I agree with the other folks who've left feedback.
I was left feeling utterly bewildered, disheartened, and cranky.
My biggest complaints?
There were too many places where the group was forced to split up (forcing and thus encouraging us remain split up).
And then right after that, places where we were suddenly penalized for having stayed split up.

Thinking back, I can't think of very many clues that stuck out as being clues that we missed. If there were any, they were too subtle.
I MIGHT... MAYBE... do this quest again as a private quests with maybe 1 or 2 close friends. Otherwise, with a group of 10 complete strangers? Count me out.
Also, I feel whole thing is set up so that folks would require multiple go-throughs to learn the quests well enough to get past the first prize tiers. If that's true, that's pretty off-putting. Make it hard to get to tier 6 on a first try. Don't make it blinking impossible.

Mostly, I could care less about the prizes. I'm just cranky that I and my party got disillusioned (is this puzzle even working?), cranky (where and what the heck are all my party members doing?), lost the quest (hooray! in half an hour we can LEAVE this miserable quest), and afterwards, we were pretty much told "Thanks for sucking! We don't even care about your feedback!"

-Cait

Some suggestions from someone who didn't sign up for Black Swan Castle (but did participate in Night at the Academy). I'm curious if anyone else would favor an event structured along these lines as well:

Someone mentioned that the original BSC was a 48 hour event. I think I would be much more inclined to participate in a future event that was structued as follows:

- Extend the event to a full weekend/48 hour event (some other extended period)?
- Include options to get clues or help at various points along the way, possibly at some cost in terms of the reward (maybe provide x number of clue tokens that the group can spend as they see fit).
- Scale back (or eliminate) the prizes altogether or tie the prize structure to how the event was completed (the more time take/clues provided/special puzzles missed/bypassed/not completed in a time limit then the lower the prize tier.)
- Provide a way for every puzzle to be solved regardless of the makup of the group (it sounds like this was done for BSC).

For me, I would much rather have the luxury of taking in the environment, noodling over the puzzles and discussing them with my teammates without having a very short time pressure on myself and the group in general. If the group gets severely stuck or frustrated then they could take some time out (sleep on it) and retackle it refreshed and renewed. Time elements can (and should) be a component of the challenge but it could be applied to specific puzzles within the event vs. tied to the event itself (e.g. possibly it takes 8 tries to complete a puzzle because it keeps resetting as we are partway through it and still trying to solve it).

I don't know if 'Guess the Verb' was a part of any of the puzzles in BSC or not but I will add that those are some of my least favorite puzzles in Gemstone as well. If the clues are there and I miss them then so be it but it would be good to know up front that all of the puzzles would be solvable using clues provided within the event.

It would also be super cool if decisions made within the event could result in a different path or ending. This would add to the replayability of the event and add some weight/import to decisions made or how puzzles are solved.

-- Robert

Maybe the people complaining about difficulty just don't like puzzle quests? If it's too easy, it's not really a puzzle, after all. My opinion may change after I get a chance at it, but it's unlikely. I know I'd be disappointed if it was a cakewalk and I was just basically paying $15 for a tier 6 prize. Sounds like the designers did a good job.

---

A red-hulled airship stained in tears crashes into Solhaven with a "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah" sound.

>Maybe the people complaining about difficulty just don't like puzzle quests? If it's too easy, it's not really a puzzle, after all. My opinion may change after I get a chance at it, but it's unlikely. I know I'd be disappointed if it was a cakewalk and I was just basically paying $15 for a tier 6 prize. Sounds like the designers did a good job.

From everything I heard, it had nothing to do with not enjoying puzzles, or being too challenging, but simply being blatantly unintuitive. Despite direct NIR claims to the contrary, a lot of people seem to think it was very much a case of "guess the verb".

A good puzzle should be challenging, complex, intuitive design, and with clues that either hint to the direct solution, or set the stage for a pattern that, when expanded upon, leads to the solution.

In contrast, a bad (hard) puzzle is seemingly random, inexplicable, a "dead stop" with no hint where to begin, with either no clues, unhelpful clues, or clues that are so hard to find that they may as well not be there.

I don't have any figures on exactly how much forced RT was in this system, but if you are going to flood the experience with RT, why not just cut the RT entirely and the alloted time by a proportional amount?
________________________________
>Barnom exclaims, "I smell delicious!"
>Barnom says, "Like sage and nutmeg.

>"Walkar says, "Yes, too many kings never work. Especially when there's only one throne. It's a wicked game."
>Shameless plug.

<<<I solved Zork 1 and 2 by myself as well as various other text based adventures. This was before the internet and clue books, mind you.>>>

Ah, fond memories. I chanced upon a version of the original Adventure (Colossal Cave) someone had left running on an old Commodore Pet in my high school library. That was it, I was hooked. That led to discovering all those classic Infocom games (classic now, new then). The Zork series, Suspended, the Enchanter series, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Deadline, Planetfall, Plundered Hearts, etc. Those games were a big part of why I was instantly attracted to Gemstone. I still have a full library of Infocom games, although it's been quite some time since I pulled one out.

Back to the topic, I've never done a quest like Black Swan in GS, so I'm really looking forward to it. Can't wait to have a go at it. :)

~ Heathyr and friends

The previous iterations of Black Swan Castle took about 12-15 hours over two days. Some of the steps were solely GM-driven--the GM could pace the players to slow them down or move them along. The quest has been retooled to be completely automated, the death and destruction has been severely toned done (although questers probably won't believe me on that), and now the players are the pacers. The artificial roadblocks have been removed, and players can go as fast as they can figure things out. It might seem like an extreme time reduction, but based on testing it is completely do-able. It takes me 90 minutes to complete the quest running two characters.

There are some new puzzles, and some old puzzles that were updated behind the scenes but will appear the same to players. Players could figure the puzzles out the past two times the quest was run, and I expect players will be able to figure out the puzzles in 2013.

There are multiple prize tiers because it is expected that not every group will finish all of the puzzles. The tiers were set up this way for a reason. It's a big quest! There are a lot of parts to it. If you're just standing around waiting on someone else, chances are you're doing something wrong. Go investigate another area!

Most of the concerns I've seen about the first run can be resolved within the quest. One of the frustrating things about listening to the feedback after the quest on Saturday was that I couldn't properly respond because doing so would have given answers away. Many of the puzzles have alternative solutions, and some are quicker than others.

This is a D&D adventure almost. If you can think of a crazy solution, odds are there's some way to do it in Black Swan. Running a verb test script on items will not solve the puzzles.


~Vanah

>This is a D&D adventure almost. If you can think of a crazy solution, odds are there's some way to do it in Black Swan. Running a verb test script on items will not solve the puzzles.

The issue is comparing this to D&D is that a Dungeon Master is a much more forgiving "engine" than an automated system.

When a D&D group is stuck, the Dungeon Master can give vague or even implicit not-puzzle-breaking clues like "yo guys, NOTHING here will take you go further, you're barking up the wrong tree" or provide some other in-game type hints to steer folks in the right direction. They can analyze ridiculous requests regardless of how the player words them, and tries to see if it would fit in the framework provided. "What's that? You all want to stand on each other's shoulders and form a teetering tower for the halfling to climb up who will then use a can opener on the cage to extract the thing? Umm, Ok. Everybody roll athletics."

We don't have those options in GS. Most folks only started mashing verb test scripts (not that any of us expected them to work) out of frustration, not out of any particular belief that the antic would work. Call it a small OOC way of swearing at the puzzle.

If you don't want us doing something like that, then maybe after 20 verb catches, you can make the item say, "You're doing it wrong, there must be another way" or something else more helpful than just standing silently by.

And for the record, in the first part of the quest, we DID try the logical verb some 20 times on an item that SEEMED like it should work on, but to no avail. Only after we started verb-smashing it did we get told a few minutes later to try the original verb again. Even if it was an isolated event, it was the first stumbling block we couldn't seemingly immediately solve, and that set the tone for the rest of the quest.

-Cait

Yes, actually when they were talking about 'guess the verb' I was thinking about that stupid book that had the band across it or something like that and you had to raise it.

I remember it well and it has been how many years since the original Hunt?

Velvette...bowcrazy