unforum

[Phaedra]

Hmm.

I think part of the problem may have been something that was simultaneously (and paradoxically) both the PMs' responsibility and beyond their control:

Getting enough players.

I'm not a PM, but I've talked to a lot of successful grassroots PMs, and they've told me this is always a worry. The collective intelligence of a group as large as the Cloudmakers, the MetaUrchins, or the Beekeepers can solve anything thrown at it (provided it's not a flawed puzzle like a_pawn).

But there were, at my estimate, about 30 regular posters playing this game. Maybe 40. With another 10 or so that posted occasionally.

I'm not sure what the magic number of players is; the number at which a group of players becomes the sort of Borg-like, indefatigable, unshakable, unbeatable collective intelligence that blew away every puzzle designed for the Beast on the first day, but I'm pretty sure it's a much larger number than 40.

So, while PMs who can count on thousands of people playing their game have the luxury of designing puzzles that are as difficult as they can make them, PMs who have tens of players need to make sure that the puzzles are easy enough for their smaller player base to solve.

And, while I'm not a PM, I have designed a few puzzles, and I can attest that it's very hard to judge the difficulty of a puzzle. What seems obvious to you, as the puzzlemaker, may be something that a group of 40-some players will never notice or guess.

So, I think part of the problem here was the relationship of the puzzle difficulty to the size of the player base. I'm fairly sure that the Beekeepers (at the size and attention level they represented during ILB) would have solved any of these puzzles within an hour.

For us, though, that simply wasn't possible. And that's nothing to be ashamed of on our part -- we simply weren't big enough.

Maybe the PMs expected a lot more players; maybe they expected the puzzles to be easier for us than they turned out to be.

Either way, though, I'm surprised and a little annoyed that the game was apparently designed to end once we'd decided. It seems pretty anticlimactic. Perhaps there was a behind-the-scenes implosion.

[kholdstare]

... wow. I never thought about player base being a problem, but I guess you may very well be right. What I want to know is how OurColony got a crap load of people to play, while a game as good as this hardly got anyone? Maybe it was just advertising.... It really is too bad it had to end this way... I've been following this one for a while, and it was pretty good. Let's hope it is a sign of good things to come.

[Phaedra]

[SpaceBass]

The lurker population is actually quite a bit larger, as most of those guys don't bother to register. I typically see about 3-5 times as many unique hosts visiting the site as there are registered users. However, the vast majority of those lurkers are quite unlikely to delurk unless they are particularly enchanted by something, so this point doesn't really affect what you're saying, I'm just adding a bit of trivia.

[SteveC]

Of course, the other solution is to design a game that people can lose

I think it has to be quite short though, basically a gentle build up of evidence and information without anything REALLY progressing, followed by a second buildup to a climactic ending that ends well or badly depending on player interaction.

In our case we got that. There were 7 people captured throughout, Amanda was never safe even though she escaped, same with Derwent obviously, so basically we always had a "there are 7 captives in a house somewhere" situation.

We then got the CD which gave us quite a few other bits and bobs to work on, this was the final buildup. Obviously we failed on that as we didn't manage to contact #1 or another member to try and stop it.

We then chose not to choose. Not a bad decision I don't think, if we'd chosen to kill amanda, the ending would have to have been that he kept the other 5 anyway, if we'd chosen the 5, why let amanda live, she'd seen some of them etc.. I can't see how it could have ended differently other than winning. (though they do say they had the 4 endings, win, lose, save 5, save 1 I assume).

Anyway, when I rule the world, ARGs will be more mass media.

[JoeOE18]

How irresponsibe of a game to end while I am in Las Vegas

[chippy]

and me in new york too!