Quirks Polishers

Fallen London
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[color=#009900]OK, now I have to lay down some mod.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Nitebrite, it’s not OK to copy-paste a bunch of anonymous comments from another community channel into this community channel. There are well-established Internet Reasons why that’s not OK, I’m sure you know them. Please don’t.[/color]
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[color=#009900]It’s also not OK to send us a number of long, long emails on this topic, and when we respond to those emails, to repost a bunch of those points here. You know we’ve heard you. Please respect our position as designers, and the amount of time we already spend on listening to feedback, seven days a week. Please don’t try to browbeat us or to go looking to mobilise sentiment against a design change you dislike. You’re better than that.[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]You obviously feel strongly on this topic and you’re obviously having a hard time filtering it: please, next time you feel like posting a rant, take a deep breath and step away for a little while first.[/color][/quote]

Get SERVED

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[color=#009900]not helping - none of this, please, folks, or I’ll have to lock the thread.[/color]

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I don’t feel too strongly about this particular issue, but the imagery of a raging mob of Londoners throwing the Tiger Keeper down the river like a startled devil is pretty hilarious.

Personally speaking, I do think steps like removing the Ruthless gain from Unfinished Business are good, since these storylets always feel like they are purely functional and not something to be considered upon in-character.

I would prefer if repeatable storylets and cards focus on increasing quirks to a low cap while leaving the (major) decreasing to major or one-off decisions.

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[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]We talked longingly about being able to do this, and I would love to have been able to, but we looked at the number of players with very high Quirk levels and realised it wasn’t practical. The rant upthread notwithstanding, we don’t like to erase people’s lived choices.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Honestly, there used to be times when I dreamed of a wipe. I wanted to throw my hands in the air and walk away from Failbetter entirely rather than constantly have my nose rubbed in the consequences of undoing some decision I made at 3am five years ago. But now, f*ck it, we all live with the consequences of our decisions, and it’s good training for a designer. :-)[/color][/quote]

You’d have my support if you did it. If the system’s not working, why hesitate from fixing it just 'cause some people have made entertainingly tall piles of the broken pieces?

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[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]
You’d have my support if you did it. If the system’s not working, why hesitate from fixing it just 'cause some people have made entertainingly tall piles of the broken pieces?[/quote]

[color=#009900]That’s a very good question for which I have several heartfelt answers.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Firstly, because we made it possible for people to spend a chunk of their lives doing that, and telling them it was meaningful. That imposes a moral obligation on us not to kick over their sandcastles without cause There are many many many limits to that moral obligation - as I said above, it’s all compromises and hard decisions - but it exists.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Secondly, moral obligation aligns with good customer service practice, and we never enjoy ragequits.[/color]
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[color=#009900]But thirdly, and most importantly, it is very hard to see the long-term consequences of our actions. [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]Fallen London and its many communities and the layered history of previous changes are a very complex system.[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)] I was much more gung-ho about making changes in the beginning. But although game designers are just not humble people, running a long big persistent game imposes some humility on you. We move slowly and cautiously and we try not to do irrevocable things, because we always know that tomorrow we might realise there was a better way all along.[/color]

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Maybe I’m a bit of a munchkin and not too much of a roleplayer, but I have to say I’ve never really cared for quirks.

Aside from a few unimportant situations they never matter and don’t have any impact. Most of my interaction with quirks is being annoyed that some of my quirks dropped while the other didn’t raise because of some stupid cap and trying to keep Hedonist above 8 for free second chances.
So most of the time I just try to ignore them and not be annoyed. Frankly for me it’s a little weird that of all mechanics Failbetter chose to work on developing quirks.

But most of all I deny that some ‘quirk’ can define my character. I don’t think I’m what some ‘quirk’ says about me, and that it can dictate me what I can or cannot do. You can tell me how much urchins like me, or what things I’ve achieved, but you can’t tell me who I am.
Right now I have something like 10 Ruthless, 10 Heartless, 14 Magnanimous, 9 Hedonist, and others at ~6. I have no idea what it means about me and can’t say I pay any attention to it as a role player.

So you can notice I’m a little conflicted about how to approach this mechanic and deep inside I feel like it would be best to either drop it completely or replace with something else, like maybe opening new options or closing them if you’ve done something really drastic at some important moment in the past (think Bringer of Death, etc).

That possibly brings me to a probabe solution. What if the &quotgrindy&quot storylet options didn’t change quirks above level 4-6 at all (neither lowering or increasing), so the quirks will only change on important one-off story decisions (think key decisions in gold storylets). That might work for me and make much more sense than the current mechanic.
Can’t say I myself am making any sense at the moment but hopefully there’s someone who feels the same about quirks.
edited by Danko on 7/22/2015

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I would be fine with getting quirks from story only. I would just choose whatever story options I felt were right for the character and live with whatever quirks I get. In a way I love (to hate) the Reflection grind also, because it neatly foreshadows the latest Parabola story (getting access to the behind-the-mirror-verse by feeding your past to it).
However if non-story actions that drain quirks remain in the game I am worried, as I mentioned above, that it will lead to entropy. Sacrificing your type-writer each time you are kind to the Clay man (in Clay Sedan Chair card) to remain very Hedonistic does not feel right. I am not sure what the best solution is, but I am not negative about the changes. The Polishers themselves are interesting, even if I can’t play most of them.

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[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]That’s a very good question for which I have several heartfelt answers.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Firstly, because we made it possible for people to spend a chunk of their lives doing that, and telling them it was meaningful. That imposes a moral obligation on us not to kick over their sandcastles without cause There are many many many limits to that moral obligation - as I said above, it’s all compromises and hard decisions - but it exists.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Secondly, moral obligation aligns with good customer service practice, and we never enjoy ragequits.[/color]
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[color=#009900]But thirdly, and most importantly, it is very hard to see the long-term consequences of our actions. [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]Fallen London and its many communities and the layered history of previous changes are a very complex system.[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)] I was much more gung-ho about making changes in the beginning. But although game designers are just not humble people, running a long big persistent game imposes some humility on you. We move slowly and cautiously and we try not to do irrevocable things, because we always know that tomorrow we might realise there was a better way all along.[/color][/quote]

Good answers all! I daresay the earlier it is in development, the more gung-ho one can be - there are fewer players, and they’re less invested in the status quo. And I imagine that you’re collectively far more frustrated with the difficulties of the existing system than we are!

I guess the difficulty is, to what degree is it possible to transform the existing system from something purely decorative, that players can essentially customise at their leisure, to something that meaningfully reflects character decisions and unlocks content accordingly? No matter how thoroughly you apply the soft cap, so that no encyclopaedic knowledge of the system can allow grinding beyond a given level, that level being above 0 means that a spoiler-heavy, deliberately-optimised build is always going to have higher potential Quirks than the average player. Plus, so long as quality reducers are repeatable, it’s possible (perhaps even probable) that a player who simply plays the content they’re given will eventually have their qualities eroded away until they have no Quirks at any significant level and no way to increase them.
edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 7/22/2015

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My apologies, the offending content has been removed. I was having a bit of a filter problem, and I tried so hard to not do that too. I even brought in four other people to proof read that post for offense before posting it and sat on it for two days but we failed and I’m sorry.

Fred,
That’s not to say they never do this cap, scrap, and rework as you suggest Fred. I can think of at least three examples off the top of my head, such as Back Alley Cobblestones, Unaccountably Peckish, and more recently iron knife tokens, and these all worked out okay. Though seeking related content really is a special case and probably shouldn’t be counted. I remember I must have had like 50+ Back Alley Cobblestones from the local gossip grind back when that unceremoniously got the boot. Ha, my poor friend had just got to 77 UP the day it was hard capped at 10 and reset by a must… They never logged into that account again, as a way to preserve their achievement and hard work eternally. That may have been reset with the server wide removal of qualities people had but didn’t have the requirements for (such as five card lodgings with remote addresses). Or so the rumor goes. I will have to check on that some day to see if its true.

But no I do feel Alexis on not wanting to apply that same method and completely scrap quirks and rework them from the ground up, even if that would be a favorable course of action. Unlike those other examples, which showed up in maybe half a dozen storylets total, and were universally considered improvements (back alley cobblestones was so grindy), quirks are incredibly salient and touch -several hundred-, possibly 1000+ storylets already. It would be a super massive undertaking with unknown consequences. It’d also stop all other /future work until the rework was completed, like a clog in a pipe, since quirks are a commonly used tool for building other stories
edited by NiteBrite on 7/22/2015

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I would like to add that I think any rework of Quirks would only be meaningful as long as the Quirks themselves were made (more) useful, i.e (more often) afflicting decisions and stories.

But this in turn is a kind of a trap.
By making quirks lock or unlock stories and decisions you have to basically say “Oh, you want to pick this sweet option? You think that’s what your character would have done? Nope, you’re wrong. For this to unlock you had to drink thirteen liters of laudanum while having a threesome on the Empress throne”.
So basically the options in the game would be locked just because the game thinks they’re out of your character, which may seem like the wrong kind of unfair.

This may require a gentler approach, as in providing additional options for high-quirk characters which will lead to roughly the same outcome but with a little different text/rewards.
I think it could be pretty nice, and is already implemented in some cases, even if rarely.
I also wouldn’t mind for some useful opportunity cards unlocking for having certain quirks.

I think the main challenge is to avoid quirk-munchkinism (players farming quirks out of character just to get certain options/things) while also making them useful to the game, while also making them not too useful to be required to progress and get nice things.

That said, have fun designing the system, that’s quite a challenge!

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Re: Paving it over.

It sounds like we could benefit from a &quotshim&quot system here, in which we deprecate yet retain support for the old system, while encouraging adoption and use of the new system.

This could start with a translation of quirks above a certain level (8, 10, 15?) to x item/quality like &quothistorical acts of hedonism&quot (people have written about what you have done, so you may still have currency via reputation even if not reflective of your current personality.)

How I could see this work: some person has 200 Hedonist, 18 Heartless, and 4 Daring. The system provides him with 200 Historical acts of Hedonism and 18 Historical accounts of Heartlessness and his qualities are 15 Hedonist, 15 Heartless, and 4 Daring.

The historical marks can still be used in times like the fishing trips, or as entry fees to other storylets (or heck even sold, if players would prefer an economic advantage). The devil’s in the details, obviously. The idea is that everyone who was allowed to invest that time gets something to show for it, without breaking the new system. If the historical marks were not spendable or sellable, they were serve as lasting tribute and even allow for a full rollback to previous state if it goes over horribly.

To sweeten it further for new players, as old content gets updated to introduce these &quotcharacter defining moments&quot, players who are past that point could be dripped out a message with a quality increase based on the choice they made. &quotYou committed a shocking act of debauchery on the Empress’s throne. Someone has remembered and been talking. (You’ve gained 3 Hedonist).&quot This approach would support players feeling equally rewarded for the choices they made previously, rather than have players feel like they missed out on the new changes to the old stuff.

It’s likely that this sort of approach has already been batted around internally, but it seems like Alexis’s top concern was treating the embedded player base with respect for what they’ve accomplished, and I think this system does that.
edited by Theus on 7/22/2015

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[quote=Theus]This could start with a translation of quirks above a certain level (8, 10, 15?) to x item/quality like &quothistorical acts of hedonism&quot (people have written about what you have done, so you may still have currency via reputation even if not reflective of your current personality.)

How I could see this work: some person has 200 Hedonist, 18 Heartless, and 4 Daring. The system provides him with 200 Historical acts of Hedonism and 18 Historical accounts of Heartlessness and his qualities are 15 Hedonist, 15 Heartless, and 4 Daring.
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I really like this idea.

It addresses one of the problems I see with the re-working of the Quirks system. In order to avoid, as Alexis put it, &quotkicking over the sandcastles&quot of players with existing high-level Quirks, a system is being created whereby someone will NEVER be able to achieve the scores that those long-standing players (e.g. Nigel and his Hedonism score) have.

Is that fair? It means that someone who from this point on dedicates their entire play to increasing their Hedonism as much as possible can never even approach those scores, even if Nigel (or anyone else - this is not meant as an attack of any kind, personal or otherwise!) never clicks another option in FL.

The idea of a Historical Achievement deals with this elegantly - it gives the player in question something to show for the effort that they put in previously - something unique that no current player will be able to achieve - but does NOT advantage them unduly in current play. I also completely agree that they should also be placed at the highest available new updated quality level.

It’s a good compromise between blowing the whole thing up and trying to re-jig the existing framework and, to my mind at least, would ruflle the fewest feathers.

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[quote=Theus]Re: Paving it over.

This could start with a translation of quirks above a certain level (8, 10, 15?) to x item/quality like &quothistorical acts of hedonism&quot (people have written about what you have done, so you may still have currency via reputation even if not reflective of your current personality.)

[…]
It’s likely that this sort of approach has already been batted around internally, but it seems like Alexis’s top concern was treating the embedded player base with respect for what they’ve accomplished, and I think this system does that.
edited by Theus on 7/22/2015[/quote]

[color=#009900]This is something we’ve discussed internally, and rejected for [reasons] - sorry, I have a day of meetings and may talk in more detail later. But one of the minor reasons is that we plan to do something similar with Connections, ultimately, and quality bloat is an issue.[/color]

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[quote=Danko]By making quirks lock or unlock stories and decisions you have to basically say &quotOh, you want to pick this sweet option? You think that’s what your character would have done? Nope, you’re wrong. For this to unlock you had to drink thirteen liters of laudanum while having a threesome on the Empress throne&quot.
So basically the options in the game would be locked just because the game thinks they’re out of your character, which may seem like the wrong kind of unfair.[/quote]

[color=#009900]This is, in a nutshell, exactly our problem. If Quirks have any consequence, sometimes that’ll upset people, and if they never have any consequence, the lack of consequence will upset people. And people will still be upset because it’s a statement about their characters.[/color]

[color=#009900]This is indeed our general steer! not universally, and there’s a lot of legacy besides, but yes.[/color]

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I was going to make the same suggestion about a reset: have it translate old Quirks into another one-time-only quality that will remain forever frozen in amber as a memento. In fact I’d do it a little like Pickpocket’s Promenade rewards: if you DO have 198 Hedonism, you can cash 150 in for one of the Most Ludicrously Hedonist mementos, another 45 for 3 rewards worth 15 Hedonism each, etc. I’d probably do this based on CP rather than levels, but details. And instigate this transition as a Must storylet that lets you make the exchange and remains accessible afterwards, but with a living storylet that’s also a Must and sets any Quirks levels over 5 to exactly 5. I mean, 5 is not hard in the current system. Oh wait, can living storylets be musts? Probably not. Whatever, plotting implementation is mostly just amusing.

If I was being really nice (and maybe if I was worried about bloating certain Quality categories that run vertical) I’d make these mementos into Home Comforts that actually give +1 or +2 (for the super costly mementos) to the Quirk. Which I know is unprecedented as there’s no equipment that changes Quirks, but what’s the point of playing a game for years and grinding your daily heart out if you don’t get something that’s unprecedented (but has no effect or only a minor effect on game balance, said the Labyrinth Runner).

I do think the new system, especially in the mechanicals of the polishers, shows all the signs of a snarl full of waxy build-up, especially for new players who come in and see a semi-possible but now-shakily-jury-rigged grind to get these rare high-level qualities that only the elite long-time players have. That’s just an inherent incentive you don’t want to affect newcomers who are attracted to rarity, grinding, difficulty, or quirks-as-roleplay. The most thoughtful of dedicated players are highly capable of understanding that this situation would benefit from some wiping. The least thoughtful of dedicated players, well… quite a few are raw masochists who both long and deserve to be hurled down into a pit so they can gnash their teeth in anger at the injustice and begin the pleasure and torment of a Sisyphean climb, yet again. And by them I apparently also mean me, since I mostly like Quirks out of cussed difficulty.

Oh, and I don’t think it’s necessary to do much more reworking of existing storylets or cards that use quirks if you do this, since the existing Quirk qualities would remain intact but be reduced, yes?

EDIT TO ADD: upon further reflection this post contains a few hilariously bad design ideas and should probably be made fun of
edited by metasynthie on 7/22/2015

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[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]This is something we’ve discussed internally, and rejected for [reasons] - sorry, I have a day of meetings and may talk in more detail later. But one of the minor reasons is that we plan to do something similar with Connections, ultimately, and quality bloat is an issue.[/color][/quote]

I appreciate the consideration of a reply, but I don’t feel like you owe me further explanation. If it’s ultimately going to lead to you spending time defending your design choices further instead of actually bettering the game, I’m sure to not be the only person with this perspective.

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This is probably the last thing I will say on the subject of quirks (and it’s okay to not read it, I don’t expect a reply). But when I think of what my ideal implementation of a reputation system, which is what quirks are, would be in Fallen London I think of Notability. Notability works exactly as it should. It caps at 15, you build it little by little, cp by cp, it can be given by both grinding and by story choices and both feel significant. And no one has ever called notability grinding too easy. Plus it only bleeds down if you don’t actively maintain it. It’s a good balance between story and grind.

That would have been my suggestion for quirks, to move in a more Notable direction. The two are almost identical already except one is balanced and the other is not. The key difference? Notability keeps grinds in check with a weekly bleed and quirks don’t. That’s my suggestion, bleed the quirks with TTH and make it more in line with your more successful already established reputation system. Everything else can remain more or less as is and it’d bring story into balance with grinding. It’s a much more consistent build that way, rather than having two disparate reputation systems.
edited by NiteBrite on 7/23/2015

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[quote=NiteBrite]t. That’s my suggestion, bleed the quirks with TTH and make it more in line with your more successful already established reputation system.
edited by NiteBrite on 7/23/2015[/quote]

[color=#009900]There would be some good things about this approach, but this is the kind of thing I mean when I say that we have to balance the needs of different kinds of player. Notability is explicitly designed to be an opt-in activity for post-POSI players that rewards frequent play (and even then, it needed a lot of balancing to be satisfying without being punitive: balancing an existing set of numbers would raise the challenge by a couple of powers). It wouldn’t be practical to decide that players could log off for a couple of months and come back to find all their records of all their decisions set to 0.[/color]

[color=#009900]The tl;dr on the grind vs story thing, for me, is that decisions you make every day can’t be as important as decisions you make only once - because you make them every day.

Edit: missing words[/color]
edited by Alexis on 7/23/2015

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This is a fair design goal, but I don’t think it describes the system as-is very well. Right now decisions you make only once are more important for increasing already-high quirks, but the decisions you make every day are much more important as a source of quirk reduction. Precisely because you encounter them every day and their power to subtract can only be countered by those rare opportunities of decisions you make only once.

Not that I have a suggestion for fixing it that doesn’t open grinding back up, but it helps to state the problem clearly?

Actually, I do have one, somewhat inspired by NiteBrite’s, but it’s probably over-engineered: for any quirk >=10, the everyday things don’t directly subtract CP from the quirk. Instead, they add CP to a secondary quality for that quirk, and everyday actions which might increase the quirk subtract from that quality. When Time the Healer comes, each level of that quality applies -1CP to its attendant quirk.

This means that, e.g., if on the balance you do an equal number of Hedonist and Anhedonist things over the week, you will retain your currrent level of Hedonist (from the big one-off things you’ve done). However, if you’re being constantly Anhedonic you’ll be rapidly drained back into the usual range. The only way to get high quirks is with the important decisions, you can’t completely ignore the everyday decisions, but you don’t have to obsess over whether this one everyday decision will cost you a rare and expensive CP of your big quirk, as you can balance it out with doing something intentionally positive for the quirk.

It wouldn’t even be amiss to have the antiquirks build up faster than they go down such that, for instance, if you make one cowardly choice you’ll have to do two or three Forceful things to balance it out, because some amount of pressure toward regression to the mean makes sense.

Obviously there are implementation issues: a whole set of extra qualities of the anti-quirks, a system that might be confusing to document, and I’m not sure if the engine permits &quotIf A<10, decrease A, else increase antiA&quot

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This is a fair design goal, but I don’t think it describes the system as-is very well. [/quote]

[color=#009900]Sure - it’s not a description of the system, or a design goal. It’s a response to his original expression of desire to have the one count as much as the other - I’m saying that’s not something we can ever cater to.[/color]