[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]memorysquid: what alternative phrasing would you suggest? This isn’t a rhetorical question.[/color]
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I’d suggest alternative functionality. The phrasing has the unfortunate quality of being completely and annoyingly, almost gloatingly, accurate.
[quote=Theus]…The outcome of both looks remarkably similar (qualitatively). This is not meaningful decision making. There is only a decision to be made after a failure, and then, it hardly matters. Now, the decision has to be made at the beginning, with no prompt from the system. If the second chance didn’t go away if we succeeded, this looks exactly the same as the above scenario.
The difference now is that your choices now matter more, and each second chance used gives an actual impact. Why don’t we want this?[/quote]
2nd chances were never a big concern of mine, but they functioned as insurance, useful mainly on challenges where my chance of success was high but not absolute. If my success chance was 10%, I wouldn’t be trying it in the first place, unless the penalty for failure was close to nothing, rewards were high and I didn’t mind burning 2nd chances like mad. But at 90% success, five 2nd chances would, on average, insure me against failure just under 50 times. Now those same five 2nd chances will insure me against failure at any success chance precisely five times. So this change has reduced the utility of 2nd chances markedly, increasingly the higher my chance of success happens to be. As Fhoenix also noted, rather than conserving use of 2nd chances - which I will claim enough omniscience to state was the object of all that player feedback, this change coupled with difficulty rebalancing [which I like] has made a years long grindy story that much grindier. Why is that something to want? The Road to Ithaca is nice, but eventually, it’s time to get to Ithaca.
Guy Scrum’s system gets my vote, it’s quite elegant.
[quote=Guy Scrum][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]memorysquid: what alternative phrasing would you suggest? This isn’t a rhetorical question.[/color]
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I don’t think you even need to let us know whether or not the second chance was necessary. When we fail the first time, you can just automatically rerun the challenge. Whether we succeed on the first or second chance, the victory text can read something like “With the help of your sudden insight, you succeeded in a Watchful challenge!” Or, on failure: “Despite your sudden insight, Watchful 100 failed in a challenge!” That way, the player never feels like a second chance was thrown away for nothing (on success, anyways). It would also require one fewer clicks if the player fails the first check. The difficulty with this is figuring out how to effectively and succinctly communicate to the player how the second chance is working, but that shouldn’t be too hard.
Using this method, increasing the chance of a rare success would be pretty easy: just run each challenge twice regardless of success on the first try, and then always pick the ‘best’ result out of the two. It would approximately double the chance for rare successes though, which might be more than you’re willing to do.
edited by Guy Scrum on 3/1/2013[/quote]
I really like this idea.