So anyway, I'm going to level with you all now and talk about what I'm feeling and what is going to happen to the quest. I really enjoyed this level of activity and the arguing/discussion; but the only posts I absolutely cannot stand to read are
>>5458420 doomer posts like this and speculation from
>>5471063 this poster, who ended up really tanking my enjoyment at the end here. Especially after the Unspeakable and P6 back to back, having yet another bad thread in a row would really break any motivation I would have to continue this quest. I want to make it very clear that I have no intention of "ruining" the quest on purpose or "trolling" my playerbase.
But this also leaves me in a really unenviable position. Sometimes you have to admit when you're straight up wrong. The same thing happened in Monke Thread #5, where nobody liked the four different government types I had written up to put story seeds for. Everyone hated it. This thread has similar vibes- but I have to repeat the reason (as I hoped I explained in the many long text walls above) as to why I did it that way. I don't want cheeky write ins to ruin any sense of actual choice with everyone trying to have their cake and eat it too. Part of this game is the choose-your-adventure aspect with planned payoffs later, which is something people(?) congratulated me for and said they specifically liked about the game. But when those payoffs and ideas have negative or catastrophic consequences, it makes people upset and generates massive salt. I genuinely can't tell if people are upset with the game itself (and by extension me) or if they're still shocked and reeling from the negative consequences of a very long planned event.
So to just be completely honest, I have no idea what I should do now. Doing a revote or even redoing the whole thread would feel wrong and disregard the previous impact and choices and would be a cop out. Continuing on when most people weren't happy or felt misled isn't a good answer either. Not everyone disliked the end of this thread, and the mystery and full strategy of the choices is now null and void since they're split out everywhere. As the one poster said, nothing I can do now can erase the buildup over these past few very real world months if it's all gone to waste. Even worse, the only people who are left in the thread are going to be high investment people who aren't scared off by the high load times and didn't already get so upset by the story that they checked out already, so any poll or vote I do now wouldn't even fit the majority of the thread's population.
So what do you think I should do?
