-ups. More people could play, the flakes wouldn't ruin it for everyone else, and no one would feel resentful that they're missing out so that someone else who managed to grab one of the few open spots can throw it away.

Not arguing-- do you have any example scenarios? Or general themes, if you're worried specific scenarios might give you away.
I personally don't mind party posts, though they do get tediou when there are several in quick succession.

Party posts aren't bad in and of themselves, but when every big group log is a party or a ball, it does get difficult to think of something new to do each time. And the IC distinction at balls between the nobles/upper class and the commoners/Dalish/whoever Orlais wouldn't like automatically divides the CR pool in two and makes it difficult for people to break out of their established CR.

As for the kinds of open scenarios I'd like to see, one in-game example is the plot where an artifact got into the water at Skyhold and made everyone sick. That log had 1821 comments - http://faderift.dreamwidth.org/102858.html#cutid1. Or the Fade plot, also open to everyone (just over 1000 comments). Meanwhile, last year's First Day feast log got 2382 comments, while the recent Satinalia log has 778. I don't think we're the only ones getting bored by party posts.

Both the illness plot and the Fade offered specific scenarios (beyond "go out and mingle at the party!"), offering structure while still giving people the creativity to do their own thing. And no one was left waiting on NPCs, flakes, or the inherent slowness of four-person threads. Personally, I found it much easier to force my character to interact with people they wouldn't normally associate with in both of those plots than I generally do with party posts, where they have no reason to talk to anyone but their friends.

The new area posts were pretty good too, I think, but of course those are limited and I don't blame the mods for trying to ration them somewhat.

178: you all need to touch grass immediately

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