saw someone else post about this and i really agree i think it just wasnt the right time for purgatory, the stakes were there but the vibe and the point in roleplay development for individual characters just.. wasnt it for me. I dont know what they have planned for the future so i cant say it shouldve happened later, but i think because of all the trips and vidcon the charas had just gotten to a point where they had started healing from their kids going missing only to be thrown into this, which can be a good point narratively but theres also a couple other things that kinda just didnt let it work out for me tbh

a lot of it was just the rules and events were weird? that probably makes no sense. but like from a viewer pov it felt like the characters were beta testers for this and the rules have been constantly changing, so its hard to get comfortable in. Like when theres a set of consistent rules teams are able to more accurately strategize and such and they couldnt really do that? so it just felt like weird improv the whole time which theyre very good at but it was just.. like idk unbalanced? thats a dif point that contributed

like etoiles pointed this out that they balanced the teams (not really imo) in game but not fandom-wise, like certain teams had a very large fanbase and certain others had a very small one, etc etc. And like for example blue team had much less people on consistently but by the time they realized that it was probably too late to change teams without an event like the one recently splitting green. I feel like the admins tried to mix up the players outside of their usual friend groups but it just kinda cut the ints in half? i know cellbit didnt wanna kill roier, bad was very isolated from all his regular friends and therefore nobody wanted to talk to him (he wasnt on their team), tubbo was kinda suffering because he couldnt use create. Red team was overwhelmingly loud, blue was crushingly quiet, green was... tbh not on a lot of the time. Not good to watch from most POVs

i could be wrong about a couple things but like this is my general feeling on it, odd timing and weird balancing combined with toxic fandoms caused by competitiveness within the streams kinda ruined it for me, you can only curate ur experience so much

I really like how you put the first part because it was also something that I had felt about the event but I couldn’t really pinpoint why? I’m sure that a lot of the planning came down to a lot of stuff we can’t see behind the scenes like trying to be mindful of the ccs/ admins schedules but scheduling purgatory so far out from the disappearance really changed a lot. Like I just got used to not having the eggs and being fine with that and a lot of the ccs did sort of move on/ adapt to it. Obviously most people want the eggs back safe but I think some novelty has worn off after being away from them for so long. I think purgatory would’ve had more of an effect if the wound was more fresh when purgatory took place it would’ve made the stakes higher and I don’t think as many people would be saying “oh I don’t care if the eggs die at this point just end purgatory.”

Also the rules changing I noticed too was really jarring from day to day. I feel like a lot of the qsmp is like this and it’s a product of the admins being quick to respond to complaints in general and changing things accordingly. In my ideal world where the admin team could’ve just run the event with a test group to almost like stress test the rules? but i doubt that’s a very viable option. It would’ve been nice to see teams strategize more than play off the cuff in the limited time frame they have I feel like that only really rewards people with spontaneous playstyles

I think a lot of the problems with balancing fanbases revolves around people not knowing how to act online. The qsmp has long stretches where there isn’t much character conflict so that’s attracted a lot of people who feel really attracted to one pov and just don’t know how to handle conflict. We’ve seen this stuff outside of purgatory like during the entirety of the elections arc and when characters have an insignificant argument in rp. I don’t think you could balance viewers while also balancing skill but its definitely a problem that exists and doesn’t really have a clean solution. Also I do think the division of teams was to encourage different people to interact or possibly drive more in rp angst but it did fall flat in ways that were unintended.

Overall I think a lot of purgatory was trying to cater to a lot of people at once but thats just not working. I enjoyed the event from the standpoint that no matter what the admins want a good audience experience and they wouldn’t intentionally let us down. This seems more like a fundamental flaw in the server maybe? That it’s just not structured to be doing competitive game in this format at the very least.