Post by Skir on Jul 14, 2013 13:04:24 GMT -8
I've never used the rant board before. I've never really been the kind to rant. I try to be professional and even keel, and I have mixed feelings about the rant board. I had kind of a hard night last night though, and I'm still feeling it today, so I thought I'd give it a try. Most likely this will come out as whining, but ranting is basically just whining at high volumes anyhow, so that's okay.
Something I guess I didn't anticipate was how sensitive the election process would make me. I'm not sure what I expected, exactly, but all the talk of "The current staff sucks at X, how will you no suck like them?" is a little rough. I suppose I've always been a little sensitive about the work we've done on staff, so that shouldn't be too surprising to me, but I guess I wasn't prepared for how hollow it could all feel at the end.
I feel like my staff has worked their asses off all year. To back pat for a second, when our staff took over mid term for the last one, we had 31 active players. As of last game the accurate active player count is 118. We did that while updating tons of broken systems and writing rules clarifications that (I hope) will give consistency and reduce mistrust and perceptions of favoritism for years to come. I know I personally spend about 60 or 70 hours a week working on ECC, outside of game. That isn't an exaggeration. I spend every break and lunch at work on it, and work on projects for it between tasks. I get through approximately 1000-1200 emails per week. I have a staff of 8 and we're still understaffed. That's 1 ST for every 15 players. The game has grown so much, quadrupled, and we've worked so hard to not only keep up with that growth and not let player experience suffer.
I'll admit I haven't made every goal. In the flood of emails, I didn't manage to let 0% of them drop like I hoped I would. I definitely missed a few, or dropped some balls, especially on letter responses from people's NPC allies and mentors. Those are the hardest, because they require the staff member writing them to stretch that roleplaying muscle that is so atrophied from disuse, scraping the barrel for some creative energy not already consumed. Most of the time it's a frantic rush to get through just one more email on your smartphone while you are waiting in line at the grocery store to buy more paper towels, or answer one or two more in the glow of your phone in the dark when you should be getting to sleep for work the next morning. It's really hard to find the time for long or flowery responses, and a sit down time to have the letter live up to the quality that you want it to have. Especially when someone has an important canon NPC they contact, there's a desire to do that character justice and properly represent their personality; that often time means diving through vampire supplements like Children of the Night or various Clanbooks to find the write-ups (and there are often more than one) so you portray a character correctly. That can take a laptop with PDFs on it and about an hour of time just to get ready to send a response. So they take a long time to get to, and sometimes that free time never comes. Sometimes I have to answer another player's concern with my lunch break instead.
I felt really strongly about the system stuff. A lot of people wonder why I spent so much time on curating the game rules. People comment that I spend more time on rules than on story. The truth is that the rules are story. That doesn't seem true at first glance, but it is true. The rules have a deterministic effect on the way the game is played, and the kinds of activities that go on. Updating Feeding rules, for instance, makes domains important, which makes them worth having and fighting for, which incentivizes interpersonal conflict, which incentivizes politics, which is what everyone says they want. Pretty much every rule, great and small, follows that way into story and gives people more avenues and more options to express their character in ways that feel good. For the most part, the rules are really well liked, but the sheer volume I tried to tackle and that transition has been jarring for some. But I only get one term, and I have to make it count. To do less is disrespecting the people who elected me on that platform.
Besides that, I also had dedicated staff members whose whole job was to go into people's backstories and run plots that were specific to their character and tied in to their hooks and unfinished business. Alas, not all of you got to have that treatment, limited resources, but many of you did, and I hope you liked those stories. I focused on those people who had less going on with the rest of the game, the people who needed some attention to make their experience better, and I had to triage out the people who were hip deep in politics and adventure. Managed to have a meta plot in there, too, with some event nights that pushed it forward, and some memorable speeches, and a crown clattering to the ground.
This feels really mopey. I take some solace in that you don't have to read this. I guess this is mostly for me.
I guess I just want to feel better about all this. I don't enjoy bragging. Those of you who have taken the time to send letters of thanks to us this year, you have no idea how unbelievably valuable those have been to me. Like it or not, I have learned that I am very sensitive to the responses of the game. When people are upset about something, it really gets to me. When people are happy about something, it means the world.
I want to believe I was the best HST the game could have, or at least the best HST I could have been. Some people think that when the website started at 30 pages of text and finished at well over 200, that was wrong of me. I really don't know how to feel about that, because that is the weight of my labor. Should I not have done this? Should I have left Vicissitude as "You can do all sorts of stuff" rather than making a system of modification points and purchasable upgrades? I don't know. I feel like in a game of over 100 players with a staff that changes out every year, consistency is more than important - it's my duty.
I changed so much stuff. I know that as well as you do. I ran on that platform - to update tons of stuff and fix broken rules systems and modernize the back end of the game with things like Wikis with every single PC and NPC on them (your own PC has pages of detail on our wiki, I promise you) and Cloud storage for Grapevine, and spreadsheets and email reference tags, and on and on. I feel like I did my job, the job I was elected for. And I should feel proud of that, but I guess I don't know if I do. You can't please everyone, they say, and I guess I don't need to, but I just wish it didn't hurt so much or take so much of the wind out of my sails when those people I didn't please sock it to me. I love and respect all of you, and that's why it feels like failing when that happens I suppose.
Heavy is the crown, I guess. This ended up a lot more emo than I think I planned for, but I guess it's what I needed to get out. I still don't know how to feel about my term. I want to finish strong, get through and fix EVERYTHING I wanted to in this term these last two weeks. I'm still trying to do that. These last weeks have been just as busy as my first weeks, despite wrapping up some of the plots so our weekly staff meetings are ending up 4 hours instead of 6. My wife is happy that I get home from them a 11 instead of 2, and she'll be happy to not lose out on seeing me before she's in bed one night a week.
I could go on about the things I did or how hard I worked but it feels sort of disgusting. Like I said, I hate bragging. I just desperately want all this emotional energy to mean something, and I just can't shake the feeling that it doesn't.
That's why the election is hard.
Something I guess I didn't anticipate was how sensitive the election process would make me. I'm not sure what I expected, exactly, but all the talk of "The current staff sucks at X, how will you no suck like them?" is a little rough. I suppose I've always been a little sensitive about the work we've done on staff, so that shouldn't be too surprising to me, but I guess I wasn't prepared for how hollow it could all feel at the end.
I feel like my staff has worked their asses off all year. To back pat for a second, when our staff took over mid term for the last one, we had 31 active players. As of last game the accurate active player count is 118. We did that while updating tons of broken systems and writing rules clarifications that (I hope) will give consistency and reduce mistrust and perceptions of favoritism for years to come. I know I personally spend about 60 or 70 hours a week working on ECC, outside of game. That isn't an exaggeration. I spend every break and lunch at work on it, and work on projects for it between tasks. I get through approximately 1000-1200 emails per week. I have a staff of 8 and we're still understaffed. That's 1 ST for every 15 players. The game has grown so much, quadrupled, and we've worked so hard to not only keep up with that growth and not let player experience suffer.
I'll admit I haven't made every goal. In the flood of emails, I didn't manage to let 0% of them drop like I hoped I would. I definitely missed a few, or dropped some balls, especially on letter responses from people's NPC allies and mentors. Those are the hardest, because they require the staff member writing them to stretch that roleplaying muscle that is so atrophied from disuse, scraping the barrel for some creative energy not already consumed. Most of the time it's a frantic rush to get through just one more email on your smartphone while you are waiting in line at the grocery store to buy more paper towels, or answer one or two more in the glow of your phone in the dark when you should be getting to sleep for work the next morning. It's really hard to find the time for long or flowery responses, and a sit down time to have the letter live up to the quality that you want it to have. Especially when someone has an important canon NPC they contact, there's a desire to do that character justice and properly represent their personality; that often time means diving through vampire supplements like Children of the Night or various Clanbooks to find the write-ups (and there are often more than one) so you portray a character correctly. That can take a laptop with PDFs on it and about an hour of time just to get ready to send a response. So they take a long time to get to, and sometimes that free time never comes. Sometimes I have to answer another player's concern with my lunch break instead.
I felt really strongly about the system stuff. A lot of people wonder why I spent so much time on curating the game rules. People comment that I spend more time on rules than on story. The truth is that the rules are story. That doesn't seem true at first glance, but it is true. The rules have a deterministic effect on the way the game is played, and the kinds of activities that go on. Updating Feeding rules, for instance, makes domains important, which makes them worth having and fighting for, which incentivizes interpersonal conflict, which incentivizes politics, which is what everyone says they want. Pretty much every rule, great and small, follows that way into story and gives people more avenues and more options to express their character in ways that feel good. For the most part, the rules are really well liked, but the sheer volume I tried to tackle and that transition has been jarring for some. But I only get one term, and I have to make it count. To do less is disrespecting the people who elected me on that platform.
Besides that, I also had dedicated staff members whose whole job was to go into people's backstories and run plots that were specific to their character and tied in to their hooks and unfinished business. Alas, not all of you got to have that treatment, limited resources, but many of you did, and I hope you liked those stories. I focused on those people who had less going on with the rest of the game, the people who needed some attention to make their experience better, and I had to triage out the people who were hip deep in politics and adventure. Managed to have a meta plot in there, too, with some event nights that pushed it forward, and some memorable speeches, and a crown clattering to the ground.
This feels really mopey. I take some solace in that you don't have to read this. I guess this is mostly for me.
I guess I just want to feel better about all this. I don't enjoy bragging. Those of you who have taken the time to send letters of thanks to us this year, you have no idea how unbelievably valuable those have been to me. Like it or not, I have learned that I am very sensitive to the responses of the game. When people are upset about something, it really gets to me. When people are happy about something, it means the world.
I want to believe I was the best HST the game could have, or at least the best HST I could have been. Some people think that when the website started at 30 pages of text and finished at well over 200, that was wrong of me. I really don't know how to feel about that, because that is the weight of my labor. Should I not have done this? Should I have left Vicissitude as "You can do all sorts of stuff" rather than making a system of modification points and purchasable upgrades? I don't know. I feel like in a game of over 100 players with a staff that changes out every year, consistency is more than important - it's my duty.
I changed so much stuff. I know that as well as you do. I ran on that platform - to update tons of stuff and fix broken rules systems and modernize the back end of the game with things like Wikis with every single PC and NPC on them (your own PC has pages of detail on our wiki, I promise you) and Cloud storage for Grapevine, and spreadsheets and email reference tags, and on and on. I feel like I did my job, the job I was elected for. And I should feel proud of that, but I guess I don't know if I do. You can't please everyone, they say, and I guess I don't need to, but I just wish it didn't hurt so much or take so much of the wind out of my sails when those people I didn't please sock it to me. I love and respect all of you, and that's why it feels like failing when that happens I suppose.
Heavy is the crown, I guess. This ended up a lot more emo than I think I planned for, but I guess it's what I needed to get out. I still don't know how to feel about my term. I want to finish strong, get through and fix EVERYTHING I wanted to in this term these last two weeks. I'm still trying to do that. These last weeks have been just as busy as my first weeks, despite wrapping up some of the plots so our weekly staff meetings are ending up 4 hours instead of 6. My wife is happy that I get home from them a 11 instead of 2, and she'll be happy to not lose out on seeing me before she's in bed one night a week.
I could go on about the things I did or how hard I worked but it feels sort of disgusting. Like I said, I hate bragging. I just desperately want all this emotional energy to mean something, and I just can't shake the feeling that it doesn't.
That's why the election is hard.
. I'm not ashamed to admit that. And you should hold your head up high because You have done a top notch job. TOP. NOTCH.