I haven’t been able to access the game at all since yesterday. Not good. And a response to feedback essentially said: our CEO has made a statement and that’s it. It was also less helpful on the "locked into an outfit altogether" issue than people here on the forum (for which, thanks, guys!)
Yeah, the downtimes had been getting more frequent. There’s one currently happening right now and had been so since 5.00 am GMT.
I sort of like this change.
I never bothered with optimizing my gear for every check. I have some gear sets for main stats maximization and I mostly switched between them prior to going to some areas i.e. hard-wearing for parabola, evening for university etc.
Most of the time I was going with a general-purpose outfit.
I endorse the idea of having areas that would require strategic equipment placement like the one broken toys story has. That may give certain equipment pieces that are not bis for some stat real meaningfulness.
Sure this change does require some refining: there are many areas that necessitate an ability to change outfits(like islands), but overall the idea is nice
I don’t mind it so much-- I don’t try to optimize everything-- though I can definitely see where it’ll get up people’s noses. For me at least it’s more an action sink than anything else. But then again, for non-Exceptional Friends, actions are more precious.
The outfit locking is far too brute-force, and doesn’t play well with a lot of content (I hesitate to imagine how it messes with the July ES), and I do find it annoying in regard to the Bone Market (I want to beg a crate of biscuits off the priest-- oh darn I’m too bizarre to see him-- oh bugger I have to go to my lodgings and change (when I have a stall RIGHT THERE)-- and so forth) but I can imagine storylets and areas where it would make sense to have a restriction like this. Off in the lab, say (where not even the Bazaar is accessible), at zee, Ealing Gardens / Jericho Locks / beyond perhaps… it could work. But not the way it is now.
You can change in the Bone Market itself, as long as you’re not inside one of the storylets (as long as the card deck is visible). However there’s a bug wherein the outfit lock sometimes fails to clear on backing out of stories. Refreshing the page should fix it.
While the outfit thing is occasionally frustrating, it does get rid of the problem of content being too easy at high levels. Besides, once your stats are topped out, it’s easy to accumulate ridiculous amounts of second chances, especially if you have Hedonist 8+ or used to go shroom-hopping (speaking of, whatever are we supposed to use Notability for now? I think that’s way more fraught than outfits). Having a higher chance of failure just brings back some of the high-stakes feeling of the early game. Like, remember when you only had like a 30% chance to catch a black cat in Spite, but you tried it anyway because you wanted to see what the result was? That. If you hate that kind of novelty, why are you even playing this game?
As for more outfits, it’s a little annoying that they’re Fate-locked, but I understand that FBG has to make money somehow, so they can pay the nice people who write and code new content for us, and so the game can still stay enjoyable instead of having ads all over the place or making actual advancement impossible without paying like every other freemium game on the internet. One of the things I love about FL is just how playable it is without Fate or even EF (though I do get EF when I can afford it). I’ll probably buy the extra outfit slots eventually, just so I can have one optimized for the new parabolan stat challenges and one for BDR/0BDR, but the game’s still playable without that; they didn’t take away anything we had before except the ability to change outfits in a way that honestly didn’t fit the real spirit of the game. Now if they’d just fix the bug where sometimes it locks when you’re not in a storylet…
[quote=Sanguinifex]While the outfit thing is occasionally frustrating, it does get rid of the problem of content being too easy at high levels. Besides, once your stats are topped out, it’s easy to accumulate ridiculous amounts of second chances, especially if you have Hedonist 8+ or used to go shroom-hopping (speaking of, whatever are we supposed to use Notability for now? I think that’s way more fraught than outfits). Having a higher chance of failure just brings back some of the high-stakes feeling of the early game. Like, remember when you only had like a 30% chance to catch a black cat in Spite, but you tried it anyway because you wanted to see what the result was? That. If you hate that kind of novelty, why are you even playing this game?
As for more outfits, it’s a little annoying that they’re Fate-locked, but I understand that FBG has to make money somehow, so they can pay the nice people who write and code new content for us, and so the game can still stay enjoyable instead of having ads all over the place or making actual advancement impossible without paying like every other freemium game on the internet. One of the things I love about FL is just how playable it is without Fate or even EF (though I do get EF when I can afford it). I’ll probably buy the extra outfit slots eventually, just so I can have one optimized for the new parabolan stat challenges and one for BDR/0BDR, but the game’s still playable without that; they didn’t take away anything we had before except the ability to change outfits in a way that honestly didn’t fit the real spirit of the game. Now if they’d just fix the bug where sometimes it locks when you’re not in a storylet…[/quote]
For me (and many others), this is not in fact about fearing failure, annoyance or increased clickiness (though that is in itself openly contrary to the developers’ vision). The real problem lies in other implications of the locking. There are areas (like Board Meetings) where if you make the single mistake of forgetting to change your outfit, you’re penalized rather more disproportionately than just reading the Failure instead of Success text. But this instance in itself is not really the gist of my concern.
Far more importantly, there is a lot of one-time content that may involve branches and options locked with certain qualities (mostly that would be BDR). In these cases, without checking wiki, you may actually be locked out of the branch that is important for your character. Even more importantly, for Exceptional Stories, there is no wiki. We literally have no way of knowing if perhaps the opportunity to interact with the story in the most in-character fashion might be unlocked with Respectable 5, or locked with Dreaded 3 or whatnot. Most of these stories were not written with this in mind, and will most likely not be screened for this sort of an issue, but you can buy them for real world money. I know I did.
The statement did not sufficiently clarify if the developers are aware of this particular facet - one time stories which you can’t "Perhaps Not" out of, and which sometimes take your character in completely unexpected directions. If and when devs say that this won’t be a concern, even in the older stories, I’ll be OK with the lock.
So far, this has not hapened.
Some restrictions have been lifted.