OFFICE HOURS: Ask DC Universe Your Questions Every (UPDATED) TUESDAY Night!

[ralphsix]

You know…it looks like it would be fun to dive into a pit of fluffy kittens, however it turns out that’s a bad idea.

Um…don’t ask me how I know that.

[Mae]

Even such a pile of these adorable dears?

[Razzzcat]

You gotta gently snuggle in and let them envelope you. It’s freakin amazing!

[ralphsix]

Trust me.

[ralphsix]

Right…it may have been the diving part where it all went wrong.

[Mae]

Sink into the kitties

[Applejack]

@DeSade-acolyte

First off, let me say that I think this years MM was way better than last year. And you know what a MM fiend I am. So that is indeed high praise on the DeSade-acolyte scale.

There was more synergy around the community with a few of the clubs stepping up and dovetailing so if their club events to bring some a MM flavor. The board discussions this year seemed just as, if not more, passionate but with noticeably better community guidelines behaviors, than last year. There were a few blazing rows over a matchup here and there. My personal fav was me & @HubCityQuestion spirited debate in the Lady Shiva Vs Ra’s Al Ghul match. While all keeping our legal Digital 6ft space minimum,

A full villain on villain edition gave it great set of stakes, and a general feel/vibe about the game thIs year just based off the raw brackets. Tip Top Job DCU. I think themes for the MM is a great idea. (A few pop to mind: Elseworld characters only, Silver & Bronze Age characters only. Non-current time characters, so earth-2, earth-X, and characters only from the golden age, LOSH or, that never appeared in normal time continuity.)

Thanks for the kind words, that’s actually quite a relief to hear. Looking forward to the constructive criticism that we can bring to next year! Those theme suggestions would help discourage the popularity contest accusations. Or if it were a full bracket of alternate earth Supermans, and fans are forced to research the nuances? That’d be something.

Getting DC creators, and actors involved was fabulous. I hope if they got involved. I hope they had a great time. Echo Kellum, Brian Michael Bendis Phil Morris & Phil Jimenez, might want get “Don’t blame me, Kelex made my Lazarus Pit Save Pick” t-shirts, for when we get back to cons and stuff.

Hahaha, that’s a hilarious idea! We may have Bendis here for a Q&A sometime in the next few weeks, so if you want to ask what he thought, you should chime in

I gotta ask, what did you think of how the tournament went? Did it meet the goals of interaction, and involvement DCU was hoping for? Where did it exceed? Where may it have fallen short? Any general views “up the food chain” as to how it went?

Keeping in mind the festivities were interrupted by the Q-tine, there were some pay-offs I’m bummed we didn’t see. We were planning on making something akin to the “Villain of the Year” trophy to award to the final villain at WonderCon, maybe with a cosplayer dressed as the champion. That was also how we were planning to announce the finalist.

It seemed like the LPS upset people so much they dropped out of the conversations, which went too far in the direction we were aiming for. We wanted to even out the popularity votes with some surprise upsets like you get in sportball, but maybe we need to figure out a more balanced approach.

It is either hard or easy to believe that the prediction microsite was a huge job to put together. We didn’t have a lot of QA time, so I think that’s where we can make a lot of improvements next year. There was a fair amount of confusion about how the two events (predictions and voting) worked together, so anything we can do to smooth that process out, the better.

Here is some feedback/items regarding the tournament this year and some thoughts.

The good stuff!

Having a theme really helps. I think part of the reason we did was there weren’t any hero vs villain matchups. We are conditioned as comics readers to give more benefit of the doubt, and More subconscious belief that the hero will bear the villain. So in picking a theme and the characters, you might think of having a heroes side bracket, (actually two brackets on my the same) the a villain side bracket(s). So the hero and villain would only meet in the final match.

Ooooh, interesting. Definitely good to keep biases in mind as we select match-ups moving forward.

A way to track your bracket against @DCDaily members and some other guest stars (Jim Lee, Echo, Bendis, etc.) I am dying to know how my bracket did over Hector’s & Amy’s. I think legal could figure out language so talent and maybe other DC/DCU staff can’t win the grand prize. So their brackets could be added to the mix.

Love this idea! With more ramp-up time in regards to celebrity planning, I think this is a great way to hook people in. Maybe even use this as a device to get people to enter, by having creators and influencers share their brackets on social. We all sign in blood that we can’t win anything when we cross the threshold, so no problem there.

A @DCDaily bracket breakdown show to kick things off would be awesome! How does our “couch panel” see the brackets unfold. I know @DCDaily films in advance, so maybe let the staff get access to the brackets early to allow for the shooting vs broadcast time differences.

Love this, and I know DC Daily would, too! Filming of the current brackets might have gone a little differently if not for [that excuse we’re all tired of now ) but this is an added layer that I think would also get the cast more invested for when it came time to announce the winners.

@HubCityQuestion odds and breakdowns articles were awesome!!! A huge round of applause for @HubCityQuestion

They definitely added some extra depth to the matchups. And while it took a while, adding options we’ve seen in animation, as well as comics, was a nice touch. Really created a sense of DCU’s daily involvement in the event more evident.

Don’t tell @HubCityQuestion, but we in the office started calling the results of the match-ups “The Jaffe Effect”. I wonder if his breakdown articles were TOO persuasive, and ended up having an impact on the results!

Giving the club group leaders the access to just the theme a bit earlier would help too. Given them more than a couple of days to plan.

Copy that! I was thinking earlier than giving people more time to submit their predictions would be good, too.

A real-time point system count and ranking. I think a points and ranking system would keep more people interested and involved than this year. What percentile there bracket is in. If they still have a character(s) alive, they may not stand a chance of winning the grand prize, but maybe they can move up the rankings.

Leaderboards were part of our original scope for the microsite, but unfortunately it had to fall off due to our short deadline But I think you can expect to see this next year

A way to “print out” or even just save an image of your entire tournament bracket, meaning all four separate brackets and final 4 bracket.

Good call- and I appreciate the way you cobbled yours together.

The ability to edit your bracket before the time for brackets to close.

Agreed.

Multiple brackets per user are an option, maybe 5. It allows folks to have different brackets that might keep them more deeply involved longer.

I’m a little trepidatious about this because we are already very particular about putting in place a system that prevented multiple submissions per IP or “like” e-mail addresses. jondoe.1@gmail, jondoe.2@gmail, etc. The typical ways people try to get around submission restrictions. I could see a x5 multiplier complicating our efforts to keep things fair.

But I wonder if there’s another way to get people involved for longer. It does feel like the contest stakes made people lose interest if they didn’t “win”, whereas last year there were no stakes, and therefore higher retention.

Maybe mini-matchups along the way or something…

For voting that is multi-day (round of 16 or final 4, semis and final.) it should probably be noted as a daily, rather than on the same 24 hour timer.
(So for a vote that lasts 3 days, I should be able to vote at 10am day 1, 6pm day 2, and 11:45am day 3. Rather than having to wait until after 6pm on day 3 to vote. Does this make sense?)

I’m getting stuck on this one. Could vote ability be refreshed every 24 hours?

The Lazarus Pit probably needs some tuning, but it’s the first year its existed. So that doesn’t surprise me.

Give the LP save a chance of not working. If it does get activated, have kelex generate a random number between 1 & 20, if the number is 13 or lower the Lazarus Pit worked (LP Save), if it’s 14 or higher the LP didn’t work (LP Fail). Or some such difference. 37 or lower LP Save and 38 to 50, LP Fail, 78 or lower LP Save and 79 to 100 LP Fail.

Arguably the wider the random range maybe the better. If you figure out how many numbers make up an LP fail, say 22, scatter the 22 into a few smaller groups within a 100 number range, For a 22 number range, example 14-18, 29-34 51-55, 70-73 & 89-91 would cause LP Fail.

I play tabletop RPGs so I love me some random numbers to inform the story, but: I struggle with translating this interest to a general audience in terms of capturing their imagination. What if the LPS is revealed as activated, and the creator who chose the character has a chance to argue what would have happened in the fight to have created that result? Then fans have one last short-term opportunity to agree/disagree with that argument (maybe even as short as an hour), and that determines the outcome?

But this feedback is worth putting on the table for the future, either way. Those are just my spitball thoughts.

Thanks again to all the DCU & DC folks involved. I’m already anxiously awaiting next year’s tournament.

Thanks for taking the time to give feedback, as you can tell we took last year’s to heart!

[Applejack]

Hahahahaha oh my gosh kittens happened!!!

[Applejack]

@DeSade-acolyte

Hi @Applejack

I know more wikis are being created, but there is no sub menu for them. Not in Watchtower, General Discussion or Community Events.

Basically, there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to find wikis. It seems to me that if you want folks to read, reference, and add to them, making them easier to find via a sub menu would be useful.

Kind of like how we did with the sub-categories for Community Events, I’m waiting to see a justification for the sub-menu before we create it. Right now we encourage the use of the “wiki” tag, which can minimize the topics to Wikis for now. I’m writing the brief now to receive the scope for certain customizations to the wiki experience, and started a monthly wiki-based scavenger hunt to try and get users more comfortable with the functionality.

It may not ever be a sub-category unless things get really wild up in here, but I could see it being placed as an additional icon in “Helpful Resources”.

I can be persuaded, but again, these are the spitballs.

[Applejack]

@DeSade-acolyte

I am speaking here with my club owner hat on.
There could be benefit and impact the larger Club organization. The “Fan Club Discussions“ to a sub menu in General Discussions, than create that sub menu item under General Discussions for Fan Club Discussions and have it be a pointer to the Community Events, Fan Club Discussions. Perhaps adding redirecting message such as “You are being redirected to Fan Club Discussions in the Community Events section” redirection message?

HEY GUESS WHAT WE DID THAT!

You may have noticed the new expandable community calendar menu that has been built at the top of General Discussions and Watchtower. When you click it, it takes you to the Community Events section, which is predominately Fan Club Discussions. So this is a good step before any other major changes are made. I hope people like it, it’s one of my favorite subtle changes!

[Applejack]

@Aylex

Something I’ve noticed: most people’s usernames are blue. But there are some gray ones. Why is that? Does it mean that user isn’t subscribed or something?

I think it means they haven’t visited the forums in a while. The next time they comment, they’ll get the “we haven’t seen this user in a while!” message.

[Applejack]

@AlexanderKnox

@DeSade-acolyte

Rather than moving “Fan Club Discussions“ to a sub menu in General Discussions, could we create that sub menu under General Discussions for Fan Club Discussions and just have it be a pointer to the Community Events, Fan Club Discussions.

Something like that may work. That way, our “really thoughtful, well-crafted content” (Applejack’s words) won’t get washed away into the sea by the people who crank out 10 threads a day* in the General Discussion forum.

*Yes, yes, I’m being hyperbolic. Somewhat.

But come on, you have to admit it’s been better this last week, right? We can’t help they’re being created, but the redundancies are at least getting addressed- ADMIT IT!

[Applejack]

@Reaganfan78

Hello Applejack ,
I’m trying to think of what to ask but can’t think of anything!

Guess I’m just dropping in to say Hello and I’m so enjoying posting these GIF pictures.

OH hai! I agree, posting GIFs is the future of all communication.

[Applejack]

@AlexanderKnox

@Reaganfan78

I’m trying to think of what to ask but can’t think of anything!

That’s how I was with the Joelle Jones Q&A. “I love everything you do” is not a question.

“I love everything you do?”

[Applejack]

@wilkinswontkins

Hi AJ,

Do you know (or could you please find out) why we don’t have the series “Promethea” on here? We have all of the other major America’s Best Comics titles that have been digitized: Terra Obscura, Tom Strong, Tomorrow Stories, and Top 10. But “Promethea” is conspicuous by its absence.

Read Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga and More

Thanks!

I don’t know, and I CAN find out! I’ve added it to my reminders list (Along with getting Legacy collected, @AlexanderKnox)

[Mae]

I didn’t know about Promethea but those sample pages look fantastic!

[Applejack]

@HubCityQuestion

To celebrate DC’s 85th anniversary, NEW FUN COMICS #1, their very first issue in 1935, was digitized for the first time! Are we going to be seeing it here?

HCQ! Hi. I don’t see this on our digital release list, but maybe if we ask really nicely… our Master of Collections/Comic Content Mangement has been on a brief hiatus and will be returning next week, and I have a whole pile of stuff to bother them with I’ll add this!

[Applejack]

@HubCityQuestion

SCOOBY-DOOBY-DOO! Newsarama has the Scooby Scoop: this May 12th, we’re getting a HUGE influx of Scooby-Doo titles onto DC Universe! How did we score this Scooby Coup? And how can we make sure everyone knows how freaking amazing “Scooby-Doo Team-Up” is?

DC | GamesRadar+

Newsarama broke the scoop early, those scamps! Let us not question the “how did we score”, we just fight and debate until something gives.

As for “how can we make sure”, well, that sounds like a job for…
Articles?
Clubs?
Fan Art?

[Applejack]

@Reaganfan78

Oh I can’t wait til May! I could just hug every DC Workers!Scooby Doo team up comic book is coming along with Stargirl!

I will dispense hugs on your behalf as soon as possible!

[Reaganfan78]

Hello Applejack ,
I finally got a question can you believe it, any update on the filming of Uscripted pilot episodes? I’m guessing it’s being postphoned for now, and how are the 3 finalists are doing? Hope they’re safe from this terrible virus.