New difficulty levels

Fallen London
101

[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]Second, thank you for your feedback, and not just in a passive-aggressive fsck-you corporate way. It’s not a surprise that some people are upset - that always happens with rebalances (some people may remember the house catching fire when we introduced variable cp rewards for challenges way back when). But it is useful to realise that we may need to tweak the challenge band descriptions so people can see the needle move better, and it is useful for people to point out bits of content where we may not have accounted for consequences (so e.g. now I have to go check on the Boatman).[/color]
edited by Alexis on 2/15/2013[/quote]

Another category of potentially unintended consequences are the ones where you have to build a progress quality to a certain level, but then test a primary attribute to see if the overall venture’s “successful.” Those’ll become less efficient when the final check is no longer guaranteed, as the fail consequences for those checks are significant. Thefts of Peculiar Character and the Investigating+Casing challenge in the Flit are the two I can think of off the top of my head. (Come to think of it, I haven’t seen the Well-Known Tree card in forever- has it been removed/capped?)

(Plus, making second chances optional will make it significantly easier to grind Boatman’s Opponent, since you can deliberately fail the challenge to raise Wounds without wasting Sudden Insights.)

102

I like the ideas behind the new mechanic, because they make items relevant again even for stat-capped players. (It looks like stronger items will be needed to guarantee success at higher levels, but that seems to be in the pipeline, so we’ll see how things turn out.)

103

I have to say that I don’t like these changes either.

After reading Alexis’ post I’m curious to see what will come in the near future but personally I’m much happier with a system where leveling gives more of a boost and where you can wait till you get a 100% success chance.

I’m no fan of gear swapping (like most here, it seems) and the lag when clicking an item doesn’t help either.
edited by Corran on 2/16/2013

104

Ah, I feel like this is not going to end well. Alexis is trying to tailor his game to a majority and get as many people to play for as long as he can. I get his reasons, I understand his reasoning. Problem is, I am not part of said majority. Nor are the other posters here part of the majority, judging by their replies.
No matter how you look at it, this change is a nerf. It breaks the silent agreement that a character with a 100 quality can generate income at 1 echo per action (on average and when taking challenges of appropriate difficulty), a character with 150 will generate 1.5 and so on. We will get less now. Whoever grinded in the past are lucky, new players are not.

More importantly to all of us, we could live with a nerf, I think, but we are very much bothered with the sheer amount of newly introduced randomness.

Particularly this snippet botheres me.

[quote=Alexis Kennedy] Particularly risk-averse players (who are, obviously, the people upset by this) do the sums and do that, but the most popular choice of balance on the way up is to start repeated action at a 60-70% chance of success.
[/quote]
Okay, so for people who took chances before, everything is fine. What is a risk-averse player who can do his sums supposed to do? I know that with a 30-40% chance I will not only waste an action, I am going to generate menace. I am fine with getting it in small quantities, but I am not going to do repeated actions that generate menace. Because that does not make sense in the long run.

Also Alexis, can you adress the problem with frequent item swapping? Because a lot of people mentioned this, but it was missing in your reply.
I just tested it, and swapping a whole set of items to max one of my stats takes almost a minute of my time (time to load the page, time to find the correct items in the ever growing list of items, time to reload the page, time to get back to the action I was supposed to do in the first place). That’s on a PC. On a phone I fear it will take much more. Is FB planning to do anything about this? You just said we are going to get even more items.

I mean ideally, I’d like either to have 4 templates, that I can feel in myself and swap at a press of a button, or have the item swap done automatically by the game for me. This is a very simple min-maxing problem, that a computer can solve in a blink of an eye. I understand this is not going to happen for the reasons of immersion. But immersion can only go so far. At his point swapping items is becoming a real chore.
edited by Fhoenix on 2/16/2013
edited by Fhoenix on 2/16/2013

105

I understand what you are trying to do here, and it is a good idea, but you really should be using the normal distribution.
It would be fairly simple to implement, would make increase in stats meaningful and still keep content relevant for a longer time.
In fact it would give you a single parameter (the variance) that would allow you to tune the relevance width elegantly and arbitrarily.

It will give you everything you want.

As for “It has to be intuitively comprehensible”

The normal distribution IS intuitively comprehensible. Sure, the formula might make little sense to most people,
but it is one of the most common and most natural probability distributions in the world. Every human being has an intuitive feel
for it. They may not have a name for it, but they do know it. Any other more “comprehensible” distribution, except the uniform one,
will be less intuitive. People don’t usually comprehend things through their mathematical properties, so having a lot of them
will not in itself make it harder to grok.

And anyway you can just show somebody a single picture and they will see what’s going on,
to a sufficient extent. Hmm… log-normal might work well too, to give you a bit of unsymmetry.
About that one I know nothing, but a single picture in wikipedia has made me see it would work nicely
for making a challenge get easier faster before the half-point, than after.
(Might be a tad harder to program, though)

Even if you really feel that you must keep it simpler than this, please get rid of the effect that
skill points mean less and less the higher you get. That is just bad.

106

At the risk of sounding like a bit of a jerk, I don’t think this was a good idea to begin with, regardless of how it is implemented, and I really have to wonder what Failbetter Games were thinking. I get that you want to introduce some diminishing returns, but diminishing returns were already present in that it takes more and more CP the higher you are trying to grind your stats. That’s how RPGs work. Grinding was sort of annoying to begin with - the early game flows reasonably well, but sometime in the 70s, you do have to start dedicated grinding sessions - but it remained bearable because at least there was a visible payoff (in steadily increasing success chances and, of course, money). This change makes the grinding much worse than it was before by massively decreasing the payoff - not just for stats but also for equipment, as it is now much harder to make money. Fallen London was heavy on grinding to begin with, especially from the mid-game onwards, but now… the words “horrible tedium” come to mind.

The gameplay side has never been the strength of Fallen London, I believe; it’s always seemed to be something people put up with so they can get to the writing (and spend time in everyone’s favourite subterranean metropolis, of course). As one reviewer put it, most individual gameplay sessions are boring, but the overall experience is exciting and fun - somehow. The idea is that the gameplay is supposed to at least not get in the way, and this update seems to break that principle. I won’t call it a deal-breaker, but this is a really really bad idea. If this is part of some kind of master plan, then I would kindly ask you to rollback the really really bad idea until the components that make it not a really really bad idea can also be put in place. All you’re doing right now is destroying goodwill. Of course, players will always complain; that’s a universal constant, even with an unusual player-base like the one Fallen London seems to attract. But, please, don’t dismiss this.

(Also, you know who is particularly risk-averse? People. It’s a human thing. In fact, people will rather miss a big chance than expose themselves to a small risk. This especially applies to people who are not mathematically inclined, as they’ll go for their gut rather than calculating expected value or whatever. So…)

107

My biggest issue is still the diminishing returns. Stat growth is linear past 50 and echos per stat in the bazaar grow exponentially. That was fine when difficulty was linear, but now it’s not. Doing the math on difficulty is pretty silly now. It’s a hyperbolic graph; as difficulty rises the value of one stat point approaches zero. With new items you can band-aid it through 200, maybe 300, but in the long run its going to get silly. Someone who just got PoSI is already at the old minimum success chance for a 600 difficulty check. It will takes them years to get the next 900 points to make that 100%. We’re not nearly there yet, but it worries me when design gets weird at the edges, especially edges we’re slowly moving toward.

108

Isn’t 200 going to be the last cap, or am I just assuming this? I don’t think there will ever be 600 difficulty checks in any case.

109

It’s possible, in which case I still don’t like it, but tweaks should fix it without too many issues.

110

Oh, come on, that’s going too far. You’re absolutely right to say that there are all sorts of interesting and counter-intuitive results about attitude to risk. But it’s over-reaching to conclude that human beings as a whole are “particularly risk-averse” - there are plenty of us who find a modest gamble exciting, especially in the context of a game.

So, speaking up for those people, let me recount my own personal experience. There’s a lot of high-level stuff in FL I haven’t seen yet: I’ve never set foot on a boat, for example. But I’d kind-of lost interest in it, because my character’s stats had outstripped my progress through the plot, and everything was “straightforward” to me now.

Why’s that a problem, for someone with my mindset? Because:

  • I blitzed through new storylines too quickly to get properly engaged in them
  • I was missing out on half of the writing, since I never saw any failure text
  • grind was just an annoying artificial roadblock, rather than part of character development
  • there was no strategy involved; no decision about whether to take an easy option or risk a more rewarding one
  • and, yes, I did miss the excitement of the occasional gamble.

That’s the way my mind works. It’s not the way your mind works, and I respect that completely. But please don’t deny that I even exist ;-)

Does this change fix my problem? I don’t know, yet - I’ve only had time for a brief look around. And like everyone else, I feel slightly affronted that my character is less capable than he was before. But on the other hand, a few stories which I’d got bored of look tempting to me again… so overall, I personally don’t find this is as wrong-headed as many seem to feel.

Cheers
Richard

111

Hm… you do have a point. I have to apologise - I did go rather far with my blanket statements, and that wasn’t fair. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is common for people to overestimate risk, or be overly risk-averse, or to perceive risks over potential benefit. Gamblers exist, of course, and many people have a small (or perhaps not so small) gambling streak. Indeed, if there was no element of risk, I don’t think I’d still be playing the game myself. (On the other hand, I also wouldn’t be playing it if it was all luck-based.)

That said, I don’t think this update is a good way to adress the (very real) problem you mentioned because it essentially makes everything a luck-based challenge - “risk mitigation techniques” like grinding or buying equipment just… stop working after a certain point. And grinding combined with diminished (and uncertain) payoffs… that doesn’t scream “fun” to me. It destroys the sense of watching your character visibly grow in power, at least for me; watching a challenge drop from “chancy” to “modest” is much nicer feedback than thinking “okay, four more points of Persuasive, and I’ll have a 72% success chance rather than 71%”. Or consider equipment - finally putting down the money for a Sumptuous Dandy’s Outfit becomes much less exciting when you realise that the precious +5 Persuasive just increased your odds of success from 70% to 72%. (Actual numbers.)

The problem you mention - everything being straightforward and thus boring - is very real, I agree. But adressing that by a) ramping up the difficulty of everything (with “difficulty” meaning “luck” due to the basic gameplay mechanics) combined with b) making stats and equipment increasingly worthless rather strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And into the river.

112

I am not very maths-minded, and I’m not sure how strongly I feel about the changes yet, but that said… I have been hanging out in the carnival, doing the dancing option with the hopes of getting a rare success or three. When I started out, it was a modest challenge. My persuasive is now five levels higher than it was - and it’s still a modest challenge. It just gives it the effect of being a matter of luck challenge rather than a skill challenge - because however much I play it, the odds remain the same.

113

I’m not liking the change. I am not a risk lover, tend to avoid luck challenges beyond doing them once or twice to read the text, and I feel that my character has lost a lot of what she so diligently worked for.
This makes it a good deal less fun.

114

(Whoops - this was a reply to Cedric Appleby above, but a couple of other posts appeared in between)

There’s a lot there I agree with - in particular, I hate the newfound emphasis on exact percentages, which is a real mood-killer for me.

But on the general point, I suspect it’ll all make more sense when we look back at it in a year’s time. I can see it working well in combination with longer-running storylines - going up 20 levels to advance a story doesn’t seem as bad if you’re working on 10 different things at the same time. And the advantage of doing it that way is that you don’t have such a narrow window in which to enjoy content “at its best” (after it’s impossible but before it’s straightforward).

Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m off to ride my newly-death-defying velocipede.

Cheers
Richard
edited by Morton on 2/16/2013

115

I know I haven’t been around on the forums much, and haven’t updated it in forever, but… my clothes swapping script still works for me at least:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/131257

It still takes some time; as it has to swap each item individually (the game is not set up to allow outfit swapping; maybe that should now be addressed?) but it is considerably faster than doing it piecemail.

116

Aye, I suppose it will. I’m just glad I did my grinding a long time ago. (Though I suspect this will seriously delay my Overgoat plans.) I just hope the developers know what they’re doing; it sure doesn’t seem that way.

(And congratulations on your Velocipede! Remember, if they lack the reflexes to jump out of your way, they’re probably better off in the Tomb-Colonies anyway.)
edited by Cedric Appleby on 2/16/2013

117

What tweaks are people hoping for, within the current system? For me, the ideal endgame would be something where the cap on difficulty is equal to the stat cap (seems reasonable) but with enough work you can boost the odds to 90-100%. If we assume a cap of 200, that means 100-133 points worth of stat boosting items. It would allow you to get to a fully straightforward endgame if you wished, but keep it non-trivial for anyone without maxed items, and you could take them off to tune it yourself. I kind of doubt we’ll see that much of a boost, though. And it puts a full half of your character’s potential into their stuff and not themselves. :-/

118

Oh, come on, that’s going too far. You’re absolutely right to say that there are all sorts of interesting and counter-intuitive results about attitude to risk. But it’s over-reaching to conclude that human beings as a whole are “particularly risk-averse” - there are plenty of us who find a modest gamble exciting, especially in the context of a game.

So, speaking up for those people, let me recount my own personal experience. There’s a lot of high-level stuff in FL I haven’t seen yet: I’ve never set foot on a boat, for example. But I’d kind-of lost interest in it, because my character’s stats had outstripped my progress through the plot, and everything was “straightforward” to me now.

Why’s that a problem, for someone with my mindset? Because:

  • I blitzed through new storylines too quickly to get properly engaged in them
  • I was missing out on half of the writing, since I never saw any failure text
  • grind was just an annoying artificial roadblock, rather than part of character development
  • there was no strategy involved; no decision about whether to take an easy option or risk a more rewarding one
  • and, yes, I did miss the excitement of the occasional gamble.

That’s the way my mind works. It’s not the way your mind works, and I respect that completely. But please don’t deny that I even exist ;-)

Does this change fix my problem? I don’t know, yet - I’ve only had time for a brief look around. And like everyone else, I feel slightly affronted that my character is less capable than he was before. But on the other hand, a few stories which I’d got bored of look tempting to me again… so overall, I personally don’t find this is as wrong-headed as many seem to feel.

Cheers
Richard[/quote]

Completely agree. I never liked having to switch costume for every single challenge, and now I have a decent chance whether I equip my good-on-average gear or my specialized gear. I no longer have to fix my attire so that the challenges are exactly low-risk or modest or whatever, I’ll learn 2 cp or more on a victory seeing as straightforward is as rare as it is. In time, this update could actually be good for me, but I have to see what FBG does with it first.

It’s much more fun to do some challenges when you have a chance for failure as well. It’s more diverse. It means I’ll have some use of my second chances. But I obviously wouldn’t mind if the rewards and such were updated to reflect this. Also, it’s worth pointing out that the ‘modest’ difficulty integer is large

119

I will second the motion for using the normal distribution. It’s perfectly intuitive with small changes to start with and end with, and it has nice growth followed by the center and then diminishing returns. One picture says it all. I also agree that using a linear risk progression completely screws with the exponential growth of item prices in the bazaar. Echoes are now much more valuable and hard to come by. At the same time items are still extremely expensive while doing less. I know it is been said that those items will have their numbers tweaked, but it will be very difficult to balance everything. In the meantime progression through content slows down to the point that there is less fun to be had at any given time, and I find myself blowing the game off for the better part of the day instead of coming back to use my precious actions. Actions simply do less.

120

[quote=Aspeon]
(Plus, making second chances optional will make it significantly easier to grind Boatman’s Opponent, since you can deliberately fail the challenge to raise Wounds without wasting Sudden Insights.)[/quote]
Not much, as you currently can just hit try again regardless of how many wounds you have. Success gives more cp, I hope?