unforum

[rose]

[Yembles]

The 'official' rooms would have worked fine. They were designed in such a way that on-topic chat could be in one room and spec and meta could be in another. This takes the strain off of both moderators and users by making the chat 'flyby' a lot slower and by keeping mindless chatter out of the solve room.

Unfortunately the spec room had been accidentally made mode +M which meant only registered users could chat in there. It took us a little while to figure this out and fix it and by then people had spilled into #syzygy, #pxc-sf and other private rooms to spec. I imagine this would have added to the confusion, especially for the players new to IRC. How are people supposed to keep track of five rooms at once, when each of them have over 100 players in, at least?

I think the 'official' rooms would've worked a lot better if they had been used as they were asked to be. Adding more rooms just adds to the confusion if you ask me.

[mac_monkey]

It's very hard to moderate a room where you politely tell people not to post the status percentage every second and nobody listens. Most people listened to the warnings and I think most people got the idea.

I just think it's a shame more people didn't use the spec room for spec when it was clearly in the topic. Admitedly we did have problems at first for unregistered users, however they were sorted out within 5 minutes of the room officially opening.

I don;t actually things were that bad...

Yes I did have a headache afterwards, yes I was a little confused, yes people weren't following the rules that were clearly laid down..

...and yes, despite all that I did have fun!

[sequoya]

The room was indeed fairly chaotic on Saturday night, but I truly believe the moderators did the best job we could given the circumstances. We had an influx of over 200 people all at once within the space of 5-10 minutes, many of whom had probably never used IRC (or looked at unfiction) before. The room was always going to be chaotic at first, and I think that by the end we did actually have it largely under control. I'm not convinced that the end result would have been much different had all 200 players been directed to #syzygy instead of #pxcsflive, which seems to be the implication.

Also, the nature of the online part of the event contributed to the messiness- we had several hundred small questions with no way of telling what had been solved (which I'm sure was intended by MC to get us to collaborate!), but many players seemed unwilling to post their solutions (whether on UF, the wiki, or another place) despite prodding from us - possibly due to excitement/perceived time constraints. So a lot of people were duplicating work and getting frustrated. When the 'Unsolved puzzles' list was posted everything became a lot easier, I think.

/me also had a headache for much of the event but did end up having fun!

[Scribe]

Lessons learned

[xena]

online gaming suggestions...

[mac_monkey]

I can see where that ide comes from, the problem is however that this was meant to be a collaboration exercise.

It wasn't about winning, or beating each other. We had to work together to ensure the task was completed. My feeling is that it is one of the 13th labour style tasks that simply wont get completed if the large community is split into smaller ones and put head to head.

Just my opinion, I'm sure I'm probably wrong anyway

[jojojojo]

It's different strokes for different folks. One person is saying that the different rooms were confusing and another is saying that we need many rooms for many people. I don't know what the answer is and I don't think MC do either, as although ilovebees had set an example, this is a totally different context.

As you can plainly see, alot of the stuff that MC do is by trial and error and all they can do is make a well educated guess on whether things will work. And thats just it, the method *did* work, it just could be improved.

I did consider making the room moderated half-way through the madness, but as people were having problems with IRC in general, I felt it was not practical as they would of had nowhere to chat and become bored with the whole plan of PMing the moderators.

During the last half-hour, I was quite enjoying the mass chatter and craziness of the room. would it of been as exciting if it was orderly? I don't think so, the chaos caused an excitement and tension which made the event for me. Especially in the last few minutes when everyone was trying to get the video link to work. Some people saying "OMIGOD!!!" and others getting increasingly impatient and excited waiting for the video to download onto the screen.

Mass hysteria is a good thing people, it makes things far more interesting.

[rdknight]

Split this topic?

[Cabbage]

[poozle]

[Giskard]

[ouroboros]

[ouroboros]

"never go into the matrix without an operator"

[Ashin]

I had a lot of fun at the Event. It was great meeting a lot of people whose names I’ve been seeing around on here for a long time, it was also great to meet some people from other ARGs of the past.

But, I feel the same way as a lot of previous posts. Avoiding repetition and elaborating:

One thing I found particularly odd was the format of a lot of the puzzles I saw other groups working on, especially because: