Miracle Live! School Idol Roleplay (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
miraclelivemod) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
miracleliveooc2022-04-03 09:38 am
miraclelivemod) wrote in miracleliveooc2022-04-03 09:38 am
Postmortem and Feedback Post
This was not the post I intended to make today with this account. As you'll all know from the mod plurk and the Discord, Miracle Live! School Idol Roleplay failed to meet the minimum number of applications submitted by the planned start date. The scope of the game was kept small, with a plan for 5-10 characters and running with as many as 15, but in the end we got one app and two reserves.
I still want to run the game someday, and I'd like some feedback as to what caused the drop in interest and how the game could survive if and when it does return. Like with the Dress Rehearsal's feedback post, I'll list the things I know or suspect might have been problems.
Too much wait time between the mock week and the game. The Dress Rehearsal was run in November and the game was meant to start the following April. Because mock weeks are intended to both test out the game and generate buzz for it, this probably ended up with the hype going nowhere and withering away. This was probably inevitable as I couldn't have run it in the December-January "dead zone" where many DWRPers drop off in activity and short-term games almost never run, but having the mock week closer to the game might have sustained the excitement; I'd tried to with the TDM, but it had no bites. Which leads into the next one:
Poor timing for the game. At least two murdergames are running at present with more planned to be held during the planned course of April to July, and while genre-wise you wouldn't think a happy idol game would be competition, most of my friends and most people into short-term games in general are part of one or both sides of the murdergame circuit. While it's tempting to point out that I had the dates first, these games were still known well in advance and I could have changed the Miracle Live dates.
The only thing stopping me from doing so is the DWRP convention of running a game in real time and mirroring the dates in the real world. Different time/date ratios are often a dealbreaker for players looking for a new game, and in at least one case there were even complaints about a game being set in the Southern Hemisphere because players had to keep reminding themselves that it should be winter in July. Because the story of Miracle Live is based around the Japanese school system and school year, with school beginning in April and the Love Live in summer, I had aimed to run the game at those dates in real-world time to avoid confusion. If anybody has opinions about that either way, please let me know.
It wasn't the kind of game people were looking for. There's no doubt that AU games are unpopular, and I knew from the start that this would be niche. There were still a number of people interested who didn't end up apping or even reserving, and I do believe that we need risky niche games back in the DWRP ecosystem, but it's still a factor.
Poor advertising. This is a private game to my friendlist, but advertising is still important to RP, and let's face it: I'm not good at it. When I last modded, we did things like promoting games in other games' chats (which today would be pretty obnoxious) and in non-RP-related fan communities for the series we wanted to grow casts for (which no one would do today), so I might be a little out of touch. And in a time where we're seeing a lot of passion projects fail to launch or stay afloat, it's important to be noticed. If anyone has input or help with that, it'd be great!
One mod. You all know how much I multitask and take on at once, but I've found that even small games have succeeded with two or three mods. Having a mod PC also might have sparked interest in apps or the TDM, as there was in the Dress Rehearsal, and I'd held off on that because I was already going to be running a lot of NPCs, both students at the school and rival school idols, and Wakaba in particular was going to be a constant fixture in the story. Hiring on a second mod might have been a better plan.
Comments on these or any other factors would be appreciated, especially when would be a good time to try again and what changes could be made to the game. Thank you all, whether you apped, showed interest, or just wanted to spectate. I still have hope that someday, we can turn one into two and then into more. Until then, see you, school idols.
I still want to run the game someday, and I'd like some feedback as to what caused the drop in interest and how the game could survive if and when it does return. Like with the Dress Rehearsal's feedback post, I'll list the things I know or suspect might have been problems.
Too much wait time between the mock week and the game. The Dress Rehearsal was run in November and the game was meant to start the following April. Because mock weeks are intended to both test out the game and generate buzz for it, this probably ended up with the hype going nowhere and withering away. This was probably inevitable as I couldn't have run it in the December-January "dead zone" where many DWRPers drop off in activity and short-term games almost never run, but having the mock week closer to the game might have sustained the excitement; I'd tried to with the TDM, but it had no bites. Which leads into the next one:
Poor timing for the game. At least two murdergames are running at present with more planned to be held during the planned course of April to July, and while genre-wise you wouldn't think a happy idol game would be competition, most of my friends and most people into short-term games in general are part of one or both sides of the murdergame circuit. While it's tempting to point out that I had the dates first, these games were still known well in advance and I could have changed the Miracle Live dates.
The only thing stopping me from doing so is the DWRP convention of running a game in real time and mirroring the dates in the real world. Different time/date ratios are often a dealbreaker for players looking for a new game, and in at least one case there were even complaints about a game being set in the Southern Hemisphere because players had to keep reminding themselves that it should be winter in July. Because the story of Miracle Live is based around the Japanese school system and school year, with school beginning in April and the Love Live in summer, I had aimed to run the game at those dates in real-world time to avoid confusion. If anybody has opinions about that either way, please let me know.
It wasn't the kind of game people were looking for. There's no doubt that AU games are unpopular, and I knew from the start that this would be niche. There were still a number of people interested who didn't end up apping or even reserving, and I do believe that we need risky niche games back in the DWRP ecosystem, but it's still a factor.
Poor advertising. This is a private game to my friendlist, but advertising is still important to RP, and let's face it: I'm not good at it. When I last modded, we did things like promoting games in other games' chats (which today would be pretty obnoxious) and in non-RP-related fan communities for the series we wanted to grow casts for (which no one would do today), so I might be a little out of touch. And in a time where we're seeing a lot of passion projects fail to launch or stay afloat, it's important to be noticed. If anyone has input or help with that, it'd be great!
One mod. You all know how much I multitask and take on at once, but I've found that even small games have succeeded with two or three mods. Having a mod PC also might have sparked interest in apps or the TDM, as there was in the Dress Rehearsal, and I'd held off on that because I was already going to be running a lot of NPCs, both students at the school and rival school idols, and Wakaba in particular was going to be a constant fixture in the story. Hiring on a second mod might have been a better plan.
Comments on these or any other factors would be appreciated, especially when would be a good time to try again and what changes could be made to the game. Thank you all, whether you apped, showed interest, or just wanted to spectate. I still have hope that someday, we can turn one into two and then into more. Until then, see you, school idols.