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etrayaooc2026-02-20 11:39 am
etrayamods) wrote in etrayaooc2026-02-20 11:39 am
Entry tags:
State of the Game
Hello, Etrayans!
Here is a summary of recent updates to the game, as well as some requests for feedback!
Activity Rewards
- The Activity page was revised, and a new method for acquiring reward points was added that utilizes a written summary instead of tracking number of comments.
- Adding locations as an AC reward was removed, but you can still renovate existing locations for 30 points.
- The Locations page has had a map update.
- After a character has been in the game for at least six months, the player can request a free location for them, one per lifetime of the character in the game. We started tracking these requests in January, so everyone has started from a clean slate there.
- On the upcoming intro CR meme for this app round, we will be including a new thread where people can advertise locations their characters frequent. This is a way of encouraging people to make use of the locations already in game, and to plan out chance encounters or assumed CR as desired.
- Please 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.
Update as of 2/23/26: There is now a Mission Suggestions page where you can direct these to! - The game has gotten much bigger than originally anticipated, and we've been experimenting with the mission formats to hopefully accommodate a variety of play styles. We started adding exploratory leads and optional meta plot involved side quests in missions, and we're interested in your feedback on how that's gone!
- We would also like to invite people to come to us with offers to run missions or events of your own on the Mission Suggestions page. This can be an IC effort or just one you as the player are volunteering for. Although we can't guarantee we'll take up every offer, we know we have some motivated, capable, and creative players in game, and we want to open up the idea!
- The Story Thus Far page has been updated.
- Also on the Story Thus Far page, all of the previously distributed notes pertaining to the meta plot are available here out of character, and thanks to the addition of an in-character data repository, several are available for player characters to view.
- We encourage players to come to us if you're interested in exploring the meta plot further, and would love some feedback on how to balance plot within the overall pace of the game! Is there enough meta plot for you right now? Too much? Not enough? Let us know down below!
Finally, this month marks Etraya's 2-year anniversary and we want to thank everyone for making this game what it is! We've come so much farther than we ever thought we would. We all as mods appreciate all of you so much.
no subject
We were also surprised no one pursued saving the survivors. We dropped in a few leads on the post itself -- "These serve as optional narrative pathways that, when explored, will reveal more information about the world of Mesa and potentially about the meta-plot itself." Following up on that by exploring the research stations, terraforming plants, or communicating with the locals all could have led to paths that helped rescue them.
There were also a few leads in this thread -- it was possible to befriend the locals after leaving them enough gifts, or they would be entranced by anyone with light-emitting powers (of which we have a few characters). Characters were also invited to contact Aurora, who remained available for contact during the mission, to ask about what might be possible.
We didn't receive any other direct questions about how to accomplish this. The only other interest we received was Accelerator's team discovering some detail about the universe Mesa takes place in from one of the research stations.
Apart from that, we believe providing anything more detailed than what we did might railroad characters into certain actions to be successful, which we don't want to do. As we said to Jenn in the above thread, we'd prefer to do legwork to respond to individual players and characters to respond to their specific actions with the leads provided. Additionally, we like to leave it open-ended on how things can be accomplished, as this also helps us work with player responses to accomplish the goals they would like to achieve. We like to not map out specific pathways on how to get there, as this gives us more leeway to create paths to different outcomes using what players choose to explore. One of our main goals of moderators of Etraya is to be able to provide "yes, and" responses to our players as often as is reasonable - and it's easier for us to do that if we leave open a wide pathway to explore.
Regarding the timing of the missions, we can keep an eye on that in the future. Since the game moves at the same pace for new missions and events regardless of how long a given mission runs, and we tend to be fairly backtag-heavy, there aren't any consequences to taking a while to thread out any given scene, and we also tend to leave the end of missions open unless players do come to us with a set conclusion (such as the train mission), leaving time and space to build up to resolutions. We are happy to hold off on reporting outcomes if a plot-relevant thread is on-going and to work with players if handwaving is necessary.
As for your note with teams, players are free to structure their team threads any way they like! Some teams did full four-person rounds and some did sets of pairs in threads, some a mix, and so forth. While teams were structured into four characters, this was more to give our players more opportunities for CR with set individuals, rather than limit them to needing to play in four way threads.
That being said, we understand that for the purposes of exploring plot points, two weeks can seem too short of a time to do so. For this mission, the limited duration was more to keep in mind the limited supplies characters went into the mission with. However, we will keep in mind that for exploratory missions, a lengthier amount of time may be helpful to give our players more wiggle room to plot out what has occurred during their mission.
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Regarding back-tagging, I was hoping to do more with the mission, since it’s still a few weeks before the next mission drops. Based on what you've said, does this mean if a thread is back-tagging 3-4 months from now, the mods will still be actively responding to questions and threads from an old mission as people continue investigating Mesa? Can the outcome of the Mesa mission be changed 6 months in the future as threads are concluded? I presumed this would be cumbersome on the mods, who are actively working on new missions/events each month, but perhaps I presumed wrong.
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We do want to reiterate that we are not withholding information from our players! Rather, we are frequently deciding what will work based on what players are interested in playing with.
Much like D&D, DWRP is a cooperative roleplay between moderators and players - and much like Dungeon Masters often have to wing resolutions as players come up with ideas, we often adjust to players' interests to allow what they are interested in pursuing to push forward plots.
We will still be responding to questions about Mesa for as long as player interest in that world continues! What happens on previous missions informs subsequent ones, so we unfortunately can't retcon major events or results, but we're open to players working with us in advance on what they'd like the outcome to be and then working through the threads at their own pace in backtagging.
For example, in previous missions, we've had players come to us asking what would happen if they chased after a specific angle. We would answer these players on the plotting posts, and they would play out those results in a manner that suited them, even if it meant taking several months of backtagging to get to play out what they sought.
We hope this helps clarify how we hope to play out missions that can involve significant change to mission environments with player and character action!
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