Postmortem and Feedback Post

[miraclelivemod]

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.

Comments

[saltedcarmel]

for me it was mainly poor timing. i think march-april is heavy on work for a lot of people but also, like you mentioned, the same short-term game crowd who would be into this might be currently in a murdergame since there's several happening around this time.

as for what might help, i think maybe letting people have a +1 or hiring on a second mod so that the pool of potential applicants is a little wider? it being a small, private game is great but i've generally seen that they do better when the applicant pool is slightly wider than exactly one person's timeline. even for the relatively small size of players that miracle live is going for.

&heart; still super interested in this concept and hope it succeeds but sometimes timing's just weird.

[sunshade]

+1, basically

I was holding off to concentrate on Ars Arcana, but since you were gonna do rolling apps, I was planning on sending someone in later.

Also seconding maybe another mod or opening up +1s. I'm def still interested in the concept!!

[miraclelivemod]

You both raise valid points. Heck, I'm in Ars Arcana myself, I just have a habit of balancing a million things at once (flashbacks to 2009 and being in seven games), and I know it's hard to do. The main reason I didn't change the dates when these higher-profile games were announced to overlap was for the IC time to match the OOC time. What would people think of the game running at a different time but still taking place from April through July in-universe? Or would it be too confusing?

[nmc0204]

Hey! As someone who was interested in ML and played in the mock week, I wanted to give some feedback on how (imo) the game can properly launch later down the line. I'll format my feedback similarly to the main post!

From my own perspective, the issues that hampered ML's ability to launch were as follows:

I agree with the main body of the post that poor timing and advertising likely did a big number on the game's chances of launching properly. Sicking so strictly to matching IC dates to OOC dates was a mistake and isn't really necessary to run a game like ML. Players can probably keep up with a differing IC calendar so long as they have a reference point, so it's fine to have the OOC timeframe of the game fall outside of that. As for advertisement, I think it would do a huge amount for the game to simply make use of the mod plurk more, either to circulate semi-regular interest checks or converse with players. I noticed that, looking at the mod plurk, important announcements were rarely replurked and there was a dead time of several months between the dress rehearsal and main round announcements. Just being more vocal about the game in official mod channels would do a lot, I think!

Aside from that, I think a big part of the game's struggle to take off is simply that it's quite niche. I don't know if I agree with the assertion that AU games are unpopular, but even without the AU angle, a purely slice of life idol game was always going to be a hard sell – particularly given that it's a small, private game exclusive to the head mod's plurklist. I agree with R that expanding the application pool by allowing +1s and potentially having a second mod would do a great deal to point more eyes towards the game.

In terms of sustaining interest, I would also suggest expanding on the setting and AU details, as well as some of the mechanical ones. Currently, the info pages feel a bit sparse in places and while that works fine for the dress rehearsal, it would help interested players a lot to have more of an idea of what day to day life in game would be like. For example – how would characters be getting involved with the idol club? What if someone wanted to app a character who would be hesitant to get involved with the idol club, like an Eli or Kanan type? What space would there be in the game for latecoming characters, or characters who don't immediately join the club? Giving players a stronger impression of this sort of thing gives them a better foundation for being able to imagine their characters in the game and I think it would help for getting people hooked into the AU.

Other misc things I think could be useful to expand on are TDM prompts, as the TDM entry itself is currently a bit sparse, as well as beefing out the setting info to give a stronger impression of daily life in the game world.

Ultimately, I think ML is always going to be a rather niche game and even assuming it relaunches with a perfect record, it still may not land. That's unfortunately the risk with niche games like this, but I am still super invested in ML as a concept and would love to see it succeed. Here's hoping for the future!