What Swinging Dove (and others too) is/are saying.
It should stay/be remade. And if it does go, then I do hope the journal gets a really nice rehaul that makes back tracking way easier.
Cus’ you know, the thought of going through 300+ and more journal pages, so one can read a tiny snippet of story in the hopes to remember what the bloomers had happend and they were doing before…is…mmm, uh-uh not cool.
I’m happy enough to see “reminiscing” be retired, because it never worked right for me. I had at least three different “reminiscing” links on my “Myself” page, and only one of them ever worked consistently. If FBG manages to make it easier to access old journal entries, that will probably be better all around (even though it will probably mean I lose some or most of my information about my main’s Ambition, since I began playing Fallen London when echoing to one’s Journal meant “broadcasting on Twitter” and I stopped doing so a short while after starting to play the game until the Journal acquired the semi-private form it has now.
I can only echo (no pun intended) what my exceptionally delicious friends have said.
I too would like the feature to stay, it was wonderful to have all the memories of the Ambition collected neatly in one place. The journal feels really disjointed and it’s hard to find what you are looking for, especially if have forgotten when you played it or what the journal entry was called. And I always regret when I forget to Echo something, especially as I only discovered that I could save the pages to the journal two-thirds into my playthrough and have thus lost everything before that.
It was such a relief to find that the Ambition had automatically been saved. I would really wish for a similar system that automatically recorded all your stories (or at least the major and Exceptional ones) under the ‘Stories’ quality in the inventory. It would be so much easier to find what you were looking for and not having to worry about remembering to record something while engrossed in the glorious stories themselves.
I’d pray to the Bazaar (or Storm, Stone, Salt, the Judgements etc.) that something along those lines be implemented.
Any chance you’d add filtering to journal since as for now it’s just an utter wall of text?
Actually the automatic reminiscing to all the stories would be preferable to "improving" the journal. I’m thinking that the journal can only be really improved by making it a "wiki" of sorts. Based on hyperlinks and indexes. Something like what TES: Morrowind had. And to do that with the insane amount of text this game has would be quite an organizational chore. But actually adding an automatic indexing to every important story in the game, that the player can access by Reminiscing, would be much easier.
Of course the link and index based journal would be much better, as this way you can easily find specific parts of the story, but I do imagine it would also be very hard to do that for everything
edited by Iskandryu on 8/18/2016
Please, PLEASE add a search bar to the Journal.
Are we now reminiscing about reminiscing about Ambitions?
Metareminisces–I love the idea!
edited by cathyr19355 on 8/23/2016
Journals are an unsearchable mess. I cannot fathom how you could believe that retiring the Reminiscing about Ambition in favour of the journal, without making serious upgrades to the journal system, is a good idea.
Having played 2 years, I have some 147 journal entries to wade through. I am pretty sure I haven’t recorded my ambition snippets amongst any of them, as others have mentioned, because of the now defunct feature. I know, having browsed other profiles, that my 147 journal entries are in the low end.
Do you have plans for making the journal better? You have not mentioned any such in your announcement, but I am sure that I am not the only one wondering.
[quote=Rainette]I cannot fathom how you could believe that retiring the Reminiscing about Ambition in favour of the journal, without making serious upgrades to the journal system, is a good idea.
(snip)
Do you have plans for making the journal better? You have not mentioned any such in your announcement, but I am sure that I am not the only one wondering.[/quote]
The announcement at the start of this thread does in fact say that this precipitates an effort to "improve the journal functionality" and that retiring Reminiscing is part of this "ongoing effort". It is inconvenient for now, agreed, but hopefully all that this means is that Journals will get an update and become more user-friendly in the near future.
I know this is old, but I just saw the thread (I don’t check this section often(.
I would love a more functional journal, but my concern is that I didn’t echo the vast majority of my ambition at all. At first, I didn’t understand how the journal worked, and then later I didn’t bother because it was automatically recorded to my Reminiscing about Ambitions section. I’d love a way to browse through all the ambition storyline, now that I’ve completed it, some of it quite a long time ago now.
Well… damn it all. I really need to check the forums more often. Please, please don’t remove the "Reminiscing" feature. If I had a say I would rather see the "Journal" thrown to the Hyenas. The journal is… okay, it can definitely be better. But Reminiscing was so clean! So simple! If I had the ability to I would make it so that every quality giving storylet would have a "Reminiscing" feature, at the very least the Exceptional Stories; doing that seems like it would solve the "problems" of Spoilers on mantelpieces and people that are dissatisfied that they cant review the content once the story is over. I’m yelling at a corpse, aren’t I? Oh well… Prost to better Journals I guess.
It is already removed, much to my chagrin. I have absolutely no clue what my ambition entailed and now way to find out, something about a singer, by the looks of the storylets I’ve unlocked, but I started the thing ages ago.
I found the reminisce feature useful. The journal is rather cluttered and would be much more functional with a search option.
I joined Fallen London after this feature was removed, but please put it back I have the memory of a goldfish.
wait, journals serve an actual function? granted i’ve only been here a week, but i honestly thought it was just for savings snippets of local color you enjoyed
The journals are really hard to use. I find it almost impossible to find information I put in there once it’s no longer in the first couple of pages. It’d be nice to be able to tag journal entries with labels for the events they’re from to make more cohesive stories to look back on and to find the information you need from something half finished you’re going back to.
edited by Alyndah on 7/30/2018
This thread is more than 6 months old but we never did get a proper replacement for Reminiscing About Ambitions. Journal is still all but useless to record information, so I’m supporting the necro post.
Several years later and still no replacement for reminiscing. I agree with several others here, the Journal is not at all helpful for keeping track of any particular story.
1734 days later and journals are still an unreadable mess, while there’s no replacement to the reminisce feature.
I know that I made several attempts to re-enter Fallen London over the last several years, and in every single instance I was put off by not being able to jog my memory of the big story beats of what I was doing. I suspect that there’s a lot of people like me, who left during the content drought, and want to come back, but don’t want to come back to a game where they have no idea what’s going on. This costs Failbetter money and it robs the community of enthusiastic players. We’re all worse off.
Worse, for those of us who played while "reminisce" was available, we would deliberately have left out echoes of important content, thinking we’d just be duplicating entries.
Hacky routes like using Wiki as fodder to google other people’s echoes are awful. Making alts takes months to catch up and discourages people who don’t want to start over.
I want to give Failbetter the benefit on the doubt here, but I can’t help but notice that the only option for returning players to catch up on ambitions now rings in at 7.30 GBP, or $11.11 USD.
Please at least let us search or sort our journals. Even if you have to change it so collated entries aren’t public, it would make the game so much more accessible and stop driving returning players away. And please, give us back reminiscing.