I am a relatively new arrival in London, came here to settle down after making my name as a Zee-captain, and I have one simple question. Is it possible to see the journal profile of your acquaintances? At first I thought that the lack of information and a certain brevity and randomness involved in dropping call-cards and other social actions, a sense of anonymity produced by this, is part of the experience. That all we know about each other is in the text we add to our social actions. But then I realised you can read journals of random people in the top right corner. And even make them your contacts and then acquaintances. Which doesn’t make sense, I can do this, but I can’t do it the other way round? And then I discovered these forums, where people seem to invite each other quite openly. I started to get confused. London’s Grafitti doesn’t get me as confused. Is this one of the many mysteries of the Neath? Why wouldn’t there be a way to inspect the journals of the 15 acquaintances I’ve made in-game? To at least see what cameos they’ve chosen for themselves? What unfathomably sophisticated skills do they boast?
That link leads to the Fallen London site for now because there is no user here name "profile name" for some unfathomable reason, but if I were to instead write my profile ( http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Azoth%20I ) you can see mine. On the forums, we often provide links to our profiles, typically by writing:
[ url=http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/profile%20name]profile name[ /url] (remove the spaces), which would produce something like Azothi
The %20 is the way spaces are recognized. You may find old profile links where the tilde ~ is used as spaces, but this was changed to avoid problems caused by people who used ~ in their name.
As for London’s graffiti, yes, it is one of the mysteries of the Neath that you can pursue. Since you’ve played Sunless Sea already, though, you’ll likely be familiar with the material, just in a new context.
If you click on those journal entries you see in the top right corner, you’re linked to those players’ profiles, where you can see their cameos etc and read every single journal entry! :)
The original poster seems to be aware of that, judging from what they posted. What is puzzling them is how to see the profile pages of people they know, their contacts. Bizarrely, there is no button to hit in the game that does this, a very strange omission. The only way is to copy and paste the contact’s name into the name part of the web address of your own (or some random passer-by’s) profile page (as described in the post above).
I would advise creating a folder of your contacts in the bookmarks of your browser once you have found them. Saves on the copy-pasting a little bit.
Thank you for your responses. It is indeed a bizarre omission in the architecture of this place. All of my acquaintances come from dropping calling cards to strangers suggested by the system, so it felt really weird I couldn’t see their journals. Normally, I try to limit my play to what’s available in-game, without reaching out to other sources like wikis or forums.
I only hope that it doesn’t mean people I come in contact with in-game will expect active participation on forums. Because that omission seems like an assumption that every player will reach out to forums. First, I don’t think I have much time for that, second, I sensed a slight massive-multiplayer vibe on some of the topics here, a vibe that I actively try to avoid. What I mean is the mysterious narrative-driven game turning into a mathematics-and-efficiency race-to-the-top system game. People in those kinds of games sometimes gain a tendency to make assumptions about the right and wrong ways to play. The "best", the "most efficient", the "fastest" (the only) way to do X or Y. I had enough of that in another world (of warcraft).
I have nothing against power-gaming, I just hope that people here don’t make assumptions that I’m playing it the same way. I’m in it for the secrets, the mystery, the unknown, the roleplay. Fortunately, the messages I exchanged in-game were all roleplay. Good sign.
Unless I was expected to see through the roleplay coating and react in a certain way "because that’s how you play this game". And I will have no way to know that unless I researched wikis and forums. But I don’t want to, as it spoils the mystery. I zailed the Unterzee with nary a guide or tip and it was a thrilling and enchanting experience, and I intend to continue that way.
Please tell me I’m just paranoid and jaded after those other massive online games, so I can sleep soundly. edited by The Unzeen on 7/20/2018
Some people here are interested in optimizing their game play; some people are interested in roleplaying. Some people are interested in both.
I don’t think there’s any expectation for people to join the forums. Forum-goers are a relatively small percentage of total players, and there’s many other Fallen London communities elsewhere on the internet for people to join.
Note that this subsection of the forums, The Bazaar, is mostly used for gameplay discussion and advice. In-depth lore discussion tends to occur in The Salons, at least in theory, while forum-based roleplaying happens in Mr Pages’ Fabularities. If you’re looking for contacts to roleplay with in-game, try The Singing Mandrake.
Thanks, that’s nice to hear. I hope I didn’t sound too dramatic. Then again, the Neath tends to bring a certain degree of exaltation out of you ;) I just wanted to gauge how much of the game happens here on the forums. And if, similarly to Warcraft, there’s an expectation of "having researched the encounter" before you sign up to anything. Or is there any equivalent of "lfm 100000ilvl fast run don’t suck". Or an extensive glossary of terms you need to study before anyone starts to treat you seriously. Etc.
In Warcraft, unless you are in a community-run dedicated RP event, you start to behave IC then you look a fool or get yelled at for slowing everybody down (no way did that stop me from annoying people with my random IC behaviour, though, good times).
I guess it’s different when the interaction with other players isn’t as extensive and involves mostly two people (are there any events in Fallen London that involve more? except impersonal server-wide stuff like elections?)
Here’s to hope Fallen London is a safe haven for weirdos like me :) I want to meet them!
I have two questions still, though. I noticed some forum users, like you, have this "no X requests" in signature. First question: why? Second question: if I just drop a call card to you in-game without seeing you on forums, I have no way of knowing. How do you deal with that? edited by The Unzeen on 7/21/2018
There’s a couple social action storylines which have minimal mechanical benefit and aren’t worth doing more than once in regular gameplay. Calling cards, coffee invitations, and other things aren’t an issue for most people. I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but I accept most social actions even if they don’t really benefit me in the moment. At most, I just decline invitations for the couple actions listed:
The Affluent Photographer storyline requires repeatedly working with other players to investigate someone. It takes a bunch of actions for a reward that’s not mechanically worthwhile, so having progress adds an unwanted card to your deck. I’m fine with spending actions to help other players in other contexts, but this storyline becomes an active inconvenience.[/li][li]Plant battles, aka the Tournament of Lilies, requires a bunch of dice rolls against other players. Again, losing the dice roll lowers a quality and thus adds (usually unwanted) cards to your deck.
So yeah, aside from those feel free to send social actions to anyone! (And for those two, you can always ask through the forums or a different social action first.) The worst case scenario is your invitation being declined without a response, but these days many social actions allow replies even when declining. I doubt you’ll encounter behavior like that in WoW; optimal gameplay here is mostly singleplayer, so anyone open to interacting isn’t trying to play ‘perfectly’. Not everyone will be interested in roleplaying, but players still tend to be polite.
The plant battles go on forever and can be costly. They are tricky for some people for role playing reasons. The only way to get rid of the plant-growing cards altogether is to reach 19 in the relevant quality. But unless one has also won all the random outcome battles, the player still appears in others’ lists as a possible opponent. Losing drops the plant growing quality, which brings back the card. Personally, I got thoroughly sick of the cycle after having my plant shredded multiple times. So if Jermion is invited, I generally respond in character, either by letter or with a beneficial action before rejecting the invitation (or having it rescinded).
The photographer story at least has an option to be duped, i.e. to help other players along without necessarily becoming involved in the never-ending cycle again. Many players are quite happy to fulfil that role.
Besides the elections, which are a once a year event & arguably more fun if you engage in the discussion instead of just voting, you more or less don’t need the forums for anything and can handle all your interactions through the in game social actions.
Some players prefer to play fallen london solely as a single player experience and will reject your responses out of hand, and others play socially but avoid a few of the less useful social exchanges (see obove) and others still accept everything. So long as you’re not offended by people rejecting social actions, you probably don’t need to worry about it