An Analysis of Original Quests on SV (Draft, under discussion and revision)

[pantherasapiens]

Hmm, to a certain extent. Which Quest?

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EOAE, like you said, though the senses there are very very vague! KCS, having had more character interactions - I'm thinking Asha primarily, though of course it's often repeated that everything she does may be an act. But she's been honest with us once or twice. I think. >_>

I do think that the players in EOAE have a very 'Fix You' mindset that comes from other Quests. Where you input X levels of interaction, and it fixes someone's problems.

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Is that why Takuma was all "oh so you're the one with no problems that Emiko picked first, and then picked up the broken ones to make a set"? XD

 

[The Laurent]

EOAE, like you said, though the senses there are very very vague! KCS, having had more character interactions - I'm thinking Asha primarily, though of course it's often repeated that everything she does may be an act. But she's been honest with us once or twice. I think. >_>


Is that why Takuma was all "oh so you're the one with no problems that Emiko picked first, and then picked up the broken ones to make a set"? XD

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Partially, though it's also manifested in the desire of the voters to interact with Genta in the hopes of fixing him. Or at least, a lot of actions have been invested with that sort of mindset.

 

[veekie]

Sometimes SV also does get a sense of what makes the person tick. I think Laurent's quests do this best, and fan-works have the biggest advantage since the players already know some about the character from the original work. Again, to draw from PMAS, this creates a massive gulf in the way players treat canon characters and original characters...

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Sometimes, but insight is erratic, and actually making it more elaborate scares off players because quoting Crona:
"I don't know how to deal with this"
*Thousand mile stare*

This is a point, but often gets ignored for the sake of keeping things "smooth"-ish. Though it'd be funny to have a quest in an Oriental context, where SV voted "hugs" and immediately got the "has no sense of space" reputation penalty.

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Probably. Or that the QM doesn't know any better.

Hmm, to a certain extent. Which Quest? I mean, part of it is that I do a lot of character building and so on, but at the same time you're still fumbling in the dark a bit with Genta...which kinda makes sense considering he's fumbling in the dark with trying to deal with himself.

So some of that might be repetition, though the difficulty of course is that the more complex a character is, the less easily you can sum them up.

I do think that the players in EOAE have a very 'Fix You' mindset that comes from other Quests. Where you input X levels of interaction, and it fixes someone's problems.

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It's easier to think of them that way really. Someone with issues means we have a Problem, which we have time to discover a Solution. This is the sort of problem solving parts of SV is reasonably good at, whereas SV is very bad at putting down grudges or coming to terms that someone who doesn't like you just plain would be incompatible.

We like to win, so we like to pick at the woobie to see where it goes.
Tunnel vision with characters is a thing as well, players vote for a character, QM writes more of that character, players want to see where the bits that were revealed or hinted at go, so they vote for that character again.

Meanwhile the other characters stand in the background, never coming forward because the primary hook was TOO good.

 

[Terrabrand]

Ouch. That would do it. I generally don't bother with quests that have voting periods less then 24 hours simply because odds are I'll miss out on at least one vote a day otherwise thanks to timezones.

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I can confirm that, I was planning to vote in that quest today, under the assumption that the voting period wouldn't end super fast. (also he had 14 not 20 in the first vote, sooo). I often try to wait a day in periods like character creation to see if anyone pitches an interesting idea.

 

[Vindictus]

Ouch. That would do it. I generally don't bother with quests that have voting periods less then 24 hours simply because odds are I'll miss out on at least one vote a day otherwise thanks to timezones.

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Eh, I updated quickly for two reasons:

I've noticed voters will ignore quests under a certain length sometimes, for what reason I'm not sure​

Votes tend to drop off rapidly after 12 hours in smaller quests anyway​

I can confirm that, I was planning to vote in that quest today, under the assumption that the voting period wouldn't end super fast. (also he had 14 not 20 in the first vote, sooo). I often try to wait a day in periods like character creation to see if anyone pitches an interesting idea.

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I said less than 20 posters total, not 20 people voting on the first choice. I believe the total count of people who had posted in the thread at that time was 17, but I only skimmed the list so I might have missed one or two.

 

[Terrabrand]

Eh, I updated quickly for two reasons:

I've noticed voters will ignore quests under a certain length sometimes, for what reason I'm not sure
Votes tend to drop off rapidly after 12 hours in smaller quests anyway​

I said less than 20 posters total, not 20 people voting on the first choice. I believe the total count of people who had posted in the thread at that time was 17, but I only skimmed the list so I might have missed one or two.

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Oh, my bad, I read it as you saying 'about twenty' posters.

In any event, my consistent experience is that quests that update too quickly during chargen tend to lose me as I have no opportunity to participate. Super rapid updates lose you anyone who was asleep, anyone who is now asleep, and much much more. Quests like @Talos A Destiny of Strife can withstand a high percent of the voters missing an update in part because he has excellent, gripping writing and in part because 'half or more missed it' is usually still 8+ voters thanks to the large pool.

Put another way, it's something of a self fulfilling prophecy to go 'I'm not getting a lot of voters, so let's rush out parts (thus losing more voters because they aren't getting to participate consistenly)'.

Another part of the equation is assumptions. I know that I need to get in now in A Destiny of Strife's voting periods if I want my voice heard because it has an explicitly high tempo. But I assume that votes will be open at least one day unless stated otherwise, so that's the assumption I work with. If you had announced a high tempo being present I wouldn't have gone 'eh, I can wait a day', I would've voted promptly (or decided I don't care enough about any available options and abstained).

 

[Vindictus]

Okay, that's fair enough.

I'll try for one longer update per day, rather than more short ones.

 

[Oh I am slain!]

In any event, my consistent experience is that quests that update too quickly during chargen tend to lose me as I have no opportunity to participate. Super rapid updates lose you anyone who was asleep, anyone who is now asleep, and much much more.

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Just adding on that IMO, a part of this is due to players seeing the quest progressing even when they miss the vote. So then, why vote? Why not just follow along as if it were a fic? Or not follow along at all? Probably is a little different for each person, though.

 

[Cetashwayo]

I had two very different experiences. In the first one, I was an absolute nutbar, updating MG twice a day; I had very little problems with this, and I don't think I was even paying attention to voter counts much. For Sworn to the Scythe, though, I wonder if trying to do an update a day, besides being tiring, was actually not helpful. An update every two or three days, longer and proof-read, may have been ideal.

 

[veekie]

Well, it's not like update SPEED actually mattered for hooking players. To the contrary even, the faster you update the less likely you are to expand your pool of players, until about a week between updates.
Update consistency is what matters more for keeping players. Update speed has only a single purpose: Keeping yourself motivated. The muse is fickle. One update per week for 6 months is far better than 20 updates across a week for keeping and reeling in players. Faster paced updates also makes it easier for your consistency to be disrupted, and then keep being disrupted, leading to early ending just because RL responsibilities keep cropping up and crowding.

Look at it this way:
<3 hour update cycle: Most players WILL miss votes. Many of them wouldn't even have seen the update before the next update lands. You can assume highly unpredictable vote patterns, with the resulting widely divergent characters. Works well for consequence free investigations, or cracky stuff. Don't expect much, if any thought put into votes.
You WILL lose players from this. You always lose some players whenever a character does something they cannot stomach/assumes a personality they don't like, but this pretty much ensures that some decisions that the rest won't be too happy with will be passed.

<12 hour update cycle: About twice a day. This is considered fairly fast, though most people will be able to participate in every update, some will miss an update or two. About normal for a new quest, but not usually sustainable.

1 day update cycle: Typical for a 'regular' quest, most players generally have time to participate, though bandwagons happen and there's no time to change the tracks about 12 hours in, so there's that.

<1 week update cycle: Usually used for quests with long, multipart votes or where you need to construct the vote. A moratorium on voting helps for these to remove the noise and increase the amount of reasoning and horse trading.

Players don't feel long waits much. While you are not updating, your quest is invisible, slowly fading from memory, but that only matters across a span of days at least, usually weeks. There's a lot of other things happening. You cannot make a quest player bored unless you post low content updates.

GMs feel the wait much more sorely. So basically, your best pace is the slowest pace that your muse can survive.

 

[Vindictus]

Well, it's not like update SPEED actually mattered for hooking players. To the contrary even, the faster you update the less likely you are to expand your pool of players, until about a week between updates.

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Huh.

That seems strange to me, but whenever I wrote a quest I tried to keep a daily-or-faster schedule when possible, due to, well:

Update speed has only a single purpose: Keeping yourself motivated.

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In theory it would probably be easier for me to simply set aside a few hours on the weekend and write up a mega-update, but in practice whenever I let a quest or a story go without updates for a couple days I've always had a very hard time picking it back up again.

That said, I don't suppose you've got any examples-?

 

[veekie]

Patterns, popular quests tend to have longer spans between updates. Participation a powerful hook.

Being unable to participate is a strong reason to drop quests. Its not Your quest anymore, just as long complex votes do.

 

[Vindictus]

Hmm.

I'll have to keep this in mind.

 

[Swordomatic]

In my experience (and I believe I've talked about this before) a quick, regular update schedule early on helps wonders with the voter retention of a quest. If you are able to get over the initial birthing period of a quest and create a glut of content over a relatively short period of time, you'll have made your mark on the community that remains even if you proceed to not update for months (in the most extreme cases years) on end. What's important is catching the readers' attention long enough to invest them into your quest world or mechanics or whatever.

Granted, there are many factors involved in it. My own pace, during my (IMO) best period would be a 3-5k word update every twenty four hours for roughly ten weeks before I fell off due to burnout, but then there's the problem of my eventual burnout, heh. The best sustainable rate I've managed was one fairly meaty update every two or three days, and participation was fairly even throughout.

Subject matter also counts for a lot, though. Glory or Death has easily twice the readers of HDR.

But honestly, after you get over your initial hump, you can update whenever you want and everyone will follow up. They just need to know that you will update.

 

[Kaelor]

Well, it's not like update SPEED actually mattered for hooking players. To the contrary even, the faster you update the less likely you are to expand your pool of players, until about a week between updates.
Update consistency is what matters more for keeping players. Update speed has only a single purpose: Keeping yourself motivated. The muse is fickle. One update per week for 6 months is far better than 20 updates across a week for keeping and reeling in players. Faster paced updates also makes it easier for your consistency to be disrupted, and then keep being disrupted, leading to early ending just because RL responsibilities keep cropping up and crowding.

Look at it this way:
<3 hour update cycle: Most players WILL miss votes. Many of them wouldn't even have seen the update before the next update lands. You can assume highly unpredictable vote patterns, with the resulting widely divergent characters. Works well for consequence free investigations, or cracky stuff. Don't expect much, if any thought put into votes.
You WILL lose players from this. You always lose some players whenever a character does something they cannot stomach/assumes a personality they don't like, but this pretty much ensures that some decisions that the rest won't be too happy with will be passed.

<12 hour update cycle: About twice a day. This is considered fairly fast, though most people will be able to participate in every update, some will miss an update or two. About normal for a new quest, but not usually sustainable.

1 day update cycle: Typical for a 'regular' quest, most players generally have time to participate, though bandwagons happen and there's no time to change the tracks about 12 hours in, so there's that.

<1 week update cycle: Usually used for quests with long, multipart votes or where you need to construct the vote. A moratorium on voting helps for these to remove the noise and increase the amount of reasoning and horse trading.

Players don't feel long waits much. While you are not updating, your quest is invisible, slowly fading from memory, but that only matters across a span of days at least, usually weeks. There's a lot of other things happening. You cannot make a quest player bored unless you post low content updates.

GMs feel the wait much more sorely. So basically, your best pace is the slowest pace that your muse can survive.

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I can pretty much back this one up. I started my Quest with updates every day, but rapidly slid to a once a week schedule. I thought I'd lose a lot of voters, but there was actually no noticeable change in the number of participants.

In my experience (and I believe I've talked about this before) a quick, regular update schedule early on helps wonders with the voter retention of a quest. If you are able to get over the initial birthing period of a quest and create a glut of content over a relatively short period of time, you'll have made your mark on the community that remains even if you proceed to not update for months (in the most extreme cases years) on end. What's important is catching the readers' attention long enough to invest them into your quest world or mechanics or whatever.

Granted, there are many factors involved in it. My own pace, during my (IMO) best period would be a 3-5k word update every twenty four hours for roughly ten weeks before I fell off due to burnout, but then there's the problem of my eventual burnout, heh. The best sustainable rate I've managed was one fairly meaty update every two or three days, and participation was fairly even throughout.

Subject matter also counts for a lot, though. Glory or Death has easily twice the readers of HDR.

But honestly, after you get over your initial hump, you can update whenever you want and everyone will follow up. They just need to know that you will update.

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I have to agree with this statement as well, at least partially. A relatively swift update schedule is certainly far more useful early in the Quest than later, because it increases visibility and gives players something to latch onto. Two or three posts isn't really enough to determine if you're going to like a Quest or not, so the more material you have the easier it is to get people off that fence. Once you've got them Watching your Quest, they'll likely come back even if you have to take an entire month off. A warning that your update pace will drop off once the Quest ends its opening phase could be useful for QMs who want to go this route, so players know that the schedule slip is on purpose rather than because you are losing interest.

That said, @veekie's warning about not giving people enough time to vote still holds true here, especially since the first few votes are often about character/faction creation and can have a serious impact on how a Quest eventually develops. Even when a Quest is just starting out, I would say any more than one official post per day is overdoing it.

 

[veekie]

I have to agree with this statement as well, at least partially. A relatively swift update schedule is certainly far more useful early in the Quest than later, because it increases visibility and gives players something to latch onto.

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Oh yes, visibility is definitely a thing, but you COULD post short blurbs or opening fictions elaborating on options, etc, while giving people time to work themselves into a froth about how the vote option leading will doom everything/been done a bajillion times, which gives you the bumpage without locking out voters.

Timing is also a thing. Starting a quest during a high activity time of day is probably not wise, counter to intuition.
That's mostly because 'rush hour' for the Quest subforum is mainly people maniacally refreshing and replying to threads they are already involved in. They are not going to have the attention to spare for a newcomer, and all the activity will bump you off to page 2 or 3 in short order. Posting during a slow period would help a bit more as bored people pick it up just to see what's going on once they've exhausted all discussion in their main threads.

 

[The Laurent]

I can pretty much back this one up. I started my Quest with updates every day, but rapidly slid to a once a week schedule. I thought I'd lose a lot of voters, but there was actually no noticeable change in the number of participants.

I have to agree with this statement as well, at least partially. A relatively swift update schedule is certainly far more useful early in the Quest than later, because it increases visibility and gives players something to latch onto. Two or three posts isn't really enough to determine if you're going to like a Quest or not, so the more material you have the easier it is to get people off that fence. Once you've got them Watching your Quest, they'll likely come back even if you have to take an entire month off. A warning that your update pace will drop off once the Quest ends its opening phase could be useful for QMs who want to go this route, so players know that the schedule slip is on purpose rather than because you are losing interest.

That said, @veekie's warning about not giving people enough time to vote still holds true here, especially since the first few votes are often about character/faction creation and can have a serious impact on how a Quest eventually develops. Even when a Quest is just starting out, I would say any more than one official post per day is overdoing it.

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One thing that definitely happened was an ebb and flow. My most frequently updated Quest is KCS, and it holds a special place in my heart in the sense that I almost never schedule updates. By that I mean, sometimes I finish writing an update on Friday for something, and then post it on Sunday, because doing otherwise creates this feedback loop where the faster the bus goes, the faster I have to drive the bus or it explodes.

But with KCS, I usually update at least 2-3, sometimes 4-5, times a week, so it's very different than most of my Quests. Back before a job I had, like, 12-14 hour voting periods and daily updates, but that's when it was my *only* Quest.

However, I'm actually picking up the slack now partially because depending on the actions, the Quest might be done (as in, main character dies) in the next two or three dozen updates at most.

 

[The Laurent]

I do wonder, how infrequent of updates will really lose people? I mean, there's no way to tell, because there's too many factors involved, but it makes me curious.

 

[Broken25]

I do wonder, how infrequent of updates will really lose people? I mean, there's no way to tell, because there's too many factors involved, but it makes me curious.

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irregular updates will bleed participants much, much faster than infrecuent ones.

 

[veekie]

irregular updates will bleed participants much, much faster than infrecuent ones.

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Yes, this. People like knowing when they can expect their next fix. They claim they want it sooner, but they never leave because of that(treat this claim in the same lines of claiming they want more actions to do stuff with, they will not leave if they don't get it, and it reduces your ability to meet their needs).

Predictability means people know when to be online waiting for the update to land and swarm over it.
Most of the time if you see a quest lose players from a long hiatus, it's because the forum routinely loses some members to attrition from RL. The main problem of a long wait between updates is that players lose track of what they were doing and are also highly reluctant to reread past updates to refresh their memory.

 

[The Laurent]

Yes, this. People like knowing when they can expect their next fix. They claim they want it sooner, but they never leave because of that(treat this claim in the same lines of claiming they want more actions to do stuff with, they will not leave if they don't get it, and it reduces your ability to meet their needs).

Predictability means people know when to be online waiting for the update to land and swarm over it.
Most of the time if you see a quest lose players from a long hiatus, it's because the forum routinely loses some members to attrition from RL. The main problem of a long wait between updates is that players lose track of what they were doing and are also highly reluctant to reread past updates to refresh their memory.

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Is there a modifier for this though? Like, if an author says, "Update on Friday evening" and because of delays it's Saturday Morning, that's obviously better than, "Update on Friday evening...some Friday evening. Maybe."

 

[veekie]

Is there a modifier for this though? Like, if an author says, "Update on Friday evening" and because of delays it's Saturday Morning, that's obviously better than, "Update on Friday evening...some Friday evening. Maybe."

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Not noticeably(as long as you hit the approximate range most of the time), but players do get snippy and rude to authors over that stuff sometimes. Usually harmless, unless it's been a bad day and the last fucking straw was this entitled little <---> being insulting about his free entertainment...you know what goes next.

 

[foamy]

irregular updates will bleed participants much, much faster than infrecuent ones.

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Whilst that's true, infrequent updates will also cost you people in a hurry.

 

[Erandil]

I do wonder, how infrequent of updates will really lose people? I mean, there's no way to tell, because there's too many factors involved, but it makes me curious.

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Yes, this. People like knowing when they can expect their next fix. They claim they want it sooner, but they never leave because of that(treat this claim in the same lines of claiming they want more actions to do stuff with, they will not leave if they don't get it, and it reduces your ability to meet their needs).

Predictability means people know when to be online waiting for the update to land and swarm over it.
Most of the time if you see a quest lose players from a long hiatus, it's because the forum routinely loses some members to attrition from RL. The main problem of a long wait between updates is that players lose track of what they were doing and are also highly reluctant to reread past updates to refresh their memory.

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Well I can only speak for myself but I have left quite a few quests because of their glacial update rates... At best I might still read the updates but if you update only every other month I can assure you that I for one won't actively participate or even just vote. Hell, even if you return from an hiatus and return a "regular" schedule it takes several updates before I feel comfortable to actively invest time in your quest again.

 

[The Laurent]

Speaking of weird experiences: fellow QMs, have you ever realized that someone you're arguing with in a thread is also a voter in your own thread? Or that sort of thing, where it's like, "Oh, fancy seeing you here."