CYOA - Problems and rarity

[Nevill]

Amusingly enough, SV has the exact same problem, though for different reasons. They have a flourishing community of fanfics with a few Original quests that rarely survive. Their problems come from overabundance of content stiffling some new and unique works that are struggling to build a readership.

Their discussion thread is somewhat fascinating. Warning, WALLS UPON WALLS of text.

I think Rihaku has managed to identify the problem:

Okay, on the matter at hand, encouraging original content. This is an extremely difficult task because quest authors, like anyone else, have access to all the entertainment media available on the internet. It's very easy for an author to get bored or discouraged (or both) and just give up. Combine that with writer's block, which can affect even the highest-paid professional authors, and you have a massive productivity hump to overcome.

Cetash's general-analysis coverage is much more on-point, and the context gorge is a huge problem for original quest authors. If we consider what a quest author is asking a player to do - to check in, and post, consistently, about a story - we get an understanding of how great the difficulty is. Any consistent action that requires some level of effort is basically a habit, and we all know how hard it is to make habits stick.

There are a lot of things that have to go right for any quest to be successful.

1. The thread itself needs to be appealing enough for people to click on it.

2. The OP has to be engaging enough for people to get invested, at least a little.

3. And then the actual hard part begins: sustaining momentum. If you want a consistent readerbase, you have to consistent yourself. Just like Wildbow can't take a vacation, you have to acknowledge that any lapse from a consistent and speedy (once every day is ideal, every two days is workable, every four days very difficult) update schedule will result in a substantial loss of reader activity. You can make a slow-and-consistent update schedule work, but you will see much less participation per update than for an equal number of words released quickly.

4. Even quests with a strong start can gasp and stutter at 3. And releasing a large number of words quickly is very, very hard, even with maximum motivation. Typically in order to build a substantial readerbase you will need consistent, fast, quality updates every 1-2 days for at least 3-4 weeks. Many quests won't see a true foundation until 6-8 weeks. If you're not fast and good, your readership will go find other things to do. If you are fast and good but take even a week's break, your readership will fall off 20-50%, and the compounding nature of activity means your quest activity will fall off 40-70%.

5. This makes author motivation the central bottleneck. Readership statistics impact content productivity inasmuch as they affect author motivation; as Ralson notes, even one voter would be enough for a true Mind of Steel to keep writing. But anyone with a Mind of Steel would be off busy running a Fortune 500 company. Writers are just people.

Even authors that attract a large audience with fast, competent updates that are long enough to overcome the context gorge can lose half of their quest activity with even a 4-day break. Plus, it's seen as passe for content producers to acknowledge that there is a link between readership and productivity (just look at what people are saying about me!), even though for many writers and artists this link is very strong. These combined factors (1-5) are the source of your stark statistics, Cetash. Even factors 1-2 are extremely strong filters behind which 90% of original content does not survive. A great OP with a less-than-gripping thread title will be running uphill during its critical early stages, and human psychology means that there is no reliably "gripping" title (Besides 14 Weird Ways for This Old Trick to Lose Weight, of course).

Obviously, not all of the points apply to us, but looking at how much discussion his quests generate, I tend to agree.

 

[hello friend]

Xenforo software with the alerts and shit go a long way toward mitigating most of those points. If the first post is good enough to make people post once, you just have to keep it not shit enough that they don't unwatch/ignore thread.

 

[Karwelas]

Oh shit Karwelas posted again.

There we go again: I wanted to necromancer the thread, since I think it was actually useful for me.

Another big problem I spotted recently with big quests is number of plots players tangle and are involved with. From fast and simple things, you get into large amount of plots that need to be solved, but their number is way too big to do that fast enough. Fangshi Myth suffered from this, a lot of older and bigger quests from SV like Hedge Maze are recently suffering from that too.

Do you think it would be possible to reduce number of plots without harming the quest itself, either by plot or mechanics? I myself get an idea during Shattered (and actually yes, there is second attempt on writing it somewhere but... Ugh. I don't think it is good enough to even mention that) to shape plot that way to make it dangerous for players. They still have vast amount of freedom but getting everywhere can bring attention to them and PC can't exactly afford that.

 

[Kipeci]

I think treave handled that sort of thing very well. He has tremendous worlds with lots of characters and various balls in the air, but it was never quite overwhelming because he'd give moments to pick a direction for the character and then pare down the alternatives. For instance, starting with the end of Four Lion's Formation you have the choice to choose a number of destinations to visit all in pursuit of information about the powerful manuals on the loose. The destination selected was a big indicator of where we'd focus our attentions based on our knowledge of which characters we were likely to encounter, and the other options such as the nuns of Emei and the ladies of Yuhua Hall really faded into the background after we decided to focus on gathering information from the imperial constables at Chang'an. Once we got there, we got a bevy of options asking essentially what group we wanted to focus on with a meeting, so we could choose between talking to our old bro Qi Liuwu, rival Bai Jiutian, the head of the secret police equivalent and so on. We chose to select finding Qi Liuwu and furthermore invested the time to teach him martial arts to help him survive despite his armless state, and so we saw our ability to make closer ties with everyone else essentially fade away while it was later all but confirmed that Qi would have died off and not been able to reassert his position had we not focused our efforts on him.

So the problem with much of the SV stuff may be more in that once you get something to investigate, it tends to linger and their massive vote lists swell ever longer. Maybe roll probabilities change over time or you get the occasional lockout if something more pressing comes up, but you don't tend to see the extent of the option pruning or the bringing of definite priorities to the fore that treave was doing to leave us with a relatively limited number of options deserving our immediate attention.

 

[treave]

Do you think it would be possible to reduce number of plots without harming the quest itself, either by plot or mechanics?

Easiest way is to let other NPCs handle it. If they aren't prioritized they can just play out in a natural manner without player interference, as they were meant to. Every plot should come from the basis of "what is this character's plan" and obviously, if the player doesn't prioritize or do anything about it, it can go however you like. Not every detail requires the player to get involved.

it was never quite overwhelming because he'd give moments to pick a direction for the character and then pare down the alternatives.

The advantage of deciding things on the fly. Quite a bit of Legend's world wasn't set in stone until you guys made certain choices.

There's also the good ol' "fuck shit up with a big catastrophe and reset" if you seem to be losing control of the plot. Bonus points if you manage to put the blame on the voters for that one.