Any comments or annotations by myself regarding a question will be written underneat the appropriate screenshot.
We had a grand total of 9 responses to the poll. 4 spies, 1 non-spy, 2 hosts, and 2 response who weren't players (one of whom kept up to date).
Everybody chose to take the whole poll.
Responses to the communication restrictions were mixed. 2 thought it was effective, 2 agreed with the pre-filled suggestion that there should be other communcation methods. The 3 custom responses were:
"Players should have been able to talk privately with other players in a controlled way; eg using an item that opens a communications line between two specific players for a while"This response seems to just go into extra detail on the aforementioned pre-suggested idea.
"Players need to be less inactive, that screwed us over from winning I think!! also the restrictions to the forum page seemed to harsh. especially when we tried to talk about it in chat i got shut down several times. can we talk about it in chat and just post the conversations into the forum pages?"Discussion of the game was not permitted outside the thread, so my thanks to those who shut this player down. Having said that, taking a more lenient approach in future seems like a good idea.
"Not being able to PM players once you felt sure you were on the same team was annoying as hell. I have to say i didn't like having to go to a different forum to do things, and it severely impacted my motication and activity. I can't put my finger on why, but being able to somehow do thing through the ele forum would have been much much easier (obviously this would have impacted mechanics.) I think team titanpads would have been better on the whole"I agree wholeheartedly with this response.
Responses to the private boards were also mixed. 3 agreed that they were effective, 2 preferred the titanpads. The pink responder didn't know that you can skip questions, perhaps. 3 custom responses were:
"the private boards probably worked well for active teams, but we weren't so I was unable to effictively evaluate this.""It seems they put other people off; I didnt care except for the activity drop""Each player having their own constant username, as well as the ability to customise profile pictures and such was a nice touch. However, the complexity involved in doing so - especially account switching for spies - was a bit too much of a barrier and overall, titanpads are easier to use, more fun, and easier to betray your faction-mates with."I also appreciated the decor.
The overall consensus seems to be that the boards were unnecessarily complicated.
Half - 4 - of the responders seemed pleased with the length of the game, however only 2 of these 4 were players. The rest all agreed that the game was too long. The two custom responses that were cropped off the screenshot are:
"way tooooooo loooonnnggggg!!!!!! there should have been a big red button apocalypse button to push and blow up everything when the game hit round 20 or 24ish!! (~48 days is way too much, next time leave it at 40 and call it enough.)""Too long, but not by design, rather player choices"Perhaps a bit of both.
Of the 8 responses only 2 agreed on an answer; that they felt forced to be cooperative. There were 3 custom responses:
"A perfectly-designed game should pressure its players into the intended outcome without external influences being required."A perfectly-designed game would encourage players to motivate themselves.
"I was a host, I liked more seeing players suffer. 
"Hmmmmmmm
"there should have been more to force the end of the game earlier. next time have a radiation leak that slowly kills everyone and there is no way to stop it, unlike the fires and legion/invaders which could slowly be delayed or stopped."Hey that's literally what the foul-smelling substance was for! Except it came way too late and could be stopped. Other than that, though
Half of the responses agreed that getting an item when exploring a new Room was fine. However, the two custom responses were:
"we needed more items at the end once a large number of the rooms had been explored. or a way to find items in rooms again even after they had been explored.""Items being giving via the Expand action promoted its use far too much until players felt forced to use it so much that it was a waste of time entirely, unnecessarily extending the game."Well doesn't that just lead nicely into the next question...
As a reminder, Tom proposed 'Players were over-motivated to use the action Expand which resulted in them wasting many actions, which could have been used for more useful purposes.'
3 responses agreed with the sentiment and 2 denied it. 1 suggested that Tom should get a backbone, and the two custom responses were:
"Partially, at the start expansion was the best option, but near the end expansion was not nearly as useful or effective.""Expand was the best action 90% of the time period. It wasnt "wasted" rather there needed to be better ways to reach certain things and it shouldnt do so much free stuff on top of getting new territory"Overall, most players agreed with Tom.
Sally proposed 'Pipeworks' central concept is an identity crisis between a cooperative game and a competitive game, which doesn't really work in practice.' I don't think Sally used a double negative here.
Other than that, the only custom response was
"well, since the only team member with an attainable goal in our team was a spy, elimination would have been the only way to win; since you didnt specify pwII, the original pw was actually rigged towards group victory, while this one was more about getting everything on the verge of collapse until all other factions are forced to cooperate despite everything. So for PWII it would be option 3 and until the end I didnt even dream CO would stack least spies, hard goals, easy spy goals and bad starting position all on the same team, on top of not even altering wording for the factions main goals"This is why I made this poll anonymous.
Overall, this question recieved mixed responses and had no definite answer. About what I expected.
I would like to disclaim that I did not get either a Tom nor a Sally to physically voice these questions.
Was the game balanced? Very mixed opinions. The four custom responses were as such:
"Can't really say it was seeing as I had no chance to survive due to my time zone""other than the fact inactivity screwed everyone over!!! it probably could have been fairly balanced on the large scale(maybe only a few minor things here and there to fix)""All remaining factions living HAVE to win in a co-op victory. It was not balanced to pick a winning faction through uneven objectives when all factions still alive have 'won' together""Everything was chaos since the start. And it was beautiful."I'm not sure about any beauty here
Overall I'd say the consensus was that it could have been balanced, but it wasn't.
"Weren't bad, but should probably have been a bit less drastic""We needed more positve events, there were many natural disasters and things of harm, but we needed to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and that is hard when only shit is being thrown in your face and covering your view.""Option 2, but i want to be a bit more clear; what i missed was risk/reward; there should be more events that the same faction that gets threatened tzhe most by also can deal the best with, while also having sth in it for figuring out how to deal with it"I think I agree with all sentiments given here.
Almost everyone agreed that the map was the right size. One response summed up to 'it depends':
"Depends on frequency of how expands were actually intented to be used; also if there was a way to access information without having to expand all the way to each terminal or get lucky with spies it wouldnt be such a big deal either"... and one sadist went out of their way to suggest that it was too big.
"The map was far too large; factions should occupy a smaller space and be much easier for other factions to destroy via physical attacks."
The Convenience section of the poll was mostly for me to justify my extra-curricular efforts. The only noteworthy custom response to this one is
"The host could have simply used an embedded, automatically updating spreadsheet which would have negated the need for screenshots entirely."Yeah, I'm an idiot.
Hey, no responses were truncated. I actually never used these.
Of the custom responses, two said that it should have been updated more frequently esp. when I made an error correction to the spreadsheet, and one said that it should have included the Consoles section.
I'm sure all the Relic Sweeper players have swathes of screenshots stored somewhere.
Comments speak for themselves.
First inactivity question. The 2 custom responses were:
"I was the only active person during quite a while in my faction, which means I could not use our faction action, which would have been very useful. So it felt very unbalanced.""Inactivity was not accounted for by the host! many indiviual goals and actions ccould not work due to the fact the host forgot people sometimes go inactive. also changing the round lengths midround screws with people as they might set meetings or appointments around it so they can be on at deadline."Overall, though, inactivity is a bad thing and everyone knows it.
This question was the REAL reason this whole poll is anonymous. A lot of players were inactive and I don't want to be shaming anyone into telling me why. It is just a game, after all.
Everyone gave a unique response, so I'm just going to list them all here in a random order.
"I forgot about the game.""I lost interest in the game.""Circumstances arose in real life, which is more important than a game.""When the host changes deadlines with less than a full rounds notice it is hard to change RL appointments so that we can have a team member on at deadline to make any last minute changes. RL comes first, and had the whole team been semi-active the whole way through these things could be avaoided."My fault, soz, but sometimes I can't avoid it.
"Got no input from anyone else then overslept deadline; was around on all other occasions"i.e.
"I was not inactive at any point in the game." but being humble about it
"I should be able to pick b, c and e all at once""I was a host. Inactivity wasn't an option (although I didn't do much)""I was not inactive at any point in the game."
No truncation; no elaboration.
With 3 votes, kaempfer13 is the MVP, followed by Ryli then UTA (along with a vote for None).
Comments speak for themselves.
Many thanks to those who put in the effort to detail their thoughts here. It's much appreciated.
Everything said here is valid, but I'm not going to go into detail right now.
Nobody actually answered No to this, which is nice. One response said that they wouldn't participate, though.
"I probably won't join unless the game decides whether it wants to be cooperative or competitive""I want to choose all the Yes options, as I don't think it should be anytime soon(maybe start Jan/Feb 2018), be fairly different than the current one was, and if possible have another host(this one is optional for me, as Onion was pretty good and I could go either way if he did or didn't host the next one)""only if players who sign up are willing to give at least 40% attention right to the end of the game."heh
One response, in addition to the custom response above, suggested a different host. That's fair. I would agree.
