Thoughts from me: fairly short, since I'm been watching from Colonia rather than participating directly. But it's been really good fun to watch!
Positive:
- lots of breaking things we thought were established fact (e.g. certain classes of interesting thing can only happen on Thursdays, e.g. nothing bad will ever happen to certain elements of the game)
- high stakes and interesting gameplay scenarios
- good and responsive use of Galnet to deliver the storyline, story felt like it was responding to player progress
- good mix of CG and non-CG ways of providing challenges, especially when combined with the isolation and limited services at Witch Head
- the Witch Head environment has a lot of potential for many further stories in an interesting setting
- fast response and monitoring of issues
- great opportunity for people who weren't around for the early months/years of Colonia to get that same "building a new settlement" feel
- good calibration of things like Trade CG and Repair targets to make them fit the timescale expectations
Ideas for next time:
- in-game foreshadowing of the next II. e.g. for this one, meta-alloy prices could have started steadily rising, and getting articles in Galnet, weeks or months before the II itself started, or for the first one, the two corporations and their rivalry over Guardian tech could have been introduced a few weeks in advance.
- more fuzziness of the phase structure: now that things clearly don't need to happen on Thursdays, doing more with the overlapping and interleaved events used in this II should make the whole thing feel more 'natural'
Negative:
- exploration CGs still don't work well, and the targets were way off all precedent. It's a credit to the rest of the II process and how well that was done that most people have basically forgotten that first CG was part of it at all.