I slept on it and I'm still annoyed, but maybe I can articulate why a little better. It comes down to two distinct, but interconnected, issues.
The first is the information issue. Voting blind isn't fun for anyone involved because it generates the kinds of speculative positions that are impossible to really debate between because they're not based on anything tangible
and those kinds of arguments tend to poison the well for things for, well, forever sometimes. It drags down the conversation, sometimes permanently. And there's bad history here.
Picking the trade road quest blind to the involved scope and a large number of voters even mistakenly thinking Black Lotus pass was south of the sect and would directly link to our future fief so we HAD to take it. Meng Diu's offer to promote Hanyi in the southwest or nearer the capital, before the first Garden of Sinners action, in the same turn, could give us any information on the disposition of people in the center of the province. And the real big one, a lack of establishing scenes for the summit has meant that a good chunk of everything we've been doing has been running around like a headless chicken, not knowing what to do, where, when, or why.
I'm not even saying the choices we made with the trade road quest and Hanyi's concerts were the wrong choices. Hanyi's been off-screened and the trade road pops up sometimes to snack on screen time a bit, but it isn't relevant to anything. But there's no reason to think the alternatives would have been "better". However, these are both cases where the underlying premise of one or more of the options we were picking between was unclear or unknowable, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence that the resulting storylines have such a low degree of integration, especially with the core narrative of the summit.
Broadly, there's a "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" issue, and it's multifaceted. It affects individual decisions we make and the interrelation of decisions we make. I think improving the first
would help with the second, because knowing what we're getting into would let us prioritize directions we want to go. When we don't know what the other hand is doing we end up playing meta-damage control as often as not, sifting through in-game priorities we don't really care about, instead of putting our efforts towards things we're excited about.
The second issue concerns narrative cohesion with a dash of player autonomy. Garden of Sinners has been on rail tracks. There's been a lot of talk of us pouring actions into the Diao, but that's not accurate. The Garden of Sinners actions in turns 14 and 15 were both locked. The thread didn't have the choice to focus on Garden of Sinners more, less, earlier, or later. Even inside those actions, we didn't have any choices to engage with Diao Hualing or her clan more or less. I don't think it was intentional, but we were effectively locked out of progress or even learning anything new, and there was nothing we could do about it.
So it's frustrating that the instant we make a breakthrough where we can actually kick the stalled progress forwards, on an excellent foot even, we immediately get that narrative unsticking thrown into a pit fight to the death against a core obligation. When there's no overriding reason that they
need to be in competition like this. It's an arbitrary framework, and it's actively punishing us for choices we never got to make.
And on a narrative level, it's also frustrating. She's got all this opportunity with a key demographic in a perfectly vulnerable place for ling Qi to attempt to sway hearts and minds towards her sympathies and away from the isolating winter of hardened prejudices, and she's just going to walk away from it? Switch tracks like that? Drop the burgeoning cast and focus of the narrative beat we're syphoning clout from to fuel this choice? It's confusing whiplash. Yes, Ling Qi should be orienting her attention towards summit-adjacent matters; she should have been doing that for a long time. But using the boost in rep from her adventures in the Central Valley and spending that on a completely different region is simply confused and basically throws out the regional establishment work that just finished being done straight out the window. It doesn't flow well at all, and from a neutral reader's perspective that means it undermines Ling Qi's character, because she's the one making the choice here. Answering "why" here in a compelling way is practically impossible. It doesn't matter how good a writer anybody is, the foundation just isn't there to make swapping tracks like this make any real narrative sense.
@yrsillar I hope this post (of whining) better communicates my concerns than my previous attempts (at whining).
