@eaglejarl,
@Velorien,
@Paperclipped:
MfD's story is nearing the climax of one of its biggest arcs so far. The stresses and the high-stakes decisions associated with it have created a few spots of tension between the players and the QMs. Upon reflection, the majority of the regular players have come to view these tensions as instances of systemic issues that have been long plaguing
MfD. Over the past several months, we've been mulling over them, culminating in this collectively-supported letter.
It must be stressed that the players don't believe that any of these issues are due to the QMs' ill intent. We believe that the QMs are operating in good faith, doing their best to rigorously model a simulationist quest and implement a fair rules-based game within it.
Indeed, the current status quo seems to be hurting the QMs as well: both directly, by making their ability to write
MfD unnecessarily harder, and by proxy, due to the negative moods within the playerbase.
The purpose of this letter is to establish a shared understanding of the problems we've identified, to serve as a foundation for subsequent discussions regarding possible solutions. We believe that by working together, we can reach an equilibrium where everyone's experience with
MfD improves significantly.
Our understanding is that QMs model the established player/QM dynamics as based on an implicit social contract. The QMs faithfully and impartially simulate
MfD's world, avoiding narrative causality and railroading, effectively implementing a "sandbox" in which the players' ability to guide the story is only limited by their agency. In turn, the players' knowledge is limited to only what Hazou knows, and the players' only channel of causal influence is through Hazou.
Effectively, on the players' end,
MfD is intended to be a hardcore-but-fair simulation game.
Despite the QMs' best efforts, however, the simulation is imperfect. In general, flaws in it are expected and understandable: QMs don't have infinite time, effort, and knowledge necessary to perfectly simulate a world, after all. But some of those imperfections take the shape of
systemic patterns, rather than one-off random errors. Specifically, patterns that markedly worsen the players' experiences in particular, in ways that might not be visible to the QMs.
Two major categories of said flaws can be dubbed "simulation lag" and "high-res vs. low-res simulation".
"Simulation lag" involves situations in which the players cannot access the resources that Hazou should, by any reasonable interpretation of the in-universe situation, have access to, due to the fact that faithfully modeling the particulars of these resources would eat up too much of the QMs' time.
Concrete examples:
- Jiraiya's seal hoard. Little more needs to be said on that topic.
- Publicly available Tower seals. We'd voted to download them, and never received them.
- Any number of seals and jutsu that Asuma would've briefed us on and given us access to in order to assist us in the Dragonwar.
- More generally, all of the actions we choose not to take because we know it would overload the QMs. (For example: not asking for a list of all publicly known non-village-affiliated clans, so that we can scan it for interesting targets to raid.)
- Our Team Uplift advisors failing to provide sufficiently detailed analyses of in-story situations.
- The second half of King Kamehameha's conversation.
- Ambiguities regarding how certain mechanics work, such as:
- ACE refresh dates.
- DoB's interactions with non-research infusions.
- MedNin research.
- Last-minute retcons due to suddenly revealed inconsistencies. (Such as the entire "the Akatsuki's anti-summon seal array" incident.)
- Various subtler continuity errors, which make us uncertain regarding which elements of the setting/characterization we can rely on, and which have since fallen Out.
Not only do we fail to make use of those resources, there are also drastic
opportunity costs involved. Advantages are often multiplicative – who knows what we could've developed
based on Jiraiya's seals, if we've had access to them years earlier?
This issue
effectively makes the game unfair-against-us – even though no party intends this unfairness.
High-res vs. low-res simulation is exactly what it says on the tin: the difference between how the
MfD world seems to work when modeled in a "low-resolution" background manner, and how it works immediately around Hazou.
Our understanding is that "high-resolution" elements are given much more scrutiny than the "low-resolution" ones, both because they're simulated in more detail (and therefore more inconsistencies become clear), and because the QMs feel the need to make their mechanics ironclad, lest we immediately exploit them into an anticlimactic, unrealistic-feeling total victory.
However, that likewise has the
effective end result of systemically disadvantaging us. The details of anything we touch are subjected to much more consistency-based constraints than the stuff our enemies are allowed to get up to in the background. As the consequence, anything we get access to seems to suddenly become much weaker than advertised.
Concrete examples:
- Every jutsu, seal, or resource accessible to the players has a rigorous receipt attached to it: how we got it, why, and what it's capable of. By contrast, the Akatsuki can be freely given an incredibly powerful seal array, because their history isn't modeled in as much detail. There are numerous "free variables" in there that can be tweaked to patch the holes in the simulation.
- The chakra-water cave. In low-res, it was apparently the thing that let the Sannin survive Hanzo long enough to earn their title. In high-res, it's a relatively underwhelming 20% discount, and it's hard to imagine how it could've had its described low-res effect.
- Research mechanics, such as sealing. Initially, it was introduced as ultimately all-capable. But once we got more into it and reached jounin-level, it became clear that its actual capabilities must be extremely limited. Else, why wouldn't sealmasters already rule the world?
- Sociopolitical developments. People like Ami can weave incredibly intricate social schemes – as long as they stay "low-res", with the details of what/who they're manipulating being fleshed out simultaneously with the idea that they've succeeded in the manipulation. By contrast, Mari struggles to think circles around Orochimaru or even Shikamaru, because once they're brought on-screen, their details and Mari's capabilities become fixed – and it becomes unrealistic for Mari to win hard.
Summing up: Once we can actually
access a given capability, it often ends up weaker compared to how powerful it appeared "from a distance". Which makes it seem as though any capability we acquire immediately ends up nerfed
just because we now have it. While we recognize that the QMs are not intentionally acting to keep us weak, it nevertheless creates this
impression, and the associated negative feelings.
I should reiterate that we don't blame the QMs for failing to run a perfect simulation. Indeed, it's an
impossible demand. QMs have limited time, energy, and knowledge, and also lives to live.
Nevertheless, although understandable in all kinds of ways, it is still
a problem. As-is, certain classes of simulation failures end up systemically disadvantaging the players.
Exacerbating the problem, it's our perception that the QMs aren't aware of the scale of the issue and how acutely the players feel it. It seems to us that the QMs still view themselves as basically succeeding at acting as balanced simulators; that any dissatisfaction with the rulings is "player salt" that can and should be dismissed with the indifference of the laws of nature; and that they must uphold the implicit social contract and act as volitionless simulation-game engines lest the entire enterprise falls apart.
On the player side, it's become particularly dire in the last several months, with many long-term players intensely unhappy with this state of affairs and considering stopping playing. The overall opinion is that significant, global changes to the way the quest is run are needed. It's not a matter of a select few bad rulings or local errors.
For one: Although perfect simulation is impossible, what we
could prospectively strive for is a paradigm of "net-neutral" simulation failures. Introduce some change to the way the simulation is run which would ensure that the simulation's failures advantage the players as often as they harm them. Alternatively, make it a policy to deliberately adjust the simulation-state to cancel out the effects of any failures on the strength of our in-story position.
Another plausible point of intervention is decreasing the importance of the "hardcore-but-fair game" part of the experience. The common sentiment among long-term players is that we don't care
that much about "player agency" or "earning our victories". We care about reading a rational, simulationist, internally consistent, well-written story. But that story
doesn't have to pull double duty as a hardcore game.
So: we're fine with some degree of QM-guided steering, as long as it's towards problems that would be fun to solve and to plot points the QMs would enjoy writing. We're fine with narrative causality, as long as the resultant story-state is still
internally consistent. We're fine with the QMs fudging the dice rolls, as long as it's for more narratively exciting outcomes (whether it's fudged in our favour or against it). Et cetera.
In turn, we would like the QMs to loosen up the rules on their end as well. Outcome-pump the hidden free variables of the simulation to
accommodate our schemes sometimes, when those schemes seem exciting to all of us. Let Team Uplift display more agency, if and when it would be fun and in-character for them to do so – even if it would clash with the
players' agency or lead to them solving our problems for us. Provide us with OOC information when it makes our life easier and doesn't open the door for egregious meta-gaming. (Paper bluntly telling us that the ACE date didn't matter for our ability to summon Cannai is a good example here. We would have preferred if we were told that at the very beginning, instead of engaging in the exhausting back-and-forth about the dates.) Et cetera.
Our expectation is that this would make the experience better on the QM end as well. QMs have repeatedly complained that the demands of the simulation and our choices within it maneuver the story towards states they find unpleasant or boring to write. The lighthousing, the endless meetings, the lack of punching. None of this has to be happening.
The status quo represents a suboptimal equilibrium. As relatively rational agents, we are surely capable of coordinating to move to a superior one.
Signatories: Noumero, _The_Bomb, Inferno Vulpix, Spector29, acidshill, RandomOTP, DanZapman, T_of_A, Emstar, Zampano, absoluteblack, CaramilkThief, RoadWild, Lunae, Gintarazimu, Sir Stompy, FaintlySorcerous, redzonejoe, ProperAttorney, Cariyaga, Unaligned Player, Halil.
