[Pingpongspiders]

Here we have Diego! Drawn by Zinthings.

[Pingpongspiders]

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Area: Announcements – Note #270
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: When Games Become a Job
Time: Tue Jul
1 11:50:54 2025
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One of the appeals of games is that they generally present you with a goal and a clear way to achieve it, just grind hard enough or get good enough, and you’ll beat the obstacle before you and that’s satisfying.

So when it comes to borough elections/politics that’s a large part of the point, people being able to go oh we’re trying to take this place, let me go do a patrol there, or let me go get a thing and drop it off and having those efforts reward you with a higher chance of winning the election and more favor each week as well.

But say if elections were just based on the pure number of monster parts or something people contributed with no other modifiers, just a linear thing. You know what’d happen right? People would want to win so they’d push themselves to grind way past when they stopped enjoying the grinding, they’d push other people in their faction to do it, casual players who can only play on weekends or a few hours in the evening would get utterly swamped out of significance, large factions would utterly dominate small ones, the leaders of big groups would make deals to carve up territory among themselves etc. We know that’d happen because stuff like that happens in online games all the time, it’s the norm in fact.

So the system is balancing two competing interests, to be responsive to what people do, but not so responsive that all that bad stuff happens. That’s why you have all these relative pools, so if you just head-down at one thing or push your group to it won’t help that much compared to having a group doing a diversity of different things according to their interests. It’s also why a lot of stuff is once per week, or graded so that minimum effort or doing a bunch of stuff particularly crammed together doesn’t work. It’s why there’s the 63rd punishing non-competitive districts and penalties for being the incumbent or owning additional boroughs.

And it’s doing a pretty good job at that so far, we can see both when people do stuff and make effort that they can gain a bunch of influence but also that when groups or individuals have gone to an unfun, really grindy place it’s rarely helped them much at all.

The problem is that a lot of the time when someone goes more try-hard or grindy and it doesn’t work, their response is often to just push even harder. So they make themselves do stuff they won’t enjoy just to get ahead, but if it doesn’t work or doesn’t work very well then they have to double down again because now they’re even more invested and it becomes this doom spiral of misery. What’s more it often starts to spray out in other directions, maybe they become convinced that the code is broken, or it’s rigged and the staff is out to get them, or other people are cheating, they develop weird superstitions about what the optiumum thing must be based on what other people are doing. If they’re a non leader they give their leader shit about how they must be doing a terrible job, if they’re a leader they complain that their members must be sitting around mudsexing all day. Other people start feeling like they have to do things they don’t want to to be a ‘good’ faction member or they’ll feel guilty, so they push themselves to do it, and everyone is being more and more miserable as what should be a game becomes a job, it’s a complete nightmare.

And the thing is, all the things that give favor are things at least some portion of the playerbase finds fun. Lots of people enjoy going on hunting trips particularly with others, or playing a raid as a little strategy game, particularly if they can have cool moments sometimes of saving someone about to go down or pulling out an underdog victory, lots of people enjoy going on plots, and going to or coming up with social events or creative outfits, early on in particular lots of people talked about how enjoyable it was to do a courier RPFight, or a patrol event, or a haunting.
And that’s what makes it particularly heartbreaking to watch people ruin their own fun to try and maximize their chance to win an election.

Especially since it won’t work, you’re going to lose elections sometimes no matter what, you might just get unlucky and a bigger group or one with a lot less penalties picks the same borough as you to focus on, or you might get unlucky and nobody picks the same borough and the 63rd come in and body you, or you might just have too many penalties from incumbancy or owning other boroughs to overcome. No matter what you do you’re going to lose plenty of elections no matter how optimally you play. The good news is that the stuff you did in that borough will still mostly be there when the next election comes up, and in the meantime, you likely have a bunch of advantages going into the next election round, and if your faction mates weren’t that helpful? Well, great, that means when you do win, you’ll get even more of the favor.

I’ve made some changes, so polling data is no longer visible, neither are the percentages in order file, although faction report will still show you the top people for the last week. I’ve added an up to 5% random swing to elections, and I’ve updated favor rewards so you can get up to 200 or so favor each week from your general individual contributions to things city wide, regardless of how your groups are currently doing.

I’m hoping this will help take the temperature down a few degrees, it’s great that people are so invested and I dont want people to feel bad about strategizing or trying to win things, just to be aware of when youre at risk of stepping over that line from energizing and fun competition to stressful and onerous. This is a game, and also it’s a RP game first and foremost; the only reason there are mechanics is to help support the story and make it more interesting.

I’d really appreciate it if people could help me with that by not putting too much pressure on each other and trying to keep the environment fun-first focused.

[Pingpongspiders]

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Area: Announcements – Note #232
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Updates
Time: Tue Jun 24 13:53:58 2025

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You now use notell to turn off your tells or notell strangers to turn off tells just from people who aren’t on your friends list. ‘

There’s a new codemonkey channel which has the same reqs as the regular OOC channel and is a dedicated channel for discussing mechanics and other thhings like that.

Doing an ‘untie’ bargain will now also allow you to escape from being captured by mist monsters.

Since it’s come up, the stance of factions on dual membership isn’t differnet to what it was previously, it’s generally considered pointless and counter productive to kick people out of a group because of another group they’re in or for any other similar, non practical and ideological reason.

[Pingpongspiders]

As things stand, I quite like the mist and how it works. I think a few things could be tweaked, but that’s a given with how new it all is.

1. I think the ‘deep mist’ takes up too much of the area the mist blankets. I would prefer a more middling or even small core of where the mist is deepest, and a more generous portion to only be ankle/waist height, to give people learning to hunt rats a little more mobility, and so that it’s a bit less risky to access your property if it is stuck in the mist.

2. Car pathfinding is tricky and will (as of the last time I checked) take you through the mist even if it could have gone around it to reach the destination, leading to lots of car crashes and so many horses on grid. Not that horses are bad, but we might get some more variety back if cars only crashed if the destination specifically is in the mist or some other measure like that.

3. Newbies have been complaining a fair amount about how quickly overwhelming the mist is and how long the consequences last, so a ‘newbie friendly’ feature might be to check a character’s hours and invested CXP, and if they are below a certain threshold on both counts, they just get mild wounds when they’re KO’d and get spat out on the border of the mist. So be it if that separates them from their vehicle – now they have an excuse to set up an escort to get them safely reunited with their wheels.

Ultimately I think a lot of criticisms about monsters are a bit exaggerated or coming from newer players/players who’re used to hunting at a higher tier, fighting too aggressively before they’ve figured things out some more. Always bring a buddy and be ready to run if you’re going monster hunting!

[Pingpongspiders]

matches[2] shouldn’t have a space

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