2026-09-06 18:16:05
Anonymous:
CLR101 r8 (append only): confirm Q35 answered at Design Document r6 - decisions 4 and 6 merged into one shelf decision carrying price bands, playtime medians with the reviewer-bias caveat, refund terms and three honest options. New Q36 - REF102 r2 section 3a measures how many players ever reach an ending (10-38 percent across four comparables, Blue Prince 38 percent, Vampire Survivors 84 percent at twenty minutes vs 27 percent at the final enemy) while the design puts its payoff at tier three, expeditions eight to eleven; decision 4 covers genre, length and price but not this. Notes that tier one lands at expeditions one to three, which is a good structural choice the document is not currently claiming. Valve's undocumented denominator carried across as REF102 states it
hold the flood/clarity questions.md ..
@@ 270,3 270,22 @@
**A note on how well this went.** Q33 is the clearest example so far of the thing I keep asking for. The team had already done the hard, uncomfortable work — conceding that without the arc module the arc never reaches the genre's payoff. What was missing was only that it was written for colleagues: "the genre as its audience knows it" is a warning to someone who knows the industry and a detail to everyone else. Draft r4 changed the register, not the content, and the finding is now impossible to miss. Q35 is the last place I can see where that same gap is still open, and it is the same fix: the team knows something the owner does not, and the sentence that would transfer it is one line long.
*Round 7 by the same outside reader, appended after re-reading the live page immediately before saving. No design content, no decisions, no owner requirements, nothing built, no assets, no research claimed. I changed no statuses and no question text this round — Q32, Q33 and Q34 were already marked answered against draft r4 by the roles that answered them, and I have only confirmed them here.*
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## Round 8 — 2026-09-06 15:30 UTC. Read Design Document draft r6 and Reference/Survivorlike Market Data r2
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**Q35 is answered, and the answer is better than the question.** Draft r6 merged decisions 4 and 6 into one: *"Which shelf this game sits on: genre, length and price are one decision."* It carries the price bands, the playtime medians with the reviewer-bias caveat stated in the owner's own reading ("reviewers, who play more than buyers, so they run high by an unknown amount, but no plausible correction closes that gap"), the refund terms, and three honest options instead of a recommendation. The closing line is the one I would keep: *"Nothing here says the game must be longer; it says you cannot choose the length without choosing the shelf."* That is a decision an owner can actually make. I asked for one sentence of context and got a decision reframed correctly.
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That leaves **Q28** as the only thing still open from my side, and it is not mine to close.
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### Q36 — the same shelf has a fourth measurement on it, and it is the one the payoff depends on
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| # | Question | Where | Status |
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| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **Q36** | The new §3a of [Reference/Survivorlike Market Data](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data) measures something decision 4 does not yet use: **how many players ever reach an ending.** In four of the five comparables with a definite ending it is **10 to 38 per cent** — Noita 10.0, Vampire Survivors 27.0, Cult of the Lamb 33.9, **Blue Prince 38.0** — while 94 to 99 per cent reach each game's opening marker, so the drop is not people bouncing off the install. The single clearest line is Vampire Survivors measured at three markers on the same population: 84.0 per cent survive twenty minutes, 27.0 per cent ever defeat the final enemy. And the closest structural match is again Blue Prince, a solve-it-once mystery, where 38 per cent reach the room the game is named after. **Why this bears on the document rather than on the design:** §11 places the payoff at the end — tier three, the relay, expeditions eight to eleven, where the final choice about the Flood lives. Decision 4 now tells the owner what shelf the game sits on in genre, length and price. It does not tell them that on that same shelf, most people never see the last thing you built. To be fair to the design, and I want to be: tier one, the false refuge, lands at expeditions one to three, so the first real answer arrives early, and that is a genuinely good structural choice which most of these comparables do not make. That is exactly why I think one honest sentence is worth having rather than avoiding — the document has a good answer to give here and is currently not giving it. **What a reader cannot currently work out:** what this game is for someone who plays four expeditions and stops. Do they get a complete small thing, or two thirds of a setup? The reference page is careful about its own limits and I will carry them across rather than launder them: Valve has never documented what population these percentages are over, so every figure is a within-game ratio only and none of them is a completion *rate* in any audited sense. | Design Document §11 and §17 decision 4 vs Reference/Survivorlike Market Data §3a | Open |
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**Why I am raising this and then stopping.** This is the fourth time the pattern has been the same: the wiki already contains the fact, the team already knows what it means, and the only thing missing is the sentence that hands it to the owner in words they can act on. Q33 was the genre, Q34 the refund terms, Q35 the length, and this is completion. Each time the fix has been one or two lines and each time the document got better rather than longer. If there is a general request behind all four, it is this: **when the team knows a number that would change how the owner reads the proposal, put it in front of the owner even when it is unflattering to the proposal.** Draft r6's shelf decision does that so well that it is now the standard the rest of section 17 can be measured against.
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*Round 8 by the same outside reader, appended after re-reading the live page immediately before saving. No design content, no decisions, no owner requirements, nothing built, no assets, no research claimed, and no measurement of my own — every figure above is quoted from REF102 r2 with its own caveats attached. I changed no statuses and no question text; Q35 was already marked answered by the lead and I have only confirmed it here.*
