Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 3.7K All Categories
- 3K The Midnight Age
- 757 Announce posts
- 125 Newbies
- 6 Class Guides
- 804 Harpy's Head Tavern
- 57 Echo Canyon
- 310 Self-Affirmations
- 163 Town Crier
- 135 The Exchange
- 167 Sparring Grounds
- Combat Guides
- 30 Combat Logs
- 188 Idea Box
- 9 Classleads
- 578 Roleplay Logs
- 107 Aetolia Development
- 5 The Void
- 744 Miscellaneous
- 9 Announcements
- 417 OOC Chat
- 217 Tech Talk
- 47 Scripts
Looking for more active discussion? Join our Discord at https://discord.gg/x2s7fY6
The Leviathan: Post-Mortem
Razmael
Administrator, Immortal
Whew, that was a long month! We had fun though, and we hope you all enjoyed it too! Tiur was away doing weird things like getting married and going on honeymoons for a large portion of this event, which means the task of writing this post-mortem thread has fallen into my lap, so bear with me!
This event had to be one of the biggest group collaborations we've ever had up here. Everyone contributed in some way: @Diogen @Kyna @Antehe @Nils @Raah @Tedrunai @Silena @Ceraen @Tiur and yes even @Keroc contributed a little. I cannot understate what an amazing team we have in the Pools. I want to give @Diogen some extra special mention here, because this project was his baby for the longest time. The Beneath instance was a project that had been in the works for a couple of years, and eventually landed in Diogen's lap after some volunteer turnovers. Without him, this event would never have happened!
Let me first preface the rest of this post by letting you all know that we fully intend November to be an off-month. This gives both you and us time to recuperate from a long event, and gives us time to both prep for the next event and focus on some of other stuff we have going in the background (including the Liruma war wrap-up stuff - we haven't forgotten!). The next event we have planned (Chaos War) is projected for some time in December - though this may change depending on how planning and preparation goes.
This event was a bit of an experiment for us on how to run an event, and we definitely learned a lot from it! Fun fact: All the main points of the event were originally meant to happen in a single day (i.e. seals breaking, Lobyl, Dreikathi, Jox, Varian, Bamathis). As we got further into planning, it became very obvious that it was simply too much to pack into a single day; it would also just not pack the same impact we wanted to get out of this event. So we decided to make the event run throughout all of October, make sure it packed the impact we wanted, and tried to make sure the weeks were filled with little activities to do. For the most part, I like to think it was successful. If we had to change things a second time around, we'd probably shave off a week. It was just a bit too long, and we were all completely drained of energy by the end of the month.
For the most part, only the beginning, the end, and a few key points in the middle (notably Lobyl & Daimoxoth's appearances) had a firm script to it. Almost everything else throughout the event we came up with on the fly. Examples of these off-the-cuff ideas are the Iosyne eggs, the Slyphe leviathan hunt, the Abhorash bloodstone, the bomb making, and so on. We had a blast coming up with all these things and implementing them, and the team really got to flex their creativity here. Here's another fun fact, the script for the final day was being tweaked right up until the final 5 minutes before the event started. We kept finding things to improve!
That's all I personally wanted to cover. So instead of continuing to ramble, I'm instead going to open the floor to you lot. What questions do you want to ask us about the event? Keep in mind we can't answer anything that's going to spoiler future content or story, so frame your questions with that in mind please! As a parting note, the final event post is still be worked on, so please bear with us on that.
This event had to be one of the biggest group collaborations we've ever had up here. Everyone contributed in some way: @Diogen @Kyna @Antehe @Nils @Raah @Tedrunai @Silena @Ceraen @Tiur and yes even @Keroc contributed a little. I cannot understate what an amazing team we have in the Pools. I want to give @Diogen some extra special mention here, because this project was his baby for the longest time. The Beneath instance was a project that had been in the works for a couple of years, and eventually landed in Diogen's lap after some volunteer turnovers. Without him, this event would never have happened!
Let me first preface the rest of this post by letting you all know that we fully intend November to be an off-month. This gives both you and us time to recuperate from a long event, and gives us time to both prep for the next event and focus on some of other stuff we have going in the background (including the Liruma war wrap-up stuff - we haven't forgotten!). The next event we have planned (Chaos War) is projected for some time in December - though this may change depending on how planning and preparation goes.
This event was a bit of an experiment for us on how to run an event, and we definitely learned a lot from it! Fun fact: All the main points of the event were originally meant to happen in a single day (i.e. seals breaking, Lobyl, Dreikathi, Jox, Varian, Bamathis). As we got further into planning, it became very obvious that it was simply too much to pack into a single day; it would also just not pack the same impact we wanted to get out of this event. So we decided to make the event run throughout all of October, make sure it packed the impact we wanted, and tried to make sure the weeks were filled with little activities to do. For the most part, I like to think it was successful. If we had to change things a second time around, we'd probably shave off a week. It was just a bit too long, and we were all completely drained of energy by the end of the month.
For the most part, only the beginning, the end, and a few key points in the middle (notably Lobyl & Daimoxoth's appearances) had a firm script to it. Almost everything else throughout the event we came up with on the fly. Examples of these off-the-cuff ideas are the Iosyne eggs, the Slyphe leviathan hunt, the Abhorash bloodstone, the bomb making, and so on. We had a blast coming up with all these things and implementing them, and the team really got to flex their creativity here. Here's another fun fact, the script for the final day was being tweaked right up until the final 5 minutes before the event started. We kept finding things to improve!
That's all I personally wanted to cover. So instead of continuing to ramble, I'm instead going to open the floor to you lot. What questions do you want to ask us about the event? Keep in mind we can't answer anything that's going to spoiler future content or story, so frame your questions with that in mind please! As a parting note, the final event post is still be worked on, so please bear with us on that.
19
Comments
Big props to everyone in the Pools and @Diogen in particular. I haven't been this involved and engaged in Aetolia in years!
Also want to say thanks to all the players. Watching everybody interact with the activities we set out was awesome and super motivating to do more things like that in the future.
The first question that really comes to mind is one that's been in at least one other thread lately. Will people who contributed to the preparations get any sort of fame/recognition of what they did? I thought that the mitrine war lines were good in mentioning that someone participated, but then also going into the level of participation (by faction rank there.) It seems reasonable to me that there could be other lines for people who fed the eggs, or did the bloodstone infusions, or whatever in addition to the current one about fighting in the battle.
For the mechanics of the leviathan hunt and boar hunt, is there a chance those could get reused somewhere? I enjoyed it, and would love for anyone who wasn't able to participate in either of those little events to experience them in some way.
Some things will be seen again in the future, now that we have had a chance to live-test them and can fine tune. The leviathan hunt in particular will be seen again!
I like that it almost felt like watching a movie scene play out in front of us. I was on discord and in web and the amount of times I said "what the unicoooooorns" or similar is too many for me to count. It was so fun trying to guess what would happen next, or find more meaning in some of the emotes or the things Varian would say.
The reactions from Varian, despite having not been a part of the world in..forever(?), felt so real and tangible. The comments about Dhar/Ivoln, the joy w/ seeing new Iosyne, the neglect of Omei - it gave me (and I'm sure others) so many things to think about and consider all the changes that we may take for granted compared to the beginnings.
My questions are:
1) Was there anything that we as players did that completely surprised you in regards to how we handled the event? Not counting the Indorani!
1a) As a follow-up, was there something you expected beyond a shadow of a doubt but nobody even touched or tried to do?
2) Did the formation of 'the Accord' change your plans in any fashion?
1a) There was pieces of lore/things we expected people to ask Lobyl that they didn't. We'll find a way to release the information we had planned there at a later date. I'm partial to the idea of a Grand Library monk publishing 'An Interview with the Ankyrean' work at some point, where said monk had interviewed Lobyl before his ascension.
2) Not really - we expected cities to work together as they had in the past for such global events. THAT SAID: I don't think we've ever witnessed it formalized like this before and it made us all really happy to see it come together. It was an awesome player-instigated roleplay, and everybody involved in its concept and formation deserves a lot of praise. We liked it so much we made sure to give a nod to the Accord in the 'fought Daimoxoth' honours line.
u can all have one sticker each @Diogen @Kyna @Antehe @Nils @Raah @Tedrunai @Silena @Ceraen @Tiur @Razmael