Lets talk about how to improve plots!

I suggest to add Plot history to Subetapedia and hopefully at the same time it would improve plot stories. Kind like how it was done here

This not only would give new users a way to understand past plots, but is also a awesome way to flesh out a plots story much more thoroughly.

This past plot for example was very fun and while some people were able to make the connections in the story line, others had a harder time, as it was a bit disconnected.

But say it was fully fleshed out before hand and made into pages like the above and released in sections/pages as the plot unfolded....maybe even like an actual news paper. It would be so much more immersive. I'm left with a "that's it" feeling and it makes me feel bad that I even feel this way, as I'm sure a lot of work went into this on the staffs end. But so much more could have been done just by having a nice fleshed out backstory to go with it.

Anyone what to share their suggestions/opinions? Just please remember to be respectful, the artists/staff put a lot of hard work into all of this!

This is exactly what should have been done, and what was not done.

Huh so that's what happened to Sarah's sister. I had wondered about it but never found anything other than vague references to her drowning.

As a newish user I would have definitely appreciated some background on past plots. I needed to look at td;lr's guide just to figure out what was going on some of the time, especially with those haikus.

That being said, I do appreciate that the staff put a lot of effort into making a fun plot for us, even if it did seem disjointed or rushed at times. It's certainly much better than some other plots I've seen and participated in on other sites.

I would really love this.

For me I completely lost intrest at the step where we talked to the pirate characters. The HAs were glitched and all appeared as the same naked default with the creepy eyes and it just ruined the inmersion. I know glitches happen and staff isn't perfect but I think having more communication like a news story or even Titiana would have helped.

The timing on some steps should be lengthened for things that will obviously take more than a couple days to complete. Which I specifically mean Pete and the battle challengers.

Pete only got halfway done, and the game scoring wasn't well planned out, whereas the Charity got completed in hours and Recycle Beast in a day. They did try to increase Pete's pace, but it wasn't scaled properly the longer you play. In the end, the improvement was hardly noticeable.

About battling, I find the 48 hour for the boss and challenger together way too rushed. Fortunately they did put it on the weekend and split the boss battles up, but even if you miss half a day you are completely behind.

Also the timing for the intro where everyone's going grey should be shortened. The random event was difficult to get for many people. It felt very slow moving.

The crafting, IMO, could have taken some extra polishing.

We should have been able to decipher spells. Thus, it would force users who don't battle to put a extra effort on dealing damage/weakening Kiyo.

Would be cool if Connor said something like "Hey, I found this old book and it says that Kiyo has a X weakness and can receive damage from spells casted from a few books sorted through Subeta. I have asked for other Councilors to help us and bring books that might have potentially damage to her"

Then, after waiting for Connor to find a book with a possible spell, be redirected to a coded page with a codex and have to decipher it (obviously there would be tons of pages and they would be randomly selected for each user) -- It would then display the exact damage (a bit higher than 250-500 since extra effort = extra damage = extra time waiting) dealt to Kiyo and then Connor would make you wait a few minutes (around 1-2hours) and then let you do the same thing again.

We would have two kinds of people working towards defeating Kiyo - battlers, fighting her directly on the battle front and causing her a small headache - and translators, fighting her indirectly by deciphering spells and dealing damage to her. IMO this sounds better than bringing 5 random items to a NPC we, like, never talked before and then he would make us a super OP weapon

Also, with the use of the spells, maybe Kiyo would have a 1:10 chance to be cast a curse from a pool of curses (or a curse called Silence, where all the damage dealt by her would be neglected, similar to a instant-round freezing) from the spellbooks and a 1:30 chance to be freezed. To make this possible, Kiyo's weapons and skills have this chance so even if the player doesn't deal any damage or doesn't stand any chance against her, she can still do nothing and the player get a double chance to damage her.

I totally agree to everything that everyone has said so far. Even while paying attention to the dialogue, it felt disjointed and not fleshed out enough. I don't mind putting pieces together, but they still have to look like they are part of the same puzzle, which was not the case this time.

The pacing issue in the beginning (we were all sitting around waiting for a RE for what, five days?) compared to the end (three days to fight opponents and two days for Pete?) was pretty backwards.

Even knowing the end result, I am still kinda confused on aspects of this plot. Like... it felt like some things were just pulled in so as to bring focus back to them? Like the pirates, councilors, and all the errand running just felt like it was to remind us that those NPCs exist. And while I LOVE that we got to use older NPCs, the way it was done was so... patchwork, I guess? I love the idea behind this plot, but I just don't feel like it was fully told to the userbase as we were participating. More storytelling would have been great! The Omen Islands war was really amazingly done when it comes to story telling. Same with the Atebus Murder plot.

I'm not going into specifics of this plot, because I've done that elsewhere as far as thinking the whole thing would have worked better in other orders and others have talked about plot holes/plot drops that I completely agree with. However I will say I love the idea of everything written out in that form being better. The whole thing ended too abruptly, it was like one massive question cluster fuck and then a bunch of answers thrown en masse at the end. Just... meh. I'd like things more spread out storyline wise.

Please no more main characters with hard to read dialog.

I actually quite enjoyed the battle part, so I have nothing to say about that. (Considering the last time they left wars open for a whole weekend, people complained about users who had no life could just battle their life away for prizes. Make up minds!)

I will say I wish the items/sP sinks would have been handled different. Item sinks being pure items sinks. Healing was a good option, but it would have been nice to have a just flat out "donate money to the front lines for weapons" option or if they were going to make it item based to make it worthless craptastic items that seriously need to have value raised. They did good enough choosing things that could be restocked/gotten from quest rewards/putting on a timer but.. I feel like it could have gone a step farther.

Definitely communication on the front of the quest not being mandatory (at the beginning). Would have liked to see some actual counts for the users that were doing the quests too. How many points they were getting or a quest tally. (I didn't notice any for the couple that I did.) Also feel the non-battlers got a bit shafted on the wait period in general.. 500 points at best for an hour without buying even more things? Again, buy coal with sP sink option would have been better)

Pete numbers/lack of communication of workings there. Seriously, I thought there was better communication (...in the forums...) on how points were being done on this plot as opposed to other plots but... would have been nice man, would have been nice.

Jellyfish barriers on the battles. That's all I have to say about that.

To be honest, I felt the whole plot was pretty rushed. Then Kiyo was defeated the final time and we all suddenly regain colour? It was slow to turn grey, why was it instantaneous to get our colour back? Just my opinion.

I actually thought the Crafting part would be coding tbh. And while questing the items was easy enough for most people to do (give take newer users that are or were finding their sea legs to earn SP), I really thought it could have or should have been more involved. I thought coding or a puzzle of some kind should have been on the Crafting end, while the Battler's obviously fight. But I think maybe it was more of a last minute edition than we were aware of.

Hire writers.

That's all I have to say. I've pretty much come to expect nothing from Subeta plots. I mean, of events and plots we've had so many pertaining to Shadowglen with the Pandemic being one of the only events with a story arc and the Jaxon plot last year. I can see you guys work hard and it's clear there is a passion behind why things are done, Rah made a nod to a post that described how this plot related to some Chinese myth that was like exactly the same, so it's great to know that there is knowledge behind it. But it's never shown off well and from my perspective it almost looks like no one on staff is interested in creating back story, which is really frustrating when they try and build up lore. You don't have to bother if you don't want to. We've had tons of fun with events like Epicon that were just events, it just leaves me more disappointed and bitter when you pretend to flesh out the lore of the site, but then nothing comes of it. (If Yumiko's name isn't mentioned to have connections to this land I'mma be disappointed as you now have an excuse for that super out of place NPC)

That and I have so much trouble reading the dialogue of whoever it is that's obsessed with accents or speech quirks/impediments. I'm basically illiterate when Keelhauliday comes around or whenever Kahaleitzli makes a post. xD

So yeah, that's all I have to say for now since that's basically my main gripe with every plot/event ever. I understand it might not be feasible, but if possible any sort of temporary writers would be great. I know there was a writing position for like 2 weeks awhile ago, so I get if it doesn't work out, but I do feel the lack of writers on staff really limits everything else on Subeta.

I agree with the sentiments but I also have this strange hopeful sentiment that goes with it. It's like back to the plot with Ecks and what-not. There was just so much room for more. There is so much room for more with this and I know the staff has stated before they can't have huge plots more than just a couple times a year because it's just so much work to pull together. I feel like both this plot and that one, and possibly others have so much room for all the questions that there are that... I don't know if the answers will be there before I'm gray. I'm really holding out hope that once this map is done that some of the characters will have dialog or that there will be places to explore (ruins/old lost things to uncover) that will hash out more of the storyline before I pass out too much judgement other than a flat standing "too many questions lasting too long, too many answers just thrown at your face at the end" type of thing.

Also, don't get me started on Kahaleitzli. :P

srsly. This is the one thing y'all can do that would pretty much guarantee a significant improvement in all future plots.

Other than that, my biggest suggestion is to release the non-boss opponents first or as close to it as possible. This time wasn't quite as bad as the Tempest plot, but you still barely gave people any time to get wins. Release them towards the beginning next time and then people can fight them in between steps.

Stop doing the written accents. Literally read nothing that Connor had to say because it was annoying and difficult to read/understand. Its offensive to people, as stated in other threads and I completely agree.

There's the weird acceleration of plot which I touched upon on another topic. I honestly though the plot would be going on for another week or two at least. There wasn't really a sense of danger, imo. We were talking about spirits, we were reading ancient texts, we were contributing towards offerings... and then the big bad swoops in to wreck havoc.

I really think it needed a few more steps towards the end. Even if they're dialogue-only. If the writing is engaging, don't worry so much about shoehorning an activity in there for the sake of it. And on the whole - I prefer the puzzle, battle, activities like Charity and Recycle Beast vs games, which the site has never really excelled at.

I don't have a problem with the written accents (heck, I even like Hagrid's accent being written out like that in Harry Potter, and that could be taken as being an "offensive" mickey-take on my RL accent), but I definitely agree with the plot history - newer players could then read up on what's happened, and older players can get a good reminder of what went on (especially with the original Yun plot, then the time travel one that undid a lot of the first one :P).

What I would like though, is the ending to seem as well thought out as the beginning. The start of the plot was quite slow paced (probably a bit too slow for the RE really), then the end seemed quite sudden - we defeat Kiyo, which suddenly leads to the weather clearing and the new land being discovered.... only 2 hours after Kiyo was defeated? That just seemed a bit.... fast? Bearing in mind the greyscale HAs seemed to change to a slightly blue tint at one point, changing back to "normal" was also pretty rapid....

The "boss" battle challenger definitely could do with more HP in the first wave - I liked the inclusion of pre-announced times, but more HP could've meant other timezones had more chance, as she wouldn't have been defeated so quickly ;)

Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer the ending to not be quite so sudden.... maybe the HAs could've gradually reappeared as coloured, like the gradual monochrome. Or we could've had a small other task after the battling?

There needs to be a proper story or event-based premise, and that needs to take priority. With this, it felt more like a device for new games and sp/item sinks. There was virtually no story. It never really progressed past the spirits being angry and needing appeasing, which became apparent fairly early on. There was no real threat or inconvenience to being "cursed" to the extent it was difficult to see how it was even relevant.

It also lost a lot from jumping about, not just in pacing (as a lot of people have already pointed out), but also in terms of content. It's so much more immersive if a plot concentrates on one part of the map and involves a small number of characters. Having to go and talk to random quest NPCs each step doesn't do much for fostering an atmosphere. We could have been playing with spirits, but instead we were stuck with Pete Says.

I agree with people saying that the dialogue was hard to read - i rarely read anything Connor said, and got most of the info from forums instead.

Id like to see a plot where it doesnt end in a battle. Could the battle be during the plot maybe? For those of us who dont battle and didnt want to spend a small fortune making 'weapons' the plot ended pretty abruptly. I wasnt online for much of the battles due to timezone, so i got 1 hit in on the first and last round and that was it, so it didnt really feel like the plot was continuing/ending right. For me it just ended with Pete's game :/

I felt the same way, and I know this has been brought up with several plots in the past. I have to assume there's something more to this since we can't actually do anything in Shengui yet, but that last news post did say it was over. There's a weird disconnect there, and I'm not sure what's going on.

The way it's been set up, it almost sounds like nothing Shengui-related is finished yet and we'll have to wait a few weeks, but that would be absolutely tragic so I hope it's not the case.

Agree with this too. I liked interacting with our current NPCs in an attempt to flesh out a world but... it breaks immersion when you're globetrotting with a couple of clicks. The 'go fetch' quests work in Skyrim etc because there's a physical world that you're traversing. There's a weight to your actions.