An Update on Outfits

Fallen London
102

[quote=Aro Saren][quote=Snort][quote=Aro Saren]

I mean, at least they can see how often people do change outfits. Presumably, to some point in the past long before this lock was introduced.
Liking is entirely different matter, yes.[/quote]

But then there’s still an issue about why people change outfits. As an example, people who have been around for a while my have stats that are relatively high, so outfit changes are only useful for difficult challenges. That’s certainly the case with me. But I still change outfits when I need to, and making this more awkward isn’t conducive to game enjoyment.

So … maybe there’s a sizeable Fifth Column of annoyance hidden in the Silent Majority?

But seriously, data is only as useful as one’s ability to interpret it. Without having some fairly sophisticated collection and ability to understand data, my guess is that FBG doesn’t really have a handle on outfit changing.

On a related note, someone (I can’t find it now) said something earlier about how wonderful the support people have been during the last 6 months or so. That’s been my experience as well. If I could send them ALL the Rats on a String, I would.
edited by Snort on 8/1/2020[/quote]

Yes, that’s exactly what I was talking about in the first comment about statistics (you’re quoting the second one). You have non-attending people, twink accounts and whatever else. Well, you CAN devise a statistical design that discerns that, at least parts, probably, but most people from my lab (not in-game, I work in real science research), including myself, would fail first 3-4 attempts to do so, and catch that only months later.
edited by Aro Saren on 8/1/2020
edited by Aro Saren on 8/1/2020[/quote]

Ahh, sorry - should have read more carefully. Can I blame my outfit? :)

103

Since we both actually agree, I propose we blame whoever whose stupid idea it was to block outfits instead.

104

[quote=Aro Saren]
Now I’m imagining how thoroughly Flyte is offended and scandalised - how we have the gall to complain about their decisions! How utterly unfair! Preposterous! Mommy, when I shit in their sandbox they don’t want to play with me, bwa-ah![/quote]

Ok now, this feels very much like bullying, which is something I’m not inclined to stand by and ignore. It’s one thing to disagree with a decision but another entirely to disparage someone’s character over said decision, especially someone who I’d imagine you know very little about. Where does this persona you’ve imagined even come from? I hope that you’ll take some time to step back and find a better way to express your disappointment than attacks on someone’s character.

Guys, please, please remember that these are actual people behind the computer screen and not mindless game-developing machines. I very much doubt that some of the comments that I’ve read would have been said if this were a face-to-face conversation. I’m really disheartened by some of the nastiness that I’ve seen over the last few days, though the majority of comments have expressed disappointment in a more polite manner. What’s always drawn me to Fallen London is not only the game but the unique community that’s (usually) one of the most polite and compassionate that I’ve experienced. So I’m always depressed when something like this crops up, and (perhaps selfishly) plead with you to maintain a more level head so that we can all enjoy being a part of the welcoming community that I know we can be.

105

[quote=Kloxe][quote=Aro Saren]
Now I’m imagining how thoroughly Flyte is offended and scandalised - how we have the gall to complain about their decisions! How utterly unfair! Preposterous! Mommy, when I shit in their sandbox they don’t want to play with me, bwa-ah![/quote]

Ok now, this feels very much like bullying, which is something I’m not inclined to stand by and ignore. It’s one thing to disagree with a decision but another entirely to disparage someone’s character over said decision, especially someone who I’d imagine you know very little about. Where does this persona you’ve imagined even come from? I hope that you’ll take some time to step back and find a better way to express your disappointment than attacks on someone’s character.

Guys, please, please remember that these are actual people behind the computer screen and not mindless game-developing machines. I very much doubt that some of the comments that I’ve read would have been said if this were a face-to-face conversation. I’m really disheartened by some of the nastiness that I’ve seen over the last few days, though the majority of comments have expressed disappointment in a more polite manner. What’s always drawn me to Fallen London is not only the game but the unique community that’s (usually) one of the most polite and compassionate that I’ve experienced. So I’m always depressed when something like this crops up, and (perhaps selfishly) plead with you to maintain a more level head so that we can all enjoy being a part of the welcoming community that I know we can be.[/quote]
I mean, like I said on the other thread, I only see a couple of people actually being offensive and not just bitter or disappointed. One being the one you’re replying to, obviously. For internet forum standards, that’s near-impossible level of politeness that we have achieved here. I believe you’re being overly sensitive by thinking that the community has gone off the rails. That’s not the case.

106

[quote=Baron Lagavulin]
I mean, like I said on the other thread, I only see a couple of people actually being offensive and not just bitter or disappointed. One being the one you’re replying to, obviously. For internet forum standards, that’s near-impossible level of politeness that we have achieved here. I believe you’re being overly sensitive by thinking that the community has gone off the rails. That’s not the case.[/quote]

I agree! This was not intended towards the entire community, just the specific people being offensive and rather hateful. I thought by replying directly to one of the intended recipients I was conveying that, but perhaps I didn’t clarify enough.

107

[quote=Kloxe][quote=Aro Saren]
Now I’m imagining how thoroughly Flyte is offended and scandalised - how we have the gall to complain about their decisions! How utterly unfair! Preposterous! Mommy, when I shit in their sandbox they don’t want to play with me, bwa-ah![/quote]

Ok now, this feels very much like bullying, which is something I’m not inclined to stand by and ignore. It’s one thing to disagree with a decision but another entirely to disparage someone’s character over said decision, especially someone who I’d imagine you know very little about. Where does this persona you’ve imagined even come from? I hope that you’ll take some time to step back and find a better way to express your disappointment than attacks on someone’s character.

Guys, please, please remember that these are actual people behind the computer screen and not mindless game-developing machines. I very much doubt that some of the comments that I’ve read would have been said if this were a face-to-face conversation. I’m really disheartened by some of the nastiness that I’ve seen over the last few days, though the majority of comments have expressed disappointment in a more polite manner. What’s always drawn me to Fallen London is not only the game but the unique community that’s (usually) one of the most polite and compassionate that I’ve experienced. So I’m always depressed when something like this crops up, and (perhaps selfishly) plead with you to maintain a more level head so that we can all enjoy being a part of the welcoming community that I know we can be.[/quote]

Well, in a face-to-face conversation I would likely tell much more, presumably in Russian, since modern English is rather lacking in obscenities (and I’m not good enogh with the old version), because as of recently I’m really sick of people abusing their untouchable status to bullshit the hell out of everyone else, while hiding behind kind souls like you, but that’s my rough period, not everyone else’s, you do have a point.

So, sorry to you and everyone agreeing with you. I think it’s my cue to leave the forum for a while, just like I suspended my game account.

Although, my experience tells that me being repeatedly yelled at for a major screw-up like this makes me fix it faster than being pampered, like you’re trying to do. And it’s not a singular experience, so I have some, er, statistic on that.
edited by Aro Saren on 8/1/2020

108

That may indeed be a wise idea. And I would advise people to refamiliarise themselves with the forum rules and the importance of posting respectfully.
edited by Diptych on 8/1/2020

109

sonder - n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

A beautiful word. It applies to all of us, including you and the developers.

110

I think that everyone has explained very well why locking outfits is such a frustrating experience (I started an expedition in the Fallen Quarter and nearly forgot to switch to my max Watchful, which would have been quite annoying). I do want to add that Failbetter has made a number of changes over the years to Fallen London that I’ve personally found annoying (capping quirks, the Favour / Renown system, the new map) but this is the first that I’ve posted on the forums about. Those other decisions may have annoyed me, but it was a small annoyance and I could see where the designers were coming from. Locking outfits has made me hesitant to play new content (my ambition, the Exceptional stories I’ve saved) until this is rolled back.

111

I hadn’t even thought about my ambition! Nooo… I’ve got three or four things planned for the next time I put to Zee and now I have no idea when or if I’ll be able to arm myself for each of them! Argh whyyy

112

[quote=Wylte]
I hadn’t even thought about my ambition! Nooo… I’ve got three or four things planned for the next time I put to Zee and now I have no idea when or if I’ll be able to arm myself for each of them! Argh whyyy[/quote]

I haven’t been to Zee to test this myself, but I think someone reported in a previous thread that you can change outfits while on your boat. It seems that you’re not able to on an island though, so if your business takes you off your boat it may be worth changing before stepping foot on land. (Or so I’ve amassed from skimming the outfits threads, if I’m mistaken please correct me!)

113

[quote=Kloxe][quote=Wylte]
I hadn’t even thought about my ambition! Nooo… I’ve got three or four things planned for the next time I put to Zee and now I have no idea when or if I’ll be able to arm myself for each of them! Argh whyyy[/quote]

I haven’t been to Zee to test this myself, but I think someone reported in a previous thread that you can change outfits while on your boat. It seems that you’re not able to on an island though, so if your business takes you off your boat it may be worth changing before stepping foot on land. (Or so I’ve amassed from skimming the outfits threads, if I’m mistaken please correct me!)[/quote]

Decided to pop out to zee to test (and grab a plated seal for my trouble) and one can, in fact, change clothes while zailing the Broad Unterzee. I’ll mention it in the wiki as well, to hopefully ease the minds of anyone else worried about this being an issue.

114

I must say I am pretty shaken by the entirety of it - and it didn’t start now.

FL has always had some obnoxious parts, that created challenges just to make a point (i.e. quirks, urchin favors, etc). Having played other games by Alexis Kennedy, and gone through the Enigma Ambition, I thought that this choice was associated with the points he wanted to make as a designer. Not my cup of tea, but this was small potatoes compared to the richness of story, and the lovely forum community!

Following the slump in new content around Sunless Skies, came an abundance of changes which… shifted the game a lot. The new (cumbersome) map. Too many new stats. Two exceptional stories that pissed almost everyone. Annoyances of a different kind, that made me think that after having worked hard on a PC game for years, the developers kinf of forgot that the FL players are after a different experience, one that relies on narrative, wordplay and conjured imagery, not on mechanics and flashy maps.
After all - actions are finite, and browser games by definition are a lovely break in your day, immersive as they might be.

Something else had shifted too: the relationship with the playerbase. The Discord/Forum debate was one example that left a bitter taste. Still, being busy around Whitsun, I happily forked Fate to catch up, because everyone makes mistakes and things were picking up.
Having taken a short break, I was looking forward to play the new content even though I had some doubts: being in the lab stopped you from having social interactions, essentially tanking them… the new stats required too many visits to the wiki… the Bone Market was needlessly complicated… in short, the new content was brilliant, but the designers hadn’t give much thought to how people actually play FL; it ignored the limitations of the form, the annoyance of switching outfits, of wasting actions to come and go. We loved the new stuff but, the ‘quality of life’ aspect was forgotten.

And now, this. This change was designed by someone who has entirely forgotten what it is to play as a low level player with 20 available actions - or as a high level player who was suddenly given life-altering grand schemes to lose themselves in, and can suddenly juggle nothing. To complain and point out how the entire game broke, and get ‘yes, we can see that now, we might change it in the future, but please keep in mind we don’t really trust your judgement as you are probably a bunch of min-maxers’ was unlike everything Failbetter had done before.
It just seems unreal. So much goodwill, wasted, Ambitions and grand schemes and stories left unfinished because the FL universe suddenly shifted. I don’t quite know what to make of the entire thing save consider that the pandemic had everyone scrambled up, and this is the result.

115

As the overwhelming negativity here has resulted in a couple of people being unconscionably rude, perhaps I should clarify my position.

I am annoyed, disappointed, and exasperated. However–

I do not hate Failbetter, or any of their employees. I do not think they are mustache-twirling villains, insisting on changing things out of spite. I do not think they are greedy corporate overlords, eager to make a buck off the suffering of others. What I do think is that there is someone holding too dearly to their artistic vision, and a shiny new idea they wanted to implement, that they forgot about both practicality, and what the consumers of their art actually want.

There are radically different approaches to game design, and that’s fine. There are games like Animal Crossing, and there are games like Dark Souls. This feels to me like someone got tired of making Animal Crossing, and decided to turn it into Dark Souls instead of making a separate game.
edited by Alexander Feld on 8/1/2020

116

[quote=Alexander Feld]There are games like Animal Crossing, and there are games like Dark Souls. This feels to me like someone got tired of making Animal Crossing, and decided to turn it into Dark Souls instead of making a separate game.
edited by Alexander Feld on 8/1/2020[/quote]

That’s the part that really stings to me. Many game developers are reaching this point these days where they’re sick of working on their games and try to terraform them into something else instead of releasing something new. And I can’t seem to escape it. I finally unstuck myself from the leaning tower of Warcraft and their need to cannibalize their own lore and systems, and I thought Fallen London was where I’d be able to hang my hat.

Like I’ve said before… If the Devs have a desperate need to make content like this, they could add a new game mode or area that uses it. It would be the hot new thing, and there wouldn’t be any need to fight about it because everything else would still be there. Hell, it could be a new hardmode for endgame players where the NPCs are considered much more suspicious and intelligent, and complete disguises and armor sets would be necessary to fit in or survive… It’s not necessary to change the entire game’s gameplay system. You CAN make everyone happy. I just want them to realize that. There is a way to make this work for everyone involved.

I guess the reason it is so upsetting is because, while this isn’t a world-ending problem, the way it is presented to the community represents that first tentative step on the road to the whole AAA standard of indifference, sometimes even contempt, for your audience. FBG is not evil. But this move makes it look they they have the potential to be, somewhere years down the road. It makes me feel like if we don’t protest enough, it’ll happen.

This isn’t just about outfits, it’s about the direction of Failbetter Games.

117

I’m really concerned about the problems with the server since Wednesday, quite apart from the frequent (and lengthy) outages. I’m in Australia and at lunchtime here (2-3am UTC) the game is laggy to the point of being nearly unplayable - taking minutes for a click to have any effect, that effect is usually just dropping back to the original screen anyway. Very frustrating. I have a railway to build d__n it!

Update: Aaand the game’s down again. I think they really need to replace the hamster wheel that powers the servers. I have a bunch of almost-trained weasels I reckon could do the job - for a very reasonable fee!
edited by Julius de Poisson on 8/2/2020

118

[quote=Kloxe]Ok guys, I think we might need to take a collective breath and step back for a minute. Failbetter are not some evil overlords who enact their every whim without concern for our feedback. They’ve always listened to us in the past, and I think their response to our concerns in this case is reasonable. They’ve agreed to address what I think many of us consider the largest problem, the inability to change outfits in storylets that you can freely leave. For me, and it appears many of the other forum members who have commented, this is the part of the update that’s the most tedious and frustrating. I think it’s only fair to give them a chance to enact the changes that they’ve promised and see how it turns out before we condemn outfit-locking completely. I admit that it would be nice if they’d roll back this feature until these changes were made, but I suppose the next few weeks will give me some time to get used to managing my outfits more carefully.

The other complaint that I’ve seen most often is that it makes skill checks even more difficult in places like Parabola, where you need a combination of, for example, Glasswork and Dangerous while tracking down animals. (I can’t speak for early or mid-game areas because it’s been too long since I’ve played them.) I’d say the action costs here are already pretty steep, and I understand (even if I don’t completely agree with) the negative response to making an already-difficult challenge harder. I hope that this could be balanced by adjusting the difficulty of skill checks in areas where outfit-locking is preserved, especially in any older areas that were designed many years ago. Again, I think it’s worth waiting to see what Failbetter comes up with before we all continue to panic.
[/quote]

I actually think my main issue with it is a third one, that I’ve finally put my finger on how to express clearly.

This change has induced a separation between when you need to prepare for a challenge and when you see what the challenge actually is.


You have to pick an outfit blind, before the game actually tells you what you’re trying to outfit yourself for - the challenge requirements/difficulty (&quotthis is a dangerous challenge of difficulty X, but you need Y bizarre to play it) is past the point where you can choose your outfit!

In the simplest form, when &quotgoing back&quot to the place where you can choose your outfit is as easy as hitting &quotperhaps not&quot a few times, this is a minor annoyance. The more frustrating case is where it takes many actions to get back to where you were before, so it’s an action sink as well. Sometimes it’s also an IRL time cost, such as with the boardroom. The most annoying case would be where it’s a one-time storylet so there’s NO way to prepare for it, like playing through your Ambition - that would feel terrible, if I was playing a one-time story, had no idea that I needed to equip an item, and was unable to do so.

I, personally, don’t mind the lower success rate from multi-stat optimization, that’s fine. Action economy going up or down a bit doesn’t bother me, you get to all new content soon enough anyway. But this sort of guessing game? memory game? wiki-search-game? where you have to figure out the challenge you’re preparing for before the game actually tells you what challenge you’re preparing for is frustrating and unfun.

119

[quote=Amalgamate]I actually think my main issue with it is a third one, that I’ve finally put my finger on how to express clearly.

This change has induced a separation between when you need to prepare for a challenge and when you see what the challenge actually is.
[/quote]

That’s an excellent way to describe the problem. It might be tolerable if the outfit lock was limited to specific, appropriately-labeled content. Universal, though? I don’t think there’s any way to remove that, even if there’s text describing the challenge in advance.

120

Just going to throw my two echoes into this one. I came back to FL to finish my ambition: Heart’s desire and it’s been awesome. The whole new content thing has been a learning curve and fairly enjoyable, not crazy about grinding all day to get somewhere story-wise, but it’s worth it.

I’d like to say I think multi-stat challenges definitely seem to be a better fit than locking outfits. In the past months I’ve worked hard to find clothing options to maximize my game-play, just for the sake of time. I’ve got a job and two kids and so also if they were some more 5-action clicked base options, especially in the lab that would be excellent. Even if it means potentially losing those 5 actions to a fail-check.

Aside from that, the game seems healthier than ever and continues to be fun. Great job Failbetter. Glad to see some adjustments are being made to the outfit update too.

121

Well, I’ll certainly keep an ear open to see how exactly FB changes the lock system &quotin the next few weeks&quot (like seriously, with a date that nonspecific they might as well have made a Soon™ joke), but the way their response so callously dismisses the overwhelming amount of negative player feedback the update got by just assuming we’re all part of a vocal minority of min-maxers (spoilers: not everyone here is a min-maxer, myself included) has been insulting enough that I’m no longer comfortable supporting FB with my EF sub & periodic fate buys, nor really playing the game at all.

When/If they actually take some steps to do right by their mistakes with the outfit lock, hopefully including apologizing for the PR disaster that was insinuating that &quotNot Speaking Up Against It&quot automatically means any given silent player was &quot#Loving This New Outfit Lock :heart:w​:heart:&quot, I’ll re-evaluate my decision, but for now I’m going to jump ship. The captains appear to be falling into an ignorant, distant &quotYou think you know what you want, but you don’t&quot mindset that’s known for utterly destroying all sense of community/creator goodwill, as we’ve seen before with Blizzard and other developers, and I want no involvement with a company that treats their playerbase (one that’s been nothing but loyal to and supportive of them, mind you) in such a way.

Goodbye Fallen London, it was a fun two years, but your creators seem to care more about proving themselves &quotright&quot than actually recognizing their faults and correcting them when the community -nearly unanimously- points them out.
edited by Xorph on 8/2/2020