[quote=Meradine Heidenreich]Like Phryne above, I’m staying out of the Bone Market mostly, in part because I often don’t have the time to find the one item that gives, say, shapeling arts, and the single point just ain’t worth it.
But if clicking on the "shapeling arts" icon on the left lit up the relevant possession in a pretty colour – one other than green or red – well, that would be a nice touch.
Otherwise, hm, I live with the fact that I can’t get 15 bizarre for the time being. I may change clubs again…[/quote]
Amen.
While I agree that we shouldn’t be able to access storylet branches if our gear wouldn’t let us access the storylet itself, this particular implementation is not very satisfactory. I would say it makes the "out-of-game price" factor even worse, because now we have to do even more clickery to get our outfits just fine (because, let’s face it, we won’t even realize we need to change outfit until we enter the deepermost storylet and see the challenge and the success rate).
Not to mention that putting all of the outfits past 4 behind a paywall seems … uncharacteristically greedily cash-grabby. And even the impression of that leaves bad taste.
(and 10 of them is still way too low, IMAO - which again leads into the "out-of-game price" factor where we will spend time changing gear by hand every time anyway, because there is not enough outfits to do it automatically every time)
ETA: I just realized what was nagging on my mind too - making gears unchangeable in storylets means we need waaaaay more combinations of outfits, because now we are doing things like "max shadowy, but with bizzare at least 15", "max shadowy, but with bizzare at most 0", etc …
This looks like a step with one foot in the right direction, the other foot in a wrong direction, and with both hands somewhere completely elsewhere. edited by xKiv on 7/29/2020
Well… I understand your point and from a roleplaying perspective it’s correct.
But I think the new update, as well as adding a action cost to change the outfit, would only affect some symptoms of the same problem: Most of the time, the challenge is “only” based on having the right stats and RNG-Luck.
Getting back to your rpg example: Even a perfect equipped player/group could fail the bossfight if they don’t play well. Besides the fitting equipment they also need to know what they have to do, react on the boss mechanics etc. Even with 2 equally equiped characters/groups there may be a very big difference in outcome based on skill.
But this skill part is mostly missing in FL, at least if you’re in a storylet. Sometimes you’ve got some decisions yes. And the question how long you’ll need to farm the money for another overgoat may depend on knowledge about effective playing/grinding but that’s it. This is also, at least for me, where the RPG comparison doesn’t fit.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m playing P&P RPG’s myself so I know what it means to be running into situations where you’re not perfectly equipped. But at P&P I can work around this problem with creativity, skill and knowledge, in stead of just rolling a dice and praying to the RNG-Gods that they won’t fail me.
Besides that, failing in P&P usually means some consequences, the game goes on with the failure. In FL on the other hand a failure usually just means a different text and some sort of small draw back in form of menaces and/or ressoruce loss, before you hit the “try again” button.
Because of this “try again”, taxing/limiting equipent changes won’t change much besides slowing down the game because you’ll fail more often.
At other storylets where you can’t change your equipment and require specific stats it will most likely result in fun for some players, but frustration and wiki-scouting for many others. Especially the latter one will counteract the idea behind the change, because people will spend even more time in the wiki in order to make sure they are able to get the desired results (and are not locked out because of a missing stat).