Poetry Fair - Discussion Thread

[Lhaa]

##PS-poetryfair @ irc.freenode.net
Seeing the server's health today, this may become a relevant tool.


Now a little reminder of things to keep in mind for staff and performers:

Grouping:
We'll have a group IG for the people performing. The group is for organizing the event so once the event starts please keep it quiet unless you have something relevant to say in regard of the event. We don't want the ones performing to be switching tabs for no real reason, so don't make it flicker for the sake of it.

Last minute performers:
No need to have applied to perform, just please send Mordaan a tell beforehand so that we can invite you to the group, and try to stick to these points for performers below as well.

Have shortcuts:
Not strictly necessary, but try to have your performance in shourtcuts. If you need help making them just ask us about it.

Use /shout
All your shortcuts or lines need to start with /shout. Don't forget "/shout /me" works now so this shouldn't be limiting you at all.

Pace:
Try to read what you posted at least twice before posting again. If there is much "noise" (people talks a lot or are reacting to your line) please wait a bit more, even. We want attendants to read what you post, not to ignore it because they can't do with all the tabs and the RP.

Event time:
Performers: It would be nice if you're in-game at least an hour before the event (so 7PM GMT) so that you can be grouped and hear what talks go on beforehand. This will save us some work repeating everything twice or thrice.
Guards: Please be there before the event starts. This is not the Den so we'll need to have an (even if short) IC talk with your chars to explain the differences for this specific day's job.

Auction tab:
For this short while, we're going to use the Auction tab to put the OOC Announcements in. We don't mean it to be used for OOC banter, but simply so that we don't pollute Main with OOC shouts. If you need to, you can still use it IC for sales/whatever you have in mind.

[LigH]

This was a little "cozy" group we had, and it was just the right number to gather around the fire pit. There have been interesting poems as well as surprising ones.

[Dralion1221]

That was a perfect event! Not too short and not too long 

I am glad I could make it this time and it was perfect little group

And to the GMs: No more talking fish or beware Suati's dagger of death 

[Mordaan]

Thanks to all those who participated.  It was a very nice event.

Here are some screenies:

[Aiwendil]

After Event discussion

Okay, we got through the event and it worked out...somehow. But in my opinion there were a lot flaws in it this time. So please allow me to address a few so that we can do it better next time:

Server downtime
It was really unfortunate that laanx went down for half a day before the event and only came back about 3 hours before the event started. I guess we have to put that in the category "bad luck". But it made it very difficult to get all setup in time and prevented some necessary IC talks which we had to do OOC to save some time. But something like this can always happen and I don't think there is much we can do about it.

Discussion in public
Having this discussion thread in public also led to some problems in my view. First of all the people knew already in advance what to expect. There wasn't much we could surprise them with except the content of the poems. But the major drawback for me was that a lot of players simply can't make a difference between IC and OOC knowledge. It was not nice to have characters ask Aiwendil about specific things discussed in this thread long before she even had the IC talk with Mordaan about the event. This lead to the strange situation in game that almost everyone seems to know better how the fair will work out than Aiwendil. What brings me to a very stupid mistake I made...Asking to post a poster IC before having done the IC talk about it was very stupid and only worsened the situation. My suggestion about this in the future is to keep discussions like this in private forums and only post the official announcements in the PS forum...and to kick me if I want to do something stupid again. And this leads to the next point...

In-game Posters
Where were our in-game posters? One day before the event I noticed a cooking fair poster at Kada El's, but no poster of the poetry fair. Also no poster at the Red Crystal Den...Not sure what went wrong there. Not that i think in-game posters are really important, but after putting some work in them I think we should have tried to get them put up...Or were they in other places? I think in the future we have to be more careful of what to mark as DONE in the ToDo-list. After one point in the list is marked as DONE we usually don't spent much time on thinking about it anymore...so things like this can happen.

Cancellation of players
This was very unfortunate this time as well. Of course we always have to count with people who have to cancel taking part in an event because of RL issues. There is nothing wrong with this...RL is always more important. But this time we really had some bad luck as almost all people who applied before had to cancel for some reasons. I'm not sure how to solve this the next time. The only thing I can think of is to get more people apply in advance and hope for better luck. But getting more people to apply is also not really an option seeing the lack of interest of players to take part in such events. But this led to Lhaa and Aiwendil having to read two poems each just to fill the time of the event. I don't really like this very much...If it works like this we can just write a script for the next event and doing it all alone with some alts. I doubt that is what we all understand under a successful event.

Lack of time
Two weeks for the discussion and preparation of such an event are not enough. Okay, maybe it could be enough if we all doesn't do anything else with our online time than working for the event. But this is not always funny and at least I need some casually roleplay during that time as well to have some fun. And because of the different online times it's hard to catch some players IC. More time would allow more of such meetings as well. In the end we again didn't manage to do all IC talks in advance and had to do some IC talking with the guards 5 minutes before the event started. I think it would be better to count with at least 3 weeks preparation time for such an event.

General lack of interest to organize things IC
It seems for most players it is enough to prepare an event OOCly in forum posts or a group chat and only show up at the event. But I can't agree there. We don't walk around asking ICly for poets or do things like this just for the fun of it. We do it to involve more players in an event and to create some nice atmosphere for the event. And it's also some kind of advertisement for the event if people hear us talking about it. For sure such advertisement is better than the usual "Going to the poetry fair - To what? - Look in the PS forum - Ah, when? - PS forum - Can I get a reward there?" in guildchat and it improves the RP atmosphere in PS a lot. So for the sake of a successful event I think we have to go on with doing as much IC as possible.

Lack of communication
We again didn't talk enough with each other before the event. Things like the setup of the camp for the fair were never discussed at all and everyone just did what he/she thought fits best there. I'm sure we can improve the overall presentation of an event a lot if we agree on more things in advance.  If this doesn't work out only in the forums we maybe should think about creating a event-IRC channel and telling all people to get there as often as possible before the event. This is for sure much easier with guild-chat if only people of the same guild are involved in the organization, but we never have this for the RCO and I doubt that the explorer's have this possibility in most of their OSP events...OSP events always involve a variety of people from different guilds.

And I won't even start about talking fishes here...