midmonth post: july 2019

[moustre]

Midmonth Mod Post: July Hello, Aefenglom! Here's your monthly midmonth mod post. First, as always, some reminders. They're pretty brief this month: • The meeting log will be going up around 3PM EST on the 19th! It'll be a mingle-style log located in one central area, so feel free to threadjack and comment where your character would, bring up new topics in new top levels, and so on. We (and, ICly, the Coven) felt that this would be a great way to encourage talk about everyone's finds and theories, given this is a big game with a lot of intrepid adventurers. • It's app month! You know what that means - Reserves and the TDM will both go up on the 17th; reserves will open at midnight EST, while the TDM will go up at 3PM EST. Meanwhile, applications will open a week later on at midnight EST on the 24th, and close at the end of the month. •Our activity check also begins on July 24th! While we'll have the requirements on the activity check itself as a reminder, here they are right now so you can start figuring things out: 10 comments minimum from you across two threads OR one network post/log made by you with at least 5 comments from you and a second, separate thread with at least 5 comments from you. In addition, players are allowed to take a strike if they have at least half of the necessary activity; the TDM threads rule doesn't apply here, as June didn't have one - whoops. Inbox threads and personal overflow threads also work - they just have to be from the current month! • The calendar has all these dates as always, so check it out! Now then - onwards! The Aefenglom Journal The month of Juril has been a surprisingly cold one - or maybe not so surprisingly, given the laughter that comes from asking around the Shopping District and the like. Aefenglom's "tradition" of having a winter wonderland once peak heat hits is here! While not everyone is happy about it, it's at least cooled the city down. Compared to the ill omens and dark, spooky caves of last month, this month has been relatively calm and light - and those native to the area are happy for it. The sooner they can move on with the year, the better, though the nervous tension that's filled the air since Litha ended remains in the air. Nerissa Bell and the rest of The Coven aren't interested in resting on their laurels; while a snow week was enjoyed by Witches and students alike, the trained magic users of Aefenglom were right back to business faster than a jackalope snatching an apple from a tree. Specifically, they targeted the cave from last month, newly revealed to be "Smugha Cave". While research is still going on into the history of the area, as well as any expeditions that might have occurred out that way, the Wilders are keen on making it a proper foothold in the Wilde - especially with its connection to a leyline. This month has been spent making it as camp-ready and safe to stay in as possible, while next month's efforts will focus on buffing defenses and linking a teleportation circle on both sides to enable faster travel. While this might all sound boring to the regular reader of The Aefenglom Journal, we are assured by those of The Coven that it's quite the exciting news. In more minor news, pickpockets in the Aristocratic District are growing more bold and may have a functioning leader, or at least someone they can use as an alibi; if one has any information regarding this, please let the city guard know so the problem can be taken care of swiftly. The Coven also wishes to remind everyone at the end of the week that there is a meeting to be held in The Parliament's building, located in the Aristocratic District. This might just be your chance to be heard - or to learn what's going on in the city and outside of it nowadays. OOC Updates • July unfortunately hit both Snow and Bella like a truck, though we've been working to dole out information and responsibilities to our lovely helper mods in the meanwhile. The TDM is a collaborative effort of theirs, actually, so look forward to it - we're all excited and pleased with how it turned out! • Our Enable & App post is live! • We'll be having a love meme next month to celebrate Aefenglom's three month anniversary! Actually, we just wanted to do one. • That's it! This month was designed to be more relaxing - a breather month - and it managed that. Feedback Like last month, we're not having a dedicated feedback post this month, but instead would again like to offer everyone the chance to give feedback here, if there's anything that you've noticed or would like to possibly seem implemented! Talking Points: • Info posts that you'd like clarification for. With so much rushing up on us the end of last month and most of this month, we've slowed our roll a little on our rehauls, but we're looking to continue them once things settle a little on the real life side of things - and we want to know what else we might need to work on. • Quests. In general, what kind of quests would you like to see more of? How can we improve with these? What's working, and what isn't? We're aware we had a group-locked Wilder quest this time, not to mention one that asked for Bonded individuals specifically; what were your thoughts on both of these? • Plot investigation feedback. We've gotten quite a few good investigations, and honestly it's been fantastic seeing what everyone does with their information. • General feelings on: the game, the timing of posts, how events and such are set up, etc. • And more! Tell us what's on your mind. We honestly appreciate all kinds of comments, and we want to make Aefenglom a wonderful, fun, and comfortable game for everyone who joins. This post will remain unscreened, so if you'd like to take something to a more private venue, you can either PM us or comment here.

Comments

this is so long i have a lot of aefenglom feelings

[topslug]

I'd like to thank the mods for their responsiveness to questions (both FAQ-wise and investigation-wise) because it's definitely made exploring the world of Geardagas super fun and I'd love to work on getting out more worldbuilding tidbits through threads and interactions with other player characters. I definitely think this is a strength of the game. I'm addressing a couple of the points I found stuck out to me the most in the time I've been in game!

Info Pages
I feel like the information pages are in a good place right now for Monsters and the Coven; with respect to Bonds, I believe the page could probably still use some additional information or at least have a few more of the more recent questions from the FAQ added to the indexes at the bottom to avoid redundancy and gather it in one place. For example, the topic of memory sharing (and relatedly, the extent to which you can manage what comes through a Bond) came up in a FAQ question and that's not touched on at all in the main page itself. While the updated main FAQ index does helpfully list these questions, the Bond page's FAQ does not.

With more Wilde/Bond-related quests, I'm also generally curious about any effects/notable experiences. If you're Bonded to two people but only go into the Wilde with one, what does the person left behind feel? How far is the range of sensing your Bonded? etc. but that's another kettle of fish.

I get the impression this already something you're aware of and intend to update, though! In addition to that I find how the Bonds page is written has the same similar issues as magic originally did -- it's almost too open-ended in some ways. While this lets you craft something that fits into the experience you want to play with, structuring the page so it's clear what's 'typical' and what's 'uncommon,' and what's 'impossible' Bond-wise would help. Using Bond intensity as the metric/tiering could work here, perhaps, in the same way schools of magic have been broadly defined?

General Feelings RE: Event Posts
I'm gonna preface this teal deer with saying that the posts with open-ended prompts have been really fun, and I've gotten great threads out of the interactions on the intro logs, so this isn't meant as a dunk on what we've had so far -- just a list of things that I've been thinking about. Having in mind that July has been a busy month for all, please take these comments more as suggestion/thoughts for pacing in future events.

Follow-up for some of the more 'plot' oriented events has felt a little nebulous at times. Specifically, what comes to mind is the Following Rumors and the nightmare log. Though I did ask questions to clarify, it was hard to figure out how things exactly 'ended' overall, and where characters stood by the end, what everyone should have as shared common knowledge, what events people could reference and have collectively known, if the NPCs had any general instructions for them (or if it was limited to those who might have asked after x thing) and so on.

Understandably, mods don't have control over what players choose to respond to eventwise or not! But I think it could help to double check that things mentioned in the event plotting posts match up to the actual event logs, or that one doesn't omit information that the other has, even if it might seem redundant. Using the nightmare post as a concrete example, the plotting post reads:

Don't worry about this interfering with any plans you might've had for the last part of the month either; characters will wake up in the late morning of the 23rd, not feeling refreshed at all, and the festivities of Litha will wind down in silence.

While the event post itself mentions nothing about this (the late waking up, the poor rest) and there's no mention of general NPC reaction to it either on the conclusion of the log (I asked a mod about it privately when I really should have asked the question on the post itself so the info was more public, so that's on me). It just feels like a bit of a missed opportunity for an event that affected the whole city -- it could have even flavored quests for July (like an uptick in looking for lucky charms, nightmare wards, etc?) -- especially when in contrast, the Litha log had a LOT of NPC feelings/attitudes to play with (the worries about bad omens, etc, little things like red being an unlucky color).

I don't have any specific suggestions for addressing this (sorry!) and other players may have different feelings on this, but I wondered if the lagtime between the plotting post (put up on July 7th) and the more plot-focused event going up two weeks later (July 22nd) after a more loosely structured event meant more people were burned out.

- I did notice that the Following Rumors quest got a comparatively lower amount of people playing/tagging in it despite being posted relatively soon after the plotting meme, which brings me to another point. It could have been the signing up nature of the quest vs the open log nature of the nightmare, or such high-risk events not actually being people's cup of tea, or life just happening to hit people like a truck, but I don't actually talk to enough of the playerbase to have a sense of what's made some events more successful over others, and not everyone is gonna sit down and write out a comment like this. With that in mind, perhaps you might consider incorporating polls into the midmonth feedback posts to the temperature of the playerbase, or every few months to see which events are landing and why? Though they're a more limited way of giving feedback than writing long responses, they can still be useful, imo, for writing stronger events (and even timing them either to the beginning or the end of the month).

Anyway, I just wanted to reiterate that I'm having tons of fun and I really enjoy the responsiveness and obvious care the mods put into the game. Ultimately, all of these are things that don't hugely get in the way of me playing with others, but I was curious if anyone else also felt the same way and/or had more concrete ideas for addressing some of these.