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.

Pretty much this.

Like, the reveal of the new land could have wait until there was SOMETHING to do there?

I assumed the land would launch when Connor gets back to us with prizes in a few days rather than a few weeks. Like, at the moment he's doing the rounds and chatting with the locals and they're getting ready for the influx of people. I'm okay with that.

From Rah's Tumblr:

Sounds like we're going to have to wait while all the content is drip-fed.

I agree with most all of the points and I'd like to expound upon one in particular. MOAR PUZZLES PLZZZ.

Seriously, we need INTERACTIVITY. Don't spoon feed every little bit of information. There's absolutely no reason that the translation text couldn't have been missing some letters, so it actually had to be solved. Whenever a plot comes a long I always have the expectations that it'll be actually good, like the saheric plot. Instead, like I've said before, this felt more like the centropolis garden project event than an actual plot. Non-battlers could have had to translate a potion recipe using a different written language that needed to be finished solving to translate and then find the ingredients that it called for instead of connor doing all the work for them. The maze game could have had an actual pattern that required planning and timing and allowed you to solve it so you didn't need to have a way to attack the enemies, like one of those games where when you move 1 square the enemies also move one. Anything for even the slightest intellectual challenge. Anything to have to think instead of just being told exactly what to do. It really adds to the immersion if you're trying to solve something related. Having more games onsite is great and all, but lets face it, if people want to play browser flash games, they're going to do it on facebook more likely than here, even if they're on here more often. I liked the games, all of them, I really did, but I'm never going to ply them after finishing off the achievements, and that's the norm. It's really a waste of everyone involved's talent. Apply the time it took to think of those admittedly clever games to puzzles instead.

tl;dr stop telling me exactly what to do and make me solve it myself.

I so agree with the plot history. This was something I wanted to post/suggest as well (but didn't because I prefer to lurk around, lol), it would make everything way easier to understand from a newbies perspective. There will be new people joining with every new event/plot and if it is referencing to something that happened before, people will not understand what is going on otherwise so this is really needed. Even for 'older' users it is extremely helpful because sometimes you forget stuff that might be important. Or basically just make a page that summarizes EVERYTHING that happened so far with links to the specific events. I know if you wanted to you could find the majority of the information through researching it, but come on... we are lazy, lol. The jumping around from one npc to another is also kind of ... meh. It'd work if it flows well with the writing, but here it did not (it was basically always "talk to xyz", "now talk to xyz" and so on). ^I agree with Mike as well. I'd love to solve more difficult puzzles, I love challenges.. When I first read the news post about the translating part I was really excited, but in the end it was really easy to solve because you knew which symbol stands for which letter, I'd actually have loved it a lot more if that information wouldn't have been given at all (or as he said, some letters would have been missing).

Plot holes everywhere.

If there is anything that I hate more than bad writing, it's plot holes. It's acceptable to have two or three, but not enough to the point of not making any sense anymore. I am salty because this miniplot was launched really late in the season, and I hoped to get it earlier. I feel like the quality is not what it deserved, especially because it started late (I had a lil' faith). I don't have any beef against Connor, but I usually just stopped reading the r-r-r because it was unecessary.

Would anyone care to explain what was the purpose of us turning grey? Some people never turned grey at all? What did it had to do with the plot? We just mostly don't know. What was the whole point with Jaxon and Kiyo? Spirits were angry because no one took care of them anymore, okay .. And? Defeating her made us clear and ta-dam! everything is alright and the spirits are at ease? It doesn't make any sense. What happened to Kiyo? Is she back to her sad, nostalgic self from the first wave? There is a new island: cool! Purpose? Why? We just don't know.

We just don't know.

Next plot, I wish for the battling to be handled better. We got the small fries in a one-shot deal and then, we had to defeat a strong boss all together: too much is too much. They could have been segmented and appeared earlier, before Kiyo in my opinion.

I also want more puzzles, especially translation stuff (history geek in me). I liked well enough the small games, but the puzzles were missing. The miniplot was kind of like an history thing with spirits .. so why no one used it properly? Anyway; more puzzles next time! I didn't like much the whole weapon crafting with Mathis. Sometimes, it looked glitched and it was not properly explained beforehand. I feel like the end was waaay too rushed. I felt like it was just to try and cover-up the mistakes that were made during the plot, especially the storyline.

Tldr; Couldn't have been more rushed. [edit] I wrote too much - oh god. [Edit] I sound rude, but I am happy with the effort we have gotten. Nice games, nice arts but it ends here.

Well it's still better than the Morostide plot.. all we got is the information that Ian have a fetish to fuck ghosts.

I liked this plot, the art was amazing.. the story was easy to understand and not so messy.. And yes, all this mess for a beautiful land, totally worth it!

Also, you simply can't explain how a land suddenly appears on a map after all those years.. you just need to live with this hole..

@ far Apparently we all turned grey because we were affected by a curse called Sorrow of Kiyo. It's from the newspost which introduced the stage 3 siteboss.

Which is why it made perfect sense to kick the crap outta her, right? Furthermore, if her thoughts and feelings can affect the living, why did only her sorrow reflect on us? Why didn't we go into full ragemode when she snapped after being forgotten, left out and ignored? Why did she even attack us if we were working on making everything right by giving the spirits offerings? Was Connor that sloppy with the translation that we mixed up the order the offerings were supposed to be given in, and that made her upset and sad? If he was, why not let us help translate instead of leaving it all to Connor while we kicked the living daylights out of the ferrywoman?

I like the idea of the plot, but there are so many holes and loose ends that it's making me really sad. :/ I wish we had a better alternative to fighting Kiyo - she didn't even seem to want to fight until we properly pissed her off by beating her up the first time around. And all that reminds me of Pylot and Tempest, which makes me even more sad. I shouldn't be feeling sad and disappointed when we got an amazing new land to look forward to exploring.

But back on topic of improving the plots. I will be using examples from this plot since it's the most recent one and, let's be real, there's a lot of room for improvement even if it was a mini-plot.

Plot presentation I loved the narrative of the Omen Islands plot. It was clear, you could read back on what previously happened, nobody was tripping over their words or letters. You got a background of the festival, you had a clear idea of what was going on. I like Connor as a character, I really do, but whoever is writing him needs to do more research on stuttering and how to write it right.

Connor's speech is fairly hard to read for a native English speaker, let alone someone with English as a second (or third!) language.

Imagine someone with dyslexia trying to make heads or tails of what he's saying. And then, to top it all off, important plot bits are mixed into his stuttering which just makes the situation worse! The same goes for accents in general on Subeta. I personally don't mind them, but I know people who find them grating because they're not written as well as they could be.

Even for a mini-plot, clarity is important. Don't make the players so frustrated with the plot presentation that they just skip the text, do the games and wait 2 days for the next step. You want immersion, not annoyance. You want people to speculate things, to have fun, not end up bickering about missing plot details because the lead character's text was hard and irritating to read.

A plot journal would be a great way to keep track of this if you want to stick with something along the lines of Omen Islands and don't want to go with a mystery person narrative. Using the current plot as an example, the user could "write down" a summary of what happened while they were helping Connor. The detail of the names on the gravestones is likely something a LOT of people missed, but it was a pretty important hint.

The games The option to skip the games for people who were physically unable to play them (or tried a lot, failed, just couldn't be arsed further and didn't care about the plot prizes) is great! It doesn't leave people out of the plot. Yes, we have topics with plot guides and the likes, but not everyone's going to be able to play every game on Subeta. If they just want to continue the plot and are okay with not getting prizes for the game - good! They get to participate in the next step, which might be easier on them. They still get some of the prizes instead of being left in the dust.

The games themselves were alright. I wouldn't say top-tier excellent marvelous 12/10, but they were good and there was room for improvement.

First of all, there is absolutely no need for a short timer on plot-based games. Were we really in that much of a rush to get to the pirate ship that we had to do it in 60-ish seconds? I don't remember the exact timer, but I remember it being very short. If we're in that much of a rush, why wait roughly 2 days between plot steps? It makes no sense to time us on a game when the plot steps clearly aren't going to be pushed out rapidly. If you want this to be a challenging game with a short timer, add difficulty stages to the game once it's properly released to the games room.

Second, Pete Says. I have a healthy memory and I can remember roughly 7-8 sequences on Simon Says games. Yes, it's true that you could write the sequence down - that's how I got past the plot requirement of level 10 for the game and how I got the top-tier achievement for getting to 50, but it's ridiculous for staff to expect people to do that for bonus prizes. Especially when Charity apparently counted her score per item donated and, far as I can tell, the Beast counted sP smelted?

Pete should have counted every point scored instead of staff forcing people to play a monotonous game where even after the tweak, 10 game points = 1 bonus plot point. It was hard for no apparent reason other than "because staff made it so". It wasn't a challenge, it was just annoying. I didn't even bother with the game because the scoring system was so off. Am I the only one who did that? I really doubt it.

Consider physical and mental limitations of able and disabled people when putting the games into place. Games are meant to be fun, even the optional ones done for bonus prizes. Don't make a tedious game even less enticing by making the scoring system unfair.

The storyline The Omen Islands plot, the Gargoyle-Skelly plot, Masquerade Murder Mystery and even the Masquerade Time Travel Extravaganza all had a clear storyline. The Omen Islands one was by far the best because it offered alternatives (pirates vs. islanders) and there were consequences for the choices we've made (RIP Amy :'( ).

This story seemed very rushed and haphazardly thrown together for the sake of revealing a new land. There are so many questions left unanswered and I'm getting the sinking feeling that we'll only get a half-assed answer with the final news post + prize distribution. Yes, we can speculate. We can speculate all you want, but if you're doing worldbuilding, you want to be as clear as possible.

Why were Kiyo and the spirits protecting that land? Why was it hidden from the rest of the world behind a magical barrier? Why did the island only appear now? Why was she so sad when we were trying to fix the aftereffects of the mess Ian made last year? Why did her spirit-friends attack us if we were trying to fix things? Why did we have to fight Kiyo? Was there really no other alternative to killing the ferrywoman/beating her into a pool of ectoplasm? If spirits wanted offerings, why couldn't we just go with that route and give her a massive offering that would appease her? Why was Connor so slow with the translation when he knew what was at stake? Why didn't he let us help more? Why didn't he ask more NPCs for help with that?

We only got a proper clarification for why we were turning gray and lost our energy at the very end of the plot. Connor somehow magically knew that it was spirits from the start (how? why?), but we only found out what it was (the curse of Kiyo's Sorrow) at the end. Even then, it felt more like someone on staff went "haha, oops, we forgot this, let's just quickly add it in and hope nobody will notice :'D" than a proper plot development.

If something bad is affecting a lot of people, there will likely be mass-panic, mass-hysteria and people (both NPCs and users) will want to know what it is as soon as possible. We did not get this here. This was shoved to the side in favor of everything else, even if the users helping Connor were affected by it. It was just a mysterious illness, with no actual NPCs with medical knowledge stepping forward to calm the public. Which is odd, especially considering that Subeta seems to be prone to outbreaks of deadly diseases that turn people into the unliving.

The battling Battling isn't really something I can give proper feedback on since I'm not an active die-hard battler. I'm not going to give feedback or suggestions on boss release times since that worked out in my favor, mainly because I literally have no life.

Alternatives for the people who don't battle are always good. But instead of mass-inflating items, maybe try mixing in more of the plot mechanics for this. Helping with translation, asking NPCs to help (Jade from Get Mugged providing refreshments, Alexander helping with translation, Quentin trying to talk to some of the more reasonable spirits, etc.), playing games to get clues, then bringing Connor those clues, floating spirits that offer guidance, etc. All that would have been a good addition to the weapon forging for people who don't have a battle pet, or want an alternative way to participate in the plot alongside the battlers. Yes, you'll have overachievers who will likely do all of those things, but that's what a plot is for, right? Having fun.

Overall, it was a fun little plot, but it felt very rushed and haphazardly cobbled together. 3/5, staff can do better.

From Rah's Tumblr:

Sounds like we're going to have to wait while all the content is drip-fed.

And all my enthusiasm for this new place just vanished. Months until we can explore it fully. I'M SURE GLAD THE PLOT WAS RUSHED TO FINISH UP SO WE'D HAVE NOTHING TO DO.

I also feel that the pacing of the plot was off. I got the grey RE on day one, which meant I sat around twiddling my thumbs and plot-speculating for 4+ days while a good chunk of the site felt left out because they hadn't caught the RE. I think increasing the RE so that almost everybody online could catch it, and limiting it to a couple of days would have been better.

I was so, so excited for the plot at first, but by step three I was just going through the motions. I was delighted to see Connor again, and I didn't mind the R issue as much as others did, and I felt the plot steps were a little disjointed but I'm not sure there's much of a way around that. There has to be time for people to play games/finish puzzles, etc, so there's going to be some downtime for faster players. I really do like the previous suggestion that "go find/do the thing" take a few more steps than just clicking on the explore map. I did like that involved almost every other land and a lot of NPC's we don't normally interact with.

That said, I was super frustrated with Pete Says. The way the scoring was set up initially was difficult, and when it was changed to give us more time to complete better scores, we had less than a day to try and score more. There just wasn't enough time to allow us to make up for the tough scoring even if we tried.

The battle enemy release felt too rushed. I liked how Kiyo was released in stages, and given the need for having multiple staff online during the battle I think it was managed as well as it could be, but we only got about two and a half weekdays to battle the lesser opponents. It felt super duper rushed.

I agree with everything and said about plot continuity. I feel bad for beating up on Kiyo when it appears that we (or the pirates, or Jaxon, or the apocryphal descendants) weren't holding up our end of the bargain in the first place, the bargain we collectively agreed to uphold. If Kiyo's sorrow is permeating the world and turning everyone tired and grey, why are things fracturing now? Was there a tipping point? If so, what was it? Will it come around again? Even though we obviously didn't give the spirits what they wanted (not enough Pete games to fill the bar, the fact that Kiyo went ragey because the correct offerings weren't presented), why are the spirits placated and quiescent now? Because Kiyo's too beat up to protest or fight back any longer? I love the new land reveal but it feels like in this case, we're the bad guys here. :c

That said, I don't mind that the content reveal will take a while or that the plot happened now when content isn't quite ready to show. What with Keelhauliday, Anniversary, Alegarten, Morostide, Fireside and Luminaire literally coming back to back to back in the next four months, site logistics suggest there's really no better time to have a mini plot then now, unless we want to wait for next summer.

I had a lot of issue with the fact that this plot, specifically, was very monologue-ridden. As stated further up the page, it really detracted from the whole experience that we weren't able to truly learn things for ourselves. Connor just kind of... threw it all at us during the final battles.

It did feel very rushed, almost like it hadn't been written out at all, and instead was written on the fly. It showed that it wasn't well-coordinated.

I'd appreciate more immersive puzzles and reading - I also got really bummed out by the fact that we weren't able to help Connor translate more of the passages (which would have made it was more exciting than hearing him tell us in the background), since we were able to do a bit of deciphering previously.

And for the love of god less games all jammed together like that.

More collective puzzles and tasks PLEASE. (eg; The uncovering of the dig site during the Saheric plot, etc) sinks could also stand to be done a little more creatively

the site should try (and have done well) to cater to the disabled or people with certain coordination issues. However, you cant solely go based on this and reduce the experience across the board.

This is why i love the SKIP button, and would even encourage differing difficulty levels. Which comes back to the point system. You earn more points in the fields you are good at. AKA your internet issues stop you from being a RS god, well you can make that up by working the flash games. You suck at both but trained a pet well? you battle for points.

Personally, I hope that with the SKIPS being implemented, staff can ramp up plot difficulty and complexity. maybe we do a SKIP, EASY, HARD paths, idk.

You still got my vibe with the too many"why" I think c;

I choked all my noodles on my keyboard.

As for the difficulty, I got the impression that this is what they tried to do with the bonus prizes? Tried and kind of failed since it was unbalanced - we got Charity's bonus done on the same day, Beast got done on the next (I think?) and despite the rebalancing attempt, Pete didn't even get to the halfway point before the bonus option was disabled and we were thrown into the battling.

This plot seemed to have all of the "why", but none of the "because". Too many things left unanswered. D:

Somebody better buy Connor a watch for his birthday.

I believe the biggest sP sink in the plot was the healer - I know I blew roughly 5m on healing alone. The weapon forging was an item sink, it made sP switch hands but the items got deleted/turned in. If you were clever about it, you could make a tidy profit thanks to the forging.

I'm primarily referring to the 'toss SP/items at said NPC' in terms of the lack of creativity - the Healer as a subtle sink was pretty brilliant (since it didn't feel like we were being FORCED to expunge currency). Having to throw SP and items at Charity and the Recycle Beast for offerings didn't really feel like it was well-woven, based on the lack of depth to the plot.

It was basically 'well these NPCs take items so there you go'.

The Healer is the perfect sink because it's sneaky LOL

IMO they could have made stuff like Charity heard about the news related to the offerings. "I have a late friend/mother/sister/brother/father/fetus/whatever and I think I could help you and make part on the offerings if you bring me a few items"

The same goes for Recycle Beast. It would be more polite to say "hey we need you guys to deplete items and sP for us to remove them from the site otherwise this will ruin economy make you lose plot prizes"

No more stutters/poorly done accents would be a great place to start. Really, all the r-r-r stuff made it too much of a hassle to r-r-read. I wound up simply skipping to the bottom of pages to see what we had to do next rather than bothering after trying and failing to make heads or tails of what he had to say on the first day.

fetus LOL

Yeah, I just didn't get the feeling like those tasks 'belonged'?

I think it would have been a better-designed sink if we would have had to create offerings shrines or such as a community effort, using randomized 4-5 item lists containing certain words ('paint', 'wood', 'ribbon', 'paper', etc) - personally I would have shoveled money and items into that because it felt like it was part of the actual story. It would have made sense.

Having to turn to random NPCs that don't seem to give a damn about what's going on just to scrape some SP out of the system felt cheap ):

Cheap? Nonsense, i'd say.

• Hey let's subtly insert a finger a sP and item sink and hope it will work and no one will notice
• Why don't we put a backstory for it?
• Nah, I don't think so.