#clampurgatory

[clamsjams]

Hellooo :D here's my opinion on the Purgatory event. I am not an expert on game design, I don't know much at all, but I still want to try to analyze the event a bit. (If you do end up using this for the video pls keep me anonymous.)

Hopefully this makes sense lmao

Purgatory:

1.- Time

a) It lasted for way too long, it never gave anyone a chance to rest. Constant stress. 

b) Changes being made constantly regarding the score = confusion, no one could properly adapt, no one knew what to do, it made strategizing a lot harder, it made pvp a lot harder.

c) The fact that they scheduled an event on Sunday and announced it barely the day before (late in the day) is nuts. QSMP has always had little activity during Sundays, they should know the ccs schedules, why the fuck would they put an event on such a day and with such short notice. The least they could have done is warn the streamers in advance, no need to tell them exactly what the event will be, but they could just let them know that they'll need to be available on Sunday.

Also, they should have warned the ccs about the entire event in general. Again, no need to explain details or give spoilers, but letting them know "hey, this event will last 2 weeks and it's going to be pretty intense, we need you to mentally prepare yourselves and also we'll have important event on X and Y days so we'll need anyone who can to show up" would have been better than just throwing them to the wolves like that.

2.- PVP

They seemed to want to focus on pvp rather than roleplay, however:

a) Cursed team is an aspect of roleplay that they introduced that actively made pvp/confrontation worse.

b) Mobs being too overpowered. Yes it's purgatory, but not everyone is a proficient minecraft player and struggling with mobs caused a lot of problems for people when the focus was meant to be on interpersonal conflict.

c) Their idea seemed to be an "anything is valid" event, but they didn't stick to it, which was for the best but the thing is that the rules should have been implemented since the beginning, wanting "anything" to be valid was always unrealistic. It is possible to have a strong competition whilst also having some rules to keep things fair.

d) They ended up focusing a lot on the quests/tasks/contracts instead of pvp, which defeats the purpose of having a pvp event. They should have chosen whether to focus mainly on pvp or on strategy and stuck to it, instead they tried to make both things equally relevant and it did not work at all.

e) Spawn protections were useless.

f) They bounty system sucked, revealing a players cords like that was only going to bring trouble, especially as often as it happened. They tried to fix it but it was not good enough and ended up removing the npc entirely. It could have worked if they just didn't give out the exact location of players, I saw many suggesting a compass that simply points in a direction and that would have probably been better (though it still could have led to bases being found but it gave people a lot more time to move and get far away before being found).

3.- Rewards

a) The event asked a lot of the streamers and the audience, yet it provided little reward for everything they did. For "winning" during the first week all Bolas got was that they didn't have to participate on Sunday's event and an "advantage" for the capture the flag event, which ended up being having an admin play on their team.

b) Winning Purgatory got them to rescue 1 egg. They couldn't even pick which egg. Also, they immediately after threw a nuclear bomb at them. We still don't even for certain what happened to Dapper.

And that's it. That's all they ever got for Purgatory.

c) They didn't even get any answers or clues re: the eye guy, the eggs, egg island, the feds, the black concrete, the supposed cursed team, ElQuackity.

They got nothing, they didn't even get the chance to fight their captor, or ElQ, who was working for the eye. Nothing.

This made the ending feel anti climatic despite the fact that a lot was happening and that it should have been a great deal for them to finally be done with Purgatory.

4.- Teams

a) One good thing was pairing people with others they don't usually have a chance to interact much with because it helps to develop friendships.

b) The problem was how they handled the inactive players.

Half of the original Bolas team never logged on for the event, not even once. They only had the numbers because the half that did join fully committed and logged on even on days when they usually wouldn't.

But that should not be the standard, people should be able to log on when they can/want, they are entitled to their off days or other projects/responsibilities, they all have a life outside of the qsmp and outside of purgatory. Plus, the fact that the event was designed to appeal to a small group of players (bc pvpers are definitely not the majority on the server) and because of how harsh the conditions were, then they discouraged people from wanting to participate. Cellbit almost fully quit on day 2. In fact, Bolas' consistency was due to the fact that they enjoyed losing their minds with their friends. It wasn't the event itself what motivated them, but rather their friendship and enjoyment of each other's company.

c) Ideally, you want people to play your game because they actually enjoy it. Or because the reward is worth it. In this case, neither occurred.

d) Struggling to get players online, or completely depending on the exact same group of people for the entire 2 weeks is exhausting and with the lack of reward is simply not worth putting up with. I completely understand any cc that is/was feeling burnt out due to purgatory.

hi kal! i know it’s been ages since i asked for this but im cleaning out my inbox now. since my qsmp hyperfixation is gone im most likely not gonna get around to doing this video but i still appreciate all the info that u and everyone else ended up sending me! i’m not deleting the asks and i’m giving them a special tag just in case i decide to come back to it one day. thanks again for ur thoughts

[clamsjams]

I just saw your ask for Purgatory opinions, and admittedly I didn't really watch purgatory so take this with so many grains of salt. But from an outsiders perspective, they're all fighting because they desperately want the eggs to live, they want their kids back and will do anything to get them back. They do this for two weeks, desperately striving to save their eggs with multiple of the streamers screwing up their sleep schedules in order to participate. Then you get to the ending and... They get railroaded. They're not supposed to save the eggs, and the admins pretty much did everything in their power to stop players from saving the eggs. There was no cursed team (it was a lie), there was no way to save the eggs, meaning there was no way to win. They did all of this, only for it to mean nothing because the ending was already set in stone. While I doubt this was their intention, it effectively invalidates all of their players hard work and effort. They had all their plot lines interrupted, and for what? They didn't even get what they were promised, and while I want to trust the admins, they keep playing with "Are we gonna bring the eggs back? Are we gonna bring the eggs back? Oh no! They're still trapped!" And it's just gonna frustrate people the more they do it. Once again, I didn't watch purgatory so I'm only learning about what happened now. I hope this is of use in any way to you, best of luck. (Also I relate to getting frustrated by the game design of QSMP)

qsmp hyperfixation has passed so the video is most likely not gonna happen but i’m cleaning out my inbox and i don’t want to lose all the feedback jsut in case, thank u for ur message! i’ve been skimming these as i post them and ur totally right and thats was and still kinda is one of my biggest gripes with purgatory. don’t wanna get into it tho cause then i’ll be here forever

[clamsjams]

I think the issue with purgatory is that there wasn't enough separation between the suffering of the characters and the suffering of the streamers.

What I mean by this is that the mechanics of purgatory incentivized streamers to login often to help their team with the day's competition, which led to many streamers running themselves ragged streaming nearly every day because they only streamed a couple times a week normally. The pvp also felt unfair because if a player was killed, the player's things would either be taken or be thousands of blocks away, and because of how hard it was to get anywhere because of food, thirst, and the mobs, it led to players spending hours trying to get back to their bodies. And if their stuff was taken, it was now time to deal with all that purgatory entailed to get another set of stuff.

In the story, I'm sure it makes sense as to why the characters had to suffer that much, but it translated to the streamers suffering the same amount. The QSMP team could have implemented things to lessen the travel time, like maybe a one way teleport to the body that the character would have experienced like it was a long journey for some story reason or another (like maybe condensing the experience through technology?), but the streamer wouldn't have to.

I feel like purgatory would have improved greatly from the server being only open once every couple days, so that the streamers could get rest but also still participate when it mattered.

In a story characters suffer and that's okay, that's what make stories interesting. But the mechanics of purgatory were too harsh on the streamers themselves.

Also the thirst bar was overkill to include, people were already starving enough as is in purgatory, they didn't need another hunger mechanic but a little different. And then the thirst bar was rendered mostly useless once tea was discovered.

archiving responses, thanks for your input!

[clamsjams]

LONG ASK INCOMING

It feels like there was absolutely zero beta-testing for Purgatory. Like, some stuff off the top of my head that I feel like could’ve been avoided if beta-tester feedback was provided ahead of time:

1) That bug at the beginning of Purgatory (Day 1, anyone’s perspective) where no one could mine cobble, and everyone was so confused that it killed the hype mood almost immediately because they all thought they were doing something wrong. By the time they figured out it was a bug, Team members were so spread out from each other trying to find out how to gather stuff that it was difficult to reconvene

2) Soulfire’s spawn being a custom snow biome that unintentionally gave them an immediate disadvantage on resources because snow biomes are naturally sparse (Day 1, any Blue team perspective)

3) The weapon and armor balancing issues that made PVP so boring that the players themselves had to fix this by agreeing to no enchants on armor or weapons (Nov 14? 15? Etoiles POV)

4) Mobs being so incredibly difficult that players were constantly demoralized. Like I get Purgatory is supposed to be difficult, it’s not happy fun time like Quackity said, BUT there is a line between “frustrating but satisfying difficulty” like say, Celeste or Hollow Knight, and “difficulty that feels like constant failure, and success doesn’t seem remotely possible so there’s no point in participating anymore.” (Literally any POV during Week 1. Cellbit ragequitting Day 2 comes to mind.) Like, even Celeste has an accessibility feature to lower difficulty, and it’s made clear that it’s not intended to be played this way, but the feature was included regardless so no one feels like it’s impossible to finish the game.

5) Team balancing! Who tf made these teams! How did they make them! They ended up having to Thanos snap one of the teams just to remotely try balancing the amount of active players WHICH WAS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN PERCENTAGE SCORES. In a competitive event like this, balancing is key to making teams that feel communicative, fun, but also viable! (I highly suggest that the QSMP team look into how Scott Smajor balances teams for Minecraft Championship)

6) Egg War Cornucopia chests not opening on time. That one was just kind of annoying. (

This next part is not as much a game mechanic as much as just general game organizer to player ettiquette? Feel free to skip/leave this out:

———

I understand that the QSMP team probably wants to present thier events as surprises because surprises can be nice, but in a competitive event like this they NEED to communicate at least a few things, like the fact this would be a TWO WEEK COMPETITIVE EVENT. Streamers have other commitments outside the server! Normally it wouldn’t be so bad, but given that Number of Active Players was a significant component of Percentage scores, these absences that were outside of players’ control meant it was unfair to the rest of their team.

Not to mention that if it’s a competitive event, it’s equally important to communicate and ask if players WANT to participate and if so, if they want to participate “to win,” “kind of to win but if I lose it’s no big deal,” and “purely for fun.” Because if players who don’t want to participate skip out or only play for fun, then it negatively affects the percentage scores which is unfair to players on the same team who do want to play competitively. (Again: I highly suggest looking at how Scott Smajor creates teams to balances tryhard, sort of competitive, and only fun.)

It feels like communication in general between the game organizers and the players is weaker than it should be. In my opinion, if you want to ensure that your players have tons of fun, you HAVE to sacrifice some of the surprise to simply ask “hey. does this (gameplay style, time commitment, rule set, etc.) sound reasonable to you?” It’s basic TTRPG consent, and I don’t see why it can’t also apply to a roleplay Minecraft server.

———

Anyways. There’s a reason why Noxcrew has rotating groups of beta testers whenever they make new minigames or maps for Minecraft Championship. Purgatory had some fun moments and occasionally good mechanics choices (giving everyone Speed II during Warzone Flag was nice) but I believe these bugs and balancing issues genuinely negatively affected the playing experience for streamers and viewing experience for chatters, and that sucks because so much effort was put into the event. But ultimately, the issues matched (or maybe even overshadowed) the good parts of Purgatory. So I cannot in good faith call Purgatory good; at best, it’s a mixed bag that has lots of amazing potential, but needs more work on first.

((i just spent half an hour writing this ask, that’s how vexed thinking about Purgatory design has me)

it’s been so long but i empathize with ur pain i don’t even wanna reread this ask bc i feel like it’ll just make me mad again. even tho the qpurgatory vid is most likely cancelled, thanks for taking the time to share ur thoughts anyways!

[clamsjams]

An issue I had with the Purgatory mechanics was that they discouraged interactions between teams. It’s not fun watching PVP when it’s 80 percent chasing at not fighting, but the game incentives them to not die (for points, to avoid looting, they have to go long distances with nothing on the chance something was left on their body) so you can’t blame players for not jumping at the chance for a fight unless they’re a top PVPer. That’s why I feel the events were the most entertaining part of Purgatory. It was active competition and even though one team did not want to participate in the first event, that team was not too worse off when they were included in the event because of the way spawning worked and because they were temporarily added to another team so their participation was low stakes for them. The events were the most engaged in pvp anyone on the server was. I wish they’d done a game event earlier on in Purgatory.

archived thank u for ur input even tho i prob won’t be using it

[clamsjams]

Saw you asking about opinions surrounding purgatories game design and I had a lot of ideas of what was good, what needed improvement and what should have been seen as instant issues. Especially as someone who loves game design as a hobby.

For the most part purgatory is a very difficult game, far more then base qsmp, which is fine! It's like comparing a early Zelda game to tears of the kingdom you know?

However a few issues I saw were the use of time, it seems the admins didn't realize how big they had made the map, causing people to waste precious time in order to get to global or back to base. This could be nearly a 30 minute journey and would later be why they integrated the portals...However...how did they only realize at that moment that the journey was that long? Did no one walk across the main island to see how long it would be for a round-trip from each base? It left the first few days a very frustrating crawl from base to global and back.

Something I did enjoy however was a few of the events, a good couple were a lot of fun, however the instant death ones felt cheap the first few days without the spawn invincibility such as toxic gas or even hunger.

answering this for organization purposes feel free to ignore

[clamsjams]

personally, you probably have already thought about this but I hate the fact that they didn't really seem to beta test it at all or think about rules beforehand - it led to certain creators doing actions that weren't against the rules and then they would add rules because people complained causing hate to those creators when they could have just added the rules in the first place. I also think it was stupid of them to remove create, as creators like tubbo and forever whos speciality was create were left demotivated because of it. they could have nerfed it at least imo. additionally i think they definitely should have warned creators way before important events because it led to green gay ninjas being eliminated just because of scheduling. I think my main issue with purgatory was how much hate creators got, so I think the admin team could have done better at making sure it was clear that none of the creators were to blame for things the admins failed to consider - like balancing. honestly I think it was stupid to have 3 teams because there's not enough active server members for that - bolas weren't balanced and soulfire had 3 people max most of the time

sorry this is so late but i’m going thru my inbox so long story short my qsmp hyperfixation is over and im not gonna be making this anymore most likely but i don’t wanna lose these asks jsut in case so ill be answering them and tagging them feel free to ignore this