Our feedback survey showed that this event was generally liked less than Summer 2015, which can likely be explained by the following variables:
- Overall, the amount of effort required was perceived as being too much.
- Overall, the difficulty for this event was rated as being a little too hard.
- Overall, the 30 minute timer was perceived as being too long.
- Overall, players felt they were not able to obtain everything they wanted from this event.
- Overall, players preferred the Summer 2015 prize shop over the Harvest Festival’s tier system.
We feel we can conclude these are the main factors that contributed to it being liked less than Summer 2015.
Some highlights of the event, as supported by the data, included the trivia style questions, community morale bar, and random bag drops! Paired with the comments we’ve received, we conclude that an event of this style would be worth repeating in the future, albeit with a series of balance tweaks.
With regards to the prizes, you indicated that you liked the items, though they weren’t necessarily rated very useful, and overall, you felt you were inspired by, or that the coat was applicable to your characters.
In particular, the feedback for the community morale bar was very positive, with almost 65% of you finding it an exciting aspect of the event. However, we had a number of suggestions as to how we could tailor this feature to be more satisfying to you in future events! We saw it mentioned several times that players prefer to know up front what prizes are available. The morale bar was an attempt at meeting some of that idea by previewing prizes throughout the event in a team-based fashion. Many of you have expressed feeling more motivated, however, when you know what goals you are working towards from the very beginning. If we implement another community task in the future, we will consider other options for incentives in the hopes of better suiting our players desires!
As mentioned in survey summaries for previous events, we have to carefully balance our prize distribution in a way allows our 30-minutes-per-day, 6-hours-per-day, and 12+-hours-per-day players to all feel as though they received reasonable value for their time and effort. These are hard balls to juggle, especially with the introduction of a new mechanic.
For this event, we opted to include a 6th ‘overachiever’ tier. We have previously noticed that pricing the prize shops and/or labelling prize tiers feels like we, as Mycena Cave, are making a value judgment on how much time a player should be investing to get ‘the average set of rewards’. This means that whatever we set as our highest participation level is what is perceived as ‘Mycena Cave staff feels you should put in this amount of effort’, even if we are aware it will not be reached by most of our players. At the same time, putting a cap on the amount of time you can spend is an identical value judgment. A cap would also be perceived as ‘Mycena Cave staff feels you should put in this amount of effort’ - no more, no less. From past experiences and feedback, we’ve learned that a cap is not received favourably by players who are willing to go above and beyond, or by players who are only able to play a lot at certain times during the event. Those who wish to go above and beyond feel limited, while those who cannot devote the same time to reach the cap feel frustration at the perceived expectations. We had hoped the 6th tier would feel like a little bit of an ‘extra’ to those willing to invest the time, but not feel like something you had to achieve. This is also why the 6th tier featured the Halloween Mushroom, instead of more prizes unique to this event.
We would like to emphasise that the amount of effort we ‘require’ players to put in for ‘the average set of rewards’ is very carefully thought out based on the amount of effort our playerbase has put in to our prior events. These tiers were not at all designed as value judgments on the amount of time we feel you should put in, but are instead rooted in the data that you have provided us with over the years. We utilized the numbers and time devoted to these previous events to determine the average player’s contribution. The major difference we found during event was that the trivia mechanic in general was more time intensive than either Spring or Summer 2015 — we had never done an event like this before, so it was certainly a lesson learned going forward.
Many of you also felt that the tier system was unforgiving - 99/100 was essentially the same as 0/100 with the exception of the opportunity for more bags. There was a strong preference for the Summer style prize shop, and so we will more than likely utilize similar prize structures in the future. If we do make another attempt at tiers, we will consider methods of making the system feel less ‘harsh.’ There were several suggestions on how to accomplish this, including smaller intervals between tiers, more tiers in general, a raffle or some kind of incentive for ‘extra’ crows destroyed without a tier increase, and a graduated tier system. We appreciate all the ideas you had for this mechanic!
The 30 minute timer also created some interesting disparity in perception. While we felt that 30 minutes would be a more ‘relaxed’ pace for players and keep them from feeling ‘glued to the computer,’ some players felt that they became more restricted in what they could accomplish around the event . As stated, our numbers for expected participation from this event were calculated based on the data drawn from previous events, including Summer 2015. In other words, Summer theoretically required a similar amount of required play time to receive x amount of event payout. That being said, being able to complete four activities per hour instead of two provided the illusion of being able to accomplish more within the same amount of time. In addition, this event had the possibility of incorrect answers, which meant that answering something wrong resulted in ‘losing’ thirty minutes of time. While we accounted for a set percentage of incorrect answers per player in determining this event’s numbers, we understand that missing questions quickly became discouraging and impacted your morale more than we had anticipated.
On the topic of “randomness”: Human psychology has a hard time accepting true randomness, and expects it to inevitably exhibit a certain level of determinism. One comment that stood out in particular to reflect this: “I think I would have preferred if the [random] drops weren’t so random”, and this was echoed in sentiment by many other players. Perhaps, if anything, we can take from this that what you as a playerbase want is not a random bag drop system, but a system that, while it feels random, is under the hood set in motion by a system with a certain level of determinism. This is something we will discuss with staff and will certainly look at for future events.
While the majority of you found the trivia exciting and engaging, you were divided in terms of which style of questions you preferred. Some of you strongly preferred having topics strictly about Mycena Cave and its canon and enjoyed the item scrambler and image search. Others enjoyed incorporating offsite elements with the trivia and the opportunity to have an educational takeaway. We would like to explore this mechanic more in the future, and will carefully consider what types of mini activities you as a community might find exciting!
With regards to inaccurate questions: we hear you and will endeavor to do everything we can to ensure accuracy in the future! We had means of checking the trivia prior to the event, but inevitably still had some fallout. That said, we are always happy to adjust accordingly as we go, and are happy that you felt comfortable coming forward when you found questions that you felt were not accurate or clear!
Some of our newer players mentioned not being aware of our item database and suggested that we have any on-site, relevant resources linked from the event thread. This is an easily applicable and excellent suggestion, and we’ll keep it in mind for the future!
One comment brought forth that the guess the image questions were particularly difficult for players who are color blind or visually impaired. Keeping comments like this in mind will help us in creating designs for future events. Accessibility is important to us, and we’d like to ensure that Mycena Cave is accessible and enjoyable for as much of the community as possible. We urge players to let us know as soon as possible if a mechanic is made difficult or impossible, so that we can come up with mechanics to better allow a wider audience to participate!
A large percentage of you indicated a desire for an indicator bar. This was probably one of the most commonly made requests in our feedback section, so this is something we will definitely keep in mind for future events of this nature! We hear and understand your desire for more clarity and transparency as to where you stand within any given event.
Lastly, it was noted by several players that we were missing the ‘Ding Ding Ding!” on the event tab… we have taken note and will see it added back in similar future events!
