IMPORTANT: PC Get-Together 2019

[Kitty]

Here's the thread with clues and puzzles we used last year. I think we can re-use some of them.

And what do you all say about having more story-driven GT? Like someone appearing on Discord telling everyone about the thread and recruiting users to help them before the GT starts. Or like creating a small fan game (about 3 or 4 maps of just walking and interacting with stuff) that would both include clues and would require clues to unlock new areas in-game. Or like having new user that would interact with other users and would tell them lore behind all this.

I know it would be a lot of work, but could be also a fun to do.

That would be really cool tbh
If that's gonna be an actual thing, should better start on it now

 

[Dragon]

Hmmm...

If we're making an evil team, maybe some of the organizers or any volunteers could play as the bad guys? o:

 

[gimmepie]

I love the idea of making this into a more story-driven thing. It fits nicely with the idea of joining against a collective nemesis and is a huge departure from previous GTs, so I expect that a lot of people will enjoy the freshness of it. For organisational purposes though, it'd probably better so just have staff organisers deal with being the antagonists.

In any case, our two main challenges as I see it are
1. Work out what our plot is
2. Work out the mechanics of how GT involvement will help solve the plot

Obviously, we'll be needing to emphasise participation over competition.

 

[Kitty]

Antagonist could be an anonymous acct maybe? Like leeroy, but nobody knows who he is except well, staff organizers. :000

Whatever happens I would love to help out with it story/events/clues wise and how we can get people to participate. Usually its the simple fun things that get to them. Like memes.

 

[moon]

Hmmm...

If we're making an evil team, maybe some of the organizers or any volunteers could play as the bad guys? o:

Antagonist could be an anonymous acct maybe? Like leeroy, but nobody knows who he is except well, staff organizers. :000

Whatever happens I would love to help out with it story/events/clues wise and how we can get people to participate. Usually its the simple fun things that get to them. Like memes.

Omg this!! Like a Lerroux but pokemon themed :D and maybe not actually taking over staff etc ahah

Basically, GT can be big and encompass the whole community, but should not be intrusive. So if somebody really wants to just keep doing their usual forum/discord business throughout the event week, they should be able to without too much annoyance :)

 

[Janp]

I love your ideas guys. I think we can make something out of this. But we should start working on a plot asap to have enough time to prepare everything.

2. Work out the mechanics of how GT involvement will help solve the plot

Obviously, we'll be needing to emphasise participation over competition.

I think we could go with regular "boring" GT format and slowly start turning it into something more. Villains or supporting detective (someone who would help users in case they get stuck) could pop in during events that takes place at specific times like CAH, Trivia and movie nights and drop clues. Clues in more competitive events could be given out to anyone, who beat a given score, symbolizing beating one of the grunts and getting clues from them. There could also be those 24h events for more clues. And don't forget on Discord, Facebook and Twitter. Some clues can be also hidden there. Oh and the forum itself. We can create an account, hide something there (like conversation between villains full of clues) and let users "hack in" thanks to clue with password. Hide a clue in splash or threads... You know, the good old stuff.

It really depends on the plot we'll go with, but if we're going with detectives, let's make a thread with all the clues stylized like board in Lycan's awesome css (with permission, of course) once staff officially joins the investigation.

Last thing that would be neat, but quite unrealizable is using real world through geocaching. Hiding a clue somewhere in the real world and letting users find it. But I don't think it would be possible to do.

 

[Kitty]

quick plot spitball(s) -
* the gt has always been pretty calm and chill and then suddenly things start getting weird? people been competitive and trying to fight over who's the better thing (meta), what's the best thing? it's actually because of this really awful organization called x, who's been doing this the past few get togethers, stirring up trouble. but today something cracked. x did a goof, and slowly but surely, people will figure out his plans and stop him once and for all!! //tried to incorporate previous gts and how they've been recently p competitive and now we're gon do the opposite idk
* WE FINALLY HAVE A SLOGAN!! it says... help???? seems like someone has called out for help, but where did they come from? players would work together in figuring this out, apparently it's npc who's been trapped in x (same guy from above) and has managed to find a way to send a message (although poorly). players try to find where npc's location is via clues, who they're actually dealing with, etc.

idk if its plot related but it's spitball(s) -
* get together based on a tower of heaven style kinda thing where each floor gets them closer to the top; goal is to reach the top floor but thats only if they work together
* keep the clues and the actual plot secret at first and let players figure things out, push them as they go? would be more storylike
* or pit them straight into the fire with an actual clue for a page (where it could be a cipher, a thing in the code, etc that would generally force people to collaborate; maybe depend on skillset of other players like hackers, writers, artists, theorist, etc?) a bit more dependent on the gameplay itself oops

quick edit -
geocaching would be cool but rly dependent if people live there :<

 

[Janp]

I would like for players to discover first clues and story on their own. We should only offer it to them through in-story accounts. Let them theorize about what is happening and only push them forward with new clues or by coming to them and saying something like: "Hey I think I figured this clue out and found this new clue." Because we as staff and organizers don't know either what si going on.

 

[gimmepie]

Personally, I think we should get the story going, if not from the very beginning, very soon thereafter. If we keep things looking like a very plain and boring GT by comparison to the previous ones we could struggle to attract interest.

 

[tokyodrift]

If we have any graphic needs, please let me know so we can get them done and not rush like last year.

 

[Arcaneum]

I can't remember the specifics but Shawn should be able to help, but I know that there was the thing we had done a little while back with the "anonymous" Team Rocket announcements here and on Social Media, I think we could do something like that on a grander scale across the board.

The idea of an all vs one type thing I really like, however how would that be set up, do we think? I see a few ideas but how do we maintain this throughout because the two big concerns are:

- Making it exciting enough to drum up interest in the first place
- Be engaging enough and not too random per se that user don't just abandon it and not bother doing events etc as a result

The reason teams - as much as we have done it a bit - work is that it's something that brings the whole community together and the constant element of competition kept things at least somewhat constant in terms of activity. With this we'll need to hunker down and think about how we will make sure every person involved will want to stay until the end; I agree with GP that things would need to start pretty quickly otherwise we're suddenly realising it's not working and trying to cram loads of rushed stuff in at the end. Ideally something coming up maybe a week or two before it even starts, saying that more will be revealed at the GT or something and that users need to be on the lookout for clues (as per Janp's idea) and need to keep them more importantly.

 

[gimmepie]

Building up a cryptic antagonist in the lead up to the GT, then having the GT itself focus on defeating said antagonist would be a great way to do things tbh

 

[Kitty]

This is assuming people are okay with the initial idea of it being storycentric anyway; is our safe to assume silence means yes or something else - to gp

Aaron makes a fair point; this really needs to be talked about immediately. I would be hopping that it would technically seem like a competition that players would want to

 

[colours]

one concern:

largely, I have zero issue with a story based get together of "GT users vs (insert evil Team here)!!" but by and large there needs to be a sense of accomplishment and progression, which I think is missing here. the reason why teams were successful before is not only because of the community gathering aspect that aaron mentioned, but also because there was a sense of competition, accomplishment, and progression.

in other words, there was a purpose to participating in the larger theme: whichever team has the most points, wins! it's a a fairly simple (if too simple at that) approach, but I'd wager that's also an additional reason why it has been effective.

GT managers would have to have the responsibility of basically moving the "plot" along as GT users have the responsibility of defeating them, and there are even three things with that in particular:

• how would GT users defeat this evil organization, or even confront it? how would you tie this into participating into events?
• where do you create this sense of accomplishment and progression? how do you keep this simple enough to understand and follow?
• What about the GT event hosts in particular? What role would they play in the bigger theme?

not saying it's undoable, but the most difficult part is tying the smaller events to the larger GT theme and figuring out roles for the GT event hosts.

 

[gimmepie]

^This is what I was talking about when I was saying we need to really look into how to make it work mechanically.

 

[tokyodrift]

This may sound dumb, but since I play video games, I'm going to use that as a reference:

I imagine the "boss" would have a health bar. Them participating in events would gradually take off health. For reference I'm using the League of Legends boss Baron Nashor. He starts the game with 9000 HP and it increases by 180 for each minute the game passes. So after say... 30 minutes he has 14,400 HP.

Every x amount of points from the events equals x amount off the main boss. Depending the amount of of events we plan on having, increase the "boss" health to compensate.

hope that made sense.

 

[colours]

some things to also consider, now that I've given this some extra thought:

it's actually very possible not everyone would want to participate in the grand theme of the GT, but rather focus on the smaller events. personally, I'd rather for us to be as accommodating as possible for a wider variety of users so we're not alienating those who do want to participate in the events but not the GT-themed specific ones, if that makes sense.

that being said....

Let's say there's a central "boss", so to speak, as Xiao suggested. This boss has a health bar, and it's the goal of everyone participating to take this boss down. For the sake of keeping this Pokemon-themed (and for example's sake), we're going to say it's Mewtwo we're trying to take down (idk why, but you know, just roll with the example ok). The GT Managers would then make a thread with directions on how the users interested would go about accomplishing this. For this task to be successful, it's imperative that users send a PM to one GT Manager as that would make it easier to keep track of timestamps. That GT Manager, along with the others, would make the determination that the first x amount of users, or the very first user that PMed them after completing the assigned task. That user would then contribute in "lowering" the health of the Pokemon in particular.

The TLDR of this is that everyone who successfully contributes in lowering the health of (insert Pokemon here) would be the "GT Champions" and have a neat little userank thingy to show with it. This may or may not be the controversial part, but people like feel-goodsy symbolic rewards so I figured this is the best we can do that isn't emblems.

What I really want to emphasize is the endgoal of being "PokeCommunity Get-Together Champion" which sounds vain as all heck but it's nice-sounding regardless and user(s) with it would have it until the next Get Together (or however long it's decided idk).

fill in the blanks/things to consider:

• what would gt managers require that would lower the health of the boss or defeat the central villain?
• would it be better to use an evil team, or defeating one pokemon? an evil team would probably be slightly harder to pull off i think.
• this is removing the GT hosts out of the picture in the grand scheme of things, allowing them to focus entirely on their events and putting progression on this theme entirely on the GT Managers. Idk if this is a good thing or not, but this is likely the consequence.

 

[juliorain]

I know you all might think I'm memeing but Rainbow Rocket and all of the bosses may sound better than Rainbow Rocket. Why discriminate when you can include them all? Have Lysandre, Ghestis, Archie/Maxie events that lead up to Giovanni and his mewtwo. We could do smogon events, rp ing events, we could even do arting events t o defeat Lysandre because flare is all about fashion.

Instead of giovanni, perahaps we could make up a new evil team leader?


Perhaps each contribution would take off HP From the boss or each mini boss, but then balancing is the thing. HP Goals need to be set high enough so that they can be completeable with slightly higher than level of activity.

 

[gimmepie]

Important to remember that not every event has to be towards the goal.

 

[Janp]

I was wondering how to spark an interest at the start and though about doing teams, but not doing teams. Let me explain. We'll advertise that for example there will be Let's GO Pikachu/Eevee themed event and that users can take a quiz to determinate their team. Just like previous years. There can be "weird" questions in the quiz and when someone finishes it, it will redirect them to the screen saying they joined the evil team. Or something like that. And then when the GT starts... BOOM! There are no teams and gt is under siege...

But I get that it isn't really the best idea as a lot of people could be really looking forward the teams and be disappointed.