STATE OF THE GAME
Hello, Etrayans!

Thanks to everyone who responded to our player survey! If you haven't had a chance to fill it out yet, we're still reading responses. It just won't be reflected below. Please also continue to leave mission suggestions on this post or anywhere else to us to your heart's content! We do save these and have used several of them in the past.

Between this and some direct feedback we've gotten from players, we've made some updates to the game:

1. The Arrival post was updated some time back with information players are welcome to handwave OOCly if they wish.


2. The FAQ had a gameplay style question added.


3. Locations page format has been revamped and map has been updated. We've also added world-building comment threads for people to add onto the settings we've made -- we very much encourage collaborative development of the environment this way!
   
   Please also note there were a few structural and name changes as a consequence of this last mission, so take a look and make sure things are where you think they are!


4. Story Thus Far post has been added, and will be updated going forward with additional details.


5. Mod contact post now has a list of who we are. We intend to shift to using our character journals for casual communications, and reserve the mod account for official consensus actions or statements. We hope this makes the mod team overall feel more approachable.


6. Mission plotting posts will now have a comment thread specifically to announce character actions that have a significant impact on the mission outcome or other characters. We heard from several people that it's confusing to figure out how a mission ended, and honestly, it is sometimes for us, too! This should help keep that straightened out.


7. We will continue having missions rotate genres and styles, but will try to incorporate both open-ended and structured hooks for players for however they wish to engage. Based on the survey, the most popular method for doing this was exploratory leads, so we will be including some of these starting with the very next mission.
   
   Prompt-style side quests and defined roles/tasks were close seconds, though, so we will attempt to include some of those as well where it makes sense for the mission.


8. There's been a clear widespread desire to move the meta plot forward, and we hope we've achieved that with the leads provided at the conclusion of this last mission. Additional opportunities to receive diary pages are included on the TDM for in-game characters. The scavenger hunt style set up is meant to allow multiple characters to come across important plot evidence, and to encourage IC information-sharing.
   
   Ultimately, so there's no confusion, once they're fully pieced together these pages will provide mathematical evidence that the universe is ending and worlds are in danger for those scientific minded characters who want to see the cold hard numbers.
   
   Please note we will not be coordinating any of the IC information-gathering -- that's up to you all! Feel free to progress the discovery and come to the IC conclusion that it is mathematical proof at whatever rate you like.


9. A surprisingly popular response was support for building out the setting of Etraya itself! To that end, we've added the world-building threads for players to contribute to for each region in Etraya, and we've themed this TDM to encourage characters to go out and explore. We also have big additional plans here that are coming very soon! 💅✨


10. We will release player surveys again in the future as a periodic temperature check for what the current player base is interested in. In the meantime, our doors are always open!

We hope you all enjoyed our spooky season event and assure you there will now be some humorous holiday downtime ahead. Thank you also to everyone who chimed in to say they're having a great time here -- it's always lovely to hear that!

And now for some charts.

For those curious, at the time we started the survey we had 85 unique active players and currently have 74. We had 39 total responses. Not bad!

People who indicated they had multiple preferences for single-answer questions had their single point weighted across the responses they indicated.