A Review Of The Hide And Seek Event

Hello everybody.

So I'll assume that if you're reading this that you either actually attended the Hide and Seek event, or you want to read this since you missed it, or something similar to that.

Before I start fucking around here, I want to point out that..
I did indeed get some fun out of this,
and I only attended the first two (three?) rounds.
I don't want you to think that I'm only writing this thread because I "absolutely hated" the event, because I didn't. I just personally feel like it wasn't put together well.

With that out of the way, let's begin.

- - -

1. I personally think that this event was not put together well.
It's a very good idea, but when only some people can get into servers that the Mods are in, you're not really gonna have fun with the event.
You (at least I did) would assume that they would try their best to make it so all players that want to participate in the event, would be able to participate.. but if you couldn't get into the server, you, well.. just couldn't since the people in the server would almost never leave.
I myself had issues whilst trying to connect to the server, since the laptop I use is pretty shitty so it takes ages to connect to a server, and by the time I'm in it I've crashed. (this doesn't have much to do with the event, just my laptop being shitty)

2. The hints were very hard to understand.
It's either I'm very bad at this game, or the hints truly were hard to understand.
The hints are well written and they are creative, but like I said it felt like they were way too hard to understand.
I'm sure if I took the time to explore a bit more before the event started it would've gone a bit better, so I guess that's my fault somewhat, although I personally still believe the hints were nearly *too* cryptic. It's just hide and seek, not ???.

3. Having the mods constantly switch servers was a pain in the ass.
I completely understand that the server restarts and your game can crash, but it was very annoying regardless.
It was basically required to have the mods participating on your friends list, but some of them had to go and some new ones came to participate so that made it a bit harder.
Say you were close to the mod, then they had to server switch. Kinda sucks.
Although it is understandable, since it isn't their fault.

4. It wasn't what I expected.
In other words, I didn't find it very fun.
I'm sure others found it enjoyable, but I certainly didn't.
Running around a bunch to find one person, I personally thought that would be pretty enjoyable, but it honestly wasn't. It felt too hard, since there was a lot of ground to cover in Gavel, and with only the first 1 or 2 hints it's really hard to figure out where the mods would be located.

- - -

@Nepeta Leijon and I were trying to complete at least one round by helping each other, and in the end we mostly had the same opinion overall when we both left the event.
This thread is already somewhat long, so I'll put his response in a spoiler.

Spoiler: boop

Alright here I go:

If I were to sum up this event in a sentence, I would say "Badly planned and ill prepared."

The Hide and Seek event, or as many players know it, the 'Le amazing hide and seek event' was a supposedly well planned event (or rather, I would have expected it to be if it was made by the mods themselves). While I could nitpick all the tiny details of why this event was an absolute flop, I'll simply list the major points:

1. Unfair.
You see, the way the hide and seek is meant to work is that a group of mods hides across various servers in the same place. You'd think that's all fine and dandy, but the servers can only hold 60 people. What with the staff being involved, I would have expected some 'Special' servers to be open with a higher player limit, but nope. That means that only the players that manage to join the random server in about 0.5 seconds of the server being announced had a shot at winning any prizes.

2. Cryptic as all hell.
Now, the way players were meant to get a clue on how to find the mods was by way of riddles. Of course, these riddles shouldn't be easy, but the riddles provided were incredibly cryptic. They made absolutely no sense at all, and most of the time they pointed to locations that were on the other side of the province. Really, these 'Hints' were about as good as saying 'We're somewhere in Gavel that has the colour green. Go find us."

3. Shady.
I found when I attempted to play that the mods would either randomly change server or new mods would decide to join in without notice. It seems somewhat crucial that players would get notified if a new mod has decided to start playing, or a current mod has switched server, but I found that there was either no notification at all, or a notification that was incredibly delayed. This seems a little shady and unfair to players since they could be searching the correct area to no avail only to find that the mod had changed servers randomly.

4. Quite frankly, not fun at all.
You might think that running around the province, desperately trying to piece together where the mods might be hiding would be fun. That's certainly what I thought when I went into this. However, when you're stuck completely lost on what the hell the 'Hint' is supposed to mean while the mods taunt you, it's not fun. Only a select group of players has a chance of finding the mod in the first place (due to the server restrictions), and if you manage to get in that group you'll basically have to search the entirety of gavel because the 'Hints' provided mean absolutely nothing. For example, I was so sure that one of the rounds was in the sky islands and/or llevigar, but as it turns out, it was actually right next to Cinfras at the location of Purple and Blue. None of the clues had actually pointed anything that might be related to said location.

To the mods reading this, I sincerely hope that if you plan to do an event like this again, follow in Wynncon's footsteps: Make sure the servers used can support over 60 people so people have a fair shot.

- - -

That about concludes it.
Once again please remember that Aj and I both thought the event was a good idea, it was just simply not executed well.
Again, remember that I don't expect the Moderators to make it 100% perfect, as there's only really so much to work with when playing Hide and Seek, on Minecraft of all things.

I hope this thread helps the Moderators for when the next Community Event comes around, (if there is another) so they can hopefully improve on it.

Thanks.

- - -

Edit: Thank you for actually being civil to one another, didn't expect that.​

 

Not sure if I should read this, a little worried...

Update: I read it, I couldn't go to the hide and seek event, so I don't even have an opinion.

cya

 

i tried to not be a negative cuck, so go ahead

 

I'd love to see those "hints", and to which location they pointed to, to see if I can make any sense out of 'em.

 

pret just posted this on the thread for hide and seek
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TH9N9fPxQAvvC70XQEp0hDki2QwQMhlfq8faV0yT8Cs/edit

 

You're not alone in this. I made a thread before I read yours.

 

Looking at your second point, I agree with you. Most of the hints seemed to be designed for people who had personally been to every part of Gavel and spent 10 hours a day exploring. I also wish that they did something else other than cryptic riddles, adding on to what I said above. This and lack of getting into the servers aside, I feel like we got to visit places that are often untouched, so that was nice I guess.

 

yeah, i did like the exploring part. i found a couple new places that were pretty cool

 

I don't get why you are complaining about the hints.
They were not too hard,and everyone was able to find them out.
I won the 3rd place in the 1st round,not even knowing that this cave existed. Of course people with knowledge about the map have an advantage,but what do you expect in a hide and seek ? That all the mods stay in Llveigar bank,just waiting for you to arrive and throw le at you ? :/ That is not how it is supposed to work or how it works in general.

You can't say " Its unfair,they know more" in a knowledge-based game :-:


HOWEVER I agree on the serverslot thing. That was super annoying to deal with

 

I can surely agree that some of these are a bit too difficult, since not everyone is a riddle master. Anyone who completed these riddles is in great, intelligent state for the new ???. ;D

This also makes me wonder... Do our moderators all have an IQ of over 130?

 

that's how i'm gonna reply to this

 

I read this thread, and I'll respond the same way here.
Glad I missed it. It probably saved me a lot of frustration.

________________________________

I understand the first one, does that make me smart?

 

Don't get me wrong please,I don't want to bitch around here or so but it was clearly your fault going into a hide and seek game not preparing anything.
Ik it is just a game but make it a challenge and you will have somewhat more fun even if you don't win.

 

My problem was Challenge 2.
Reason being, both the hints had the potential to be 2 different places.

Bucie has slightly burning fields, some mobs around it, has a white meteor nearby and there's a lake nearby.
Gelibord has a village that is literally burnt down and destroyed nearby, loads of monsters everywhere, a white meteor nearby and a river running through it.

 

I am sorry about that, it was my first event and I will do better next time. We decided to do 6 mods on different servers so that there could be a lot of people trying to find us. I am sorry that you had issues because of your laptop but we can't do anything to fix that.

The hints really did describe the surroundings and were apparently really easy to quite a bit of people. As round 5 ended in about 15 minutes unfortunately.

We wanted to switch servers so that we can give different people a chance, we didn't want the same 59 people looking for us every 6 rounds. The crashes/restarts we couldn't control so that was unfortunate.

It was supposed to be at least somewhat hard, I didn't want an easy event. Actually the original one was too hard and it had to be changed to this. It was hide and seek, the entire premise of it is in the name, we hide you come find us.

1. We don't have the power to change the sizes which is why we kept swapping, if we could then I would have had them changed.
2. The riddles again described the surrounding, the first one was a little random I agree but most of them were noticeable things that could be pieced together.
3. We had some difficulty because the mods that were supposed to show up suddenly had stuff or weren't able to make it so we had to improvise until then, I am sorry that it happened but it does. I myself actually woke up 2 minutes before 11:30 my time because I was trying to get it all ready and planned for the day before for some last minute things.

This was my first event and I tried to make it work, I am sorry that you didn't like it. If I ever decide to do another one I will try harder.

 

About the hints being "too hard", I will point out that the hide and seek event ended one hour earlier than originally scheduled. This is because pretty much every hint except numbers 1 and 2 were found within 20 minutes. Even the last one, which we had believed to be practically impossible (the fact that it could be interpreted as a different location was left there intentionally, this was meant to be unfair), was found ridiculously swiftly, before we even got to the image hint which we thought would be absolutely necessary. I think if we had made the hunt any easier, it would've gone by within half an hour.

That said, number 2 was a bit ridiculous, I will admit. The hint basically lead you to anywhere else but the actual location, which is why we basically had to give everyone the answer.

 

i would tag aj in this, btw

but thanks for actually replying! it means a lot to see that you're taking some of this into consideration (if that's even a good way to put it)

 

Tantibus, you made the hints you said in the thread, they were a bit confusing at first but then eventually a lot of people figured it out. Good job!

 

A small few people had a clue. My guild was just like 'wtf' the whole time.

 

Adding onto what I previously said:

I think if anything, the hide and seek was too EASY and that became detrimental to the event as a whole. People figured out the riddles quickly and it basically became a race to the location after a few minutes. The event was meant to have players think for a bit. It would operate under the assumption that whoever figured it out first, would find it first because not many people would figure it out so it'd be spaced out a bit. That didn't wind up being the case, but that was mostly due to the clues actually being too easy. The event whizzed by. I think the only one that went well was, ironically, the very first one (the one with the least amount of time between hints). The playerbase was too smart for us, in a way. We'll definitely have to think differently next time we do a Hide and Seek.

I didn't write all of them, actually. I forget who wrote some of the others though.