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Hi everyone and welcome to the Feedback Thread for our Get-Together this year.
This is the thread we'll be using as a discussion point over the next few days about the Get-Together and things you found really good or enjoyable about it and things which you think could do with improving, whether that be a specific event or how something such as points or schedules were handled.
Be mindful that this is to be posting stuff regarding things in the Get-Together - posting about things like an event not fitting your specific schedule for example doesn't really offer much advice to the Event Organiser other than you couldn't make it. If it's an issue across the board then that's a different matter and something that would need to be a consideration for next year.
As always, try to be as civil as you can when providing feedback/critique. Remember that the people that helped organise the Get-Together spent a fair amount of time and energy doing so, coming in all guns blazing saying everything sucked, with no definitive and constructive reason why, ain't it chief and your post will just be removed.
This thread will be around until October 28th, when it will then be closed and stored ready for next year.
On a final note - thank you once again for everyone that participated and everyone that helped make this Get-Together happen this year, as always it's been an absolute blast!
The event was some real stuff ngl
I really enjoyed too(kinda), espcially da challenge :p thankz to Prinzessin & Janp & Arcaneum and all da hostz, y'all made this some real fun
Hope ya guyz continue PC like this really EXCELLENTly and continue to grow and prosper and hold these memorable times!
Spoiler:
Just one suggestion to please put ARC and me on same team from next time thanks :p
The event was wonderful!
If I may suggest something, thought, it would be to pick, like ZeoStar said, Forum Games and Trivia's threads better suited for fast paced posting. These sections certainly do not fall short of funny threads for each user to interact with the next!
It was perfect for me! I took part last year and as a newbie I missed some of the events, but this year I managed to take part in everything I wanted. And that was a lot! We had many interesting events. If anything I'd want an even wider variety of events next year, but it can't be helped, we're in need of more good organizers
It was pretty fun. I've participated in more events than in the past. It was a little bit of a strange experience in one regard: during the first week I felt quite a bit under pressure. Meanwhile during the second week there wasn't really much going on for me. That's because a lot of the events I participated in ended up requiring me more attention during week one due to luck of the lot.
As a result I was kind of annoyed that the Fakemon Contest event didn't allow me to do stuff during the weekend, the final day for every prompt being Friday. So between that and my usual work week I had to cram in quite a bit during that time. Maybe next time extend the time frame a little and put the final results all at the end of the entire event?
Thanks everyone for making this GT so great. As always, on one hand I wish I could participate in more events, on the other hand, my event ate up most of my time, but I feel like I could post updates more often.
I think this year's GT went pretty well considering it was done during a really busy time of the year for a lot of people- which at least in my case was the reason to not participate as much compared with other GTs. I definitely prefer GT to be done around the same time as the other years with that in mind, but I understand that things happened and it had to be done during these days, and it coincided with PC's anniversary too, which is nice.
The chit-chat threads for teams were a neat idea, more considering we have at least two users that are exclusively forum only, and they also worked well to host important information for some events (hi Deva). Definitely something to keep for future events imo.
In general I think every EO did a pretty good job, so I'm gonna leave that point aside before leaving some thots on the events I actively participated at.
Trivia
Firstly, it's really nice to see more people outside user Arcaneum hosting these events. I bet it's a bit exhausting trying to come up with questions for every day, but the three trivia were still handled nicely— VG trivia was perhaps a bit too hard compared to the other years tho lmao.
Speaking of VG Trivia, I really liked the bonus round. Coming up with the Fun Quiz for User Arcaneum Aaron Fartcaneum was really fun, and I wouldn't mind seeing something like this again.
Eevee's Arcade
I hopefully don't have to play something like Toss It again.
Jokes aside, while the games were fine this year— Hyper Jump was the best imo—, I think it would be a good idea to add some info about each game, a how 2 play or something, at least for the less intuitive games like Toss It or Breakdown.
Fortune Cup
I honestly really liked what y'all did this year regarding using coins to evolve pokémon or buy the other stuff, it was a nice idea. I got a bit annoyed that you couldn't get any points for losing against a teammate though, but I think that was to balance the game a bit considering you needed coins to get mechanics and all that?? Idk
Battle Bash
I really enjoyed this event for what I was able to play. It was nice having something more focused on team building at the same time as a more RNG focused battling event.
Amiibo Casino
This was such a fun time. Sadly I missed the first session, but the teams one was very chaotic in a really good way. The stream lagged a bit for me, though, but I think that was discord's doing more than anything.
Mind Read the Room
This was a very cool idea in general and it worked quite well, I liked seeing the results as they came out! That said, I think the question about which Pokémon would be worth more money didn't work quite well to me considering we are almost at 1000+ Pokémon, but I'm also angry I didn't predict anything that round so there's that.
I think it would be a good idea to add some info about each game, a how 2 play or something, at least for the less intuitive games like Toss It or Breakdown.
First I'd like to thank the GT staff and the EOs who did a lot of work so the event could work as well as it did!
I'm going to say a lot here so I also very much appreciate the people reading this all the way through <3
Team Allocation
This year we had a slight problem in that more than 90% of people were actually Guerreros*. Most people who ended up in Arqueros, ended up there because of autobalancing (and those that didn't, I know for a fact at least one of them chose answers to get there).
This makes sense because most people in a Pokemon forum tend to skew younger and younger people in general tend to skew towards what we wanted Guerreros to be, but it also means that Arqueros consistently had fewer people since it takes a while for the autobalancer to kick in (in a meaningful way).
And since selection wasn't really evenly distributed, Guerreros ended up with some clusters that were unfortunate.
There was only one Arquero in Animal Crossing and in FF Glamour. Normally I'd just say "People didn't join, it happens" and leave it at that but considering the non-accessibility of those games was a point of contention in the last GT Feedback Thread and the official response was "Not everyone needs to be able to play every event", the fact that both events were almost exclusively populated by one team is a bit chafing.
But enough about the problems, I should start brainstorming solutions:
The boring solution is go back to non-team events as it was in the distant past when I was a kid and dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It works but it'd also be throwing the baby out with the bathwater so, onwards.
Try to account for more variables in the quiz, stuff like "what's your timezone", "do you do online battling", "do you write", "do you like art" and stuff like that concerning the events that we have (but y'know, subtler) and use that information for a more sophisticated autobalancer. I don't know if we'll even have that when the transition happens but this is possibly the only way to have a guaranteed "fair" distribution, at the expense of a lot of work (and of course, I would volunteer to help if need be).
Don't do the quiz (or make the quiz flavor fluff and just throw away the answers) and just do straight up coin flips. Odds are you'll get a much healthier distribution of people per event.
Don't change teams every GT. Keep longstanding teams and naturally power structures and interests in certain things will rise due to friendly banter and competitiveness. It's basically what Neopets do and every year a bunch of people show up from the void to play time consuming games because they want their childhood team to win.
If this is done right, you don't even need to do assignment anymore, people will naturally gravitate to "their team" across the years out of loyalty.
Personally I think #3, possibly followed by #4 (with random assignment for newbies) would be the best course of action.
* Not actual math, I'm saving my math braincells to talk about points
Points Allocation
Before saying anything, let's have the point distributions ready:
Code:
total 6546 +100.00 %
Guerreros 3983 +60.85 %
Arqueros 2563 +39.15 %
Forum Games & Pokémon Trivia Spotlight 519 +7.93 %
Spot the Difference 480 +7.33 %
Video Games Trivia 475 +7.26 %
Eevee's Arcade 455 +6.95 %
Fakemon Design Contest 435 +6.65 %
Create A Pokémon Card 365 +5.58 %
Create A Pokémon Card [VOTING - anyone can vote!] 355 +5.42 %
Paint & Describe 330 +5.04 %
Jackbox games 325 +4.96 %
Anime/Manga Trivia Challenge 320 +4.89 %
Small Writing Competition 275 +4.20 %
Battle Bash 265 +4.05 %
PMD&D 250 +3.82 %
The Fortune Cup 245 +3.74 %
Entertainment & Media Quizarama! *Finished!* 242 +3.70 %
Divine Offering - GT Pokémon Challenge 241 +3.68 %
Amiibo Casino 185 +2.83 %
[Week 1] The Great Egg Swap XV - Sword & Shield 175 +2.67 %
Arqueros Team Thread 170 +2.60 %
VPP Community Event! 155 +2.37 %
Six Degrees of Entertainment & Media 150 +2.29 %
Animal Crossing Fancy Dress Party! 150 +2.29 %
FFXIV Halloween Extravaganza 145 +2.22 %
Mind Read the Room (Complete) 130 +1.99 %
Pictionary 110 +1.68 %
Speed Art Challenge 3.0 Let's heat things up! 108 +1.65 %
Draw Along~ 60 +0.92 %
[Week 2] The Great Egg Swap XV - Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl 30 +0.46 %
Guerreros Team Thread -599 -9.15 %
(Guerreros Team Thread has a net negative because of the point deflation. They lost more points when we changed those events I mentioned before than they regained with achievements later)
Methodology of how I got these numbers in case anyone cares:
Spoiler:
I went to the Modify Score pages where all EOs have access to, copy the rows of the table to a text file, then removed linebreaks and added the appropriate commas with regexes (and manually in case of organizers) until it was a csv.
Then I used a Python script:
[code = "python"]
import csv
scoreboard = {'total': 0}
with open('points.csv', newline='') as csvfile:
spamreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',')
for row in spamreader:
[organizer, event, team, points, date, show] = row
event = event.strip()
team = team.strip()
points = int(points.strip())
for event, total in sorted_points:
print(event.ljust(biggest_event), f'{total}'.ljust(5), f'{100 * total / scoreboard["total"]:+.2f} %')
[/code]
to tally the final points
Now, I am a bit salty with this because the numbers are telling me the points of one my events was changed without telling me (I was told Pictionary would have 170 points, which would become 210 after achievements. Apparently, this became 110 total somewhere along the way), and while I don't think it was an error when I made the data source since it matches the final leaderboard, it's a fairly minor thing and wouldn't really change the final results in any meaningful way.
What I do think is a bigger problem is that it is fairly disheartening as an EO since some events that barely got any attention / had a lot less sessions than I hosted, ultimately contributed more to the scoreboard than Pictionary because they were longform, and two other massive point inflators got a much smaller point reduction than Pictionary did, presumably because they were also longform.
Points are difficult to balance. I get it and as someone who brought the inflation in this GT to the forefront, I understand that in a visceral level. It's very easy for something to look OK on paper and then actually be very much broken.
But I think that the solutions we're having (do an ad-hoc change in the middle of GT and then tweaking before the next one) are ultimately not going to work, we'll just end up changing where the inflation is. This time it was Pictionary, next year it can be Jackbox or Art Phone or Egg Swap since SV will be new-ish and we might even have DLC by then or something.
My proposition is to essentially make every event longform, which has a bunch of benefits:
- It means that every event is exactly important as any other event so if you can't contribute to any one event for any reason, you're still being useful
- It means that it's impossible to have an inflation since there's a fixed amount of points. At most it creates a "blue / red / swing event" meta, which is more or less what already happened here to a certain extent, it just wasn't formalized.
Shortform events are more amenable to a ratio distribution rather than a Top 3 + participation distribution but I still think having points be essentially longform would serve us better.
Egg Swap
I enjoyed the event, but BDSP kinda screwed me over a bit. For future events I'd recommend having every game (with functioning online) available as an option for points (or maybe in different leaderboards) instead of just "current gen" so we could have SV, SwSh, BDSP, SM/USUM, heck even PoGo if people are nearby enough and meet up.
Create a Pokémon Card
I very much enjoyed the event, but my one gripe was that it wasn't made clear that we could use artwork that wasn't our own / wasn't made explicitly for this event, if I knew that I'd have used a different piece.
Someone also brought this up on Discord but I might as well post it here as well so it's recorded:
"Points awarded for being creative, realistic, accurate, viable in hypothetical play, and innovative." gave the impression there would be a judging phase or some kind of achievement based on those things instead of being voting guidelines.
Being clearer about this could have influenced votes (I know my votes weren't guided by a bunch of these things) so it's probably something to keep in mind for future versions of this event.
E&M Quizarama
I loved the event, Starlight, but please, please, don't do an event where you edit one post again instead of making new posts per day.
Seeing threads bubble up the forum listings helps a lot with keeping track of when there has been a turnover or not.
A&M Trivia
In A&M trivia 10 of the 15 days involved music or sound in some way or another.
Now, when I saw that the event was heavily reliant on anime I already more or less knew it was time to dip out, but part of the reason I don't do a lot of anime is because of attention issues and hearing issues.
For accessibility's sake, if we have this event again next GT (which I'm very much down with, it's a cool concept), I'd recommend trying to mix a bit more of manga stuff or just more visual aspects of animes (like say, "name this weapon" or "name this location" from a screenshot like Arc did for Video Game Trivia) so people that are manga fans but not necessarily anime fans, and people that do enjoy anime / manga but are hard of hearing / deaf / have audio processing issues could have a bigger participation in the event.
Spot the Difference
First of all, congratulation on your editing skills! Doing manipulations of 3D stuff - specially stuff that tries to go for a realistic style - isn't easy and your work look extremely natural.
My one recommendation would be downsizing the canvases. Spot the Difference usually is side-by-side for a bunch of reasons and one of them is that having both images in your field of view at the same time is important for the cognitive processes. It can be one of top of the other, of course, the main thing is both fitting in the screen at the same time.
When you have big images and you're using subtle things for differences (a spot on a rug, the button on a jacket, a rust spot on a rusty pipe) you're making things artificially harder, and that might be what you want, of course, which fair enough, as long as you're making a conscious and informed decision as a designer.
My proposition is to essentially make every event longform, which has a bunch of benefits:
- It means that every event is exactly important as any other event so if you can't contribute to any one event for any reason, you're still being useful
- It means that it's impossible to have an inflation since there's a fixed amount of points. At most it creates a "blue / red / swing event" meta, which is more or less what already happened here to a certain extent, it just wasn't formalized.
Overall:
IT WAS GREAT like man. I never rly truly participated in any of the GT events but... This was fun!! EOs and GT Management absolutely popped off today like every single event I saw (and participated in) was super nice and the achievements were super good like the scariest costume, etc. gives people the chance to turn things around if they don't get placed or anything. <3 I guess the skew towards Guerreros is one thing to consider but maybe that just means don't do a quiz based on personality sfkjdhla (or at least make it feel like an illusion of choice thing but in reality they're getting properly separated) (Idm tho I was with the besties) honestly not sure how u wanna solve the activity issue unless u just wanna.... rng people altogether and even then there's still the nature of inactivity.
Maybe it's just me that has problems with funky timezones but... Maybe discord timestamps please?
Also that bit where you guys did (random funky events) in Discord out of the blue was honestly fun. Maybe bring back some more of those like the create a meme ones way back then haha. Either way more diverse events would b great but the current ones rly good as is so I'm not complaining.
PMD&D:
Lycan (and GP) were champs for handling our shenanigans lmfao. Aside from sudden inattendance (which can be inavitable and the difficulty was changed anyway so big props thank u), maybe u might wanna have a pool of moves available for any Pokemon next time so u wouldn't need to think on the fly when converting old Pokemon moves (like Disable, etc.)? Just a thought.
Also Unlimited PP is so useful lowkey wish you'd do it like the PMD style where there's scratch but I appreciate being able to push over the chess table to assert dominance over my enemies.
Draw Along
Bc ofc I'd have feedback for myself. Chill events were great, maybe it'd be good to tailor it less to drawing but more just casual hanging out and doodling? Small turnaround aside Sapphy's timezone seemed to be the best bet. :pray: (Rip no gremlins aka my perfect timezone).
One fun thing could be to include Gartic phone as we're technically drawing along... and chilling. :^) Anyway SAPPHY u were great thank u for hosting the other two!! Was fun.
E&M Quizarama
I barely participated but same sentiments please just post it in a new post instead of editing the previous one please it's super hard to keep track of sometimes and we (I) tend to just forget about it.
VGM, VG Trivia
THE BONUS ROUND WAS GREAT I can't believe you knew the answers to those still wow- The only thing I think for me personally is the Dating Description round? Some of them are too vague (like I can put this description on anyone and it'll work kinda vague) but I'll chalk that up to me personally than u since it does lean to a particular genre that I don't play often haha
The other rounds were all super fun and I have no complaints tbh it was my first time (techincally) participating in a trivia thing in the sheets and listening to the music was funky.
Anime Trivia
It was great but as someone who regularly skips intros that pained me sometimes (most of the times) esp when things get really familiar and it's on the tip of my tongue. The anagram ones were painful and I died but that was potentially the intention- though I also thought the spaces were part of the anagram so. It would be cool if you could do a round about Anime too like what SS said e.g. Who killed [REDACTED] in the battle of [REDACTED] or whatever but honestly that was a rly fun time
The Very Last Tiebreaker Round for Six Degrees of E&M
As someone who was very much wide awake during that time when it dropped I heavily appreciate but I guess it would be more fair to drop in a more popular timeslot hehe
Fakemon Contest
The fakemon contest was great and super fun! The prompts were v on point with the theme of evolution / temporal things and you were all p fair to everyone who entered! Minor feedback pls make the CSS text color also black so when people are on dark screens it wouldn't like dip. A bit bigger feedback is the critiques given, some of them tend to lean on the artistic ability (even though I think it wasn't rly discounted in the scores, just some feedback on the overall piece)? And how Pokemon should look like Pokemon, when it was mentioned that artistic ability wouldn't be judged. I think a simple fix would be just to fix the rubric so it would count for something and it would be expected, or just having a part in the form where you ask for the artist's [intention] and compare the result to what they wanted to achieve. The second part with the prompt check part helps in that a lot!
Art competitions tend to have this kinda rubrics which might be a shout (at least in like elementary they did it according to something like this haha) but also honestly what u did was super nice as is and I want more of it. <:)
Spoiler:
Create a Pokemon Card (I voted)
I was about to join this one aahhhhhh but no I forgot so I voted instead. Same sentiments again, I think the wording threw me for a loop (when it said it was being judged on creativity, realism, hypothetical play, etc.) when the voting kind of just went to the popular choices? It doesn't help that pretty art makes my mind go brr so I just clicked the funky ones. Maybe having a combination of popular by votes + judging (like how Fakemon did) would make the event "feel" fairer.
SWC
IDK maybe I wanna see the written works immediately :<< But I get that since I don't think I'll be posting mine I'm too shy kjdsfhlakfssdfh sobs. Collabs would have been amazing?? But also understandable if that's not possible at all! Most minor thing ever: I wasn't sure if there was a word limit and that if haikus were allowed and would that technically count.... The most submissions earning points was a rly good choice tbh it definitely pushed people (me) to join in just to close the gap in participants. Thank u for not being too harsh on judging
The Small Events in Discord
This one's just a timezone issue and my timezone just sucks(tm).
Mind Read the Room
I didn't play it but this one just looked so fun tbh this was such a creative and funky event!
Please add this again in the future haha
Event this year was pretty fun, if somewhat anxiety-inducing lol. Congrats to the organizers for making A&M Trivia, Create a Card and a few others quite enjoyable to follow even if you weren't directly participating.
I'm probably / likely going to echo a few things that have been posted before, but I wanted to emphasize anyway.
VG Trivia, A&M Trivia, etc
The event works well in its current, longstanding format, and adding the bonus rounds was a nice touch in particular in that they had a different deadline and general time management. Just about the only thing I can suggest is having more variety in organizers since at some point it just drops down to "this is a trivia about celebrities / anime that I personally know"; which is not bad, unless it's always the same person.
An option could be to pre-prepare, about a month before the event, a pool of trivias from different potential organizers that the final organizer(s) have to rotate a minimum ratio of into their event. This also gives everyone a buffer to work with in case the current organizer is Suddenly Hit With IRL.
Create a Fakémon
It was one of the most interesting events I had my eyes on and I could not participate because I could not find a visual artist to join, I even begged for people to use my power :( Really, that's just about the only contra I can say about it, so it might make sense for future iterations to explicitly allow for IA-generated art or Stock art (presumably with an associated point deduction) so that writers / worldbuilders have a better avnue for participation; alternatively, having a supplemental event that is more geard towards non-visual artists specifically would be nice.
Small Writing Contest
Once again I apologize to the judges for the scare lol.
General GT Considerations
I can see some pros to the idea of turning the event into a sligthly more long-term thing, considering this year it seems to have hit lots of people into the ends of uuuuh school break and stuff? Honestly this also requires a more long-term study as well so I can't really say anything useful that people more familiar with the event haven't said already.
One thing I saw mentioned was that team assignments notoriously favoured Guerreros. This can perhaps be fixed by redesigning the quiz, as IMO it should include questions that are actually relevant to the taker's ability to participate. For example these things are relevant in aggregate for assignment to teams:
* Timezone of the taker
* Experience in which artistic branch (visual, music, writing)
* Interaction hardware (microphone, drawing tablet, access to Discord on-the-go if necessary for team coordination, etc)
Another option to explore, which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, is the ability to (auto or manually) post-fix team assignments and shuffle people from one team to the other if the balancer can't correct for the desired variables, for example if we're two days in and only 10 artists have signed and only 1 of them is in Team Blue, it makes some sense to move one artist from Team Red to Team Blue before the big events begin. Ofc, with a more informed and balanced chooser beforehand this would be unlikely to be needed.
It was one of the most interesting events I had my eyes on and I could not participate because I could not find a visual artist to join, I even begged for people to use my power :( Really, that's just about the only contra I can say about it, so it might make sense for future iterations to explicitly allow for IA-generated art or Stock art (presumably with an associated point deduction) so that writers / worldbuilders have a better avnue for participation; alternatively, having a supplemental event that is more geard towards non-visual artists specifically would be nice.
The irony is that I was actually considering to look for a partner. I just gave up assuming people where just going with their best buds. I think I didn't even see your post. It would have probably helped a lot in not turning my submissions into these...unhinged...results. ^^"
thoughts! in no particular order! maybe not all of them but there sure are a few!
General GT
I appreciate the team threads! We probably could utilize them better, but I think they are good to have. Maybe I'll drop memes in there or Discord quotes or smthn next year. I'm sure I would have been more attentive to them if we had some team members who expressed being forum-only types of people (we had Lozz instead).
Meanwhile, I feel like #gt-general was also underused. There didn't seem to be a lot of cross-team banter or memeing or competitive nonsense. Bring it back.
The numbers were a little skewed toward Guerreros (87:74) but the discrepancy in numbers does not account for the shocking statistic of Guerreros Discord channel having 10x as many messages as Arqueros. After thinking about it, I did realize that the quiz basically asked "are you bold/active or contemplative/passive" and perhaps dividing the teams along those lines ain't it. I still believe in teams and sorting quizzes but we gotta… figure out what to focus on there.
Guerreros were very motivated by being behind for the first couple (several?) days and really just ramped it up like crazy. I like that attitude 💕
October is a bad time for GT let's never do it again. Even so, I would not recommend this being extended past the usual two weeks-ish timeframe. It's supposed to be an intense burst of energy and effort from everyone! and then we die at the end but thats fine
After adjusting the point inflation, this was a very balanced year for scores. But we did have to have that adjustment, so… we'll figure it out. I have ideas.
I prefer a mix of short and long form events. I love to see the point totals ticking up on both sides. I don't think the points all being counted at once is very fun or motivating. I also think having events that are scored in a way that isn't 1/2/3 is important- participation and engagement is our greatest desire. That has to be encouraged.
Achievements are such a great idea, we should keep doing them for sure.
I missed Mapping! Last year I said I was definitely gonna do it this year and then we didn't do it ;_;
As much as Pictionary happened (an incredible amount, you love to see it) I think more/more frequent group games would be great!
Collaborative entries being allowed into more creative events would be really cool! The points are going to the entry and then the team anyway rather than the individuals. Why not, y'know?
I could go into more ideas and thoughts and solutions but as I'll be working on next years' I'll shut up for now and let others have their time to talk :)
SWC
I think the timeframe was good- maybe one more day to write would have been nice, especially because that would have been a Friday, but it wasn't bad at all. I appreciate that y'all left yourselves time to judge this year lmao. Prompts were good as well!
Animal Crossing Fancy Dress Party
This was such a cute idea! I appreciate that it was far more accessible than room design, with potential for such a wide variety of costumes! No notes honestly, perfect event. Also I'm playing ACNH again after 2.3 years because Karen needed a hat.
VPP
I probably need some perspective because I'm insane but I thought it was really easy to accomplish and I wonder if that's… ideal. Or fine? It's a super nice way to bring VPP to the GT though, and pairs really well with FG/PT Spotlight!
Create A Pokémon Card
For clarification- I only voted here. I love the idea, I love the submissions, I love the work and creativity put in- I do not like how this was scored. The OP stated "Points awarded for being creative, realistic, accurate, viable in hypothetical play, and innovative." These criteria did not affect the actual results, which was entirely a popular vote and suffers from the fact that most people know little about TCG mechanics (I was actively asking my teammates what the power scaling even is in TCG rn). It really came down to more of a visual design competition in the end. I think this is an event that would function much better if judged by a few people who know the content area. I want that to happen!
Mind Read The Room
This was very fun! Absolutely baffling and I was very bad at it but I enjoyed trying to figure out the mystery that is the hivemind of PC. I liked seeing everyone's answers and an analysis of the data, that's always the best part~
Spot The Difference
Seriously incredible, very fun! A good turnout too, with 9 people getting scores of 100 or more out of 120! I don't think the difficulty ramp up is strictly necessary; I think all sets having 6 differences would have been just fine! Maybe they need to be harder, too, considering how many people perfected the normal rounds ;3 I like to design mean games though, so take that with a grain of salt lmao.
FG/PT Spotlight
I loved this! I think there was only one game that perhaps shouldn't have made it in to this kind of fast-posting event and that was Super Pokémon Hangman- anything that relies on a specific user to update to keep the game going should be a no-go for this imo. Also let's just make sure the threads aren't having a slow-posting problem because of being too big before we use them for this. Otherwise, very good event! Ten posts per thread is like the perfect amount. :) And sure, we were all on top of each other in there, but hey! That's how it used to be here all the time, kids! Really had me feelin' like it was 2005 lmao.
Battling General
I did not have nearly as much time to battle as I would have liked- that's a circumstance of October, really. Beyond that, I know there are issues with re-commissioning PC's battle server or whatever. But I think not being able to hang out with exclusively PC people in a server on Showdown kind of hurt the… availability of battlers? Maybe it's just me. I much prefer to just have a list of people who I can see on the sidebar who are available to challenge. Otherwise I end up battling the same people over and over again. I also think everyone should be updating their battles as soon as they have them, or are done with a few rounds of a battle sesh- there were a few confusing points where people hadn't updated and so the scores were effectively hidden.
Fortune Cup
I'll say that I probably shouldn't have placed second in FC- 50 of my 80 coins were gained from solving Shawn's puzzle. That's crazy! The measures to balance the coin distribution were very effective, and as much as I appreciate game balancing that sure means I don't make much for coins lmao. I wish leaderboards had- existed? And I wish there had been more minigames/events, to better stand out from or make gameplay different, especially when standing side by side with Battle Bash. I like the idea of the shop, especially being able to pay for evolution. I think it's somewhat undermined by the fact that you can RNG full evos and legendaries/mythicals though- I fully just lost battles until I got RNG chances rather than pay coins. I would be interested in seeing a version of FC where there is some sort of RNG tier list that you can pay for? Mechanics are my jam lmao let's throw ideas around.
Battle Bash
I enjoyed this, even though I'm not much of a battler really. Got to play with some premade teams, screw around a little, learn some things. I liked the idea of bonus points for featured format, but I think that if I had been able to battle more, I would have focused entirely on FC and just used that to boost my BB score. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, or what it would mean for BB. The scoring seemed like an awful lot to keep track of, too. Making a points table and just letting the battlers do their own addition seems like it'd be much easier on you. I don't know if you had any kind of hard time with it but still- the more players you end up with, the more work it'll be, right?
Trivia General
This is the first year I really paid much attention to trivia and I love how we came together to solve them all~ Having a spreadsheet really helped us keep track of everything. I think all the questions were a good level of difficulty! Getting scores around 70-80% on each stage is ideal imo; if everyone was 100%-ing everything it'd be boring. I think all trivia could benefit from having two or so hosts with fairly different content knowledge bases- that way the spectrum of the questions is far broader!
A&M
more PokéAni questions pls I'll actually be able to get them
It was great tho! I loved anagrams even if they were super hard haha. I agree that music was over-focused on, and perhaps so with anime in general. And I guess the shonen genre was over-represented too, though that certainly is just a result of its popularity. I like the three guesses aspect but I know we didn't take advantage of it as much as we should have. It also requires you to be available at all times to confirm- didn't seem to be much of a problem (degen life) but it sure is a thought, if something like that was getting overwhelming.
VG + VGM
I like the idea of them being the same event but alternate days, that worked really well! Big fan of the anagrams round here too ofc. And I love the bonus round, that was super fun! I think next year you should have us do the quiz for you and then have the teams swap quizzes a few days later hehe.
E&M
Such a good variety of rounds honestly! I love the silent music videos and just music rounds in general. And the pictogram deciphering! Sports murdered us lmfao but it was such a cool idea~ I would def advocate for posting each round separately as well though. Starlight did absolutely incredibly well on the variety aspect here! Very impressed!
6 Degrees
I'm still a little unsure about this one. Both teams kept hitting their targets incredibly quickly and I felt like I couldn't participate as much- which is a shame, I think it's really fun. It was surprising to everyone I think haha. I like the idea, but I think it needs a little refining to boost the challenge? I also like that it was every other day- having many every day events gets to be a lot to keep track of. Maybe this works better as an individual event rather than team? Unsure, just gotta think about it more.
All in All
Thank you for this year! GT Management went hard and dealt with a lot (Aaron and GP are both dead now) and made it a wonderful experience! EOs did a great job as well- it takes a lot of time and work to host and manage and I appreciate it so much! And thank you to everyone who turned up and made it a fun time to hang out- we don't always chat over the rest of the year, but we always come back together for GT and ain't that what it's all about?
Overall, I liked partaking in the GT! I have said before that I never expected to participate in a group event until I got curious about it, and there I was! I'll be honest, I didn't participate in most of the events, but what I did dip my toes into, I enjoyed.
I agree with ZeoStar in that forum games like Super Pokémon Hangman weren't really suitable for the section in which they were presented, but games with faster action were perfect. A piece of feedback of my own would be for the Fakemon Design Contest; sometimes, the instructions felt somewhat convoluted for such simple premises, especially the second one. We were asked to make a "past" or "future" variant of a Pokémon, but the premise also included the recreation of a present Pokémon through fossil revival. Based on that, I figured out I could make a future variant that was a digital recreation of an existing Mon, but it turned out to be too far off the mark. Next time, the guidelines for this contest could be stricter, just for the purpose of making them a little clearer.
This year we had a slight problem in that more than 90% of people were actually Guerreros*. Most people who ended up in Arqueros, ended up there because of autobalancing (and those that didn't, I know for a fact at least one of them chose answers to get there).
This makes sense because most people in a Pokemon forum tend to skew younger and younger people in general tend to skew towards what we wanted Guerreros to be, but it also means that Arqueros consistently had fewer people since it takes a while for the autobalancer to kick in (in a meaningful way).
And since selection wasn't really evenly distributed, Guerreros ended up with some clusters that were unfortunate.
There was only one Arquero in Animal Crossing and in FF Glamour. Normally I'd just say "People didn't join, it happens" and leave it at that but considering the non-accessibility of those games was a point of contention in the last GT Feedback Thread and the official response was "Not everyone needs to be able to play every event", the fact that both events were almost exclusively populated by one team is a bit chafing.
I agree with all of this. At the risk of sounding like a sore loser since I was on the losing team this year, at times I did feel like we were severely outnumbered. Look no further than the Forum Games and Pokémon Trivia section: the first few days Arqueros had the advantage, but then more people came in and all of them had been assigned to Guerreros, resulting in us ultimately losing no matter how constant we were with our participation. I think the selection process should start much earlier than it did and be a little more extensive in how many events people are willing to participate in, so that we are facing off in more even grounds.
That's all I have to say for now, but otherwise, I was left with a very positive impression of the event and its organizers. Kudos to all of you, and thank you for allowing us to participate in this wonderful event! May next year's event be even bigger and better!
Amiibo Casino
Enjoyed watching. Would have liked for people who could not make it live to have more of a chance after the initial matches. Perhaps make the Google Form a ranked choice vote? (To do this, select Multiple Choice Grid. Write "First Choice", "Second Choice", and so on for Rows. Put characters/teams in Columns.)
Wants to see a tournament with items included too.
Anime/Manga Trivia
Recommends giving a hint for any anagram rounds. Really struggled to unscramble foreign words, compounded by possibly being unfamiliar with the words. Might be sufficient to give a very general theme? Or perhaps three anagrams with a fourth, unscrambled word that fits?
Enjoyed it overall. Liked the music rounds more, due to being able to participate more. Understands running fewer for reasons given by Shooting Star, however. May be able to participate in a written round too. Would not mind more variation in anime either, as mentioned by Aquacorde. Remembers seeing One Piece, HunterxHunter, and Dragon Ball Z a lot. (May have stood out due to not knowing them, admittedly.)
Video Game Trivia
Mixed up the game selection better this year. Had fun self-gaslighting on some of the music tracks once again. Liked the weapon round too, despite doing terrible at it, for being different than a straight text question.
Entertainment & Media Trivia
Cannot comment too much here. Completely lacked knowledge in some areas. (Considers that okay too.) Personally found the photo ID rounds fun, though. Felt like a part of the event by suggesting different ways to look at the pictures, even if unfamiliar with the thing in question.
Animal Crossing, FFXIV, and Egg Swap
Lumped these three together. Suffers from the same access issue. Mentioned that already with Arqueros and Animal Crossing and FFXIV. Experienced that with the Egg Swap on the Guerreros side. Is there some way to tweak the events to allow people without the games/Switch Online to participate? Is there a model viewer website to create outfits? Is there something to simulate Pokemon trades?
Enjoyed the Animal Crossing outfits more than the rooms, also. Found it much easier, personally. (Created some really nice looking rooms last year, though.)
Eevee's Arcade
Seemed like a fine line-up of games. Preferred Hyper Jump the most between the (technically) five. Worked well with achievements.
GT Pokemon Challenge
Succeeded in forcing a different playstyle. Created some interesting dynamics of setting up Pokemon to sacrifice (especially with some of the rules in play). Served as rules in their own way, even for people done with their own. Was a great theme for the challenge too.
Also liked the achievements. Affected your playstyle as well. Considers that the sign of a good achievement.
Some possible spots for improvement:
Removed the rules too early. Created a weird difficulty curve. Might have been better with some progression element mixed in. Something along the lines of "Receives Tier 2 rules at the start of Update #4 and Tier 3 at the start of Update #7. Replaces your current rule, if it has not been cleared. Cannot claim points for old rules after being replaced" maybe? Spreads out the difficulty a little. Rewards progression too.
Might have been too ambitious. Designed rules for every possible game. Led to a few being impossible (and only a few, to your credit). Might have been better tailored to each region or generation instead, or even a range of one of those two. (As in, four possible classes for Generations 1 + 2.)
Confused people at the start. Admitted it to be confusing in the rules post. Suggests keeping an eye on your word count for the main rules post. Trim edge cases and examples. Loses people by being wordier. (Suffers from this issue, personally. Suspects similar here.)
Points to the glossary as an example. Remove "Final Battle" and "Major Battle" entirely. Specify the terms of major battles for people with those rules only, rather than using a similar term. Could have dropped one of the Geodude and Gengar examples for abilities, if not both.
Did a smart thing with only showing people one tier of a rule at a time. Reduced the amount of information people needed to know right now.
May be speaking out of turn, though. Likely receives better feedback from someone else.
Would have found point amounts for achievements useful. Helps to know how worthwhile the extra effort is.
Spot the Difference
Viewed the Steam images positively, especially as someone accustomed to just Pokemon. One possible idea: do not specify the number of details for the second half of the event. Separates the pack more. Keep it around the same amount, though.
darn you anna you somehow managed to ninja me in the feedback thread and say half the stuff I was going to say!!!! ok I should just write faster and not take breaks between writing, seeing as at least 2 more people have posted
General Stuff
This being the first time I've hosted an event, I finally got a taste of how time-consuming doing all this stuff can actually be. Thank you to all the Event Organizers and GT Management for putting in the time for setting up everything! As for how I personally enjoyed the GT, I think it well by pretty well! I will say these two weeks flew by pretty quickly and I guess I wish there could have been more? Ahahaha!
Team Composition
I'm not sure about the numbers nor the quiz, I don't know about the logic that goes on behind that. I'm not a big fan of auto-balancing, but I think there are concerns in terms of "fairness" for any type of sorting quiz (whether it's like how it is now versus fully random). Regardless, I don't think there should be any way to game the system to get on the team that you want. Perhaps there could be an algorithm behind the scenes that calculates a probability of you getting on a team based on a weighted mixture of your quiz results and the current numbers of players in each team.
In terms of balance this year, I think the end result was that Arqueros was not as active as Guerreros. But I'm not sure if willingness/availability in general is something that can be polled for on the quiz, since plans change all the time For example, last year I was only planning on participating for a few events in GT but I ended up doing almost any event I could - it's likely there are others who want to devote more time to GT but can't because stuff comes up. On the flip side, perhaps accessibility could be polled for, since I do think that a fairly even amount of people on each team should be able to join each event. If they don't want to or can't, I think that's an issue with willingness/availability and I don't think it's reasonable to split based on how one would answer that quiz at the beginning of GT since it could all very well change.
Points
Yes, points were a mess. Choosing whether or not to change the points system 2 days before the event ended is a hard decision to make - perhaps I would have made the decision to leave it but I think either way people were not going to be happy with the result. Obviously, this would probably have to all be worked out during the planning phase. I think my suggestion would have been to separate the events (at least the ones that we're used to like Trivia, Pictionary, SWC) into subtypes and then make point systems based on that. I think it's fair for some events to give out more points than others, given that some events require more effort/skill than others.
Events
I will take this space to talk a bit about the Anime/Manga Trivia. I'll start with saying that it could have definitely been better prepared by me, especially with more research into different genres and categories of weeb stuff. I ended up preparing a lot of each day's events last minute because while I did have a rough plan, I did not consider the feasibility of some of those plans so I had to scrap them in the end. I originally planned the non-music days to be more focused on the Manga, but I think my own personal thoughts on the PC's demographic was that more people were into Anime. I also did consult with a friend who's much more familiar with weeb stuff than I am, but that was more for the openings which is why I tried to include that more and it was a one time consultation. The original intention for this event was to hopefully have people reminisce about some Anime openings or songs and having Trivia as a medium for that. Overall, I feel like I learned a lot in terms of event preparation and will take what I've learned into future events I may host, be it Trivia or other stuff.
Amiibo Casino
This was super fun to participate in and it was a very chill event in general! I hope it comes back, with improvements (like just having more of the event) as well.
Battle Bash/Fortune Cup
I think not having the Battle Server around really hurt the participation of these events, though it's not anyone's fault. It would definitely be a huge boon to have the server back, at least for GT - a lot of communication issues get solved and I think activity would go up. That being said, while I do end up placing well in these every time, I feel like the scoring system is inherently anti-competitive. If someone gets very ahead in points/coins, it can be very demoralizing for other people to try and catch up, especially in an event like Fortune Cup where you might just have a bad team. I'm not sure why I feel this way this year when I was more fine with it in prior years (lack of activity, perhaps), since the scoring system has always been the same.
I think in the future, this event (Fortune Cup) could be reworked, at least in the way it interacts with GT Points. For example, there could be another participation threshold, with vastly lowered 1st 2nd 3rd GT Points. Perhaps this could promote the activity better? I think because the GT point values for 1st 2nd 3rd were so high, people (myself included) were scared to spend coins and it definitely took away from the event. Anyway, I guess a lot of this could be sorted out for next year.
Create a Pokémon Card
Echoing what others have said above, I think the criteria of being a creative/viable/etc. TCG card was not relevant in the final results. Personally, I would have like this event judged similarly to the Fakemon event. There are very interesting things people can do with their card (which aren't just the visuals) that can make their card stand out more, and different scoring categories could have been created for this.
Voting is fine for an event such as this, since there is the aspect of community interaction. But if there is voting, then the onus of judging based on certain criteria should not be put on the voters, so it would just be better not to include that in the first place. I think generally events with results that are based on voting should not award a huge amount of points, but that's not really an issue with the event itself.
Overall, it was fun to brainstorm a cool card idea and try to design it even if I suck at art, but I was a bit disheartened to see that any effort I put in to designing the card's abilities and thinking of its viability was kind of wasted (I had hoped for some judging).
Fakemon Contest
Super fun to participate in and it was very nice to see what everyone came up with! I think my only complaint was that it had turned into a mini SWC for week 2 and I had to read so much!
Pictionary
I think it's great that the categories were changed up every time to keep people on their toes (though not for me personally since I don't know the new Pokémon as well). I understand that in the end it didn't matter as much because GT points got rebalanced, but I had some thoughts about the way the points around the sessions were handled (at least for some days). I think having extra rounds beyond the first is fair and fun, especially if everyone's in the mood for it. What I don't think is completely fair is that these second rounds were impromptu, which I also needed to attend to get participation points. If I attended the first round (and at the time, the only planned one), and it's asked afterwards whether or not people are down for a second round and I say no, I don't feel like I should be counted as not having participated in that session. If the fact that there were for sure going to be two rounds was communicated to me beforehand, then I would say that it's fair to consider me as not having participated in the session.
Classic Events - Trivia, SWC, GT Challenge, etc.
Fun to participate in as usual! I don't really have many other comments.
Other Notes
Even though I got super salty last year and it would have killed me time-wise to do it this year, I missed the Mapping competition. I'm not sure what the correct balance of long-form events should be. I definitely like having a few "projects" to work towards (instead of just biking back and forth in Pokémon Emerald at super speed), but I also understand that it's super troll to have all the points come in all at once at the end of the competition.
I also think there could be more live events, though I understand that there were some issues with activity and stuff this year that had less turnout for those events. But yeah it's always fun to chill and chat with people!
Anyway, thanks everyone for a great GT and hope to see y'all next year!
EDIT: One more thing I forgot - can we have those tags/thingies on people's posts on the forums so that we know which team they're a part of?
So, I've seen a bunch of comments regarding my events and I thought I might as well respond to get the point across that I am reading and taking them in consideration.
Thanks a lot for participating and caring enough about the event to give this feedback!
About timing
Yeah, the timing was off on both of my events.
While the Pictionary sessions were convenient (ish) for me they seemed to be very much inconvenient for many other people. I probably won't do twice daily ever again (at least not without a co-host) but if I ever do something like Pictionary or Art Telephone or some other game like that I'll definitely try to consider times that are more friendly to the most common timeblocks.
Regarding Fakemon, I ended up choosing Friday mostly because of how we had two prompts and I wanted to give them both equal time and the second weekend needed to end on Sunday. If I do host this again in the future I'll probably do one "SWC: Art version", just one prompt that ends on the second friday to make it easier for everyone.
CSS and Styling
Yeah, CSS was a bit of an afterthought and since I mostly use light themes I ended up mostly checking for that. In fact if it weren't for Arc, I wouldn't have even changed the text color >.<
I'll definitely try and do more thorough testing in the future.
About the rubric
I don't necessarily think that the few comments that I did like "This is giving Digimon" were more about artistic ability per se (or even style), they were more about the design because while Digimon is generally a mess, Pokemon has a lot more unified design language.
My thought process when judging was more about the overall design and story of the piece instead of necessarily stuff like "Oh, it's so pretty" or "the shading is exquisite" or stuff like that (although it's very hard to divorce yourself completely from the effect that technically talented pieces do have), but I do apologize since I think I didn't convey that appropriately on my comments.
I definitely will consider having a more thorough rubric (such as the one Kitty suggested) in the future if I host this again though.
About AI generated art
I personally don't mind AI generated art - my point of view is that it's an art tool like any other, perhaps one with ... "dubious" ethics on how it was created, but an art tool nonetheless - and in fact I don't think it was banned outright, although looking back I can see why it might have looked like it was.
If I do host again (or know of someone hosting in the future) I'll definitely consider making it explicit. I do also have a bunch of other ideas for events, I don't know how many (if any) I'll be able to host in the future but I'll definitely keep this in mind and try to fit in alternatives or see if we can have a parallel event for the non-visual artists.
About the prompts / judging
So this GT the judging was done independently and then I just average the two scores, with that said, I think that at some points Cube and I had different interpretations of what was and wasn't "on prompt".
Like, there were some comments that Cube made that I probably could have catched what the artist was trying to do and vice-versa. And while I don't think this GT could have worked if we had together grading because my schedule was crazy this last week due to a bunch of irl stuff that just came out of nowhere, I'll definitely keep in mind for the future to try and at least have a discussion time before posting the final results.
About participation points
On the context of Fakemon Design, I'm sorry because I probably should have increased those points and maybe gave bonus points for Top 3? Because you guys put in a lot of work and I feel like giving 5 points was severely underrewarding the effort you guys put in.
On the context of Pictionary, I do apologize regarding the randomness of whether there would be a second game or not. During the planning phase I was told to give points per session instead of per game (to prevent an Among Us situation that blew up points last year) and I didn't fully adjust my mindset from game ("make it through the end of a game") to session (which should have been "make it through the end of at least one game").
I'll definitely readjust the way participation points are given if I do host Pictionary again.
Firstly, huge props to the GT managers and organisers for working together to form such a fantastic GT this year, with a fun variety of games! It's clear how much commitment and care went into designing this GT, and on behalf of the community, I'm really grateful to those who made it happen. <3 It's always a good time, even when there are hiccups!
Most of my feedback has already been stated by several posts above me and far more eloquently, but I'll echo the sentiment that we should 1000% stick with summer/winter GTs from now on. Tying it with the anniversary + Halloween was still a fun idea though! I think allowing dedicated non-staff members to help with GT management could be really helpful going forward, as well.
I do think that team balancing and timezones need the most consideration for future GTs, because it was deflating when the numbers skewed in favour of Guerreros (I'm not just salty I swear!). Personality-based quizzes are not a great idea as we learned; it would be much better to quiz people based on their engagement levels, timezones, preferred events and where their strengths lie, so we (hopefully) don't have all the "GT crackheads" on one team again, haha. I wouldn't be against re-shuffling members early on if it meant getting the balance just right. You would need to make this clear at the beginning so people don't get salty over an unexpected team swap. :p Maybe even start this process early, say, a few days before the GT begins, so that it allows time for people to join but doesn't upset things too much if there's a reshuffle?
As a side note, I don't think we should have dedicated teams that people side with each year because teaming with new members and competing against friends is one of the best parts of the GT!
Now, timezones. A lot of the events just didn't work for me at all (I'm UTC +8), which I think might have been an issue for others in similar timezones (we got all the Australians lmao). Mind you, I do take some of the blame, since my lifestyle just doesn't allow me to participate during the most active hours. Perhaps a reason the chat was so quiet compared to Guerreros was partly due to the whacky timezones of its most active members? Either way, the fact that most of the GT is going on when I'm asleep is a problem that makes it hard to engage and keep track of deadlines. It makes me feel a bit excluded/demotivated. Not sure how we can fix the timezone issue since it really depends on the organisers (I don't want anyone to lose sleep over deadlines! as if that doesn't happen), but most events could certainly use a co-host or two for this purpose (like Draw Along did).
Speaking of deadlines, putting them on a weekday and not a weekend really threw me off! I could not join in on events I wanted to (Fakemon for instance, or even SWC) because my weekdays are pretty full-on as it is, and that's without working 9-to-5 like most others do! Then again, perhaps this was more a symptom of the GT being in October, when people are busier overall. I understand that judges need some leeway in order to judge fairly. But even an extra day, pushing deadlines to Friday/Saturday, would have made it seem far more manageable.
Speaking of judging, I am in strong agreement that creative events need a rubric! Winning by popular vote (if we include it at all) should only be a fun statistic, not determine actual winners, since people are naturally influenced by prettiest art or whoever their team members are. A lot of members can feel discouraged from events where artistic ability is graded. That's why it's really important to get the team balance right, so members can pair up and combine strengths.
Overall I really enjoyed all the events I engaged in, and for those I missed, I was still happy to see others having fun!! The creativity and individuality poured into each submission was inspiring, I live for it! And a big shoutout to all my team members, it was a pleasure! Team Pink all the way!
