I love the world of Fallen London. I love the writing, I love the atmosphere, I love all of it. Have been an Exceptional Friend for ages now and never regretted it.
But the fact that to be anywhere near optimal I need to check multiple times a day means it increasingly conflicts with my adult life, and I hate that.
If I don’t check my deck every couple of hours, I’m missing out and it feels annoying to me. If I do check, I’m constantly pulling myself out of work and other tasks. Like most gainfully employed adults, the ideal gaming situation for me is a game I can play once a day at a specific time, not something I’m constantly checking in on.
I’d gladly pay $20 a month to get a full day’s worth of actions and opportunity cards in one go, once per day. Yes, a 140 card deck with a 140 action candle or something to that effect. Something where I can fit the game into my life without it stressing me that I’m either playing too little to make progress at a reasonable speed, or constantly pulling myself out of the real world.
I wouldn’t be gaining progress quicker than anyone else can. It would just be more convenient. I’d pay a lot for that. And it probably wouldn’t be particularly hard to code, since you already vary deck and candle sizes for money. edited by Televangelist on 3/9/2017
I have a similar problem, in that I don’t always have time to take breaks in the middle of the work day. But all I would like is something that lets me perform the entire box grind in two clicks, the first to spend 13 actions raising boxful of intrigue, and the second click to select a reward. Even when I have all the time in the world, it would be nice not having to waste real life time clicking through every level in the grind for the 9 millionth time. And I don’t think it should cost money. Maybe the fast grind option could appear after Empire’s Kingmaker reaches 100.
This is why I switched to the Fidgeting Writer grind, and then the Soul Trade grind from there. Both mostly involve cycling fairly quickly on "Try Again" options so you can sink a large number of actions into them fairly quickly. The Box Grind is lucrative, but slow to execute and prone to misclicks that eventually require you to deal with the whole Turn Coat thing.
I’ve found Exceptional Friendship makes it fairly easy for me to be mostly action optimal. As long as I can find 3 times to log in through out the day (generally, first thing in the morning, mid afternoon, and right before going to bed) I get my 120 actions which is a pretty solid number of actions. The lack of card efficiency does occasionally frustrate me during certain seasonal events, but otherwise isn’t a big deal. So the ability to bank a full days worth of actions and cards would be nice but not something I’m jumping for.
It’s worth noting that this is the perspective of someone in the deep end game most focused on long term grinds. In my earlier days when I was pursuing all the story tracks (especially those based on card drawing) I might have felt differently.
You’re not the only one… "Fallen London: After Dark" (but it’s always dark down here!)
Anyhow… the balance of actions and such has changed, here and there, over the years, but I will say that you’re under absolutely no obligation to use every single action you possibly can. We all have other stuff going on in our lives, and if you act on your impulse to play the game whenever you can… well, you’re not going to get much sleep. Even I, a Huge FL Nerd, might only log in once a day, or every few days, during the off seasons. edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 3/10/2017
[quote=Kukapetal]Heck yes! I’d be willing to pay quite a bit for some hot Cheery Man action! Just name your price and…
[/quote]
FINALLY A KINDRED SPIRIT. LET’S DO THIS, I’ll create the kickstarter and we can commission different scenes with variations for every hat and–
Oh. I guess this is not what the thread is about.
All joking aside, I know how you feel, Televangelist. My classes take up a lot of time, and I really shouldn’t have my nose stuck to the phone app just to grind another Affair of the Box point.
Personally, I’ve made a point of only logging in during certain hours, making full use of my actions, and then focus on something else entirely. If you’re constantly thinking about all the Echoes you could be gaining right now, you’re more or less giving yourself the Torment destiny IRL.
Think of it as if you were reading a novel, and enjoy the trip. There is no "goal", other than the ones you set up for yourself. edited by Slyblue on 3/10/2017
[quote=Slyblue]If you’re constantly thinking about all the Echoes you could be gaining right now, you’re more or less giving yourself the Torment destiny IRL.
Think of it as if you were reading a novel, and enjoy the trip. There is no "goal", other than the ones you set up for yourself.[/quote]
I agree. The biggest reason I play Fallen London is that I don’t feel terribly pressed to log into it all the time. I used to feel some pressure about opportunity cards, until I realized that you often would rather discard the card anyway and use the action on a storylet. If I’m working or playing online, I can check in with some regularity. If I’m busy, it can wait. If I’m busy for a month, then it’s still waiting for me to come back. Nobody steals my glim, my wine cellar doesn’t hit capacity with bottles of '79, and my bats don’t fly away for lack of sodding crickets. That is pacing I can live with.
I don’t think it would be a good idea to create a class of super players who would then proceed to lord their vastly greater number of actions and cards over the rest of us.
The current subscription is a really good deal - seven dollars a month! Whether buying fate is worth it is a very subjective question, but the subscription (double actions/cards, a monthly story that’s part of a larger series, House of Chimes) is objectively an excellent deal and it’s well within the price range of most people. 20 dollars a month on the other hand is a lot - I couldn’t afford it. And it’s not necessary. If you want to throw money at the game for actions and cards, you can just buy fate.
Its the same number of actions and cards, but at the same time for people who can’t log in often. (I mean, I don’t really like it, but it doesn’t really give an advantage)
I don’t think the OP is suggesting they get extra actions, just that they can access their full day’s worth of actions at once instead of waiting for the candle to refresh.
EDIT: whoops, Suinicide beat me to it edited by Kukapetal on 3/10/2017
[quote=Kukapetal]I don’t think the OP is suggesting they get extra actions, just that they can access their full day’s worth of actions at once instead of waiting for the candle to refresh.
EDIT: whoops, Suinicide beat me to it edited by Kukapetal on 3/10/2017[/quote]
Unless you’re logging into the game in a very regularized intervals, you’re regularly missing actions and draw opportunities :P So someone who pays to have them all at once is essentially buying the action points and cards that the rest of us missed.
It would totally destroy the pacing, and force the FBG team to design for two different speeds of players. Like almost for two different games, basically. Seriously, the impact on game design would be horrendous.
As others have said, this doesn’t speed up the game at all. Neither does current Exceptional Friendship (I’ve always found the description slightly misleading). Think of Actions and Cards as coming out of a tap (at a rate of 1 per 10 minutes) and Candles and the Deck as buckets. Larger buckets just means you don’t have to log in as often to keep them from overflowing. A truly dedicated player could get the same number of actions and cards in a day with a 20 action Candle and a 6 card Deck as a player with a 100 action Candle and a 100 card Deck. You just have to log in a lot more frequently (and not sleep).
I think having extra candles (or a really really big one) would stop people with various commitments from missing out on actions/progress. I would limit the card draw max to about 25 as cards a designed to be a thing you come back to regularly to check on and nobody gets all their card draws.
I would but the max candle at about a hundred.
More quick but suboptimum methods to spend actions would help those that don’t like actions nor their own time going to waste.
Something that some people would definitely pay for is ability to tag some cards so they never draw. That artist is a primary one. This would be the least hassle for cards that are trigger by one quality which once you’ve unlocked the card draw only effects that card. I’m sure failbetter has a list somewhere of which cards have the lowest plays to draws ratio, I’d that with those unless there some updates to some particular cards coming up.
I admit that some cards are extremely annoying - particularly when you need to draw that one card (cough Amanuensis cough). However, I can also see this getting abused very quickly. Even assuming you can’t tag things like Eyeless Skull cards, you still will have people trying to force-draw whatever cards they want by blocking out everything else, which rather defeats the purpose of the opportunity deck. You can try to avoid this by capping, but then you’re just setting yourself up for continual arguments of how many cards of which type can be opted out of. It sounds good in theory, but in practicality is probably a "nobody will ever be happy" sort of situation.
In case that wasn’t clear (I’ve been accused, quite rightfully at times, of using too few words for complex matters :)) - I was thinking about the designer’s perspective there. This game is mainly, first, and foremost about the storytelling experience. Now think about this idea - implementing it would basically mean people could do the FL equivalent of Sunless Sea’s Last Tour in ten minutes - and then do it again - and then again again - and all this in the next ten minutes of playtime. And now just think of the game designers trying to a) make that work with whatever they implement which way ever and b) at the same time do the very same thing for the players who don’t do that. It’s [b]Hell[/b] to make that work satisfyingly for both groups of players from the designer’s perspective I think… unless of course you don’t care catering to players who don’t care about story flow etcetera, and who only want numbers (DERISIVE MODE ON: f_____g highscore kiddies. DERISIVE MODE OFF… for now.)
I don’t see, from a designer’s perspective, how you could get these two armies going under one flag. Or, to put it bluntly: Just. Plain. Too. Much. Work. It’s almost like asking for forking that source - assuming, of course, that the interesting part of gameplay is the storytelling, and not the numbers. Unless, of course once more, you just plain don’t give a s__t. Which I somehow do not think the guys who write up all this would think a viable point of view.
(/rant OFF. The wine is GOOD tonight. My english still is not necessarily so.)
To sum it up: I believe I’m not the only one who mostly cares for the storytelling - and a big part of that is the flow of it. And different ‘realtime’ speed does matter there. In fact, it does matter a lot. I’m, not talking about repeating grinds - I’m talking about The Gift pt.II, f.e. It makes one helluva difference if you have to write that up for people who can either goute it the standard way, or just breeze through all of it in a mere ten minutes, and then you’d have to put both of it into the very same box.
I just call that superfluos, and unnecessary EXTRA work - with no guarantee of succeeding at delivering. THAT is what you’re asking there of the designers/writers.
As someone who suffers from brain fog including memory and concentration problems due to disability, I would definitely appreciate the option to bank more actions and play a day (or even 12 hours) in one go. I can’t say that my experience of long, complicated narratives has been enhanced by having to split them over several days. In fact I haven’t played any story content in over a year because the prospect of starting a long story and being unable to keep track of what’s going on exhausts me before I even start. It’s particularly difficult with FL because so much of the big narrative stuff is concealed in seemingly throw-away lines and cross-references that you have to be immersed to catch. Personally I feel that the drip-feeding of actions works wonderfully when it comes to creating the player’s overall narrative experience of FL, but when we’re talking about something self-contained and complete it’s a damned nuisance.
Regardless I’m pretty sure I remember reading that FL had determined that the 20/40 action cap was a sweet spot in terms of revenue and player satisfaction, so I’d imagine we’re out of luck.
It’s basically what I personally love most about this game - that it’s not designed to be read like a book. And I right now had to clean out about two dozen of them (books, opened, layed down) from my bathroom because the plumber needed some space to work :) The drip-feeding of content is just an integral part of this whole game’s design - if you could just read it all up in one go, it would simply end up as number 27 on my loo. And yours, probably.