User blog:Flamefang/Lilith's Letter Phase One Termination

Given the current conditions I find Lilith's Letter to be in, I have decided to officially begin the shutdown of Phase One to allow us to proceed into Phase Two. Not a single one of the twelve teams fully completed their mission, though three came close and a few others made significant progress. A number failed to move anywhere at all, and remain the largest disappointment so far encountered on this project. Since none actually completed, I'll be separating the teams into one of three categories. Missions close to completion, will be edited insofar as is necessary to allow them to complete, and will be therefore considered "Completed" from there on. Missions that made progress but failed to come close to completion will be considered "dropped" and all members remaining will be considered to have returned to their point of origin, having taken with them any objects, characters, or information they acquired. The final category, will contain teams that "failed" or failed to make significant progress whatsoever. From there, whatever each team acquired will be displayed publically, though will also be separated by faction (Camp or Broken Covenant) to serve a purpose I will mention later on. The results of this separation will be displayed on the Campaign Status page. At present, I have no start date for Phase Two, though I expect you should see its release before the summers' end.

Lessons Learned
Overall, this first phase served its primary purpose which was to create a platform upon which Phase Two can be built, as well as to test the waters and allow me to glean as much information as possible about how people react to this method of roleplay. Some of what I learned still baffles me, for example I still don't understand why some of the teams suddenly stopped posting in unison, and why others saw members seemingly purposefully derailing the mission. Yet, from what I do know, I think I can create a stronger second phase that caters to a greater variety of interests here on the wiki. Given some misunderstandings and miscommunications throughout the length of Phase One, I also intend to write a small user-friendly guide to how things work in the campaign. On the individual level, I was very impressed by some users, though I was also a little disappointed to see a low level of cooperation between users in unraveling mysteries and solving puzzles. I recognize that there is little I can do to remedy this, besides encouraging it, and so we'll simply have to see if things improve on their own in that field. There were some other things, however, that stood out as particularly bothersome and I'll take a little time to address them below.

1. I noted this before, but a lot of Demigods seem to act way out of character once they exit camp. Killing and subjugating mortals probably shouldn't be commonplace, and nor should blatant and unnecessary actions likely to alert mortal authorities. You may be a demigod, but that doesn't give you permission to be a total jerk when you're outside authority.

2. Simply saying "I don't know" has been something of a problem on a few quests, and serves as a way for users to get around being creative and coming up with an answer to something I placed before them. If I go out of my way to show you something, or bring forward a character, users should go out of their way to accomodate that action. I can't make things happen unless you let me.

3. Randomly appearing and disappearing. Some users seemed to think that it was fine to stop editing, unannounced, and returned later expecting no reprocussions. Situations like this were dealt with on a case by case basis, though really shouldn't have to be dealt with at all. If you need to leave the team, make it clear that you are doing so and do so permanently. You can't inconvenience your entire team just because you're going away for the next week or so, and then come back whining for an open spot. This will not be tolerated in the future.

This brings me to the final section of this blog.

Reprocussions
A staggeringly high number of users elected to leave or simply stop editing on their teams. Some because they left the wiki entirely, and there's nothing we can do about these, but many others continued to be active in other places or popped up later expecting nothing to happen. Any user who did any of these things is forbidden from participating in the next phase with more than one character, and is also barred from recieving any Special Characters revealed during this phase at the end of the campaign. There are a few instances where I would perhaps consider lenience with these rules, however I cannot afford to make exceptions lest they undermine their severity.

In conclusion, I hope to have the second phase to you as soon as possible. Please look for updates to the Campaign Status page.