##Vote: Gaelicat
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Big Viva la Fantasia Mafia - Game Over! Storm Squadron and Hope Bearers win!
- Thread starter ariariadne
- Start date
Alice Kazumi is the GOAT of all time and deserves to be listened to always
As mentioned on the Discord, the game has been declared over, and the Storm Squadron and Hope Bearers are the winners! I will have a more elaborate postgame tomorrow (funnily enough, I am currently watching a friend play Final Fantasy VII for the first time) and post the remaining role PMs. Possibly a VC at some time if people want to do that? Thank you to everyone who played, the activity made me really happy and I hope you all had fun most of all! And thanks a million to Tommy for helping me with my first Smogon main-hosted game.
Surprisingly I have quite a bit to say about this game given that I was only really active for one cycle out of six and didn't do a whole lot for my team overall. I was initially interested to see how this game would play out since on the surface it looked very similar to the setup of MRM2 but without the long list of complex mechanics and priority power creep that made planning actions so tedious and difficult. In general I think moving towards less powerful and complicated roles is the direction a lot of us would like to continue seeing for future OC games. Nevertheless I think there were a few critical game design issues that really held the experience back for me. These were:
Finally going back to that vote, I will continue to contend that the Road Warriors have no right to blame us for our choice to stay neutral. They offered us NOTHING and gave us very little time to adequately weigh in which choice would be better for us long term. Contrary to what is being stated, this isn't simple math. Both choices were shitty for us since they were our allies, and it is a fact that for all our reservations about him, zorbees had kept his promises and offered us both a recruit (phoopes) and also attempted a JK to protect him. Our team was completely fucked over and had no other prospects. No KP, no real defensive role, no permanent info role, NOTHING. No outcome of that vote other than a Storm death had any real meaningful chance of getting us a comeback.
Almost forgot to say this in closing but I do want to thank Tommy and ria for hosting this game. They were polite, punctual, and also kept the game free of any major mistakes with resolving actions, and I don't really think you can ask for more.
- The aggressors were overall way too strong relative to all the other job types. This game has an HP system which effectively means all factional kills are 1/3, yet multiple aggressor FLs were 2/3. Simply put, having the majority of the killing power in this game in the hands of FLs instead of factions is a very poor balance choice which can easily result in one faction snowballing from early recruitment of one of these roles and a near mechanical impossibility for the weaker factions to mount any reasonable comeback. I don't know the power of some of the other healing roles but the one our faction had could only heal one HP of damage and at low priority, making it absolutely fucking useless despite the fact that we had used it on two players that were targeted for kills. For all of our complaints about MRM1's balance, the distribution of these roles at least made sense as most extra kills outside of the factional required certain conditions to be met or had a limited number of uses like as part of a JOAT role. In that game, Grass was appropriately punished both mechanically and diplomatically for wasting all of their extra kills to bully one faction early in the game, so when I got recruited onto Trance I was cautiously optimistic that our enemies would not be able to continue raining so many kills on us as they had earlier, but my assumption was proven to be naive. Finally the fact that this game ended this quickly (even accounting for the fact that it it was called early) further demonstrates that there were simply way too many kills flying around with too few restrictions in how they could be used.
- I still don't know why we started off with siloed job servers when the FLTopia faction/wincon, the most fun and innovative aspect of MRM2, wasn't carried over to this game. Without this being a thing there was not much room for any interesting or meaningful conversation to be had in the servers or in the public game chat. Instead the server chats were effectively destined to be dead unless some interactions between multiple factions could be arranged through the pregame recruits. With my role especially this made the first half of the game very dull as I just sat and idled for three cycles. The silos also exacerbated the snowbally nature of the game as I mentioned above since this meant that not all factions had an equal shot at getting claims / recruits at a baseline like they otherwise would in a typical recruitment style game.
- Some of this is my personal salt but given the above point, it was especially aggravating to see such a wide disparity in overall role strength even among the same job types. It just feels insulting to see that my role exists which is a really weak JOAT role (that oh so conveniently didn't have any aggressor role included) that was only an appealing recruit for Trance at all because they were so horribly boned early in the game, only to then see that the Ditto gravedigger role also existed right next to me. I think some amount of disparity in role strength is ok but in general, this is something that I have always disliked about most recruitment style multifaction games since this meant that as a FL you had very little agency when you have a weak role, doubly so with the silos. Again, this is exactly the type of design problem that was solved with MRM2's FLTopia game design. Yeah, I get that FLTopia effectively made MRM2 feel more like a TvM at heart, but perhaps like Yeti I also just prefer the TvM format to this one for these reasons.
Finally going back to that vote, I will continue to contend that the Road Warriors have no right to blame us for our choice to stay neutral. They offered us NOTHING and gave us very little time to adequately weigh in which choice would be better for us long term. Contrary to what is being stated, this isn't simple math. Both choices were shitty for us since they were our allies, and it is a fact that for all our reservations about him, zorbees had kept his promises and offered us both a recruit (phoopes) and also attempted a JK to protect him. Our team was completely fucked over and had no other prospects. No KP, no real defensive role, no permanent info role, NOTHING. No outcome of that vote other than a Storm death had any real meaningful chance of getting us a comeback.
Almost forgot to say this in closing but I do want to thank Tommy and ria for hosting this game. They were polite, punctual, and also kept the game free of any major mistakes with resolving actions, and I don't really think you can ask for more.
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We got crunked by KP we had no ability to deal with and no ability to recruit because our leader didn't elect to go into the Aggressor server and recruit - which I don't fault him for at all. I fault the game design making job servers for that. Also didn't put in as much effort as Storm/Hope and it played out accordingly - which is why I just don't enjoy multifactions. Where one team simply never stands a chance if its sweat doesn't overperform what effort they want to put into a game.
GG to Storm/Hope for their work in the win! It was a dominating performance... assisted by some unfortunate freelancer rands our way lol
Bum allies didn't come up for us on both votes - another reason multis are inferior. Your wincon is entirely dependent on at least one ally being there for you and they often just aren't. It's hilarious when it's to their own detriment to have failed you but pyrrhic victories are about all I get if I don't pour hours into multifactions lol.
Trance can lament we didn't offer them enough or talk to them but fairy was equally uncommunicative with us and that is kind of exactly my point - neither team put in the sauce to talk for hours and both teams lost accordingly. I just don't find that dynamic fun anymore, over the solving or deception (mandatory deception, not lying to your allies because you're mentally bankrupt) of TvM.
Grousing aside I personally don't think this game deserves to have been the one to kill my MF drive, though it did unplug the life support machine. At least my organs can be donated now. This was a well-hosted game by ria and Tommy and I think the roles were overall fairly balanced... although I didn't read most of the role PMs lmao. I suppose the existence of KP-additional roles when factional kills couldn't even kill on their own, and gating them behind a server not everyone can talk to, is a rather glaring issue, but KP FLers are not usually such a fatal flaw.
The main issue here is that this game was a Viva, a multifaction subgenre oriented around recruitment and assembling one's own team, deception to other recruiters, trusting you'll get picked up or playing to your own benefit until you are, and the servers completely removed that element of it. Recruiters didn't pubclaim, there was no real choice to where about half the game went because they were randed (or a pre-N0), whoever went to the Aggressor server had big ups on the others due to the way KP worked.
This game attempted to take one of the most successful elements of MRM2, the job servers, and transplant it 1:1 here, while removing what precisely made the job servers successful - there was something to solve for or work towards as a freelancer. FLtopia was a realistic win con and by Sam's overly-rigid design a necessity to happen. In this game there was no such thing thus the servers were largely idle (mine was, which was not inspiring for me) and overly restrictive. We didn't find good contact with Exalted until C3 and we could have found Alice much sooner if we shared a server with her due to knowing she was not a FL.
If FLtopia is not a realistic option, no future viva should have job servers imo. The attempt to replicate a good element of another game fell very flat here imo, and that's the only design choice I'll fault the hosts for making. And I understand why they did it, but they wound up taking away the proper earlygame interactions of a viva and provided nothing in exchange. Unfortunate.
Like I said well-hosted with no mistakes that I saw and I think the roles/setup were well-designed. Props to ria for a successful first Big hosting!
Thanks Ecat for the name recruit <3 you're always a pleasure to play with! Our team was not particularly active (and lost accordingly) but were a nice bunch. Need more engagement in a multi if you want a better win.
Also lmao @ the FLers who voted for Judge and got recruited to teams that lost due to that vote get good kids and don't vote for the dominant factions' benefits until you're actually on their teams.
GG to Storm/Hope for their work in the win! It was a dominating performance... assisted by some unfortunate freelancer rands our way lol
Bum allies didn't come up for us on both votes - another reason multis are inferior. Your wincon is entirely dependent on at least one ally being there for you and they often just aren't. It's hilarious when it's to their own detriment to have failed you but pyrrhic victories are about all I get if I don't pour hours into multifactions lol.
Trance can lament we didn't offer them enough or talk to them but fairy was equally uncommunicative with us and that is kind of exactly my point - neither team put in the sauce to talk for hours and both teams lost accordingly. I just don't find that dynamic fun anymore, over the solving or deception (mandatory deception, not lying to your allies because you're mentally bankrupt) of TvM.
Grousing aside I personally don't think this game deserves to have been the one to kill my MF drive, though it did unplug the life support machine. At least my organs can be donated now. This was a well-hosted game by ria and Tommy and I think the roles were overall fairly balanced... although I didn't read most of the role PMs lmao. I suppose the existence of KP-additional roles when factional kills couldn't even kill on their own, and gating them behind a server not everyone can talk to, is a rather glaring issue, but KP FLers are not usually such a fatal flaw.
The main issue here is that this game was a Viva, a multifaction subgenre oriented around recruitment and assembling one's own team, deception to other recruiters, trusting you'll get picked up or playing to your own benefit until you are, and the servers completely removed that element of it. Recruiters didn't pubclaim, there was no real choice to where about half the game went because they were randed (or a pre-N0), whoever went to the Aggressor server had big ups on the others due to the way KP worked.
This game attempted to take one of the most successful elements of MRM2, the job servers, and transplant it 1:1 here, while removing what precisely made the job servers successful - there was something to solve for or work towards as a freelancer. FLtopia was a realistic win con and by Sam's overly-rigid design a necessity to happen. In this game there was no such thing thus the servers were largely idle (mine was, which was not inspiring for me) and overly restrictive. We didn't find good contact with Exalted until C3 and we could have found Alice much sooner if we shared a server with her due to knowing she was not a FL.
If FLtopia is not a realistic option, no future viva should have job servers imo. The attempt to replicate a good element of another game fell very flat here imo, and that's the only design choice I'll fault the hosts for making. And I understand why they did it, but they wound up taking away the proper earlygame interactions of a viva and provided nothing in exchange. Unfortunate.
Like I said well-hosted with no mistakes that I saw and I think the roles/setup were well-designed. Props to ria for a successful first Big hosting!
Thanks Ecat for the name recruit <3 you're always a pleasure to play with! Our team was not particularly active (and lost accordingly) but were a nice bunch. Need more engagement in a multi if you want a better win.
Also lmao @ the FLers who voted for Judge and got recruited to teams that lost due to that vote get good kids and don't vote for the dominant factions' benefits until you're actually on their teams.
alright i lied when i said i might wait a little to write more of my feelings about things
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A couple things about this game's general philosophy, with regards to design:
1. The number one goal with this game was making sure things were a relatively simple experience. I had fun with both of the recruitment games since revival, but I found the process of planning during MRM2 to be pretty much exhausting once we got to have a massive number of people in the united server. It was extremely important to me that most roles were simple to understand and plan for, both for the sake of players, and because I don't really like resolving overly complex games. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this aspect of the game went, and I'm glad that this was something players seemed to really appreciate too.
2. I completely agree with the sentiment that the Job servers were pretty stranded in their purpose without the dream of Freelancer unification (and commented this in the informed chat as early as Cycle 1 I believe). To me, I really enjoyed the Framer server experience during the earlygame of MRM2, and found it to be less intimidating when not expected to have to be chatting up everyone during the earlygame, but that was probably naive to expect when nobody besides the people with a factional already had a definite "goal" within their servers, and really ended up backfiring and exacerbating the feeling of having little impact being a freelancer early in this type of game.
If I had a redo of any aspect of this setup, getting rid of Job servers would be my #1 change, and it's honestly not particularly close. I would probably have included Jobs in a smaller form still because I like the idea of grouped roles and they're a staple of Final Fantasy, but they would have been different overall.
3. Some people have expressed that damage was really high, but to be honest, server issues aside, I'm not that disappointed with how Aggressors turned out as a Job. I think the fault lies in that this game was pretty thin in regards to defensive options. We were really worried that without normal kills, the game might end up dragging on longer than intended, so we distributed roles that could help with damage not only with the various Aggressors, but also every other Job had at least one role that could help there. As a result, damage was in plentiful supply.
On the other hand, this setup only had 4 full-time roles that actually entirely blocked damage, which made the surplus of damage pretty hard to deal with. In retrospect, I would likely have cut back on the amount of heals (especially the low priority ones), added a few more direct protection roles so that there could be proper defensive counterplay, and let some roles be a bit more abstract if we had removed Job servers and didn't need to have strict classifications. Alternatively, I am not sure if this setup would have been better if no roles were changed at all, but job servers were removed and everyone had 4 HP to start with to have longer survivability without needing to adjust multiple defensive roles. Food for thought, I suppose.
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On the starting roles:
Faction leaders: I wanted to keep these as a constant within each group and instead let their first recruit roles be what gave each team their own little flavor. One downside was that this made a lot of cool characters have kind of boring roles, but oh well. For the personal powers, I chose an inspect because I think every faction having the ability to find enemies/potential recruits/etc is important. I thought about every leader having some sort of choice of various minor powers (not dissimilar to sam's game), but out of a desire to keep things cleaner and not box out too many potential roles, I settled with mayor for each of them. Faction leaders in the other two games suffered from being entirely pointless (ipl's game)/relatively worse (sam's) to actually kill off themselves because of almost all of their power was in factional abilities. Mayor seemed like a reasonable incentive to attack in order to wrestle control of the vote when things got complicated midgame (which they kinda didn't, but I don't have a problem with how I set these up).
First recruit roles: A few people (Former I know specifically called this out) correctly identified that these roles were intended to be standouts among their Job. I think three of them ended up in a reasonably powerful spot with Squall, Cecil, and Zidane, although the latter two basically died instantly, which was unfortunate. Lightning was definitely too strong, and even though it won, I agree with bluedoom's statement that Tidus ended up being the weakest of these roles. Tidus could probably have just protected for 3 HP and been fine, although I'm not really sure what I would have done for Lightning to adjust it offhand (maybe some sort of debuff instead of that being on Ultimecia). I made a change to Cecil on Cycle 0 because I had wanted to make that edit before the game started and just kind of forgot. As it turned out, it performed no actions all game, so it really didn't matter.
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On some individual Freelancer roles that I have further comments on, in no particular order other than I am putting the one I am most annoyed by first:
Bartz (skip): Oops! So this role lead to a lot of confusion in a way that wasn't really to much benefit. First of all, the real time component of the recruitment denial ended up being really frustrating for Hope Bearers while they were waiting to find out what it meant that they didn't get a recruit right away. Secondly, this role seemed to be one where the flavor of Freelancer being a useful Job in the context of FF5 bled into the actual function of the role a bit too much, and people mistook this role for having specific benefits for staying a Freelancer besides the inherent freedom of being able to choose a side later (which, to be honest, maybe isn't suited for this type of game in the first place). Third of all, and this isn't entirely related to the gameplay itself, it was probably a mistake to have an alias named Warrior as well as a faction named The Road Warriors AND an alias named Mimic which is what this role's ability was called. In hindsight, I think letting this role having editable conditions for letting it be recruited by certain factions would have made it work smoothly while preserving the spirit of the role.
Crono (internet): Former said he thinks Lightning (his role) was the strongest, but this has my vote for it. Motivating one ability sure adds a lot when quite a few roles only really HAD one ability that made up either the majority or entirety of their power budget. Adding on the super high priority one-shot ability on top of that was probably a bit much.
Sarah (C7): So I don't hate this role overall, but I think it's symptomatic of this game's issues that it was stuck in the Defenders server but with no way of saving teammates from actual damage. It's more of a Support role, but really the game would have been better off with a doctor variant. Oh well.
Balthier (Bass): I don't think this role is as bad as Bass says in his above post, but I do think it suffered from being made fairly early when we were not entirely settled on the direction of where the setup was headed (and, in particular, had not locked in on every recruiter having an inspect). I would probably have combined the rogue + inspect abilities and gave it something else, although it probably wouldn't have been damage because I wanted it to be distinct from Freya.
Sora (realiti): I think this was a fun role overall, but we should have constrained it to actually having to mix up its options rather than allow it to just kinda bounce back and forth between two options. That would've been a pretty simple fix to it that would've made a lot of sense to me.
Freya (sunny): So why was this jack of all trades not an All-Arounder? Well, it started off as one, but that relates to us not wanting to overcentralize the damaging roles in Aggressors and All-Arounders. Since the other 3 abilities all fell under the umbrella of the Support server, I felt it was appropriate to move there when we were shifting a few roles around while downsizing.
Ardyn (fairy): I actually stealth buffed this role Cycle 0 because Tommy's original intention was that this role would only get Starscourge if it successfully healed up damage, which I thought made the role total ass. The wording was a bit ambiguous, so I didn't even mention this to fairy, just gave her a point with her C0 result and resolved it as it worked before. I still think this role kind of sucked and I should probably have given it a closer look before game started.
Vayne (rssp) and Ignis (LN): These were by far the roles that gave me the most headaches in terms of resolving actions. zorbees and the Hope Bearers also asked questions about how LN's role worked a LOT, often in complex scenarios, not helped by the fact that LN initially told them how his role worked slightly differently than how it actually functioned, so they were asking for things that we hadn't really prepared for in terms of setup design. Vayne was a bit subtler but safeguards can honestly just be super messy, especially because it wasn't necessarily obvious what counted as a positive or negative action in some cases. Thanks to Nuxl and euklyd from eimm for helping me resolve some issues with these on Cycle 4/5 lol
Yuna (Celever): This role was not-stealth buffed Cycle 0, and honestly still ended up relatively weak I think. This role ended up being edited a bit late because Tommy wanted to keep Yuna instead of Seymour when we were downsizing from 40 to 35 players.
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On player gameplay:
Yeah so to be honest I don't really enjoy going that deep into this. It's sooooo easy for a host to say what the correct play should be when they have the most omniscient view of the game in terms of actions but aren't really diving deep into conversations (even if I could see all of them, I ain't got time for all that). I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't do ANY sort of snippy comments during the game, but I think it would be neither interesting nor productive to do some in-depth grilling of people for their play after the fact.
I do think that Storm Squadron and Hope Bearers played well with seeking out Freelancers with useful roles, as well as coordinating with each other very consistently to maximize their actions. If there is one broader lesson to be taken from gameplay, I think there's a cautionary tale with regards to placing trust in factions before actually being recruited. For Cycle 3 in particular, a lot of people ended up surprised where they landed, and then an opposing faction had a lot of information about them, as well as some of them having directly hurt the faction they would be recruited to! Something to consider for future Freelance gamers.
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Closing thoughts:
For anyone who missed it, the game sheet and role PMs are linked in the announcements of the main Discord. I'll be keeping that server and the faction servers around for posterity, but if you have anything you want to save from the Job servers for whatever reason, do so before I close them tomorrow because those were pretty quiet. I think I will be running some sort of postgame call this Thursday at 5 Eastern (same time as deadlines were), so be there if you wanna chat about things. As for my hosting, I will probably host a more traditional TVM game in the future, but I'm not in any particular rush- I'll figure it out when the right inspiration strikes for me.
I think that's all I got for right now. Thanks again to everyone!
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A couple things about this game's general philosophy, with regards to design:
1. The number one goal with this game was making sure things were a relatively simple experience. I had fun with both of the recruitment games since revival, but I found the process of planning during MRM2 to be pretty much exhausting once we got to have a massive number of people in the united server. It was extremely important to me that most roles were simple to understand and plan for, both for the sake of players, and because I don't really like resolving overly complex games. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this aspect of the game went, and I'm glad that this was something players seemed to really appreciate too.
2. I completely agree with the sentiment that the Job servers were pretty stranded in their purpose without the dream of Freelancer unification (and commented this in the informed chat as early as Cycle 1 I believe). To me, I really enjoyed the Framer server experience during the earlygame of MRM2, and found it to be less intimidating when not expected to have to be chatting up everyone during the earlygame, but that was probably naive to expect when nobody besides the people with a factional already had a definite "goal" within their servers, and really ended up backfiring and exacerbating the feeling of having little impact being a freelancer early in this type of game.
If I had a redo of any aspect of this setup, getting rid of Job servers would be my #1 change, and it's honestly not particularly close. I would probably have included Jobs in a smaller form still because I like the idea of grouped roles and they're a staple of Final Fantasy, but they would have been different overall.
3. Some people have expressed that damage was really high, but to be honest, server issues aside, I'm not that disappointed with how Aggressors turned out as a Job. I think the fault lies in that this game was pretty thin in regards to defensive options. We were really worried that without normal kills, the game might end up dragging on longer than intended, so we distributed roles that could help with damage not only with the various Aggressors, but also every other Job had at least one role that could help there. As a result, damage was in plentiful supply.
On the other hand, this setup only had 4 full-time roles that actually entirely blocked damage, which made the surplus of damage pretty hard to deal with. In retrospect, I would likely have cut back on the amount of heals (especially the low priority ones), added a few more direct protection roles so that there could be proper defensive counterplay, and let some roles be a bit more abstract if we had removed Job servers and didn't need to have strict classifications. Alternatively, I am not sure if this setup would have been better if no roles were changed at all, but job servers were removed and everyone had 4 HP to start with to have longer survivability without needing to adjust multiple defensive roles. Food for thought, I suppose.
-
On the starting roles:
Faction leaders: I wanted to keep these as a constant within each group and instead let their first recruit roles be what gave each team their own little flavor. One downside was that this made a lot of cool characters have kind of boring roles, but oh well. For the personal powers, I chose an inspect because I think every faction having the ability to find enemies/potential recruits/etc is important. I thought about every leader having some sort of choice of various minor powers (not dissimilar to sam's game), but out of a desire to keep things cleaner and not box out too many potential roles, I settled with mayor for each of them. Faction leaders in the other two games suffered from being entirely pointless (ipl's game)/relatively worse (sam's) to actually kill off themselves because of almost all of their power was in factional abilities. Mayor seemed like a reasonable incentive to attack in order to wrestle control of the vote when things got complicated midgame (which they kinda didn't, but I don't have a problem with how I set these up).
First recruit roles: A few people (Former I know specifically called this out) correctly identified that these roles were intended to be standouts among their Job. I think three of them ended up in a reasonably powerful spot with Squall, Cecil, and Zidane, although the latter two basically died instantly, which was unfortunate. Lightning was definitely too strong, and even though it won, I agree with bluedoom's statement that Tidus ended up being the weakest of these roles. Tidus could probably have just protected for 3 HP and been fine, although I'm not really sure what I would have done for Lightning to adjust it offhand (maybe some sort of debuff instead of that being on Ultimecia). I made a change to Cecil on Cycle 0 because I had wanted to make that edit before the game started and just kind of forgot. As it turned out, it performed no actions all game, so it really didn't matter.
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On some individual Freelancer roles that I have further comments on, in no particular order other than I am putting the one I am most annoyed by first:
Bartz (skip): Oops! So this role lead to a lot of confusion in a way that wasn't really to much benefit. First of all, the real time component of the recruitment denial ended up being really frustrating for Hope Bearers while they were waiting to find out what it meant that they didn't get a recruit right away. Secondly, this role seemed to be one where the flavor of Freelancer being a useful Job in the context of FF5 bled into the actual function of the role a bit too much, and people mistook this role for having specific benefits for staying a Freelancer besides the inherent freedom of being able to choose a side later (which, to be honest, maybe isn't suited for this type of game in the first place). Third of all, and this isn't entirely related to the gameplay itself, it was probably a mistake to have an alias named Warrior as well as a faction named The Road Warriors AND an alias named Mimic which is what this role's ability was called. In hindsight, I think letting this role having editable conditions for letting it be recruited by certain factions would have made it work smoothly while preserving the spirit of the role.
Crono (internet): Former said he thinks Lightning (his role) was the strongest, but this has my vote for it. Motivating one ability sure adds a lot when quite a few roles only really HAD one ability that made up either the majority or entirety of their power budget. Adding on the super high priority one-shot ability on top of that was probably a bit much.
Sarah (C7): So I don't hate this role overall, but I think it's symptomatic of this game's issues that it was stuck in the Defenders server but with no way of saving teammates from actual damage. It's more of a Support role, but really the game would have been better off with a doctor variant. Oh well.
Balthier (Bass): I don't think this role is as bad as Bass says in his above post, but I do think it suffered from being made fairly early when we were not entirely settled on the direction of where the setup was headed (and, in particular, had not locked in on every recruiter having an inspect). I would probably have combined the rogue + inspect abilities and gave it something else, although it probably wouldn't have been damage because I wanted it to be distinct from Freya.
Sora (realiti): I think this was a fun role overall, but we should have constrained it to actually having to mix up its options rather than allow it to just kinda bounce back and forth between two options. That would've been a pretty simple fix to it that would've made a lot of sense to me.
Freya (sunny): So why was this jack of all trades not an All-Arounder? Well, it started off as one, but that relates to us not wanting to overcentralize the damaging roles in Aggressors and All-Arounders. Since the other 3 abilities all fell under the umbrella of the Support server, I felt it was appropriate to move there when we were shifting a few roles around while downsizing.
Ardyn (fairy): I actually stealth buffed this role Cycle 0 because Tommy's original intention was that this role would only get Starscourge if it successfully healed up damage, which I thought made the role total ass. The wording was a bit ambiguous, so I didn't even mention this to fairy, just gave her a point with her C0 result and resolved it as it worked before. I still think this role kind of sucked and I should probably have given it a closer look before game started.
Vayne (rssp) and Ignis (LN): These were by far the roles that gave me the most headaches in terms of resolving actions. zorbees and the Hope Bearers also asked questions about how LN's role worked a LOT, often in complex scenarios, not helped by the fact that LN initially told them how his role worked slightly differently than how it actually functioned, so they were asking for things that we hadn't really prepared for in terms of setup design. Vayne was a bit subtler but safeguards can honestly just be super messy, especially because it wasn't necessarily obvious what counted as a positive or negative action in some cases. Thanks to Nuxl and euklyd from eimm for helping me resolve some issues with these on Cycle 4/5 lol
Yuna (Celever): This role was not-stealth buffed Cycle 0, and honestly still ended up relatively weak I think. This role ended up being edited a bit late because Tommy wanted to keep Yuna instead of Seymour when we were downsizing from 40 to 35 players.
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On player gameplay:
Yeah so to be honest I don't really enjoy going that deep into this. It's sooooo easy for a host to say what the correct play should be when they have the most omniscient view of the game in terms of actions but aren't really diving deep into conversations (even if I could see all of them, I ain't got time for all that). I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't do ANY sort of snippy comments during the game, but I think it would be neither interesting nor productive to do some in-depth grilling of people for their play after the fact.
I do think that Storm Squadron and Hope Bearers played well with seeking out Freelancers with useful roles, as well as coordinating with each other very consistently to maximize their actions. If there is one broader lesson to be taken from gameplay, I think there's a cautionary tale with regards to placing trust in factions before actually being recruited. For Cycle 3 in particular, a lot of people ended up surprised where they landed, and then an opposing faction had a lot of information about them, as well as some of them having directly hurt the faction they would be recruited to! Something to consider for future Freelance gamers.
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Closing thoughts:
For anyone who missed it, the game sheet and role PMs are linked in the announcements of the main Discord. I'll be keeping that server and the faction servers around for posterity, but if you have anything you want to save from the Job servers for whatever reason, do so before I close them tomorrow because those were pretty quiet. I think I will be running some sort of postgame call this Thursday at 5 Eastern (same time as deadlines were), so be there if you wanna chat about things. As for my hosting, I will probably host a more traditional TVM game in the future, but I'm not in any particular rush- I'll figure it out when the right inspiration strikes for me.
I think that's all I got for right now. Thanks again to everyone!
thank you both for hosting aria and Tommy, I had a wonderful time even if it wasn’t the best ending
It's probably worth focusing on facts when it comes to the Aggro server. Was being in it great? Yeah, one of the better ones. But let's look at when/how people were recruited:
Former - C0 Recruit for Storm
Saber - One of the last recruits of the game for Hope. Despite the fact that Zorbees started in that server.
Charlie - Only recruited (and sniped tbf) by us because we randed his alias as a cop C0.
Lechen - Recruited late in the game, after C3
AirC - Recruited early C1 (Road was in that chat starting the 2nd cycle, it's completely unfair to pretend they didn't have as much opportunity as the 2 factions that did start there)
Phoopes - Recruited late, after C3
Every single faction recruited a single aggro role, making that server nearly evenly split between all teams. No actual benefit arose from being in that chat, because the only actual intentional recruitment ended up being accidentally sniped and the rest came down to either luck, cop results or talking after the servers opened up. I think it's entirely copium to pretend that being in that chat had any sort of advantage that other teams lost out on. Ultimately, no faction was able to monopolize the damaging roles in that chat.
At best, some factions (such as Storm) lucked into getting 2 aggressors early and then made it our game plan to protect Charlie and I at all costs while simultaneously doing anything we could to deny other teams any source of damage.
Former - C0 Recruit for Storm
Saber - One of the last recruits of the game for Hope. Despite the fact that Zorbees started in that server.
Charlie - Only recruited (and sniped tbf) by us because we randed his alias as a cop C0.
Lechen - Recruited late in the game, after C3
AirC - Recruited early C1 (Road was in that chat starting the 2nd cycle, it's completely unfair to pretend they didn't have as much opportunity as the 2 factions that did start there)
Phoopes - Recruited late, after C3
Every single faction recruited a single aggro role, making that server nearly evenly split between all teams. No actual benefit arose from being in that chat, because the only actual intentional recruitment ended up being accidentally sniped and the rest came down to either luck, cop results or talking after the servers opened up. I think it's entirely copium to pretend that being in that chat had any sort of advantage that other teams lost out on. Ultimately, no faction was able to monopolize the damaging roles in that chat.
At best, some factions (such as Storm) lucked into getting 2 aggressors early and then made it our game plan to protect Charlie and I at all costs while simultaneously doing anything we could to deny other teams any source of damage.
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Thank you for the opportunity of leading a team Aria and Tommy, I'm open to try new things and I didn't expect to be a recruiter this game so it definitely was new for me. Good job and hosting this I don't think there were mistakes, it's definitely doesn't look easy to host these type of games with so many players. 
This game was a bit frustrating at times because we spent a lot of time trying to reduce a big deficit from the beginning and would have been successful at doing so if not for a big stab from our ally in C4 that I learned after the game ended
Well not only reduce but we would have been in a winning position. We can't do anything about that since storm were untouched and it was not our job to kill them . Probably the frustrating part of these type of games, you have to balance a lot of things and even after doing that sometimes it's just not on you. After playing a few multifactions a wayne brady, space war and diplomacy I learned that I vastly prefer games with clear alignments. I don't like stabbing nor being stabbed nor having to depend a lot in allies picking you over others. I played as if my group chat was my ally the whole game in both the wayne brady and the space war game and in both cases I got stabbed, one of them costing me the game and I was surprised in both.
Not everything was frustrating, I had fun talking to people even if some call me mean for pointing things out!
I would say I'm not the best negociator though
but it was fun.
I personally don't regret how we played, surely there were better decisions at times but I think our decisions were sound with our available information. However I do regret not having an active chat, it was my main wish this game and I failed to do that
. Maybe people are too busy to play this or I'm not the most enjoyable teammate to be with, I hope my next big if I end up in a team chat things are more lively!
Regarding the game balance, mechanics and stuff I don't have much to add to what Yeti and Bass said. The game was clearly a lot of hard work and is a big, you can't please everyone... it's impossible.
I will put how the game went for exalted in the spoiler, it's a bit rushed and doesn't go as in depth as I wish but read it if you want!
This game was a bit frustrating at times because we spent a lot of time trying to reduce a big deficit from the beginning and would have been successful at doing so if not for a big stab from our ally in C4 that I learned after the game ended
Well not only reduce but we would have been in a winning position. We can't do anything about that since storm were untouched and it was not our job to kill them . Probably the frustrating part of these type of games, you have to balance a lot of things and even after doing that sometimes it's just not on you. After playing a few multifactions a wayne brady, space war and diplomacy I learned that I vastly prefer games with clear alignments. I don't like stabbing nor being stabbed nor having to depend a lot in allies picking you over others. I played as if my group chat was my ally the whole game in both the wayne brady and the space war game and in both cases I got stabbed, one of them costing me the game and I was surprised in both.Not everything was frustrating, I had fun talking to people even if some call me mean for pointing things out!
I would say I'm not the best negociator though but it was fun.I personally don't regret how we played, surely there were better decisions at times but I think our decisions were sound with our available information. However I do regret not having an active chat, it was my main wish this game and I failed to do that
. Maybe people are too busy to play this or I'm not the most enjoyable teammate to be with, I hope my next big if I end up in a team chat things are more lively!Regarding the game balance, mechanics and stuff I don't have much to add to what Yeti and Bass said. The game was clearly a lot of hard work and is a big, you can't please everyone... it's impossible.
I will put how the game went for exalted in the spoiler, it's a bit rushed and doesn't go as in depth as I wish but read it if you want!
Pregame
When the game started and I got the recruiter role I was panicking because I have never done this before. I saw that my pregame recruit was a defender, a nice thing to have, so I wanted to prioritize having a couple of defenders early to have a solid team. I decided to take a random server with no recruiters because at the time I thought it was fine to have any combination with defenders. My pregame recruit was completely random from a list of players.
C0
We basically didn't do anything this cycle. My idea was to prioritize defenders as recruits so I asked Flandrs to talk to them but he went "I don't know these people" and didn't interact with the game anymore. We randed everything this cycle. There was a sentiment in my all arounder server of "being weak" but I was pretty sure that was because they had nothing to compare with and it was not a high power game.
C1
I panicked a bit when flandrs got disabled and hoped it was a random freelancer hitting us with a disruptive. We landed a recruit on Aura Guardian, a roleblocker, simple role but effective. He wasn't very active either because of being busy but I appreciate that he definitely checked things and voted with us later in the game. I decided to recruit someone active from my server so I talked to Bluedoom and Celever. Bass seemed like an enigma with one Word replies so I didn't intend to recruit him at that stage. Bluedoom rejected me for that day, I think he was already recruited by then, and celever accepted so I was happy to have him. We got lucky with out C0 actions because we scanned Lamia, a trance so we deciced to hit it and watch and hit moogle, the trance alias outed by LN, to get aliases from posible defenders/supporters.
C2
We somehow managed to kill both Lamia and Moogle which was really Good, an enemy faction starting with -2, however we lost our pregame recruit who had a revive so we were behind other factions individually. We tried to contact Bartz (warrior), the freelancer we ended up scanning but didn't got a reply. Celever and Bluedoom made contact as a start of the exalted-warriors negociations but unfortunately we would discover later that he was a mole. Fortunately since he wasn't confirmed as warrior we didn't exchange that much information with him. We defended dragon (Aura Guardian) with a no vote.
C3
Servers opened and we finally got in contact with storm. We quickly learned that both of us knew a lot of aliases from each other and started working together a bit. We discovered the moling, and also that road had no idea about bartz so we determined that he was working with hope given that he was unlikely working with trance. We thought at the time that bartz was still a freelancer so that seemed as an agreeable vote. Unfortunately that got a road warrior voted out, I tried my best to convince the freelancers to not vote judge out but we didn't know all of them and ended up falling short.
Information wise we did some progress this cycle exchanging lists with the actual road warriors and storm squadron. Our recruits attempts were lechen and ln (goblin and ghost). Unfortunately ghost would end up in hope, we prioritized goblin because we had a severe lack of kp, that would end up damaging us a lot in the future.
C4
We finally had some info on hope for this cycle so we did our best to diminish their numbers, succesfully killing rocktoise and sahagin. Unfortunately Storm sold coeurl out which had time compression on ghost and got killed before it activated. I think if that didn't happen we would end up with an solid advantage over hope, action planning for future cycles would way simpler, they relied a lot on ghost.
For the vote we just didn't get anything from road warriors on the vote of Flan so we just no voted. We didn't get a contact from trance either so we weren't going to push for a warrior vote again.
We tried to POE the last recruit with a few aliases.
C5
Our POE on the last recruit was successful and we got Realiti.
By this time we had good info on everyone and did our last attempt at winning the game. We thought monk was damaged by storm so we did 1 damage on him and 3 on thief and warrior. 3 hope kills would make them have 2 players alive, with trance half dead as well we should be winning but unfortunately that wasn't the case, Storm had already picked a side and protected warrior. We got destroyed by a warrior + ghost combo this cycle.
Not voting out storm made sense if we wanted to work with them after beating up hope but we ended up failed on doing that so it was game over.
When the game started and I got the recruiter role I was panicking because I have never done this before. I saw that my pregame recruit was a defender, a nice thing to have, so I wanted to prioritize having a couple of defenders early to have a solid team. I decided to take a random server with no recruiters because at the time I thought it was fine to have any combination with defenders. My pregame recruit was completely random from a list of players.
C0
We basically didn't do anything this cycle. My idea was to prioritize defenders as recruits so I asked Flandrs to talk to them but he went "I don't know these people" and didn't interact with the game anymore. We randed everything this cycle. There was a sentiment in my all arounder server of "being weak" but I was pretty sure that was because they had nothing to compare with and it was not a high power game.
C1
I panicked a bit when flandrs got disabled and hoped it was a random freelancer hitting us with a disruptive. We landed a recruit on Aura Guardian, a roleblocker, simple role but effective. He wasn't very active either because of being busy but I appreciate that he definitely checked things and voted with us later in the game. I decided to recruit someone active from my server so I talked to Bluedoom and Celever. Bass seemed like an enigma with one Word replies so I didn't intend to recruit him at that stage. Bluedoom rejected me for that day, I think he was already recruited by then, and celever accepted so I was happy to have him. We got lucky with out C0 actions because we scanned Lamia, a trance so we deciced to hit it and watch and hit moogle, the trance alias outed by LN, to get aliases from posible defenders/supporters.
C2
We somehow managed to kill both Lamia and Moogle which was really Good, an enemy faction starting with -2, however we lost our pregame recruit who had a revive so we were behind other factions individually. We tried to contact Bartz (warrior), the freelancer we ended up scanning but didn't got a reply. Celever and Bluedoom made contact as a start of the exalted-warriors negociations but unfortunately we would discover later that he was a mole. Fortunately since he wasn't confirmed as warrior we didn't exchange that much information with him. We defended dragon (Aura Guardian) with a no vote.
C3
Servers opened and we finally got in contact with storm. We quickly learned that both of us knew a lot of aliases from each other and started working together a bit. We discovered the moling, and also that road had no idea about bartz so we determined that he was working with hope given that he was unlikely working with trance. We thought at the time that bartz was still a freelancer so that seemed as an agreeable vote. Unfortunately that got a road warrior voted out, I tried my best to convince the freelancers to not vote judge out but we didn't know all of them and ended up falling short.
Information wise we did some progress this cycle exchanging lists with the actual road warriors and storm squadron. Our recruits attempts were lechen and ln (goblin and ghost). Unfortunately ghost would end up in hope, we prioritized goblin because we had a severe lack of kp, that would end up damaging us a lot in the future.
C4
We finally had some info on hope for this cycle so we did our best to diminish their numbers, succesfully killing rocktoise and sahagin. Unfortunately Storm sold coeurl out which had time compression on ghost and got killed before it activated. I think if that didn't happen we would end up with an solid advantage over hope, action planning for future cycles would way simpler, they relied a lot on ghost.
For the vote we just didn't get anything from road warriors on the vote of Flan so we just no voted. We didn't get a contact from trance either so we weren't going to push for a warrior vote again.
We tried to POE the last recruit with a few aliases.
C5
Our POE on the last recruit was successful and we got Realiti.
By this time we had good info on everyone and did our last attempt at winning the game. We thought monk was damaged by storm so we did 1 damage on him and 3 on thief and warrior. 3 hope kills would make them have 2 players alive, with trance half dead as well we should be winning but unfortunately that wasn't the case, Storm had already picked a side and protected warrior. We got destroyed by a warrior + ghost combo this cycle.
Not voting out storm made sense if we wanted to work with them after beating up hope but we ended up failed on doing that so it was game over.
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