A War in Spite!

[quote=fishandchips]I went with Crosses first then switched to Naughts early on. I spent about a day farming wax lumps at the Sunken Embassy.

I noticed that Naughts and Crosses support spiked at intervals of 6 to 8 hours. Earlier today, the meter reached 38% one time before dropping back to the low 30s and high 20s. It’s either a game feature or people from different regions/ time zones support different teams.

I really hope the bajillions of wax lumps (or silk) and actions invested is really worth it, both for the winning and losing team. Since this is the very first event I hoped we would get it over and done with asap to see what’s the outcome. It’s also going to be a regular recurring event anyway.[/quote]Uh, FL is anything but a game where things are or should be rushed nor a game where reward is the end goal.
edited by Skinnyman on 1/24/2022

I agree in general that the &quotreward&quot isn’t always the goal or the point. I jump straight into the Crab Hunts even though I’m fairly sure they’re not the best use of my time.

But to me this event will feel a bit incomplete without some oomph at the end. The main loop is fairly dull–just play the one action, until you need to farm wax. The community-vote tug-of-war aspect was interesting the first few days to see how support oscillated between the two gangs, but seems to have leveled out distinctly in one’s favor.

Perhaps this is a balance issue. Crab Hunt was better the second time around, and the scaling difficulty as the population dwindled made the event as a whole feel like it had progress. This one, I dunno, I feel like I’m not moving the needle unless I dump an inordinate amount of actions which I can’t justify to myself.

Hopefully I can get levels of a useless vanity quality proportional to my support. Then we’ll see community mobilize behind being able to complete the set of vanity qualities next time around.

[quote=PSGarak]I agree in general that the &quotreward&quot isn’t always the goal or the point. I jump straight into the Crab Hunts even though I’m fairly sure they’re not the best use of my time.

But to me this event will feel a bit incomplete without some oomph at the end. The main loop is fairly dull–just play the one action, until you need to farm wax. [/quote]

You know, if you’d stop with the wax, we could win quickly with the crosses and all would be right with the world. :)

I played a few rounds. Thing is, I’m really not that invested at all in whether Noughts or Crosses win… I haven’t formed attachments to the urchin gangs. And the mechanic of “supporting the winning team doesn’t get you much, but supporting the losing team gets you good rewards” feels like it’s going to ensure that the war stays balanced - the losing side gets support from both true-believers and opportunists, the winning side gets true-believers only. So to me it feels like trying to really push for “my” side to win is futile, since I’m just creating incentives for people to oppose me.

So I played a few rounds, just enough to make sure I’ve got support for the winning team, but not so much that I can’t swap over to the other side if the other side seems to be winning, since they said it’s good to be on the winning side at the end.

Dunno, maybe at the end there’s going to be some reward or cool thing that scales with amount of support, and I’ll wish I’d really dumped more actions into it. (How many more? Another 10? Another 100? Another 1000?) But I’ll see for next time.

Since the event is accessible to early-game players, I’m expecting rewards appropriate to early and mid game.

In other words, I think it’s very unlikely to be worth investing more than a few actions

I found it fascinating to observe the level of interest I managed to rally compared to the digging / collapsing of London and the catching of beasties out at zee. Much less, to be honest.
The two earlier ventures featured elements that appeal. I’m a sucker for zee adventures and excavations, in the Quarter as well as at Moulin. You never know what you’re going to find (within limits, of course). Maybe that’s the key.
I’m sure FB will be trying out a range of these general public ventures to work out which are taken up, and which generate less enthusiasm.
edited by Meradine Heidenreich on 1/25/2022

They could scale rewards with level of Persuasive. And for time-limited uncommon event they could aim at higher than usual rewards, it will not break the game.

This particular event is not even announced in-game for some reason! I believe there’s a significant share of players that don’t even know that it’s happening.

As noted by others above, I have no particular attachment to these gangs and, as such, am not invested in helping them promote violence among themselves. Further, this kind of sounds like another grind, so I’ll just stick to my existing grinds for now.
edited by Toran on 1/25/2022

Yeah, this activity would have been more compelling if the choice was one that people could more easily form opinions about rather than one where the basic conceit is that both sides are the same. Without a story reason to choose a side or contribute, it feels like a betting game where you have to pay unknown levels of resources to achieve unknown rewards, with an uncertain but definitely worse outcome (maybe you get some end reward, maybe you get nothing, we don’t know) if you back the wrong horse and haven’t hedged your bets well enough to switch sides in the unknown amount of time you have once a decisive winner has emerged (which could well happen overnight, depending on your time zone, your resources left, and how cautious you are).

It’s a lot of grind, a lot of resource-sinking barely disguised by flavour and game-ness, and the grind on its own without the unknown and not-guaranteed final reward isn’t itself very rewarding in story or in echoes. I think this one’s a rare miss.

I think elections demonstrated that having an activity that people can form strong opinions about where the outcome is influenced by other players’ actions is a recipe for trouble, unfortunately.

That’s a good point. An activity people can form mild opinions on, maybe? ;) Something less mild than an explicit absence of difference, at least. The Great Clearing-Out worked very well and I think created mostly positive community feelings rather than conflict, because it had an element people had opinions about (which site to unearth first) to engage them, but in a more collaborative than conflict-fuelling way, since all would be unearthed in the end. But I’m not sure how easily that would transfer/scale to other events since it requires multiple end-states/rewards, and I do like that they’re trying out many different things.

I wonder if it’d help to set mid-point milestones to give more motivation to push to some goal, such as if a faction reaches 15000 above/below the starting number, it grants a small reward or a faction leader is introduced to everyone with a short snippet of text, or unlocks an additional resource or action you can contribute for greater variety. Or the same thing but for each player individually based on their level of support rather than the total balance of power. If they want it to be more competitive, it could be that only the first faction to reach each milestone that gets it, if they want to encourage bigger back-and-forth swings, they both can get the milestone reward if both are reached at some point.

Less mystery might also be better; I’d certainly feel more motivated to put a lot of energy into this if I knew that there were end reward tiers at 10, 20 and 40 support, say, than I do with just the promise that there will be one (for one side, at least). Or less risk; if my support with one side didn’t diminish my support with the other, I’d probably put more into it on both sides instead of nervously watching putting small amounts in that I will be able to reverse while constantly checking if it’s going to switch sides because I don’t want to lose out altogether.
edited by enail on 1/25/2022

[quote=PJ]It’s strange to me that there was no in-game announcement of this. They have a message-of-the-day feature already built into the site; why didn’t they use it?

I usually don’t visit Spite for several days at a time, and still haven’t had a chance to do so today. If I hadn’t seen this very thread on the forum, I would have had no indication that this was even happening.[/quote]Agreed - an in-game announcement would have been very helpful - I just saw this thread, and as I’m away from London with no actions, assume I’ve missed this event… :( ETA: still ongoing, haven’t missed it :)

ETA: an announcement by FB on this forum would also have been very helpful for players not on Discord, too! Many thanks to elderfleur for posting it here.
edited by theonie on 1/26/2022
edited by theonie on 1/26/2022

Or could be that at the end of the day, this was just an event targeted at midgame players. There ARE probably people in the level range where the rewards are reasonable, and that would lead them to naturally get involved. Not everything has to be balanced for endgame.

[quote=amalgamate]Not everything has to be balanced for endgame.[/quote]People seem to forget this and the &quotstandard&quot in most (casual) games is that everything must be balanced, no matter the choices you make. :|

Re the perceived lack of engagement (if actually real) for myself the issue was that I simply was not aware of the War until it was already half over. I guess I have to pin the Gazette storylet in my Lodgings and make sure to check it daily…

Is it just me or did the storylet disappear without a trace?..

Thanks. The in-game communication on this piece of content remains sorely lacking.

Yeah, it’s super-weird for it to just… not be there, even more so than having it appear without any notice in-game. Jarring. I feel a bit confused as to what they were going for with this whole event, honestly.