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.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
17/5/24 01:03 (UTC)General feedback:
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.