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

[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.