Once you work your way up to Wounds 15, you can no longer play chess until you reduce your Wounds.
I keep running into grinding cards (for casing, investigating, the hunt is on, etc.) where my options are literally between the 70% success option and the 68% success option. I used to be able to choose between high-risk challenges with greater experience/rewards and sure things with lesser experience/rewards. Now, with the spread allegedly between 67-74% success on Investigations in the University, the number of options just feels so… pointless. That’s not even 10% better chance on the “safe” one than the “dangerous” one. What’s the point of all the options, now? Different flavor-text? I love my flavor, but that, just isn’t enough. I feel like I have fewer options and it doesn’t matter at all which one I pick. Why not pick the “difficult” card? I’ll fail a whole seven more times out of a hundred? What difference does that make? It’s frustrating.
Doctor, what do you think of the new change? - YouTube
Then again, I still miss the big, red “Go” button.
I understand this is a work in progress and that a lot will change in the coming weeks, but for what it’s worth now I don’t see the need to fix something that wasn’t broken.
I’m one of the non-mathematical people Alexis was talking about and while I’m not 100% about the numbers of this thing, but from the looks of it it seems that gaining a level only increases your chance to do something by 1%. It also seems that a character with stats in the 70’s has approximately the same chance of success as a character with stats in the 120’s.
While this doesn’t make me want to play Fallen London less, it really, REALLY makes me want to design a game for StoryNexus less. I have a great deal of copy for a game I’ve been working on, but have held off to get a better grasp on the mechanics of what I want to do. This makes me think I shouldn’t bother or should just use a different platform for my content. One of the goals of my game was to take a character from a lowly, in-debted indentured miner and work his way up through all levels of society until he could become mayor. With this new system, it seems like gaining a level makes little difference for his chances to be the latter as the former.
The idea of StoryNexus inspired me to start writing a game, something I thought I’d never have a chance to do outside of a table-top RPG. Now I think that StoryNexus isn’t the platform for that game. It lends itself to a much heavier grind and, rather than giving the players incentive to increase their level, it makes all levels approximate.
I hope that everyone at FailBetter will take a look at the numbers this change makes in the amount of people who play and how much they play. If those numbers are steady or increase, then I guess the change is fine. If this is something that turns people off the game, then I hope they change it back. I think Fallen London is a fantastic storytelling system and I really think the more people who play it more often the better.
But I want the game I design to look a lot more like old Fallen London than new.
edited by Nigel Overstreet on 2/17/2013
You can still use narrow challenges in StoryNexus. Below does.
I have to agree with the naysayers - this change essentially abolishes any sense of personal progress over the short term, and completely overturns the existing paradigm of ‘high risk, hish reward - low risk, low reward’. I realise that attraction of letting higher level characters visit storylets that they’ve outleveled, but with this change it has shifted the entire ethos from personal advancement to luck. Even if the items are upscaled to appropriately affect the chances involved, you’ve just turned it from personal advancement (something players can be very satisfied with ‘once upon a time, I was scrounging for invitations, but now parties will wait for me to start’) to ‘you bought good items’.
I can’t help but consider this an awful change. That’s not even getting into the potential for higher menaces! If the system is due for a change, fine. But for goodness sake, make sure the system is ready to be put in place before starting to pull pieces out and slot new ones in! I can see one positive here (a wider range of characters being able to attempt storylets) and a -lot- of negatives that may or may not be allieviated in future. In -future-.
edited by SayleCal on 2/17/2013
[color=#009900]To reiterate and clarify what I said earlier.[/color]
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[color=#009900]- This is a done deal; part of a much longer-term plan. (Why not make all the changes at once? for the same reason that you don’t hold off building a house until you’re ready to put the roof on, even though you might get wet when it rains in the meantime.) I’m not going to use the normal distribution, and I’m not going to remove the change unless I come across a major unforeseen consequence. I knew it would upset a minority of players, I dislike upsetting players, and I spent the design time and tech resource to do it anyway because I was convinced it was necessary. [/color]
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[color=#009900]- I’m very interested in hearing about specific issues with specific bits of content. I’m afraid I’m not going to trawl through and respond in detail to a long thread full of this-sucks and me-too. If you feel the need to vent your unhappiness, here is as good a place as any, but if you drown out specific useful questions and suggestions, that’s a shame.[/color]
[color=#009900]I very much hope you enjoy the changes that are coming, and I’ll always try to support a variety of play styles: but it will never be possible for me to cater to everyone’s tastes, and ultimately I’m doing my best to build a game that I would enjoy - which I still think is the most authentic and honest creative approach.[/color]
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[color=#009900]EDIT: clarified last sentence.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 2/18/2013
The Broad difficulty system is not intrinsically a bad system; it is, however, a difficulty system designed for a very specific kind of game, one which is nothing like Fallen London.
The basic impact of the Broad system is to decrease the marginal benefits of gaining levels. Given a scaling factor of 70%, then when you’re playing DL 7 stories, each level you gain gives you a 10% boost in your chances of success. This bonus decreases with each level, from a 10% boost per level at DL 7 to a 5% boost per level at DL 14, to a 3.3% boost at DL 21, and so on.
(Note, by the way, that this is using the 70% scaling factor that the current FL implementation is using. The default scaling factor of 60% condenses things even further, with a 10% boost per level at DL 6, a 5% boost per level at DL 12 and so on.)
Levels have two functions in SN games: Increasing quality levels is a way that players can see tangible rewards; increasing difficulty levels is a way for authors to differentiate choices and stories.
The decreasing marginal benefit of the Broad system, however, means that levels serve these functions less and less as time goes up. My personal viewpoint would be that this system is best-suited for a game that has a content cap in the mid-teens. By the time you hit, say, DL 35 with each level giving a 2% boost, levels have long since stopped serving either the purpose of giving players tangible rewards or distinguishing choices.
Beyond this issue, in the kind of game that the Broad system works for, each level increase should have a uniform cost. The time spent to gain a level should be the same for each level; if you have gear, the cost of each additional +1 from gear should be the same. The Broad system already makes the marginal gain from a level less, so increasing the cost for each level gain or gear increase means you’re effectively doubling up on the idea of discouraging leveling.
In Fallen London, a new player is likely to blow past DL 7 their first day, and DL 14 in their first few; the overwhelming majority of the game is above that level. Each level increases in cost up to level 50, and each additional bonus from gear becomes more expensive. FL simply isn’t the kind of game that the Broad system was designed for.
For the sake of comparison, let’s say that we used a stepped Narrow difficulty system, in which levels from 1-10 (from increasing a quality or from gear) gave you an increase of 10% per level, levels 11-50 gave you a 5% boost, and levels 51+ gave you an increase of 2% per level.
My intuition would be that such a system would be quickly perceived as a bad idea, giving insufficient rewards for levelling and not particularly helpful in distinguishing between easier and harder choices. Nonetheless, this kind of stepped system would actually be significantly friendlier to players than the Broad system.
That rant out of the way, since all indications are that FL has no intention of reconsidering anything, let’s discuss the particular areas that need to be looked at:
- Carousels and all other all-or-nothing checks at the end of multiple actions need to be reviewed. Having an unavoidable chance of failure in a normal 1-action storylet is one thing; succeeding on 14 actions and then getting only half-rewards from the final action (which is balanced to be an appropriate reward for 15 actions total) is too painful.
This includes storylines like the Velocipede Squad and Hunter’s Keep, as well as multi-action storylets like some of those within Unfinished Business.
- All storylets with a range of multiple choices intending to range from easy to hard need to be reviewed. There are a number of storylets which present a situation, and then have an “easy option” and “hard option”. My perception would be that this is intended to make the storylet provide new content over multiple levels, as the players move from choice to choice as their level increases; if so, that goal has now been destroyed.
An obvious example would be the Labyrinth of Tigers storylets in the Fourth Coil, with a difference of 6% between the easiest and hardest of the three options, or Hunting Dangerous Prey in Wolfstack Docks, which has six options spanning a total of 8% between the easiest and hardest. As these are now trivial distinctions, the multiple options are pointless.
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Rewards from non-luck-based stories need to be increased across the board. The most rewarding stories in the game were all luck-based; now that you have added an unavoidable chance of failure to the non-luck-based stories, you have effectively made the luck-based stories even better in comparison. Unless that was one of your goals, you need to increase the rewards of the non-luck-based stories to account for the decreased chance of success.
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The equipment system needs to be overhauled. If the idea is that we’re going to be changing gear every time we’re making checks with a different stat, then we need a much more hassle-free way to switch gear.
This is one I have the least hope for. FL’s equipment system has always been one of its weak points, with poor equipment organization (souvenirs, story objects and useful gear all jumbled together) and the switching process cumbersome and slow. Perhaps this is one of the things that will change in the changeover to the SN platform, but I’m not sure that FL staff even recognize this as being a problem area.
- The second chance bug, in which succeeding after a second chance doesn’t give you the bonus CP, needs to be fixed.
I have a specific concern/complaint:
The ‘acquiring a boat’ storyline. I am at the point where I must gamble with the masters. Before this change happened, I had a straightforward in Persuasive and Watchful, and a ‘long-shot’ luck-wise. Now both the qualities are at ‘modest’ and I’ve stopped trying.
Every time you lose, you lose a significant amount of items. If ‘long-shot’ is a 10% success chance, then I’ve gone from a 10% success to 5.47%. Each loss accounts for several days of playing to make up the materials. Was this intended? The cynic in me says this is to try to force people to pay for 20 fate and skip this branch. The optimist in me hopes this was an oversight, and I’ve been playing other stories waiting to see if it gets fixed/changed.
Edit: apologies, the luck rating was “The odds are strongly against you” not “A long shot” but my point still stands, it is still twice as difficult as before.
edited by Nathan022 on 2/18/2013
[quote=Tesuji]The Broad difficulty system is not intrinsically a bad system; it is, however, a difficulty system designed for a very specific kind of game, one which is nothing like Fallen London.
The basic impact of the Broad difficulty system…
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[color=#009900]What the… you do know I designed both Fallen London and the Broad difficulty system? And you did read my last post? It looks like you make some specific points below that long wall of rant, which I may come back to when I regain the will to live.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Nathan, thanks, I’ll take a look.[/color]
[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]To reiterate and clarify what I said earlier.[/color]
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[color=#009900]- This is a done deal; part of a much longer-term plan. (Why not make all the changes at once? for the same reason that you don’t hold off building a house until you’re ready to put the roof on, even though you might get wet when it rains in the meantime.) I’m not going to use the normal distribution, and I’m not going to remove the change unless I come across a major unforeseen consequence. I knew it would upset a minority of players, I dislike upsetting players, and I spent the design time and tech resource to do it anyway because I was convinced it was necessary. [/color]
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[color=#009900]- I’m very interested in hearing about specific issues with specific bits of content. I’m afraid I’m not going to trawl through and respond in detail to a long thread full of this-sucks and me-too. If you feel the need to vent your unhappiness, here is as good a place as any, but if you drown out specific useful questions and suggestions, that’s a shame.[/color]
[color=#009900]I very much hope you enjoy the changes that are coming, and I’ll always try to support a variety of play styles: but it will never be possible for me to cater to everyone’s tastes, and ultimately I’m doing my best to build a game that I would enjoy - which I still think is the most authentic and honest creative approach.[/color]
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[color=#009900]EDIT: clarified last sentence.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 2/18/2013[/quote]
Might I humbly recommend striving to make a game that I will enjoy? If you can’t please everyone, why not focus on me? :)
I like the new difficulty levels; a chance at failing or getting menaces is no biggie, and it refreshes interest in familiar cards. The format is a bit distracting, but I don’t really care. Given that FL is such a stunning grindfest, the only time I don’t like failing is when it locks me into a sub-optimal storyline choice. Especially when that challenge is luck based with no means of guaranteeing success. If I wanted to deal with the vagaries of chance ruining a years’ long endeavor through no fault of my own, well I have a whole world of disappointing choices beyond my control in external reality.
I am not massively bothered by this change! My biggest concern is not accidentally using up my second-chances before they become optional, because I like to keep them at multiples of five… and I accidentally went down to 9 Anticandles on a failed Shadowy check, and where can you get 1 Anticandle? Nowhere! But, I know this is my psychosis to deal with, and shan’t bother the devs with it.
[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]…which I may come back to when I regain the will to live.[/color]
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Yikes! Our complaints can’t be that bad, can they?
One perhaps unanticipated consequence of this system is that almost impossible challenges will either completely disappear once you hit a certain not-very-high level, or they’ll be so difficult that even a 200+ skill check won’t give a good chance of passing them. Let’s say the highest level challenge at the end of the game will be 300. Then for a character at 100, the success rate will be 100/300 * 0.6, or 20%. This isn’t great, but it’s also not that terrible given the gap between the two. You’d have to have a level 600 challenge to get down to 10%, and that challenge will be very difficult even for stat-capped players (unless equipment really explodes in its benefits).
Another consequence which I just realized: ignoring menaces, all actions now have almost exactly the same echo expectation value. The expectation value is E = (reward value)(probability) = (reward value)(char level)/(challenge level) * 0.6. If the reward value is pretty much the same as the challenge level, then this reduces to E = (char level)*0.6. There are extra penalties for failing when including menaces, so the actual expectation value would be worse for the higher-level challenges. Therefore, as things currently stand, the most efficient action will always be the highest level straightforward challenge available. Maybe this is intentional, but it seems like you should actually get better rewards when you work your way up to accessing better storylets, rather than just having the chance of failure slowly go down on the low-level rewards you can already get.
I actually really like the idea of broadening the difficulty levels, but I do think that this simplest linear broadening is insufficient. I know you’ve said that you won’t use a normal distribution, but something along those lines would solve a lot of the problems here while retaining all of the benefits of the broadening. It doesn’t have to be very complicated either. Just approximate it with a piecewise linear function. Or you could do something like the first five levels above the 50% mark increase it by 5%, the next five increase it by 2.5%, the next five by 1.25%, and so on (this has the added benefit of never actually getting all the way up to 100%). There are a lot of possibilities, and they’re all slightly more complicated than what you’ve implemented, but the simplest answer isn’t always best.
I hope you figure this out. Thanks for the great work so far!
Sure. What I’m saying is that this is a good system for a particular type of game, but that kind of game isn’t FL. (Perhaps I shouldn’t say “the system is designed for…” as that carries an implication of “intentionally meant for”, but rather “the system is a good fit for…”)
I can see why you’d want this in a SN designer’s arsenal; at low levels, this kind of system has some interesting properties. At higher levels (15+ for a scaling factor of 70%; maybe 22+ if you want to be generous), however, the numbers start getting too big, and most of Fallen London is, relatively speaking, high level.
If this is really the system you want to go with, you could at least curb some of the worst downsides by having a floor, a minimum change in the success chance per level, which would at least solve the problem of completely undifferentiated levels. Given a number of storylets with options that are 2 DLs apart, a floor of at least 2.5% would make some sense, which is equivalent to Broad from DL 1-28; Narrow (base 70%, 2.5% per level) thereafter. A floor of 2% (equivalent to Broad from DL 1-35, then fixed thereafter) or 1% (equivalent to Broad DL 1-70, then fixed thereafter) would also be possible. (I wouldn’t call any of these good systems, but they’re better than just using the Broad system as is.)
Certainly. I had already started typing up my rant before your posting, and I do hate to waste a good rant. You did say that this was as good a place as any to vent unhappiness, after all. ;)
And though you say this is already a done deal, I couldn’t resist holding on to at least some hope of getting across to you the frustration that some players feel.
I sat down to play the game with a lower-level alt character, to see what the changes are like for a non-capped character: All I saw was a sea of yellow; storylets were Modest when they unlocked, and disappeared before they hit Low-Risk. I went to play the Black Ribbon storyline and had six options, all roughly the same chance for success. It didn’t matter whether I leveled or what gear I wore, the chances didn’t appreciably change; it felt like nothing the character did mattered, and he had no meaningful choices.
[color=#009900]no indeed, it was this experience:[/color]
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[color=#009900]AK: posts ‘rants don’t help, guys, could you stick to feedback’[/color]
[color=#009900]AK goes to bed[/color]
[color=#009900]AK gets up and sees the VERY NEXT POST is the LONGEST RANT YET[/color]
[color=#009900]anyway a nice long run in the winter sunshine has restored my will to live and I will post another response later in the day if I have time.[/color]
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[color=#009900]A key point though. The broadening mechanic has a huge deflationary effect, and people keep posting ways to ‘fix’ it. The thing is, the big deflationary effect is intentional, because now I can inject stat gains and equipment bonuses that are as high as they need to be back into the system.[/color]
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[color=#009900]An example. Once we move to SN, I’m considering introducing slots called something like Destiny and Professional Advantage, which require time and commitment to gain or switch but which provide really substantial advantages (nb: there is no reason why ‘equipped’ items need to be extrinsic-feeling advantages rather than inherent-feeling character traits). I could then allow a Doomed by Bells destiny that increases Dangerous by 150, which upgrades to a Damned by Bells destiny that increases Dangerous by 500. NB these numbers are completely fictional! But there’s now room to breathe in the design to allow a gradual, enjoyable acceleration.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Those of you who yearn for the days when everything was straightforward, let me make you an offer. Click this link for an access code that will set all your stats permanently to 100,000,000. This will ensure that every difficulty in the game is permanently set to Straightforward for you - which is what happened under the old system anyway, because at the cap with max stats you were ensuring nearly all new content was at Straightforward long before we introduced it. The catch is that you’ll be locked out of all the new mechanics and resources that I hope to be introducing over the next year or so. Tempted?[/color]
EDIT: ‘no’ to ‘now’!
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edited by Alexis on 2/18/2013
>(Perhaps I shouldn’t say “the system is designed for…” as that carries an implication of “intentionally meant for”, but rather “the system is a good fit for…”)
[color=#009900]No indeed. But also, you’re (almost) right, it’s not designed for (your referred style of play) in FL as it is now. FL will continue to change: Broad difficulty has fixed a bunch of issues and introduced some others. The 100% style of play is an unintended consequence of a naive design decision I made back in 2009 that allowed for a trivial degenerate strategy.[/color]
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[/color]> the numbers start getting too big
[color=#009900]See my last post.[/color]
>You did say that this was as good a place as any to vent unhappiness, after all.
[color=#009900]Fair point! But, you know, you bury other fair points under all that rant, it materially reduces your chances of getting them responded to. It’s up to you whether you prefer the pleasure of vent.[/color]
[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]The 100% style of play is an unintended consequence of a naive design decision I made back in 2009 that allowed for a trivial degenerate strategy.[/color]
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And I adopted such a strategy, and have been a trivial degenerate ever since!
…that’s not what you’re talking about, is it.
[color=#009900]And this morning’s Rimshot Award goes to…[/color]
I shall put it in my Acoustical Cabinet, next to my collection of rare bird calls and my box of ministerial sneezes!
On the subject of rimshots, promise me if the aforementioned skill modifier does get called “Destiny” you’ll throw in a Bungie or Halo gag. Please? Pretty please? With a rubbery kitten on top?
Many people have said that the deflationary effect is not the main concern here. They are indeed fixable, e.g. by changing storylet rewards, and would be present under a normal or piecewise linear distribution anyway if you used a large enough spread. The problems with specific areas of the game, such as carousels or hunting animals for the Labyrinth, are also fixable (though it will be harder). What is not fixable is the complete lack of any sense of progress through normal play. I don’t want all my storylets to be set to Straightforward right away. I want to feel like gaining a level means something, and the Broad distribution ends that. Normal or piecewise linear distributions wouldn’t.