Number of Players

[narrativedilettante]

You've mentioned here and there that you expected a larger player base. How many players were you anticipating? Were you disappointed in the size of the playerbase? I feel like you put in an awful lot of work for not very many people, but the people who were here did very much appreciate it.

[Tom]

We expected something on this order of magnitude, but larger. We were only worried at the beginning when it looked like there might not be enough people to complete some puzzles. That turned out to be not the case.

We also changed some game dynamics to make it more personal and less divisive at the end because of the group size.

With a player base more than 4 or 5 times this size we couldn't run a game like this. There would be too many people pushing the characters in different ways. We would have had writers unable to read all the comments or be aware of all the player plans, and we would have needed to found ways to filter the information the players threw at us.

Twice the number of players we had would have been ideal, but we're happy with what we had.

[Rick Healey]

Well, if we actually had significantly more players, I would have broken out some of the ideas that I had that were totally infeasible based on the number of players we had. There were certain things that I had ideas about that I didn't bother expressing because it was extremely unlikely that we would have ever needed them. I'm certain that others might have been stressed over the prospect (and who knows if those changes would have resulted in butting of heads), but I'm a bit more sanguine than Tom is about our prospects.

As for the source of those ideas, that's best the topic of another thread, for the ARG that I'll never be allowed to create.

[Blurred_9L]

As for the source of those ideas, that's best the topic of another thread, for the ARG that I'll never be allowed to create.

You mean you still hope to use those ideas?

[Rick Healey]

As for the source of those ideas, that's best the topic of another thread, for the ARG that I'll never be allowed to create.

You mean you still hope to use those ideas?

Some of them, yes.