route_006 | HMD | April 2012

EVALUATE MY BATTLING!

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A mod devoted entirely to Rockets would be fantastic. Maybe helming one of the NPC admins, so Rockets could request to be sent on missions and the like if they wanted? I concur that they need more infrastructure in-game, particularly since they're supposed to ICly be an organization.

This is actually something we've tried that we've all had difficulty maintaining in the end. We're looking into having a mod or two primarily on Rocket plot/duties and secondary to the other parts of moderating. Because of the way most of our Rocket Plots tend to go, it tends to work more easily when there's more collaboration instead of just assigning it all to one.

But the idea of mission requests and possibly a mission board or collaboration is a good idea! I hadn't even thought of that one.

... Weren't Rockets supposed to have missions to do every two weeks in the first place? The fact you say Plots like they've been reduced to mere plot devices for the rest of the game is really worrisome.

They should have things to do OUTSIDE of plots and you guts have totally dropped the ball on this one and just left it up to the players, which really isn't fair to Rockets.

No, rockets were meant to produce pokémon every two weeks, but because they all had to be rare-ish breeds we were allowed to handwave it.

... No, in the beginning of the game, individual Rockets had varying missions and were to receive new ones every to weeks. This was dropped for reasons that we've yet to be given.

The new thing has been essentially useless because we can just hand wave it. It would be like handwaving the gym leaders for the trainers.

Ah, fair enough, I wasn't there for initial Rocket missions.

I do think you're right on the handwaving thing though- it did make the whole thing seem a little pointless.

That's okay, they were only used for about a month. There was some really great stuff with them though. Some characters were selling Magikarp for a lot of money, others were selling Slowpoke Tail; it felt like Rockets were THERE. I was sad to see it fade away.

It's unfortunate that we can't have player owned Pokemon getting stolen, but an alternative might be NPC accounts having their Pokemon stolen or something to the effect? That way at least it feels like a real threat and it's not as hand waved...

I heard about that, admittedly I'm thinking of doing a similar idea to those admittedly- I'm just a little scared of going overboard, regardless of people telling me otherwise

They were, and that completely flopped on our end. They weren't reduced to them, but trying to jumpstart bi-weekly missions when the actual game hadn't had many plots had pushed that on the backburner. That was why we ended up deciding on putting more priority on a more game-wide plot with a heavy rocket influence to spark the activity first, to get as many individuals involved and spark rocket activity before working on the missions. We haven't abandoned the missions at all, and we plan on keeping them going. We're just trying to take on what we know we can handle first.

That sounds good on paper, but when there haven't been any signs of them since... the first month or two of the game, that's really disheartening. With four mods, even making them monthly with as few Rockets as we have can't be that hard.

And you're saying you put priority on game-wide plots, but there's been a huge lack of those overall as well, so...? I'm not really even sure what to say in regards to the missions since you guys haven't really done what you said you changed focus to from them.

That's what we're hoping our new mods will be able to help us with, but we can only know once we get started on everything. This spring, with the new team, we're basically starting afresh and changing how we work things. A lot of the changes we've implemented have just come in other ways, but now most of our focus is on the Rockets.

We're working on one right now, which we're hoping will be a decent catalyst for most of our newer changes and ways to lead how we do things in a better direction. A lot of it has been attempting something and having it either not work as planned or not work at all, but we're trying to start off with things where we have a better start in general. It's a little harder in terms of getting everyone together nowadays since Ara is at a 14 hour difference from me (and one of our newer ones is in the middle of that), as opposed to Okami and I who were just an hour apart and could plot over the phone on any given Sunday. Quite a bit of it is more subtler changes, but we want to start things off with secure footing on our parts in general. We're going to start with this and working on the input we're receiving today, and then hopefully move more progressively forward from there.

I hate to be rude, but quite a bit of this comment could be cut down to read as some excuses along with it's still going to be months before we see any results. That's after the weeks it's taken just to have these new mods slowly but surely being worked into the team. Shouldn't they be bringing new things to the table rather than being trained to be mini versions of you guys? More of the same will just mean more of the same problems.

We've heard the story about Rockets before, so forgive me if I'm wary to believe it again until we start seeing people actually applying for them a lot more and having reason to do so.

They're definitely not being trained to be mini versions of us. What we're training them in is mostly just the basics of moderating and the mechanics of the game, as well as getting them adjusted to doing some duties, but the rest of it is discussion of new ideas and plots.

As for your wariness, I'm sorry I personally can't change your mind. I know I can't just tell you something and have you immediately believe me. I just know the rockets ARE our #1 priority at this moment, and that's what we're currently in the midst of working on.

HMD | April 2012

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