Creator Reveals + Feedback Post

[battleshipmod]

Creators of our over 1000 works are revealed! RIP to AO3's mailserver and your inboxes.

Thank you so much, everyone who made this one of the best Battleship rounds ever! The mods had fun and we hope all the participants did too. Take a goggle at this year's stats—truly incredible.

To keep the good times going, Soulstoned is making bingo cards with under-used tags from this year. Complete a bingo (by posting treats for Battleship 2023 requests to the Battleship 2023 collection) before Battleship 2024 nominations begin and win a tag claim! Email battleshipexchange@gmail.com or DM Soulstoned on Discord for info on how to request a bingo card.

If you were on Team Tower, you can claim a tag for next year. If you were not on a team and you posted two or more works to the main collection, you can claim a tag for next year. If you completed two or more treats during the anon period, you can claim a tag for next year. If you get a bingo, you can claim a tag for next year. These claims stack! Please claim your tags here.

We would love your feedback on any and every aspect of Battleship 2023, and your ideas for 2024. Please comment here with your thoughts, even if you already made suggestions in Discord—having everything in one place will make it much easier for us to look through it all and make decisions about what to inflict on Team Crystal and Team Volcano next year. If you want to give feedback privately, email battleshipexchange@gmail.com.

As a final treat, here are all the treasures given to both teams and the treasure hunters. See you next year!

Comments

[mixtapestar]

Things I loved:
- All squares in the first two rounds were useful. Treasure in round one and BOTH treasure and info in round two! This helped a lot toward making any square call exciting and also keeping motivation for more than just trap squares.
- Two tag choices per square. I think we all agree that was a genius move. Also made for a fun mini-game of 'how would a work look with both of these?'
- Minesweeper! Such a fun puzzle to work out whenever we had new shots to call. It also worked nicely that Dungeon could take a peek at what Tower was finding out, making it a bit of a closer game.
- Bingo at the end is inspired! A great chance to get more works for those tags that didn't get as much love.
- All the worldbuilding! We have this every year and I love it always, but the boss stories and treasure descriptions this year were especially lovely. <3

Random thoughts:
- I think the work caps were just right, personally. I appreciated the increase to 12 in the final week even though we wound up finishing quickly, because I know at the end there can be more of a need to churn out several short works for those last needed tags. As someone who hits the cap, 10 works well to keep me focused without burning out.
- I leave it to the artists to pitch their word count equivalent changes, but I definitely think art should be worth more in the boss rounds. I know azurrys had some great ideas to make it scaleable.

I might add more later but that's what I've got for now! Best round yet! <333

[shadaras]

I had a ton of fun with this round! :D Thank you so much for running this game, and I'm super hype for next year! <3

Two tags per square is so fun, both for going "oooh can I hit both of those?" and for giving options when one tag is difficult/not something the team is into.

I loved minesweeper. <3 I personally found it way more motivating to get a CLUE alongside "this wasn't a hit" than I did during just searching for shapes (especially when we hadn't found the two-square trap yet and thus could barely rule anything out). Plus, the energy of playing minesweeper with my team was so good.

The balance of grids + bosses felt really good to me.

I know it's a Tower innovation but oh wow having tickyboxes to track pending tags was so much easier to remember to do than going down a list and incrementing the numbers by hand.

Also, the health bars for the bosses! Fantastic! And the emoji boards for minesweeper! So many cool innovations from participants that you integrated into the spreadsheets!

I love the idea the mods were tossing around in the server of making participants fill out a quick survey about competitiveness, if they tend to write long or short, smut/gen preferences, etc. I think that'll help a ton with balancing the teams.

Bingo was also great! I love that as a way to help inspire more late treats! And to help get more love for underused tags.

I deeply appreciated there not being minions. The treasure hunters seemed like they had a good time, and the end when we all came together to finish clearing Dungeon's board was a great party with all the people who had been on different teams. I really liked the community aspects throughout this year's game, and I hope the vibes stay similar next year. <3

The treasure descriptions were so fun and added a lot of joy and excitement to learning what we'd hit, since we wouldn't just be getting a "hit" or "miss" but a neat little description alongside it! Thank you so much for your work in coming up with all those, and I'm glad you made it into an ao3 work so everyone can appreciate them!

[wolffyluna]

I really enjoyed this round! Thank you so much for all your work organising and running it! <3

Things I liked: - as someone who was working long shifts + at an offset timezone from most people, I appreciated how the mechanics were not timing based (for example like shields were.)
- having two tags per grid square was great! It made my team feel stuck less often, at least.
- I really liked the treasure. It limited bad feelings when you made a work for what turned out to be a non strategic square, because it could still net you treasure.

Things it might be good to change:
- the word count equivalents for art for bosses aren't unworkable right now, but it might be worth re-balancing them next round? 750 as a base seems reasonable, but I think it might be good to give different point values to different kinds of shading? It would require trusting the artists to honestly tally up their points, but the current one does, too.
- with the two tags per grid square, it might be good next round to not have squares with both tags being smut tags? I realise this might be difficult to coordinate over so many tags, but it did seem like double smut tags caused a bit more feelings of stuckness?
- I do think a simple survey of "are you a writer? Are you an artist? Are you a podficcer?" at the start to balance the teams would be good. Especially because podfic of fic written for Battleship fics is very strategically powerful.

[(Anonymous)]

First of all, just want to preface ALLLLL of this by saying I appreciate everything the mods did to keep this game running smoothly and making it fun. This is just some feedback that I noticed as a player that I think would have made things a little more enjoyable/comfortable for me.

---

1. 
   On July 26th, Team Tower was informed that a minor was enrolled in battleship and that's why Soulstoned focused on writing more for Team Dungeon b/c of the loss of member. (https://discord.com/channels/727095013548490772/1122369855513960468/1133785575569235979)
   
   
   I feel like this was handled WAYYYY too casually considering how heavy some of the tags are for this event.
   
   There should have been an all-server @/everyone ping in #rules-and-announcements letting everyone know of this infraction and to reveal the user's name before anyone gifted something inappropriate to them. In fact, we did not even know the minor's username until 4 days later when someone (not a mod) mentioned it in general (https://discord.com/channels/727095013548490772/727095013548490775/1135407682505941082).
   
   A few of the mods have said that there will be a survey at the beginning of sign-up next year, and I hope that Battleship will move towards the same procedure as SeasonsOfDrabbles (https://seasonsofdrabbles.dreamwidth.org/28651.html) who decided this year to explicitly request for 18+ participants only in their sign-ups moving forward.
   
   I feel like this needs to be made more clear, more frequently, for the minors who try to enter the event but also for the writers who are straight up at points writing rape/non-con and other smutty fics and not even knowing who some of their recipients are.
   



2. 
   I'm not an artist, but I thought that azurrys argument on how to scale point distribution better for art submissions made a lot of sense, and I agreed with their suggestion here: https://discord.com/channels/727095013548490772/727095013548490775/1134867925375922197
   



3. 
   The funnest mechanic was definitely the EITHER OR for squares, it made it really entertaining figuring out ways to double tap on a square by combining the two tags.
   

[soulstoned]

When I discovered that someone was a minor, I deleted their requests, removed them from the discord, and contacted the person who had already written for them directly. There was already a rule in place that players have to be 18+ (the participant re-reading the rules saw it and reached out to me) but I do plan to make it more obvious going forward. All mods were aware of who it was and we were keeping an eye open for any additional gifts that came in for them. If we do surveys before assigning teams next year, a question asking participants if they are over 18 will be part of it.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes please! That would be really reassuring. I appreciate hearing how swiftly and what steps were taken to remove the person were.

I just wish it was a little.. more communicated to the server?

Like yeah, the mods knew who it was, but it was genuinely a throwaway comment in the strategy-chat that gets a ton of traffic for Tower, and we are all from different time zones so some of us may not have even seen it if we weren't backreading.

Atleast if it was in one of the pinned announcements with everyone pinged, it would be far easier to ensure that more people read it is all I'm trying to say on that.

[soulstoned]

There is no rule breaking behavior that I intend to name and shame a participant over. Works were unrevealed so we were able to make sure they were not gifted anything explicit and that the author of the T-rated work they had already been given was aware so they would have a chance to remove them as a recipient if they wanted to. (If it had been an M or E rated work, it wouldn't have been a choice, we would have kept the work unrevealed until the recipient was removed)

We also checked to see if they had already posted anything, and they hadn't.

I don't believe making a bigger deal out of it would have helped anything.

[(Anonymous)]

If you didn't want to name and shame a participant, I totally get that.

With them being a minor and wanting to keep things private, I don't think you had to out their name publicly (even if that is what I suggested earlier, I totally get wanting to respect their privacy and not wanting to target them in particular).

But I do think it would have been appreciated to have an announcement saying,

"Hey! We had a participant reach out and say that they re-read the rules and identified themselves as a minor. Just another quick note that this is an 18+ exchange, so please reach out to the mods if you don't meet this criteria.

For the sake of the minor's privacy, we won't release their username but their prompts have been deleted and have been removed from the discord.

If by chance a collection reviewer notices that you sent a gift to them or any subsequent submission from this point forward, you will be contacted in DM if you feel comfortable with sending the gift still, but you won't be penalized in game for whatever tags were claimed for it."

Then it brings awareness (without naming and shaming) while also drawing attention that the issue was resolved.

It doesn't need to be made into a huge deal, but a lot of us craft our fandom spaces for 18+/not wanting to interact with minors, especially for NSFW-heavy fandoms, so not knowing that it it was breached, even inadvertently, warrants some sort of heads-up, IMO.

[mcbangle]

This was my first time participating, and I had a lot of fun! I loved the creativity of figuring out how to double-tap some of the squares, and I liked how it pushed me to write and draw things I probably wouldn't have come up with on my own.

My only (minor) complaints are that as much as I enjoyed Minesweeper, it might have been more fun if each board had a different mechanic. I would have liked Board 3 to last a day or 2 longer for Tower; it flew by once we established our Minesweeper strategy, but it might have taken a bit longer if we had a different mystery mechanic to discover and strategize about. It also would have been nice for the "treasure" squares to have some sort of value on Board 3 as they had for the first 2 boards.

As an artist, I agree with azurrys's suggestion for color and shading to be applied to each individual character instead of once across the board.

[peaked]

Second year playing Battleship and I had a really great time! I was on Team Tower, so a lot of my feedback will be from that perspective.

Things I really enjoyed:

Lack of ambassadors/minions. Stripping this back was a really good decision, and it really allowed the team culture to be at the forefront. As someone who was an ambassador last year, I really appreciated how dialled back the game felt (even if the lack of intensity made me feel very lost/ not quite centred at times) and I felt 10x more connected to the spirit of the game. I really enjoyed being able to step back this round, something I felt I couldn't do as an ambassador last year.

Two tags per square! This was so good and meant that I felt a lot more useful in my team, especially when the squares contained tags I couldn't create for. I felt this created great flexibility. I would love to see this again.

Discovering treasure was very, very motivating, and I really loved this addition to the round. I'd love to see it in future rounds as I felt that finding something, even if it wasn't a "trap", contributed to the positive vibe of the game for me. (The treasure descriptions were really fun and I liked that it was obvious the mods were having fun, too.)

I loved seeing the mods come into Tower's chat and also help create for us. This really set a positive tone to the game!

I didn't hit the work cap this year, but 10 is a reasonable number imo.

Things I didn't quite connect with but it didn't negatively impact the game for me:

I thought Minesweeper was a great surprise, but I just don't understand the game, so I was lost throughout the last two rounds of what to do. (I find being lost during Battleship is the norm for me, anyway.) I found having strategic/number-inclined team members take the lead was very useful in this instance. I would've been super lost without them.

I felt the team moved very, very quickly through the rounds, which was great! But it left me feeling very lost when I had to be away from the game for 10 hours while working. I'm not sure if there's anything the mods can do to make things feel less like Troy with the pizza gif, but I think perhaps teams could approach the game with timezones and slower creators in mind a little more. (I suspect this was just a team-specific thing.)

That said, I wouldn't classify myself as a slow creator, but I felt like I sat in some strange middle ground between being able to pump something out that night and being too slow for my team. It'd be great to see something that gives slower creators more presence in the team chats, even if this is just something the team leads rather than the mods. (Our Slow but Mighty thread was fantastic, but I felt it came a bit late, so I'd love to see this established from the beginning so slower creators feel like they have a seat at the table. I remember some mentioning they felt shy in chatting because of how quickly everyone was moving.)

The way Team Tower organised itself was absolutely brilliant and made it so, so easy to find information without having to back-read over 1,000 messages. (Our Strategy thread, Social thread, and Slow and Mighty thread made it so easy to locate information without having to read through strategy talk mixed with social talk.) I think it'd be great if the mods could set up those threads in the next round from the beginning.

I also really appreciated the innovations to the spreadsheet. All of this helped me since I didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to creating, and I was able to sit down, find what tags my team needed to hit, and create. This is a big shout out to my team members who suggested those innovations, and Lailah for making them happen.

The use of the #general channel. I really loved seeing the teams chat and have fun in that tag game Tower brought over. The game felt less insular/divided this round.

Things that didn't really impact me:

Treasure hunters felt a little disconnected from the game to me. I was intending to sign up as a treasure hunter this year with the anticipation I could "pinch hit" and help both teams, but when I found out that wasn't their purpose this time, I decided to sign up for a team. I'd love it if there was a way for them to take on this role while keeping things fair between teams and avoiding the minion issue from last year resurfacing.

I didn't participate in bingo, but I really liked this idea and hope to see it again next year.

I don't really feel like I felt the loss of the specific Team Captain role this year. I feel like Team Tower was a well-oiled machine, so I don't really have any comments regarding the Team Captain role other than I felt like every time Soul popped in, it was to participate as a player (which was great!).

Suggestions:

Could we possibly have a thread in #general where all teams note if they accept podfic and art of their works and offer betaing? Team Tower did this in our channel via conversation and a social/networking spreadsheet and I felt that this was really useful for those creators. This might help create some cross-collaboration.

I'd also really love it (if it's at all possible and of interest to players) if we could have some tips on how to request podfic and comment on it. This round felt very podfic heavy (or it did from Team Tower's chat) and I'd love to be able to cater more toward those creators next round. I'd also suggest something similar for art, too (even though I know some resources are floating around outside of Battleship).

I'd also really love to see more players throwing out "I'd like to create for X!" more in #general (like I did) as I felt that some participants threw prompts in the collection for me and I was able to create for people I otherwise missed when I went around bookmarking/claiming prompts. It opened the game up to me a little bit more and I really enjoyed briefly crossing paths with people I otherwise didn't see in my team chat or who were in Dungeon.

If we have the mechanic that the winning team helps the other team complete their board, could we wait until the next day (or 12 hours) for both teams to process the end of the game? I felt that the doors to the dungeon were opened a bit too quickly after Team Tower won. I didn't feel like Team Tower got to celebrate finding all our traps before being thrown into the dungeon, and I imagine it was the same for Team Dungeon. (It was also a really, really quick win where I felt like Troy with the pizza gif for real.) This was the only point in the game where I felt tensions were a little high.

I had a really great time, and I'd like to give a shout out to Team Tower for that! Everyone was really positive and enjoying themselves, and it was really fun to walk into chat and see everyone being so encouraging and helpful to one another. Even though I came in and out sporadically with gifs and music, I felt a part of the team despite not being as active and present as I was before. It was a great team culture, and I really enjoyed getting to chat with team members whenever I popped in.

A big thanks to the mods for all your hard work, especially Lailah with all the spreadsheet innovations Tower requested. And Soul for being so responsive to feedback, especially with introducing bingo so players could still hit the tags they wanted to hit! It's very obvious how ensuring players have fun is at the front of the mods' minds, and I really enjoyed seeing how responsive the mod team was to encourage a positive atmosphere for everyone as much as possible. (And all the mod cats, of course. They did most of the work.) Even though I felt a little disconnected this round, I still had a lot of fun, and it helped me break through my creative burnout, so thank you for a great round of Battleship! 💛

[donutsweeper]

I really liked the change to have two tags per square and that more often then not they were a mix of smut/nsfw tags and more general/sfw ones. It was really nice to be able to help hit more of the needed squares rather than just having to rely on a few creators to clear the more niche ones. (It was probably just me, but I think would be very helpful if we could get a list of the tags after each board was revealed though, something C&Pable so we could go through them ourselves to easily see what we could and could not create for.)

The tower's additions to the spreadsheet with the tickyboxes were incredibly helpful. It made it so much easier to update what you've posted without worrying about messing up the sheet and also to see what was needed to be worked on at a quick glance.

I loved minesweeper, it was very fun to try to figure out where the hits would be in relation to the clues (and the clues were so fun! Major kudos to the mods for those) and having the boss fights in between the boards made for a nice change and a great way to finish up and still find use for things that didn't get posted when their tags were relevant.

I wish there had been more of an upfront plan when Tower joined Dungeon to help them clear their board. It just seemed chaotic and messy and confusing.

Battleship was a lot of fun this round, thanks so much to the mods for all their hard work!!!

(this is embraidery btw cbf to log in)

[(Anonymous)]

I think there were a lot of great innovations (speaking as someone whose first Battleship was the test rounds) — two tags per square was great, for example.

The one thing I’d want to comment on is team size — maybe three or four teams would have made it a little easier not to get lost in the shuffle? I definitely felt overwhelmed, even with the excellent #dungeon-crawlers thread for slower creators.

Thanks for running the event! I didn’t participate as much as I planned to, but it’s such a fun concept and it’s always great to try writing something I hadn’t considered before.

[vtsuion]

This was my first-ever round (though I watched the previous test round), so it's hard for me to compare, but I had an absolute blast and think this worked really well!

Things I liked:

• The puzzle of trying to figure out how to use the clues to determine where the squares were in the first minesweeper round and how squares without traps contributed to knocking down the boss (and contained fun treasure!) because it meant all squares were useful without needing to a full clear.


• Two tags per square for greater flexibility.


• The Tower Team spreadsheet was amazing and I'd love for both teams to have that next time.


• The friendly atmosphere both within and between teams.

Things that it might be nice to change for next time:

• Tower joining Dungeon at the end of the game sounded like a great idea, but in practice was kind of awkward - a lot of people in Tower had run out of steam and those that wanted to keep creating felt awkward about intruding. I wonder if it would help to just start the pre-anon editing period as soon as one team wins, giving both teams a bit of time to celebrate/process, and then let the winning team join the losing team during anon period if they still haven't finished their board so it can be more chill, like people seemed to want (and then start the bingo at the end of the anon period?). Or maybe during the anon period, combine the two boards (as in knock out all the squares either team got) to go for a full board clear for extra tags?


• I really liked the idea of being able to find/earn items to knock down more difficult squares from the test round, though hearing about past rounds, I realize that could create hoarding issues. Maybe some requirement for them to be used in a particular amount of time from when they're acquired would help? And maybe the same for calling squares? It was nice not worrying about whether to call or hold back.


• Things did go very quickly, especially toward the end for Tower Team. It'd probably be good to have higher tag totals (especially with items) and I'd love for the last board to have been a mystery too. It would also be nice to have some mechanism for rewarding slower creators, since they're investing more time for less reward. I remember in the test round, there was an item that let you see some squares on the next board, which might help, as might having items that make all squares on the board useful, even in the final round.


• I wasn't a treasure hunter and I get the impression there weren't many of them, but they seemed pretty detached from the rest of the game. Having not experienced last year, my feeling is that it would be fine for them to help with boards too without bribes, maybe even encourage teams to put tags they're having a lot of trouble with in the treasure hunter chat so they can help out, and maybe they earn tags if they do a certain number of works (or do works for both teams, to encourage even play?)

[yellowmagicalgirl]

Hello! First time playing, so I can't comment on changes from last year, just on things I liked/disliked/am on the fence about about regarding this year.

Likes

Two tag choices per square. I felt like I was more able to contribute than I would have if there were less tags.

Bingo; it's nice to have another set of prompts to work for.

Neutral

I have mixed feelings on minesweeper. On one hand, it was fun to see the strategizing. On the other hand, a part of me was disappointed since I came here to play battleship as opposed to another pattern-finding game.

Dislikes

I agree with the other comments on how it would be nice if treasure meant something in Round 3.

It would have been nice if the rounds were longer, but I'm also a slow writer. Perhaps there could be more tags per square? However, I also feel that it could lead to more burnout towards the end, since a lot of us on Team Tower were a little burnt out when trying to write for Team Dungeon.

[extrapenguin]

This was my first time playing battleship, and I really enjoyed it!

Likes

• Team Tower's organization with the strategy thread and especially the spreadsheet were amazing! After we joined up with Dungeon I missed Tower's tickybox spreadsheet, so it would be nice if that were given to both teams by default


• The two tags per square was good, as usually at least one of them would be something tolerable to create for


• I absolutely loved that Tower had several other people in non-US time zones so that the chat didn't die when the Americans were at work or asleep. It was perhaps a bit quieter, but I really appreciated all my friends around the globe!


• Minesweeper was a good mechanic for the third board, where the treasure squares otherwise don't matter anymore, even if I half wished to have gotten an all-new third mechanic

Suggestions

• I'd like to have a mod doing approvals and shots in a non-US timezone. I think I got to saw shots going out perhaps twice during the game, and it was an amazing energy I really wanted to be a part of! ...except that shots started at 2am my time and ended just before I woke up. IDK how it ligned up for AUS/NZ timezone people, but it was kinda depressing for me as an European


• Seconding the suggestion for there to be a cooldown period before joining up the teams. It was a nice idea, but Tower could've done with a celebration period and Dungeon a moping period, since I think we ran them over like an overzealous golden retriever and way overcommitted with the full board clear idea when some people had burned out and I think everyone was mentally checking out, since Battleship was in one sense over. I know I had trouble feeling like there was any urgency in making anything once Tower won, even when the mod started meandering over with the key.


• I was originally going to suggest that there be treasure on the final board as well, with a mechanic along the lines of 1k of treasure being able to knock down a tag count by 1, but then we ended up blasting it in two days lol


• The team balancing spreadsheet is an excellent idea! Unlike some people in the discord, I think time zone/region would be a useful information to have. Sure, some people are very early birds or night owls, but having people on at similar times to me was an integral part of what made Battleship so good to me. Having the team channel fall completely silent for the vast majority of my waking time would've sucked and I wouldn't have felt like a member of the team.

[peaked]

re: shots from Australia (just to speak up since you mentioned Aussies!) — As someone in AEST, I saw shots called maybe two to three times a day, but it tended to occur during work hours, so I sometimes rolled in late with Maccas after the fact.

+1 your amazing suggestion re: identifying regions, too! (It would also be great to have a non-US mod, but I don't know how feasible that is.) I was really pleasantly surprised to find some Aussies in Tower, and I wouldn't have known they were around if they hadn't said "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!" But I felt the chat died by the time I could sit down and write (which was around 5.30pm AEST) and it felt really awkward at times until someone piped up. I'd like to see more representation/acknowledgement of non-US timezones, since we non-US Battleshippers exist, too!

[(Anonymous)]

It's my first time joining Battleship, and I really appreciate the mods'effort!

I really love the minesweeper mechanic, Two tags in the same square, bingo and the board+boss fight format.

Things I really like and hope to be part of future initial setup:

- threads for slower writers for both team. As a slow writer, I really appreciate the Dungeon Crawler thread.

- the same square tags game thread is very inspiring

Some suggestions:

- a thread "I am creating for X" in #general so anyone who welcome them can check it more easily (and people who're not interested can skip them)

- The tickybox in Tower Spreadsheet looks really useful. I always worried about typing wrong when I filled in the sheet. It'll be great if I future sheets let me just tick boxes in the future.

- +1 for podfic coordination thread/sheet in #general so it's easier for podficcers to check people's permission, or who welcome them.

[maevedarcy]

First of all, this was my first time playing Battleship and I joined in a rush, the same day sign-ups ended, so I barely had any idea what I was signing up for... and boy did it deliver!

What I liked the most:

- Two tag choices per square. I think we all agree that was a great move. And I kept trying to fit both tags in a work for maximum tag efficiency (not that it always worked but still)
- Minesweeper was fun too. I haven't the slightest idea of how to play it properly and I relied a lot on my team mates, but it was great to see the numbers pop up in the chart. Though I would prefer it if maybe Minesweeper was only in the last portion of the game, since we're playing battleship after all.
- The spreadsheets! Oh god, how I loved the spreadsheets. Team Tower and lailah specifically made this game so much more fun to me because I was able to visualize what we needed and when we needed it
- I liked the 10 works cap per week. Though I never reached it, I think it's a good method to avoid burnout and it encouraged an interesting atmosphere on Sundays right before the reset, when we all wanted to get a last work in just in case.

What I feel neutral about:
- Treasure hunters. I didn't really see them much and I didn't really understand if they would eventually help a team or not. If they come back next year, I'd love it if it were to play alongside the teams to finish their own board (making it a 3-way competition) or if they had a day where they could choose to collab with any team, no bribery required.

What could be improved:
-Honestly, I feel pretty great about this round, but I did find myself shocked that Team Tower cleared the last board so fast, so maybe the last board could have higher number of works or maybe it could have a higher minimum word count, something to make it more challenging (and to give people in all timezones a chance to create)
- The bosses were great! I truly enjoyed the moment we created for them because I could really let loose and write, but maybe the second boss needs to be a bigger challenge still? I'm just terribly impressed by the speed at which my team created

Thank you guys for running this exchange! I had a lot of fun and I feel like I connected with a lot of great people. Also, fuckwater you will always be famous.

[azurrys]

Huge thank you to the mods for running this round! Despite a rough start, I ended up having a ton of fun <3

Things I enjoyed

As everyone has already mentioned, two tags per square! Lots more flexibility, and makes even the most difficult squares feel more achievable when you can -2 them instead of just -1.

MINESWEEPER. It was my favourite thing. I'd just been starting to feel demotivated and gloomy over the massive lead when Minesweeper happened and saved the day. Though we didn't actually strategise heavily for it (our entire philosophy throughout the game was just 'create what your heart wants, spray and pray' lol), having the board to solve was a ton of fun.

Things that could be refined

While I liked Tower coming in to help with the board in concept, I think having it immediately happen after their victory was awkward; it felt like they had a lot of expectations we weren't ready to address right after losing. I think it would be nice to have a cooldown period of at least a day where the original team can go on plinking at the board and decide what to do when the other team comes in.

Seconding the suggestion of getting a non-US time zone mod if possible; I live in GMT+8 so on weekdays, and shots are always called while I'm at work on weekdays and can't make anything. I'm nocturnal on weekends so I participate in pushes and see shots called then, but some of my most freest times are my evenings and those are almost universally dead silent, lol.

Detailed feedback on some specific points:

Art Equivalents During Boss Rounds
Scaling Colour/Shading by Character
I made this suggestion in the Discord during the game (thank you to everyone who supported it above <3) so I'm just repasting it here!

Since the 300 for colour/shading is currently applied just once no matter how many characters there are, I'd like to suggest having it apply to each individual character:

the work complexity for colours/shading increases exponentially with every new character

at the same time, only ever applying colouring/shading once means the ONLY way to get more word count is to add more characters, so basically this heavily tilts artists towards limited no-colour, no-shading styles unless they want to add a LOT of work for just 300 words

just as the new comics rule now counts each time a character appears as long as it's redrawn, I think this is reasonably easy to judge at a glance (whether a character is coloured/shaded or not), especially since artists are required to break the values down anyway

it makes it more welcoming to complex styles that take a long time, such as painting, which quickly becomes complex and very time-consuming with multiple characters

At this point I basically have to 'game' around the requirements to feel like my art is worth my time (such as drawing very simplistic-looking characters, rather than the humans or complex humanoids which compose maybe 90% of art requests) and it's very limiting, which seems unbalanced to me as an artist!

Scaling Base Values
I'd also like to suggest adjusting base point values to be based on bust/half-body/full-body estimations. This would make it a lot more involved, so it might be handy to hear from other artists (especially newbies) first! It wouldn't be personally difficult for me to compute for my own art since this is pretty commonly used for commissions, but it's definitely more complex.

Bust (something that only depicts a character's head or shoulders) - 750
Half-body (waist or thighs up) - 1000
Full-body (head to toe) - 1250
Small animals or mascots (regardless of how much of the animal is included) - 500

Note: while it would be technically fairer to also scale colour/shading by this scale (i.e. for shading a full-body to net you more points than shading a bust), I feel like it starts getting way too annoying and complex to score that point, so I would be fine having a flat 300 as the bonus for colour/shading regardless of bust/half-body/full-body. I'd rather give up the extra points than have to score against a different points scale for each level, lol. If there are to be any different scales, I'd actually vote for a nerf to colouring/shading for small animals/mascots (perhaps to 150 each), because speaking from experience, spamming small animals can get out of hand very quickly.

Background/Extra Character Point Buffs
For backgrounds, I'd like to suggest the following:
Simple patterns/shapes - 300
Scenery, backgrounds with multiple different elements or props - 500

…Instead of it just being 300 across the board.

In addition, each extra character currently counts as 300 under current rules. Adding an extra character is decidedly harder than just adding colouring/shading! I would personally vote for buffing this to 500 for humanoids, in addition to letting colour/shading count per character. (It's fine for it to stay 300 for small animals/mascots though.)

Summary
For mod consideration, with all changes included, scoring would look something like this:

Your first character is worth a certain base value based on this scale:
Bust (something that only depicts a character's head or shoulders) - 750
Half-body (waist or thighs up) - 1000
Full-body (head to toe, or including most of the legs) - 1250
Small animals or mascots (regardless of how much of the animal is included) - 500

Any extra characters after the first are worth 500, small animals are worth 300
Colour is worth 300 per character, small animals are worth 150
Shading is worth 300 per character, small animals are worth 150
Backgrounds are worth 300 for simple backgrounds like patterns/shapes, and 500 for complex ones like scenery or which have multiple props/elements

Balancing Square Numbers & Tag Combos
Even with two tags per square, some of the difficult tag combos, especially in conjunction with high numbers, were a bit stressful to me! Although I can and do write porn on occasion, the majority of my output (including for Battleship this year) is SFW, so dual-porn tag squares are difficult to me. In addition, I was a bit sad to see easy tag squares with RTMI tropes receive low numbers because then I knew they could very well be gone before I could create for them.

I know it's a lot of pairs to review and I appreciate that mods do review them (and personally felt that the numbers were, on average, more balanced in Round 3 vs. Round 1). To help inform decisions of which tags the majority of participants may find tricky and ensure they're paired with something less tricky, perhaps there could be a pre-game voting form after the tag list is finalised? Maybe something like a list of tags with ticky boxes where respondents are asked to please select the tags that they, personally, would find very difficult to create for, so mods can avoid pairing tags that are viewed as difficult by a larger number of people and keep an eye on the numbers for those squares.

Adding Extra Tags to a Square via Item/Other Mechanics
I'd like to suggest this as a way to alleviate the tag balance problems — basically letting a difficult square gain an extra tag so that it's easier to create for! It would mean adding rather than replacing any existing tag, so a square that was originally X or Y would now be X or Y or Z, and players could hit it by creating for any of the three tags (or hit it 3 times it if they somehow include all 3 tags LOL).

I suggested adding the extra tag via item because I personally miss items from the test round, but I do remember mods mentioning concerns with item usage where it might lead to unproductive discussion or even arguments + it has time zone limitations. Since asking a team to choose a tag could lead to the same issues, some thoughts I have for streamlining that:

In terms of choosing the tag to add to the square: source the extra tag from the list of tags that were previously downed in the current board. It can either be randomly chosen, or teams can vote on the tag at the time the item is revealed. I also like this because if you were making something and ended up in the situation of 'oh no, the tag went down before I could finish my work' there's the possibility the tag may be back later!

In terms of choosing the square to add the tag to: this is going to be the trickiest bit since every team will find different squares difficult and may have varying priorities that influence what square they'd want to add a tag to, so my best suggestion here is as below:

Have a clear process/flow for how the item is handled from the outset, for both teams. For instance, make it so that the moment the item is found, mods open a channel/thread where people can suggest the square that the tag should be added to, and a poll is put up after a fixed amount of time with those suggestions. I think that as long as there's a clearly communicated process, a lot of trouble will be minimised.

Team Balance
The imbalance in the teams was a bit of a downer for me in the early-game especially, when the lead felt insurmountable. I really appreciated that the mechanics allowed for a little catch-up later, and love the mods' idea to have a team sorting feedback form/spreadsheet next year! Also adding support for having time zone as an optional field for the form, and would also suggest having official fields in the form for any specific matching or do not match requests.

[buddywritesfic]

This was my first full round after playing the test rounds last winter, and I had a really good time!

I like that the team that's behind has some advantage in that they can see what the team ahead of them is dealing with. That felt like very elegant gameplay, and it helps keep things competitive.

I liked the switch from battleship-style grid to minesweeper-style, but it's not that I prefer minesweeper to battleship. It's more that I like variety and surprises. It was fun going into the game not knowing exactly what I was in for or how it would change.

Having two tags per square was great, it made me feel like I could contribute a lot more because there were more tags I could write, and more options for tag combinations.

I definitely prefer a puzzle to figure out which squares need clearing rather than a full board clear.

For me, the boss rounds were less motivating than the boards in terms of fic, but I like that it means that slower writers' works aren't wasted. I drew art during boss rounds instead. I feel like the art scoring worked for me. It offered enough points that a piece felt worthwhile. For context, my perspective is that I don't usually draw, I'm not an accomplished artist, I'm not using any advanced techniques, and I draw relatively quickly. I appreciate the motivation to try something outside my usual wheelhouse.

I was on Team Tower, and hughmikkelsen's ticky box page on the spreadsheet was absolutely clutch. Much, much easier than manually adjusting numbers up or down to show what tags I hit, and it made in-progress works for the team way easier to track. I'd love to see something like that on both teams' spreadsheets next year. It was a great innovation.

I didn't end up creating anything after Tower won, when we were clearing the last board with Dungeon. Part of that was that some of that motivating sense of urgency was gone, and part of it was that I'd seen people on meme saying they didn't want Tower to sweep in and make all the tags on their in-progress work useless, so I was concerned about stepping on toes. I know when we brought that up on discord, the Dungeon people who responded at the time said to create whatever and it was fine and they didn't have dibs on anything, but I knew there were other people who either weren't online at the moment or weren't talking who felt differently, so I didn't want to make things awkward.

The bingo sheets were a good way to give the underserved tags some love. I really liked that we got to personalize our sheets and pick tags we liked or thought would go well together. I did my bingo during the anon period because I knew I'd never get it done without a deadline lol, but the longer deadline seems like a good thing for people who work well with long timeframes.

Thanks for all the hard work, and I'm looking forward to next year!

[eirvyan]

I am very late, but I noticed no one from the treasure hunter side provided feedback, so I’d like to speak to my experience. In terms of everything related to the game, I am a treasure hunter, so please take my feedback from that perspective.

General feedback:

• I liked the editing period! Two days was perfect for cooling down and editing my works without having to worry that the collection would reveal while I was busy elsewhere.
• Minesweeper was neat! It felt like more spaces and thus “useful” tags remained in play longer, which I liked to see. (Also, while I always secretly solve the boards in the background, I am a minesweeper fan and especially had fun with these ones.)
• I liked how double tags helped balance out more difficult tags! It did continue the issue of undercreating for nicher tags, so stuff like the bingo cards was nice too. I would actually lightly propose a community post-game board reminiscent of the 2023 treasure hunter board – fill squares with underutilized tags, and have a challenge to clear X squares to let participants (who posted at least Y works) claim a tag.
• Also, just speaking as someone who finds smut easier to write for, I thought the tag list felt fairly balanced, and combined with the double tags made personal “impossible” squares much rarer. I’ll also echo azurrys above and say that asking for a list of personally difficult tags might improve tag pairing balancing.
• I think the giftless/treatless list should’ve been released when both teams were in the same (final) phase. The way it happened this year, one team had a disproportionately better reward for claiming the bonus – Tower could claim and progress difficult spaces while Dungeon could only receive 100 words for several hours. Technically speaking, they are equivalent, but the worth of claiming specific tags few can create for is much higher.

Regarding treasure hunters:
I’ll be blunt. This year’s setup did not work for me. Even after the adjustments to allow boss contributions, the lowered requirements, and the stacked tags (and thank you for being so responsive!), Battleship for me is about the board, which in past years everyone could contribute towards, so the general isolation of the treasure hunters this year just wasn't that fun. Granted, my investment and awareness of the game was much higher than the average treasure hunter, but I wished I could have helped bridge the gap the entire game. Several times I made the mistake of noticing useful or necessary spaces with nicher tags I could’ve helped complete. I originally voted for the adjusted board to see if it was feasible, but in hindsight, if I could go back, I would’ve given the board and the tag up if it meant I could post to a team. Yes, I know we cleared the board, so by outside measure this setup was “successful,” but the mods know as well as I do how this progress was distributed.

Letting third parties interact with the main game is essential in my view. Something like 2022 is too much, but 2021 feels like a good model for third party participation. In particular, the philosophy of the pirate board – where one team could “theoretically” convince a mercenary to add a specific tag to the tagset, but both teams ultimately benefited – felt pretty fair to me, and in general I was satisfied that year (as a player). Really, anything connecting third parties to the main game would be nice. Personally, I’d be happy just with the ability to post to team collections, though if you want to remove third parties potentially helping only one side, perhaps you could double count their works across both teams, or incentivize "balancing" contributions.

Also, if there are tag rewards for third parties, I’d prefer them to be individual rather than a team effort (within-game rewards could be communal goals, I don’t have enough past information for an opinion here). Because people who don’t sign up… don’t sign up, it’s hard to determine 1) how large the group is or 2) how invested they are, and scaling is extremely difficult – even moreso this year because of the unusually limited reasons to participate as a treasure hunter. This is just my feeling based on this year’s setup.

Finally, just speculating on how 2023 turned out, I think the minimal treasure hunter presence was partially because it was initially stated that there would be zero game-relevant benefits for treating in Battleship. In other words, you could not participate in the game portion of a gamified event, period. This pushed some people who would’ve otherwise intentionally remained third parties to sign up, and caused others to simply check out of the game. Combined with the high initial community goals, especially if you only read the DW posts or looked at the sheet in the first few days, I think this dampened the numbers and contributions of third parties.

…Despite those big paragraphs, I really did enjoy 2023 overall! The format of the game itself seemed great, and I especially liked the integration of phases and incentives for slower creators and "unneeded" works. Battleship still remains my favorite fandom event - I love how unique it is within the EAD sphere, and I think the mods are doing a great job creating an enjoyable game design. It was a pleasure to help out with approvals.