My experience with the 2015 Hallowmas was a mad rush to try and do the whole confession thing with everyone, making sure my menaces were at the appropriate level, finding that I had a whole bunch of people contact me for confessions when I left my profile link on the Facebook thread (most of whom, it seemed, had ZERO interest in reciprocating), and finally barely scraping through to get the 500 Spirit needed to get what I was aiming for. Like, if even one more person had ignored a social action, I wouldn’t have made it.
Afterwards, I felt pretty burnt out about the game in general - and while I’m glad I eventually managed to achieve the goal I’d set for myself, it did leave a bit of a sour taste afterwards.
Not to mention I now have a whole flood of random people on my contacts list that I don’t really interact with, but I haven’t yet started creating a spreadsheet so I can cross-reference with my email logs to figure out which of them still talk to me and which of them I should delete.
So if they’re changing the way Hallowmas 2016 is going to be, I cannot honestly say that’s a bad thing. :-)
I also think this is a step in the right direction. To obtain the best possible reward costing 500 Spirit which players being players will strive for, requires a great deal of mechanical grinding which is both repetitive and boring. This creates a cognitive dissonance with the act of confession which is fundamentally private, personal and made sparingly in real life. In short, by the time the player has obtained 500 Spirit, the player has ceased to attribute any meaning or weight to the in-game act of confessing.
To put it simply, if you are making a heartfelt confession to a close friend, that single act has a great deal of meaning, and weight. If you make 500 frivolous ‘confessions’ to 500 strangers for the sake of obtaining a reward, you would be hard put to remember what you said after.
Ideally, any gameplay changes should first address that.[/quote]
^ Agreed.
Edit: the whole POSI vs Non-POSI confessions thing (and then one of the trackers screwing up so I couldn’t interact with everyone’s stuff because I’d done too many of the wrong type of confessions first) didn’t help things either.
edited by Kittenpox on 2/4/2016