That is more like Echo Bazaar used to work, years ago, though with a higher cap.
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And they removed that? For no obvious reason?
It was something like a predecessor of what Fallen London is now. It was a different engine.
Believe it or not, it was actually an upgrade at the time. Instead of a maximum 50 actions per day, they’d regenerate infinitely.
Yup. So annoying and super-boring to now convert the Echos to scrip. I guess they just don’t care.
I’m rather fond of the action cap at 40 (admittedly 20 was a bit low) with the ten minute regen. Granted, I don’t tend to minimax my actions too much.
I like the way it builds in clear ‘pause for a bit’ break and exit points, while not letting me disappear into a story to such an extent that I start to hit fatigue. Since I plan to do stories when I’ve got 20+, I rarely get stuck in places where I desparately need more actions.
I think without the cap, I’d have the same trouble with Fallen London that I had with cultist simulator: disappearing into a game that I can’t put down until I start literally being unable to process information and tumble out, upset by the experience. 40 actions forces me to go ‘Okay, I’m going to do this story now’ do that, then says ‘You’re out of actions, it’s okay to pause’ and I come back when I feel up to it again.
I don’t think I’d complain with 50 actions of course, but 100 seems too much for doing anything except repeatable grinding (not really what the games main appeal is IMO) and 1000 actions just seems like a nightmare (at that point I don’t think you can use them all before they start regenerating).
I won’t deny that I’ve been annoyed by lack of actions sometimes, but having that slight nudge to get up and do something else is - I think - a really important part of maintaining your player bases mental health (certainly mine). Fallen London doesn’t have an action loop like Sunless Sea where you’re returning to a set location as an ‘end’, and so short of a realistic action limit (around 30 to 60 I’d guess since I tend to find 40 actions takes me about 10-15 min to use depending on how much I’m planning stuff) I’m not sure how they’d build exit points into the game.
Then there’s the obvious financial incentive that action limits allow them to sell action refills encouraging people to get subscriptions and buy refills of actions, plus the shorter supply potentially keep players coming back throughout the day, which probably looks better for analytics. But honestly, I’m less concerned with that.
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Game mechanics tied to the passage of real-world time are absolutely the worst, and it’s a real testament to the quality of Fallen London that I’ve been willing to put up with it for so long
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Starting from midgame almost every step of the story arc requires material or action costs, which constantly grow. For some late game steps costs could easily be weeks or even months (infamous knife gate). So if you want to finish story or part of the story in one session 150 actions and even 1000 actions may not be enough.
Talking money, that’s how FL loses majority of potential players and payers. People roll out of the earlygame, see slowdown, think something like “oh, I have to login in 3 hours, do some grind… and do it again… like 6 times… before I could see next turn in current story”, lose interest and drop the game. That’s literally how most of my friends left the game. If you don’t give something to players in every session, very few will come back.
Solutions to this either overall speedup (faster action regeneration) or bigger sessions (higher action cap). Solution to reduce clickiness in bigger sessions are options in grinds with high action costs.
I can see the argument on the money side of things (though obviously whether players dropping out are covered by the payments of the group buying action refreshes is a question that would be interesting with a bit more data).
I agree on the issue with the material gates on actions. I think spot fixes like the reduction in needed railway steel and knives have helped with that, but it’s definitely a problem. I don’t think that would be fixed necessarily by more actions, since I think the act of clicking through the same carousel over and over again is just inherently boring. Grinding is the sort of thing I’d like them to mitigate for rather than supporting from the drop (maybe give one time actions that unlock after a story has been out a while that help you catch up, like they did with the railway meetings, or give more options where having done optional stories like Last Constable, Exceptional Stories or Christmas more than once, helps you skip material costs to help the world feel more interconnected and alive).
I guess I worry about adjusting the actions in the way you’re suggesting to such a degree, because actions are so fundamental to the mechanics of the early and mid game as well as the late game. I think I’d have hit the same problems I had with Cultist Simulator if the game itself wasn’t built with clear breaks and necessary pausing points and certainly if I’d arrived in the game with hundreds of actions I’d probably of been worse at focusing on particular tasks and thus got less satisfying stories early on. Maybe greater supplies of resources like Darkdrop Coffee would help smooth the grind, without breaking the early game (since Pause for Reflection worked well). Those give players an opportunity to tailor when they want to burn through actions, and a little boost to get over the ‘Oh no, I ran out just at the good part!’ problem. You could maybe tie them to time the healer or put a couple as a reward for Professional payments (since the rewards on that mostly stop being valuable as your stats max out).
While I think boosting 20 actions is probably sensible, and I might be convinced on 40/60 (non EF/EF) since that gives you enough actions to get a full night’s sleep or go to work without losing out on actions, I think 100/1000 is running into the point where you effectively no longer have an action cap (especially if you’re reading stories rather than grinding) and I think that’s an issue. While it’s annoying a lot of the time, I think the action cap does do good work for a game that is otherwise pretty bad at signalling pauses and action loops to players. You could use Time the Healer or Living Stories for that but then you lose a lot of your ability to decide when you as a player are going to do things (and of course the action refill exists, though obviously anything that spends real money should be considered a potential problem vis a vis ethical game making).
Basically, I think if we were going to tinker with actions in that way, we’d need to seriously respec the way Fallen London tells stories and manages resources (maybe an inventory space and a loop like Sunless Sea). For allowing grinding without the clicking, I think more shop tabs or similar actions where you can key in your amount of resources and get a payout out for them (or trade them in large numbers as an equivalent action a la the Relicker cards) is probably more appropriate. Maybe put some cards in the deck that trigger with large numbers of specific items and let you cash them out for rewards that gradually build up (a la the Heart’s games distinctions or the Bisected Owl) rather than making everything just ‘money’. Make the grind a little more interesting and reduce the repetitiveness of cashing out.
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That is exactly true. If you’ve ever played The Silver Tree, (I recommend it by the way, it is both entirely free and has some delicious lore) which now has an action cap of 1000, then you’ll know that having infinite actions is actually much worse for the overall fun of the game. Of course, The Silver Tree isn’t quite as tightly designed as FL, and has the air of some of the more boring MYN segments, but it still shows why having an action cap is a good thing. With infinite actions, you essentially are just drawn into clicking one thing over and over again until you can get to the next story beat, since there’s no motivation to find more efficient or interesting ways to earn resources.
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Silver Tree was designed with grinding and an action cap, then had the cap removed. If it has been designed without capped actions to begin with, it wouldn’t ask you to click the same thing over and over to gather resources
That’s true. However, Fallen London was also designed with grinding in mind, (though many of the more recent grinds are more interesting than older ones) so Silver Tree is a good example of what Fallen London might look like with an absurdly high action cap, as some above me have suggested.
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- I never proposed infinite actions or no cap.
- 100 != infinity. You might be surprised, but even 1000 in infinitely smaller than infinity.
- Maybe I am missing something, but do people really like their chains that much? Do you really need devz to tell you when you must stop playing? On top of “natural” ingame breaks like end of the story arc or grind carousel.
- If you play without losing actions, you get those ~1000 actions per week. Even now. They are just sliced in awkward bricks of 20/40 actions, which are not very compatible with human life or existing structure of the game. Only thing that changes with 1000 action cap is that people have more flexibility. And maybe FBG gets no money from action refills (but they probably could make up for it with better retention).
- If for some reason FBG wants people to engage more ofthen with the game, they still have other incentives. Card system, for example. Keep it still at 10 cards max, raise the difference in profitability between cards and base grinds – greed will lure people to play more often.
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Yeah, as far as I can tell an action cap is just too tightly built in to Fallen London’s design to be removed. It’s always had one, and though the exact amount has varied, it hasn’t even varied by that much - I remember early on the cap was 10/20, now it’s 20/40, I don’t think it’s even ever been as high as 100.
Sort of hard to describe why, but I do notice that even with a cap of 40, sometimes I end up clicking through a story too fast to get to the end and missing the text. I think the action cap kind of leads you to carefully read the few bits of actual new text you get in a grind-progress cycle? I’m not actually sure though.
Or maybe they just want it to be habit-forming, you come back every day or whatever instead of being the sort of game you binge and then forget? Dunno
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… maybe it’s also easier for server-maintenance, if any given account can only generate max 20/40 action-queries (location changes and such not included) in a row?
… my actual technical understanding of suchlike topics is rather limited, but given how the servers seemed to react to Summer Estivals, where there is a lot of simultaneous activity, I think an in-build safer mechanism against overflow (or simply a way to better predict behavior) might be quite convenient?
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The action cap is probably a business decision. While FL is the most ethical “freemium” game I’ve heard of, it does still follow that business model. As I recall, something like 40% of their revenue comes from people buying more actions.
Though there is something to the server load idea. Were there no action cap, the servers may well be overwhelmed by the number of bots automating grinds.
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Server load has certainly been a consideration in the past. In the early days, you had a set number of actions per day, rather than a constantly-refreshing candle. I remember they tested the switchover to the refreshing model to see if the servers could handle it.
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Which is wild. Can you imagine how quickly your bank account would drain once you decided that it was a reasonable option to pay real money when you ran out of actions before you were done playing?
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As someone who knows poor, unfortunate souls entangled in the hell that is gacha gaming? Yes. Yes, I can most certainly imagine.
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As a recovered gacha addict? Ouch.
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