Must Read Summer Scramble '19 Feedback

"Not as exciting as last year's. I was not interested in the events this year and having not a lot of participation coming from other teammates as well. And honestly, I don't like the writing prompt. And I was hoping for Tetris. Tetris I can do. The others, no. It's not just fun this year for me. Probably because I think it's leaning towards more of the competitive side of Pokémon than the more casual trainer I am. I understand it's supposed to be more story based this year, but I'm not exactly interested in the Ultra Beasts and Cosmog. I have a more of a preference to Gen 4 and 5 than Gen 7, sadly, and I think that this Summer Scramble is leaning more towards Gen 6 and 7. Honestly, I preferred being a pirate, because the events were actually fun last year, not this year, for me, anyway..." I said in my QnA thread, paraphrasing. It wasn't fun for me, mainly because of the events. I feel like they leaned more to the competitive side of LV than the creative side. While I now understand why the other teams didn't post their RP thread, it did erk me. The writing event prompt made me uncomfortable, the arcade games I wasn't comfortable with playing myself, and I kinda didn't want the Team Captain role, I wanted to be a Vice Captain. In the beginning, I was trying to organize the team so we could figure out these roles. I struggled with getting people to respond, and then, thankfully, @KnightBlader stepped up with some of the events I wasn't comfortable and/or had no idea what to do. In my opinion, the Summer Scramble wasn't as engaging it was last year with Crimson and Azure. I feel like I had some members that signed up for the scramble and then didn't participate at all, and even with effort with including them with any event, they didn't even respond. I won't say names, but it did frustrate me that they signed up for this month long event and they didn't even participate.

The Summer Scramble was more competitive and less creative. I loved the Create-A-Type event and Create-A-Pokémon Event from last year, like Postfest, QUIZZES, Design a flag for your Team/LV, MASCOTS! That is what needs to be done. Next year, use some of the events from the first two years of Summer Scramble. If the team names are simple enough and NOT story-based, then if the members can create a RP based on it, then it's good.

 

I was hoping to see more drawing or art related events. There was only really one or two this year, and they were team events, meaning that though we could all contribute ideas, in the end only one person's art was really shown. It also felt like there was a lot less to do this year, but that's because many of the events were the reoccurring and arcade events, neither of which I participated in. I had fun with Summer Scramble, and really enjoyed the activities that I did, but again, more creating events would be great.

 

Well, I guess I should give feedback since I signed up for this.
Summer Scramble '19 was an interesting event, that was quite fun, even if certain problems arose every now and then.
Now to get into the big picture and not just paraphrase around it, there were some issues.
First of, Week 2. I don't think I have to talk a lot about Week 2, even if every member of staff was busy, I feel as if it was a missed opportunity to just not communicate properly with us. I found that it, at least for me, took away a lot of the steam from Week 1 which was actually quite fun.
Secondarily, the events themselves. There are a few problems I have had with the events that I will talk about in no specific order:
-Uniform: The point reward feels a bit weird here. Why is there such a big gap between first and second? Why is it so heavy pointed anyways? I get that it's a long running event but it just felt a bit draining for me as primarily a battle camp dude to basically have EVERYTHING I have done invalidated by a single event.
-Writing and Trivia: Writing came in Week 4, but it could have probably come sooner. As @HeroofFire101 mentioned, it just felt like creativity was a bit neglected here, which is kinda sad, especially since Trivia was specifically mentioned on the sign up sheet.
-Smash: Okay, to me this is a big elephant in the room. There were multiple things that just felt off about it for me.
First the obvious thing that got adressed later on: Why only allow the Pokémon roster of characters at first? Shouldn't SS be about inclusion?
Second: Next time you do an out of Pokémon game event, please put it on the sign up sheet - I don't think Prismatic had a single person that plsyed Smash and Sunsteel was basically infighting.
And lastly: There need to be more events. If the team of moderators or admins aren't enough, please, ask around. There are tons of passionate people here. Be it Trivia, Art, Writing, Competitive Battling, Retro Gaming, what have you, you can find someone here who is willing to help you guys out and lend a hand. It's a shame that not every week could be like Week 1, which served basically everybody.

 

Pretty enjoyable event but there are a few things I think it could have improved upon, at least for the events I was in...



- The Smash event felt kind of flawed in a few ways. I think King Dedede acknowledged them and will change them next time but I'm not certain because my memory is awful...

Anyways, one of the bigger issues is that it was very easy for teams to just infight and farm points that way. Most of the people who participated were Sunsteel, with a few Moongeist participants, and very very few Prismatic. A lot of games were just Sunsteel vs Sunsteel and there was literally no loss for doing that, the team just gained 7 points. Someone could have theoretically borrowed a friend's Switch to play Smash, just self destructed away their lives versus all Sunsteel players, and given their team a ton of points. I highly doubt anyone would ever do that because it defeats the competitive nature of the scramble, but the fact that there's a hole like this here made me at least feel like mentioning.

There's also a rule where you get to re-battle anyone you want if you've played everyone who's participated so far, which is a good idea in theory to keep people from being unable to participate, but there's one issue with it in practice. I was at a big time zone difference with one of the users here, since the time they go to sleep is before the time I wake up and I've wanted to avoid staying up too late playing Smash since the first time I did it. That rule in the end only made it so I specifically couldn't have done anything more to help my team.

We discussed this earlier on Discord, but we could do one of two things- a tournament or a crew battle. Both of these stop both of the issues above, but have a few key differences. Tournaments could have you scheduling matches in advance to fit with whatever times work and they could be done over the span of the month, but this could dissuade people with lower self-esteem from participating. Crew battles have a much bigger competitive team-based feel to them, and we could have themed crew battles every week, but time zones could end up being a bigger issue. Either one would probably work fine.



- I absolutely love the idea of the arcade events. They're all very simple video games that are largely skill-based, so anyone could pick them up and understand them easily, although some people will have mastered them but that's beside the point. However, the website that they were on was way too laggy for me. Emphasis on the "for me" part at the end, since I don't know who all else this effected. The ads constantly refreshing on my screen made the games significantly harder than they needed to be, and forgive me if I'm being a jim, but in the end I lost enough lives to the lag to the point where I just ended up quitting out of fear that I'd get angry, when in reality, standard Donkey Kong for example wouldn't have been like this for me.

I don't know if this was an issue for anyone aside from me so I don't know if there would even need to be a fix or a way to improve here, especially since I doubt many websites would specialize in running arcade games on browser. I love the concept of this event though and it would have probably been perfect if I owned a better computer, but I'm a minor with no job, so that's not possible for me yet.



- The most notable issue for me was that the point system was kind of broken for a few events, especially with the Eggs event. I'm perfectly fine with the fact that Sunsteel and Moongeist underpreformed there and lost for it, that's our fault for not participating as much in it, but an event that matters this much to the outcome of the game is a bit much, and if a really dedicated person wants to win, then they can just cheese the one event out really hard. I wasn't too focused on the Egg event specifically so I don't know how it worked but I have a possible solution...

Kind of a weird idea I had that probably isn't practical, but maybe we should have a point cap for certain events? Like maybe the winning team of a certain event gets 250 points, and we give the losing team(s) points relative to how good they did against the winning team. Say the scores would be 50 to 30, that would scale up to 250 to 150. Maybe we can raise the point cap for more important events, and maybe we can lower it for weekly events. This might be a bit too needlessly complicated, but it might work. I'd only do it if we're still unsure of how cheese-able certain events are, but it's worth mentioning. It'd probably be much more practical to just individually change the scores of the events, but I don't know how it'd work with new events that have new scoring systems. If that's the case then maybe we could come up with something less complicated, but I dunno.



This was a really good event though, and most of what I have to say is just minor nitpicks that didn't take away too much from the enjoyment that I had in participating, and I know this is largely meant for fun in the end. I especially love how participation is encouraged with a few points being given to people who don't perform as well to tell everyone that they are helping their team, even if it's only a small amount. I'd also like to thank the staff here for allowing me to join late, I imagined that I wouldn't have been allowed to when I first heard about this event but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was wrong there.

EDIT - Should also edit this to mention I'm into more competitive things, so this is all from the perspective of someone like that. I get that the fact that this isn't supposed to be a competitive is a big complaint many others have had too so I felt the need to say this, since I don't find that to be a big issue but I understand that others do.

 

tbh i feel like since i didn't do like. anything my opinion shouldn't matter but my feedback kinda ties into why i didn't do much this year compared to last year. granted i got busy with some other things during the scramble but the main reason i didn't do much?

if i were to be honest, one word.

disappointing.

there was WAY too much focus on competitiveness this year. with smash and arcade scores and probably other things i missed, it was more of a ruthless fight for points instead of a fun summer event! the previous years had art, trivia, writing EVERYONE could be in, and some non catcher forum things. (the catcher events were okay from what i've seen.) i was expecting the scramble to be more like previous years where it was just a fun little thing to motivate us to interact and post.

but instead, we got a writing event that people like me (people who don't play pokémon anymore) couldn't fully invest in, smash too competitive for a casual player, one single art event that only a few people actually got to draw for, and nothing else of value.

and id like to give credit for trying a more story based scramble this year, but as someone who didn't even play us/um, i was confused. so confused that it completely demotivated me to participate at all, as i felt like i HAD to know the story of the ultra beasts and the legendaries. life sucks when you don't play pokémon anymore...

i hope my criticism doesn't come off as too harsh, but this scramble was truly disappointing compared to the prior years and i hope we can go back to the fun spirit of events we can all feel comfortable in and not this war of competitive nature.

 

I'm kind of gonna echo the sentiments of a lot of the people up above and say that last year's Scramble was definitely a lot more fun for me.

I honestly wasn't feeling it this year, and as much as I tried to upkeep my Captain's role, I'll admit, I kind of lost interest around the middle of Week 3. As Hero said, there was way too much focus on competition this time around, with the main events being battling. Not only that, but a lot of the events were focused on individuals/1v1's, and less on team cooperation. Furthermore, none of the team-based events really lasted that long (at max 2 weeks) compared to the month-long efforts of the 2018 contests.

I REALLY wish there could've been more collaborative art contests. Last year had a beach art, a Fakemon, and a Type-design, so I was at least expecting something like a space themed group photo and/or UB Fakemon design event. There also weren't any Discord puzzles, which is another thing I missed seeing this time around. I get that not everyone uses Discord, but those puzzles really did spice things up as well.

Overall... I was kind of... disappointed with how this year's Scramble turned, and it makes me sad to say that. I really tried my best to stay motivated but these events were just not up my alley and I feel a lot of my participation came from battle-post-forget things. I apologize to my Sunsteel Squad. Really wish I could've done more.

EDIT: Other events I feel could've been implemented.

Last year, Team Azure and Crimson had to track down Mesprit and Uxie respectively. Despite this Scramble's focus on UB's, there weren't any UB's in the catcher. Maybe something like Buzzwole for Sunsteel, Pheromosa for Moongeist, and Xurkitree for Prismatic could've worked?

 

This Is A Good SS Edition, As Usually. Although I Liked The Idea Of The Story To Lead Up To The SS, It's Best To Bring The Past Events Like Postfest And Puzzles. I Was Thinking About The Future SS Can A Lead-Up Story But, Using The Idea From The Past SS Writing Event.

 

I couldn't participate due to having issues with LV's mobile site

 

As someone who spends months in advance planning and anticipating Summer Scramble, I have a few insights in response to the feedback given up. I want to remind you, we're human too and can't account for everything (each user's personal preference, quirks, likes, dislikes etc) which in reality is the case here. Inevitably as we think we have the answer as to what will please our userbase, it's equally likely we're forgetting some other key ingredient. All we can do though is do our best to learn from any mistakes and move forward positively.

Spoiler: Creative Events/Art

I agree with the lack of creative events part. We should have had a larger emphasis on our writing, art and puzzle/trivia side of the community and that's something I regret I didn't pay more attention too.

I agree it didn't help that the one art event we had was only 2 weeks and fully agree with Jeydis' idea that certain creative events should last for a month while events more suited for the week (arcade etc) should be weekly. Our idea here was to keep creative events short to prevent burnout from doing one type of thing for too long but at the same time, we should have introduced more art contests to keep people on their toes and keep a steady supply of art related stuff.

I also think it's a massively underappreciated with how much time the Staff Team spent on their events. @KnightBlader mentions this but in all honesty, it's not easy (ideally 1 mod would run 1 event) but we had staff running more than 1 multiple times (including me, I ran some events + coordinated the whole SS). While I do appreciate the sentiment that we have members willing to "lend a hand" their levels of leadership, responsibility, reliability is something we have to account for diligently otherwise we end up in a more stressful situation. One great way we can gauge this is higher activity on the forums so we can see that you're enthusiastic about the community. We also urge you to reach out to us regarding your willingness to help.

All that said, I do think recurring events meant that if you didn't want to participate in them, a huge chunk of what you could do was gone. We should have done a better job of adding more creative events since that's our community largely and next time, we'll make sure to find a right balance.

Spoiler: Scoring/Points/Coin System

As far as Scoring/Coins go, I completely understand that we (I specifically) needed to do a better job of scaling and balancing point/coin values across the whole set of events. With that in mind, to scale point values for a whole set of events, someone has to look at every single event AND gauge what the appropriate effort levels are and then adjust everything else accordingly. To do that, you HAVE to have a wide knowledge about all the events being ran to understand how much effort is required in each.

Rarely will you find someone that has such a wide skillset that they know what each different event requires (effort wise). I wasn't able to do this properly but I'd like you all to know this is trial and error and most of all subjective.

This subjectivity is huge...If you find battling something you spend a lot of time on (cause it's your favorite thing), of course you're going to want to be rewarded more for that than art compared to an artist who wants to be rewarded more for his art than putting together a team to battle. It's highly subjective and all I can say is we'll continue to strive towards hitting that perfect equilibrium.

Next time I plan to rigorously evaluate the skill required in each event to do a better overall job and I thank you for your patience.

The last bit I'll say is in regards to how subjective all this is again and where that leaves us as a community...

As a member, maybe you didn't like one writing event. Maybe you wanted to draw X instead of Y. Maybe you prefer certain creative stuff over others. Maybe you love battling, maybe you hate it with a passion.

In the end, as a Staff Team, we try to anticipate what our community likes and do our best to get as close as possible to keeping everyone happy. Still, people forget though that we're just like you. Just cause we have a colored role doesn't mean we have the ultimate knowledge as to what each and every member likes and dislikes...We can't analyze if you like a new Gen or not and definitely don't know what what everyone likes, I find it unfair when at times those personal reservations are made to seem like the event planner's fault.

Saying there was "nothing else of value" I feel is extremely harsh. Generally, as a Staff Team, we do our best to keep up with what may interest the community but it's a two way street with you playing a big part in it too. As a member of the community it's important to try out new stuff and step out of your comfort zones. I ask you guys at the very least to put in the effort to try stuff out since we're putting in so much effort to host such opportunities.

To end, we're nothing without our community and whether it's apparent or not, we'll continually strive to please and better your experience. I wholeheartedly thank you for your feedback and I hope you enjoyed at least some part of SS. Thanks

 

As much as I liked the egg hatching event, it doesn’t seem right to me that a lot of people would all of a sudden start posting way more. I understand, that’s how you’re supposed to hatch the eggs, but it doesn’t seem right to me that people are posting more frequently just to hatch eggs. (I saw this especially in the Pokémon catcher section, expedition cabin thread (in the catcher section), and the Q+A with people asking questions on many threads.)

As a captain I felt that I didn’t do much to lead the team; it felt like the mods were being more of the team captains. I guess that’s on me? Idk.

Aside from that and the battle camp week 2 thing I thought it was fine; I’ve never done one of these before and it was really fun.

 

i was overseas for the last ss so i only have that to compare to, but honestly i think that this ss wasnt very fun compared to the first and the second (based on what people are saying).

first, the events were REALLY "specific" and not everyone could partake, like the smash event, which locked people out if this event because you need to have the game to join this event. also more casual Pokémon players were locked out of the game because the only Pokémon events present was about smogon competitive battling, and as a really casual player, i didnt want to even try. the events catered to only a select few and left out a HUGE chunk of people from participating.

and my biggest gripe: THE WHOLE EVENT WAS TOO COMPETITIVE AND INDIVUDUAL.

what do i mean by this? i wanna address the competitive factor first. the biggest example of this
is the arcade event, where i didnt feel like i could casually play the game and help, but i felt i HAD to rack up an ungodly score to beat the previous ungodly score to make ANY impact. this drove me away from the entire arcade events after week one: i felt like my efforts werent worth anything despite knowing they WERE. the second example is the Pokémon events, where the majority (if not all) were competitive/"smogon" based that casual players (like me) couldnt invest in. there were NO casual Pokémon related events i and other casuals could enjoy, like the first year's shiny hunt. of course there were battles in years past, but they werent literally the only Pokémon events we had like this year. the smash event? also competitive. i didnt even want to try because the feeling i got from this whole event was that "CASUALS ARENT ALLOWED" which doesnt help me as im always busy and dont have time to play a flash game for seven hours. i figured this out by the first week, and it made me not want to participate anymore: i felt "unwelcome" and "not good enough" to do ANYTHING.

and what do i mean by "individual" events? the first year, we had collaborative events, like the create a Pokémon event, the tcg card event, and even that nightmarish coin hunt. this year? events like this were totally absent. the closest we got was maybe the uniform contest, but even that was just a quick "kk i like this design" rather than the other events i mentioned, which encouraged everyone to participate because of all that was needed to do. even my teams hub in discord was like this, with barely ANY collaboration in events as the most i saw was "gonna battle" which is hardly teamwork. i didnt feel like i was on a "real" team, i felt like i was back in gym class in fourth grade with that randomly assigned dodgeball team.

i also wanna talk about the creative events: or should i say lack thereof? the artists got two events, and the writers got one. as someone who could really only contribute through my art, this was a really bad situation as once the art events were over, i was of no use anymore. another thing i want to note: my team had TONS of artists, but only my art was shown which is REALLY unfair to me as more of the artists deserved to draw something for the scramble. i cant say anything about the writing event because i stopped caring at this point, but only one? i sometimes forget our old motto was "where creativity flows" instead of "GET THE HIGH SCORE"

minor nitpicking: the captain/vice captain roles felt useless! i didnt feel like i was doing anything for my team, it was more of the moderators taking over BOTH roles. also, the point values between first and second place were outrageous in some events, getting second place in the uniform event made me feel like i had wasted my time with how little we were payed off compared to first. i also never played gen 7 so the story was totally useless to me.

overall, im not gonna lie, i was VERY disappointed with this year's scramble: i didnt feel like it was a community event where i was having fun on a Pokémon forum, but rather i felt like i was on a generic video game forum where the most competitive players only got ANY enjoyment out of things. personally, i felt almost unwelcome to the events due to their competitive nature. i get that new things were being attempted, but the old events worked, and theres no need to fix it if its not broken and throw them away for laggy flash games and smogon pandering.

(i hope this whole thing doesnt come off as rude im just a really harsh reviewer plz no ban)