New expansions? Control over the deck contents? Are you suggesting a CCG? London: The Sundering
From what I know about the bones of Storynexus (and assuming FL works similarly enough), it could be entirely possible to add options to individual cards that would remove them, either temporarily or permanently. The question is, would doing that be more worthwhile than making new cards?
Personally, I like the idea of an option that removes a card until Time, The Healer comes around. That way you’d still have to SEE a card to remove it and it’d never be truly gone. Some pesky cards could take more actions to cull, or require a resource. What if giving that moron of a painter double what he asked for in jade actually got him to leave you alone for a week?
That sounds great! Of course, I don’t know whether it’s feasible but I like the idea a lot!
I love the idea of removing cards from the deck, but I can hear the cries for technical support and screams of woe when the ‘wrong’ card is removed already.
That’s why I think temporary removal is the best. At worst, you’ve doomed yourself for a single week. Plus, this functionality would probably have to be added by hand to a specific selection of cards, so it probably wouldn’t get added to everything, and could be omitted from stuff that would break something.
If FB were to test this, I’d imagine they might look at use/discard ratios for cards (assuming they have those numbers) and add it to, say, the 3-5 most discarded cards. Maybe for exceptional friends only.
While it would be counterproductive/potentially impossible to put in a toggle for every card in the game that enables you to turn it on and off at will, if you implemented this the way I’m imagining (and again, my knowledge is extremely shallow and comes from fooling around with Storynexus for a couple days once), you could have a single pinned card at your lodgings that you can use at any time to reintroduce ALL the culled cards to your deck.
edited by CulturalGeek on 1/6/2015
If you think about it… we’ve already seen card removal by subset.
Look at the remote location homes, that’s what they /are/.
The opportunity cost of those is that you can’t use a 4 or 5 card lodging while in one.
Lets think in similar terms for how it could likewise be done for other sets of cards.
A home furnishing that while it was active, closed a set of cards, perhaps? Awarded in an event to keep the number of them lower, so it has to be sought out, not just gotten without notice. By making it a home furnishing you’ve required that the person be a POSI, and thus have played long enough to be aware of what this represents. Third, by having it be a piece of equipment, the step in troubleshooting “take off all of your items and furnishings” would solve it.
I agree, that’s another great idea. Less micro-manage-y, and subtler. There may be balance reasons you would want some of these things to not be accessible “on demand” (so to speak), but this doesn’t have to apply to everything.
The difficulty (and it is by no means insurmountable) is deciding what “set” of cards to have each item apply to, and what should be included in that set. We’ve mentioned the one that already exists: City Vices, but those are all clearly labeled. So what else?
Pets? Connections? I never have any business with the Great Game, but I often look for the Urchins and the Tomb Colonists. High groups? Low ones? Or perhaps a particular group… anything to do with devils? But then, what would count?
Don’t mistake me: the lumping together of large groups of cards has some lovely gameplay implications, with cost-benefit analysis if an item turns both desireable and undesireable cards off. The remote address almost universally removes less popular cards, and it’s very transparent what is going away - anything with “city vices” in the title. It would be an interesting exercise to come up with obvious sets that would be useful to eliminate.
The city vices cards didn’t use to have "city vices" in their names before that update.
Other categories:
Faction cards (e.g. Burning Shadows: the Devils of London)
Conflict cards - though I guess you can already have these to go away by reducing connections…
Dream cards
Would it be balanced, though?
edited by Aximillio on 1/7/2015
I’ll admit that trimming of the opportunity deck has felt surprisingly important around the end game where cards have to compete with the desire to pursue my increasingly grindy goals resulting in them mostly being discarded. I now have a trio of 5 card lodgings but expect to spend most of my time being a hermit in a Zee Zhell snickering about the hermit crab reference because of this. As a result when a piece of fate locked content isn’t meant to provide a monetary reward I generally prefer getting a random bauble or quality that doesn’t get in the way than a persistent opportunity card that I’ll draw and discard in place of something more useful/interesting. These things don’t need to provided meaningful stat boosts or be used for anything, it’s just something to remind you of the story that you could throw up on the mantel if you were so inclined.
There’s an idea I’d like to share here although what I know of the Story Nexus engine makes me believe this will never happen so it’s more of a "wouldn’t this be cool" thing (for the uninitiated opportunity cards and the storylets that appear below them are much closer to being the same thing than you might think).
If anyone has played Hand of Fate this is going to sound familiar. The cards that build the game deck there come from two sources. The player selects a set of cards to include and the dealer selects another set. It would be neat if Fallen London had a similar divide. The player has a set of cards available to them from which they choose a certain number to build part of the opportunity deck. These would generally be things the player has some control over like which lodgings they intend to frequent, pets they want handy, connections they want to cultivate, cases they want to pursue, etc. The rest of the deck would come from the game itself and be determined by stats, seasonal events, etc. These cards would represent the things outside the player’s control that they could encounter around London. Each time a card is drawn it’s randomly determined which deck the card comes from so even if the game defined deck gets large you still see a reliable percentage of the cards you’ve chosen to include. Perhaps if you include fewer cards in the player chosen deck the chance of it being a random event card increases as players are choosing to just wander the streets instead of pursue their own schemes. As an added bit of fun some of the game defined deck could cycle in and out over time so it doesn’t stay completely static once your at the end game.
This solves a lot of the deck clutter problems as the kinds of things that end up cluttering up the deck (pets, lodgings, random story rewards) often fall into the category of things that the player could include or exclude as they desired. For example, some of the city vises cards center around the attending of parties. Do you want your character to attend parties? Then include the cards that give you such opportunities, such as A Rather Decadent Evening, in the deck. If you want your character to be anti-social, don’t put them in. Are you trying to collect a lot of Certifiable Scrap? Put all your lodging cards in so you spend more time around places where you can find it. Would you rather spend time with your pets? Then less lodgings, more pets.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of stuff that would have to change for this to really work and it might be confusing for new players but it’s kind of novel.
If we’re talking about possible mechanic changes in the future, I wonder how feasible it would be to have an option for fewer actions available in exchange for a larger bank of actions?
I would like more actions, of course, I imagine nearly all of us would. However, I do not have internet access throughout the day, and even with exceptional friendship, I often must go 8-16 hours or more without it, not counting traveling. A tradeoff for a slower gain of actions in exchange for a larger number of candles or something would be beneficial to me.
I’ve never brought it up before, because I don’t know if it would be viable for enough other paying FL players or feasible to accomplish with Failbetter’s resources. But since the topic is here already, I thought that I might as well pitch it.
Caninicus makes a really good suggestion. I’d trade a slower refresh time for a larger action pool.
[quote=Caninicus]If we’re talking about possible mechanic changes in the future, I wonder how feasible it would be to have an option for fewer actions available in exchange for a larger bank of actions?[/quote][color=#C2B280]This is unlikely to happen, for a few reasons. The biggest is that we have a very large list of things we’d like to add to or change in Fallen London, and all else being equal we’d rather prioritise ones which will make the game better for a majority of players.
Another reason, though, is that we already offer something which helps with this: Exceptional Friendship. Fallen London is very lightly monetised, and we’re proud of that, but we’d need to be really convinced of the benefits to the player base before allocating scarce development time to something that would make Exceptional Friendship less attractive. (It has happened: long-time players may remember that the price of Exceptional Friendship was lowered when we removed daily action caps.)[/color]
Based on things FB has said here (increasing to 20-40 actions was great, but adding a larger bank might give diminishing returns) vs some frequent concerns (more actions desired during the early game, SOME amount of additional storage for cards/actions for those who can’t visit often), the first thing I came up with is MORE COFFEE.
I don’t think all these mechanics are necessarily currently possible to implement, but these are the things that seem like they’d require the least amount of code.
For new players, you could reward the completion of one-time storylines with cups of coffee that they can spend to play longer, if they wish. Or specific one-time storylines could just give 5 actions on completion (I think alternating between those two options might help players learn about the connection between coffee and action refreshes).
For exceptional friends, you could hypothetically introduce a mechanic that slowly, very slowly doles out coffee if they sit at full actions for a long period of time (alternative: an action that trades 20 actions for 1 coffee, something that could easily be done from a smartphone. Bonus if you can figure out how to allow it to be triggered via twitter). Other than the 20 actions = one 10 action consumable storylet, these are the most technically improbable things I’ve suggested.
I’d also like to suggest some kind of benefit for new accounts that link to a Sunless Sea account, but I’m not sure how exploitable that would be. If there were a way to award a little stack of action-renewing items for new players coming in from Sunless sea, it might help ameliorate the "browser game culture shock."
None of these consumables would have to be darkdrip coffee as we currently know it. They could be something perishable that vanishes with Time: the Healer, or at the end of the month, to prevent game-breaking action hoarding.
edited by CulturalGeek on 1/13/2015
How about just including Darkdrop Coffee as a possible reward from Bundles of Oddities? Or giving everyone access to the Caligula’s Coffee House card.
Maybe as a middle-ground between unlimited actions and the doubled action bank we have now, you could make it so that Exceptional Friends get another action every five minutes instead of ten for regulars. The problem with EF, as I see it, is that once you’ve used up the extra 20 actions in the morning, it only helps you if you’re not playing the game for an extended period of time, which is counter-intuitive since paying for the game should mean that you want to play it more, not less. Increasing the refresh rate would make it easier for EF’s to speed through the grinding process and get to the good parts faster, without totally breaking game balance like unlimited actions would, and it would also make the 40-action buffer much more useful.
I’m actually pretty happy with the way EF works at the moment, and I’m one of those people who is around a computer all day and as a result doesn’t use the extra candle that often. At a minimum it gives you an extra 20 actions each day (assuming you sleep a semi-normal amount) and if you are need to login on a more spaced out schedule it helps you even more. That extra breathing room on action usage was actually my original reason for paying for EF.
I’m not sure what increasing the refresh rate of actions or cards would do to the game’s pacing but it would certainly increase the pressure to login frequently and use your actions and while I probably wouldn’t drop EF over that it’s not really what I wanted to get out of it. I could get behind increasing the number of undrawn cards you can bank but even that I would only take so far. I’m much more interested in the idea of including a small but stead of feed of EF locked content than in further altering the game mechanics with it.
Not sure it’s in keeping with the original intent of the revised thread, but how about a fate-purchasable object to temporarily lower stats? It’s hardly pay-to-win, but I know I’d buy one. It’d allow people to revisit old content, or more easily finish the last grind to max stats, but I don’t think it would be massively unbalancing…
The Mantrap (Weapon)
You have deliberately put your handing into the working trapjaws of a mantrap. It hurts, it’s distracting, the chain is very noisy, and dripping blood on the carpets is simply not done in polite society. People start to question your sanity.
-100 Dangerous, -100 Watchful, -100 Persuasive, -100 Shadowy, +1 wounds, +1 Nightmare, +1 scandal, +1 suspicion
RandomWalker, have you heard of the Talkative Rattus Faber?
Yup, and I use it. The problem with the rattus faber is that it’s minus 25 to all stats, which means that at stat-cap you can go down all the way to about 170 in any stat. I’d just like something to get down to pre-posi levels or the like. I mean, sure, I could just start another character or whatever. I’m just trying to think of something that FB could offer that I would buy that wouldn’t unbalance the game.
I think exceptional friends getting more content is a good priority too, but from a game design perspective, it’s always good to see if something can solve two problems. Too many times I’ve seen a project say "ok, we need to continue plotline #27 and make a new dungeon. Team 1, work on content for plotline #27! Team 2, make a dungeon!" The idea of having a single team make a dungeon that simultaneously illuminates or references the story you want to develop doesn’t always occur to people.
That’s why I kind of like the idea of new Exceptional-friend-only options on older or unwanted cards: in my mind, these convenience improvements wouldn’t be just functionality-based, they’d all be tied to some new storyline or character. (I have this whole idea about making friends with the concierge at the House of Chimes and as you get to know them better you can decide what services they offer you and some of their major story junctions could require free evenings and at first you’re just after utility but eventually you start to… sorry, I think I have to go have a bit of a lie-down.)
edited by CulturalGeek on 1/15/2015