Ideas and Advice

Hi.
It's me. The guy who started the old forum thing. How's it going?

I'm still not sure if I'm actually going to play this time (believe me, I want to, but I don't know how long that would last.), but I thought I could maybe start this thread in which we can try to find out why the last one died and how to prolong this one.

Point one: I think actual one-by-one real-time play might have been a bad idea. Sometimes players have a lot of stuff on their platter at a time, when their characters have nothing more important to attend to than the forum that is ensuring their continued survival. Not sure how to fix this. If you would make each real-life day represent half an ingame day, it would throw the whole timeframe out of whack. Maybe that would do more damage than good.

Point two: I think too much stuff piled up last time. Almost everyone in the forum was constantly being harrassed by some paranormal thing and everyone was waaaay busy. We should try to find a way to have priorities, so only two emergencies are really active at any given time. It prevents exhaustion.

That's all I can really think of right now. What do you think?

Point two makes a whole lot of sense. Maybe when an emergency has been resolved, we can put in [RESOLVED] in front of the title, and while its still active we put [ACTIVE] in front of it, and there can be no more than 2 or 3 active threads at a time, so you can't make a new [ACTIVE] thread until one of the 2 (or 3) already active becomes [RESOLVED]?
Might help to lock [RESOLVED] threads but IDK

As for point one, that makes perfect sense, but I don't got no solutions.

I'm honestly not quite sure how to tackle the problems myself. Any other format than realtime could pose problems for everyone who wants to play a student for example - I know that back in Mirrorhands, I actually tended to wait until in the afternoon to post with Saika, because she was a student. With more than one day for every ingame day, people might have to wait for whole days regularly just in order to post once or twice. No fun at all.

About the piling up of plots... I did try to address that in the FAQ already. I do hope that I can encourage the use of the Planning subforum enough so people will schedule their plots a bit smarter. If not, maybe we'll have to approach some one by one...
But gladly, it seems that most of the character concepts that applied by now are not planning any super immediate plots.

Zab, you're being brilliant again. :3 We can actually put that to use ingame.

Hi Nichtschwert! Its good to read you again!
I hope you will give it another try ,it would be a real gain for the Forum!
For your suggestions: D'aawww you the fact that you'wanting to help us despise the fact that you still not really know if you will join: This is heartwarming ,man!

To Point 1.:
Unfortunately i see no way to fix that problem anyhow. The only suggestion is that we should try slow thing a bit down maybe?
To Point 2.:
Here is the question how we should avoid a multi-escalation like the one in mirrorhands.... Maybe we take turns ,allowing only 1-3 escalations at once before the next begin? Or we could make it so that we entitle 'storywriters' which are dictating the player what happens to the chars at which times?
Both is a bit cramping for my taste but maybe it will add to the flow of stories and characters?

Ugh, and then I couldn't resist and had to make an account to talk to you guys. I was nasteh on the old forum.

Concerning the real-time problem: You can try to incorporate less posting into a character concept, too. Some people just forget about forums if it's not on their home page. (Especially when you reduce the density of emergencies, so people would have less reason to really hinge on the forum.) Some people could also be in a field like software developing, where you might have a lot of time to drop by all day in some weeks, but in other weeks it's crunch phase and you hardly have any time at all.
People who go on hiatus can have their characters temp-banned from the ingame forum for a few days because they (accidentally?) caused trouble.

For the escalations, I'd just suggest... something like taking turns. Just communicate about it. If some players say they have a hard time keeping up, maybe postpone your own superplot for a bit. You can still announce that you have something planned for your character when a different scene finishes up.

Writing this up is basically just one big justification to let this character concept in the back of my mind out in the open, sobbb

I still think mirrorhands has a lot of potential and if anybody's gonna have fun with it, I'll support them. Cause this fluff is whack.

Problem One: Well we live in the age of Smartphones, so even students can post rather regularly from school, unless they're under a lot of stress, or get their phone taken as punishment by the teachers. And it might be true, that if we keep the superescalation low, that people will not even have that many problems with inactivity.

Problem Two: I think communication is probably the key here. Marking things as active or inactive in the ingame forum might break the facade a bit. It would make things easier to keep track of, though. In any case, extensive use of the Planning subforum will save us headaches. We could even have a Thread in which people announce their plots and someone puts them on a list, which is sorted by some manner, so that characters who haven't had much time in the spotlight get priority.

OH and I found another very important thing we should talk about. In the admin window thing, there should be some place where you can activate a password recovery system. I failed to do that, lost the admin password and was unable to retrieve it, because I hadn't activated that option. Don't make the same mistake.

I think we should introduce Zabs idea of including a [ACTIVE] and [RESOLVED] tag in the ig forum, as a rule that exists in-universe. Every so often, a case thought solved can escalate again, but if characters are careful with the [RESOLVED] tag in the first place, that won't pose a huge problem I hope. And it's a sensible action in-universe. I don't think we need clear restrictions for that as long as we tell the users up front that their limelight will be very small if they post a new case while 3 others are already in progress.

As to the time, I think we will leave it at 1:1, because nastehmapp is right. People just sometimes forget, are absorbed in their daily life or have more important things to do than post in a forum all day every day. We will have to trust the players there, and to encourage them to create characters matching their own schedules.

On my way to buy some booze i had the idea that we could offer to assign a 'storyteller' to players which would like one. That woulld mean that one of the admins or some experienced players are planning the plot of the characters together with them ,navigating the story in a way comparable to an RPG dungeon master. As long as we keep this optional ,it would help keeping the different paranormal events at the same 'mirrorhands-style' and could give us more control over the way the story proceeds because we can take the edge of it if we think that other arcs are more important. Plus, i for myself would like the idea of developing my story in interaction with somebody ,although that whole Storyteller-thingie would of course not be an option for Shutter^^'
The [Active] and [Resolved] Tags are a good idea and i think we should try it ,but maybe we can use both systems simultaneously?

Yup, using both systems simultaneously sounds like a good idea! :3
Btw Nichtschwert, I actually made two more accounts than just the founder one admins, just in case.