So, while this is meant to be my observations, both positive and negative, I openly note that I feel strongly about some of this and I may get a little inflammatory here (because some things really annoyed me). I'm not trying to egg anyone on or troll anyone. If anything, I'm hoping discussion on these points will help me figure out how to do some things better in the future, so I'm hoping even if you disagree we can keep things rational. If any of this comes off as bad form from being a host, I make no apologies, though. I have no problems speaking my mind now that the tournament is over.
01) I have my work cut out for me with this community and some archetypes of characters. I love Gina to death, and thought she was written well in WitS, but people still don't really care about her, and I suspect it even if she had been a bit more prominent it wouldn't have mattered too much. She got several starring scenes in the latter rounds, case in point, that NO ONE cared about. The community has such a bent towards some archetypes of characters (witty/badass/antihero character in particular) that it makes trying to introduce or use characters outside of those realms frustrating and difficult. Makes me wonder if the Muses are going to be worth my efforts. While they seem to have graduated from the "lol SXIV" stigma, now it seems that many of their character archetypes and personalities are going to be working against them just as much, and it's somewhat disheartening.
02) 48 hour rounds? Good. Still trying to cram as much into a round like it was still 24 hours and acting like I have to use every single minute of it as best as I can? Bad. This goes for hosts AND sponsors. We may just need to learn to pace ourselves with them better in the future, but at the moment we're kind of defeating the point behind 48 hour rounds.
03) My Round Design still needs work.While I had a good one in Wayward's Wild ARMs round, most of my ones otherwise (El Hazard and Code Geass) were definitely lacking, probably because of the locales. I suspect Midgar was inspired by an idea I told TK sometime before I became a host, I think, but n the end it wasn't really my round to plan and execute like the others, so I don't count it. Makes me wonder if other round ideas I've had, like my Teen Titans San Francisco round and my Mai Otome Garderobe round are worth keeping for the future.
04) There is an increasing trend I dislike of people needing the hosts to spell out exactly what they need to be doing in a given round- and then complaining when this leads everyone to all be doing the same stuff. I had thought a Mission System would help spread people out to multiple objectives, but no, people all still gravitated to the same stuff (Or in Round 4, generally ignored it). The Mission System is flawed, yes, but without something like it, people complain about not knowing what to do, or even flat out ignore host requests because there's no stated reward backing it. With it... everyone complains about things being too defined/people all going to the same things? Make up your damn minds @_@
05) On a related point to the above, I am beyond sick of complaints about Clusterfucks. Let's get one thing straight: They're going to happen. They're a constant facet of these tournaments, and they aren't going to go anywhere. They aren't worth complaining over, and bitching isn't going to change things. Going further, I'm sick of people complaining about them when there's other things to do. Pretty much every round in WitS except round 2 had a handful of prominent things for people to do, and yet people all still gravitated to the same things by choice and then complained about it, and that was before taking into account things they could do that weren't specifically laid out by the hosts (Admittedly a challenge in the Axis and Terra Tower, but in at least two of the other rounds...). I could understand if it was all we handed you in a round, but that was rarely the case. There has been work to lessen how bad they are, spread people out, and generally alleviate the problem, but they never work because no matter what, people come back to them.
06) Healfending needs to go. I used to defend it as a legit tactic, but after four tournaments hosting and several playing, I'm sick of seeing people fly under the radar in rounds who may not have deserved it because all they do as sit back and turtle their way through the game despite constant gripes, complaints, subpar writing, whatever the case may be. The people who actually play the game should be rewarded, not the people who sit back and horde their healing and defense and turtle. Also extremely tired of seeing numbers go so deeply into negatives when it comes time to tally damage.
07) So. Sick. Of people. Not. Reading. Things. God, I can't count how many times between this and Wayward that I was just astounded by how obvious it was that some people flat out hadn't read a) trailers (Of which there was much less of that Wayward, there was no real excuse),b) character bios, c) the round intro, d) midround, e) the system, ect. It is still mindboggling. One of those things I should know by now, but lord it gets worse as things go on.
08) On a more positive note, I have greatly improved at expressing emotion in writing and writing fight scenes. Particularly after Wayward, which cost me a lot my confidence both as a writer, as a planner, and as a host, this was fantastic to see and it warmed my heart every time I looked back on a finished post and was actually proud. Even in H&S that usually wasn't the case, I always felt unsatisfied, like Iw as lacking something. Not so here. That hasn't happened since my Rydia performance in SXVIII. Maybe I truly have my mojo back? We'll see.
09) Kinda related to number 2, but I find myself still trying to do way too much in rounds. Ask sometime about some of the stuff we had to cut, scale back, or down play in each round because we'd planned ot much and had to cut becase writing was going slow or something was running over time for one reason or another.
10) What pissed me off most was people have complained for several tournaments about not having much opportunity for sponsor duels, including people who have set them up rather out of the blue, drafting characters for a tournament where the expressed purpose and intent is for sponsor dueling and interaction... and then asking like uptight actors what their motivation was.Come on guys, in tournaments as recent as H&S, you were working out the weirdest reasons to fight each other, but in the tournament where that's the purpose, you can't do that? We shouldn't have to hold hands there. I suppose I should know this by now, but good lord, people really WILL complain about anything and everything given the chance regardles sof what they've done in the past.
BONUS) Next time you have something you cut from a tournament or tournament lead in for some reason, be sure to cut everything related that comes later. Things related to our original beta still remained in WitS, and really, no one cared, noticed, or got it because of that, and it was probably best left on the cutting room floor and reused later.