I created an alt specifically TO do SMEN, but then the content was frozen before I could join the hunt.
I am very excited for SMEN. When I first joined FL I’ve tried to start the story for a while before finally realizing it was suspended, and I was very sad.
But to be honest most people that joined after SMEN was cancelled have no idea what you really risk by playing it, myself included.
I know there’s a guide somewhere, but I don’t want to spoil the story itself since it’s too delicious.
So, would anyone consider listing some examples of what your character had to suffer during original SMEN story, and why it was so horrible?
i know that there are some choices that HALVE your stats and there was a shadowy check that if failed it would have taken from you a lot of precious things (and some fate locked too)
I’m hoping Ben Carlisle will one day achieve immortality (that’s certainly in line with his desires and his destiny) so I won’t be pursuing SMEN with him. My alt, Amalia, might, but I want her to succeed in pursuing the Vake, so we’ll have to see.
a lot of people is going to do it, i thought that less people would destroy his character but i also see some slave of the bazaar who will not do that, shame on you and remember ALL SHALL BE WELL AND ALL SHALL BE WELL AND ALL MANNER OF THINGS SHALL BE WELL
You sacrifice your Connections, permanently ruin your soul, spend days imprisoned and insane and dead, throw heaps of treasure down luck challenges without any material reward, spurn the Masters, grind and grind and grind, lose several levels in each stat, and watch your character become a mad pariah.
Oh, that’s all just the first stage, to find the Number. I was on a break when the real quest for the name was released. I hear that was much, much worse.
Why did I do it? Because I’ve never played anything like it. A story of your own loss and failure and idiocy, and no meta reward to make it feel like a game. It was wonderful. Don’t do it.
But if you are hungry for this type of experience, and the content makes its mythical return, don’t create an alt. Experience the loss. Suffer as you watch years of work crumble. That is seeking.
edited by TheThirdPolice on 1/31/2016
I’m not planning to Seek, but I’m very much looking forward to following the adventures of you mad fools who do.
Most people think of the self-sacrifice involved, but the really savage part of SMEN were the non-voluntary harmful large scale social actions. This whole post is going to be a big spoiler listing out just a few examples of sufferings past:
[spoiler]Example 1: First off do you like knife and candle? Because its now mandatory hurray, you have to get a waxwail to advance SMEN. When it was around, initially there was only the iron leagues and you had to get 77 prize tokens to buy waxwail. Oh? Grinding knife fights to kill and rob other players as they kill and rob you doesn’t sound so bad? At least its a fair competition? Yeah no. As a seeker you are now eligible for a social action where any other seeker can just straight up take all of your tokens for a single action and there is no defense possible other than to hide in menace states or at zee or in flute street. Oh wait, you hid in death? The boat man has now eaten all of your tokens. This was a time when people would go spend most of their days hiding in the mirror marches, only daring to poke out into real london for a few minutes each day, just enough time to flip through the opportunity deck once and hope you got the K&C cards so you could to stab one or two people before they noticed you had come out of hiding and took your entire token collection and insta-bought the wail before you could draw a new card and wrestle the tokens back. Are you an alt, intent on using the fact no-one knows who you are and you aren’t on anyone’s social action list to hide and protect your tokens? Surprise, Mr Eaten has just tweeted your name to everyone. I hope you like getting ambushed by total strangers 24/7. I remember one time I stepped away from the computer for 5 minutes, literally 5 minutes, in the dead of night (like 2AM CST) I was stabbed by 14 different people and nearly died from wounds which would have cost me all of my tokens and K&C gear back then. Fun haha.
Eventually the price of waxwail was lowered to 44 tokens, the moon league was added to provide non-menace state hiding, a living story was added to give free prize tokens, tokens and gear were made to persist even after you left the leagues, and an option was added to buy prize tokens with notability. So if seeking was still around for these modern days, it would be much less brutal, but I can still see one or two bad eggs stealing everyone’s tokens and fleeing and making themselves like 50 waxwails off the back of everyones hard work.
Example 2: Do you have more than 7 searing enigmas and any points in Reputation Abomination? Congrats, this makes you eligible for a social action where people can take your enigmas and give you enough menaces in all stats that if you aren’t at 0 when they hit you, you are going to all four menace states at once. Also the social action eats like 5 levels of stats for both players. Oh yeah, by the way you need 77 searing enigmas to advance smen. But wait there’s more! Having the 77 enigmas only unlocks the opportunity to guess at a puzzle where you need an exact and specific number of proscribed materials to advance. Did you guess wrong? Well, no one ever tried it before it locked, but the common assumption was that you would lose all of your enigmas and proscribed materials and have to guess again. What was the number of proscribed materials you needed? Vague clues were spread around, but there was never anything concrete. I keep my guess hidden as a number in my forums signature, lest I ever forget.
Example 3: The fingerkings once put a hit out on seekers with reputation abomination. Literally. There was a card in the Royal Beth where it was like "hey kid? want to get out of here faster? Give your menace to these jokers" and then it linked to a forums list which had all the Rep Abomination seekers in it. If you were on that list, any player in a menace state was -encouraged- by the game itself, to pass their menace along to you so they could get out of jail sooner. Oh, and you gained menace across all categories, amplified by several times more than what the player in the menace stat had lost. People would just wreck you with menace, and you had to just take it because there was no defense, save not having any reputation abomination (which you get from playing the can’t discard seeker menace cards). You don’t get any benefit from this, it just hurts.
Example 4: The bugs! Oh sweet child, the bugs! Seeking must have been held together with shoestrings and bubblegum, the bugs were so bad. It was a literal minefield of getting hurt above and beyond what was necessary if you didn’t know about them in advance. I’ll give three examples here. 1. At one point in seeking, you needed a lot of starveling cats, but if you uh, chose poorly, it was possible that the game would set the number of cats you own to -2. SET. So you would lose accumulated cats -and- have to grind out two more just to get back to having 0 cats and so you could try the content again. 2. At one point in seeking, you need to perform 7 betrayals. Usually, you betray 7 friends using social actions and possibly alts to advance here, BUT it was possible to use certain high echo cost companions for betrayals instead. Notably the 400 echo cost midnight matriarch could be betrayed. So if you wanted to avoid harming other actual players, or stay off of their social action lists (so you wouldnt risk getting hit by them later) you might go buy all 7 midnight matriarchs at once. Only to find that the betrayal SETS matriarchs to 0 instead of reducing them by 1. OUCH. OOOOUCH. Congrats, you just lost 2400 echos because you didn’t know you should have bought the cats one at a time instead of all at once. 3. Winking isle. Just all of that. I point furiously at it, go read my mega-post on it in the SMEN afterparty thread. There are no words.
As a veteran seeker, I went above and beyond the call of duty in seeking out these bugs, to brave the uncharted waters of being among the first to try out particular pieces of seeking content, and to find the "safe paths" through it. I would gently guide newbies away from such landmines as the matriarch glitch, and protect them from harm beyond what they choose to do and what was necessary. I was a navigator of these rough and dark waters, and my only reward for this was to become super visible and a prime target for menacing social actions ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. ILU seeker friends, y’all are literally the best and the worst at the same time </3[/spoiler]
I could go on for days about other sufferings you might expect from smen, but the four examples above were definitely some of its rougher edges. I didn’t even touch on stats halving, high level or rare item and echo sinks, the Wild Hunt, or the core of the storyline mechanics and losses. But hopefully these tiny examples help to dip your toes a little in what is to be expected if you participate in SMEN. It can be, uh, quite savage indeed XD
EDIT: Hopefully this is okay to post since SMEN is retired, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it gets taken down. Talking about SMEN was a forums taboo and the moderators would delete posts containing spoilers on a regular basis. I’m hoping that these don’t count as spoilers since there’s no guarentee the content will come back the same as it was before.
edited by NiteBrite on 1/31/2016
So far, half the respondents say they will do all of SMEN, and 80% intend to at least dabble (good luck with that). Conclusion: the Forum is filled with maniacs.
– Mal
I might attempt this with my main, when the time comes. I’ve managed to stay away from major spoilers thus far.
Oh, yeah. Any warning post about potential losses from SMEN should also include this dreadful possibility if one isn’t careful.
Also, I assume you mean "Grand Hunt", and not "Wild Hunt", unless this is a Fallen London / Witcher crossover, in which case I’m very interested… :-)
NiteBrite, thank you for that post. Sounds like a masochist’s wet dream! I guess I’ll never understand why anyone would punish themselves like this…
I mean, it’s one thing to give it a try on a throw-away alt you don’t really care for, and walk away when it gets too punishing. It’s another thing completely to play this with a character you’ve spent lots of time and maybe Fate on to make progress in the game!
Though I’m pretty sure that they can’t do most of those things you described with official, supported content. Too risky. Meaning, if SMEN ever comes back, it’ll have to be pretty toothless compared to what it was. Still hardcore-mode compared to the rest of the game, sure, but not something begging for a lawsuit.
edited by phryne on 1/31/2016
Most people think of the self-sacrifice involved, but the really savage part of SMEN were the non-voluntary harmful large scale social actions. This whole post is going to be a big spoiler listing out just a few examples of sufferings past:
[spoiler]Example 1: First off do you like knife and candle? Because its now mandatory hurray, you have to get a waxwail to advance SMEN. When it was around, initially there was only the iron leagues and you had to get 77 prize tokens to buy waxwail. Oh? Grinding knife fights to kill and rob other players as they kill and rob you doesn’t sound so bad? At least its a fair competition? Yeah no. As a seeker you are now eligible for a social action where any other seeker can just straight up take all of your tokens for a single action and there is no defense possible other than to hide in menace states or at zee or in flute street. Oh wait, you hid in death? The boat man has now eaten all of your tokens. This was a time when people would go spend most of their days hiding in the mirror marches, only daring to poke out into real london for a few minutes each day, just enough time to flip through the opportunity deck once and hope you got the K&C cards so you could to stab one or two people before they noticed you had come out of hiding and took your entire token collection and insta-bought the wail before you could draw a new card and wrestle the tokens back. Are you an alt, intent on using the fact no-one knows who you are and you aren’t on anyone’s social action list to hide and protect your tokens? Surprise, Mr Eaten has just tweeted your name to everyone. I hope you like getting ambushed by total strangers 24/7. I remember one time I stepped away from the computer for 5 minutes, literally 5 minutes, in the dead of night (like 2AM CST) I was stabbed by 14 different people and nearly died from wounds which would have cost me all of my tokens and K&C gear back then. Fun haha.
Eventually the price of waxwail was lowered to 44 tokens, the moon league was added to provide non-menace state hiding, a living story was added to give free prize tokens, tokens and gear were made to persist even after you left the leagues, and an option was added to buy prize tokens with notability. So if seeking was still around for these modern days, it would be much less brutal, but I can still see one or two bad eggs stealing everyone’s tokens and fleeing and making themselves like 50 waxwails off the back of everyones hard work.
Example 2: Do you have more than 7 searing enigmas and any points in Reputation Abomination? Congrats, this makes you eligible for a social action where people can take your enigmas and give you enough menaces in all stats that if you aren’t at 0 when they hit you, you are going to all four menace states at once. Also the social action eats like 5 levels of stats for both players. Oh yeah, by the way you need 77 searing enigmas to advance smen. But wait there’s more! Having the 77 enigmas only unlocks the opportunity to guess at a puzzle where you need an exact and specific number of proscribed materials to advance. Did you guess wrong? Well, no one ever tried it before it locked, but the common assumption was that you would lose all of your enigmas and proscribed materials and have to guess again. What was the number of proscribed materials you needed? Vague clues were spread around, but there was never anything concrete. I keep my guess hidden as a number in my forums signature, lest I ever forget.
Example 3: The fingerkings once put a hit out on seekers with reputation abomination. Literally. There was a card in the Royal Beth where it was like "hey kid? want to get out of here faster? Give your menace to these jokers" and then it linked to a forums list which had all the Rep Abomination seekers in it. If you were on that list, any player in a menace state was -encouraged- by the game itself, to pass their menace along to you so they could get out of jail sooner. Oh, and you gained menace across all categories, amplified by several times more than what the player in the menace stat had lost. People would just wreck you with menace, and you had to just take it because there was no defense, save not having any reputation abomination (which you get from playing the can’t discard seeker menace cards). You don’t get any benefit from this, it just hurts.
Example 4: The bugs! Oh sweet child, the bugs! Seeking must have been held together with shoestrings and bubblegum, the bugs were so bad. It was a literal minefield of getting hurt above and beyond what was necessary if you didn’t know about them in advance. I’ll give three examples here. 1. At one point in seeking, you needed a lot of starveling cats, but if you uh, chose poorly, it was possible that the game would set the number of cats you own to -2. SET. So you would lose accumulated cats -and- have to grind out two more just to get back to having 0 cats and so you could try the content again. 2. At one point in seeking, you need to perform 7 betrayals. Usually, you betray 7 friends using social actions and possibly alts to advance here, BUT it was possible to use certain high echo cost companions for betrayals instead. Notably the 400 echo cost midnight matriarch could be betrayed. So if you wanted to avoid harming other actual players, or stay off of their social action lists (so you wouldnt risk getting hit by them later) you might go buy all 7 midnight matriarchs at once. Only to find that the betrayal SETS matriarchs to 0 instead of reducing them by 1. OUCH. OOOOUCH. Congrats, you just lost 2400 echos because you didn’t know you should have bought the cats one at a time instead of all at once. 3. Winking isle. Just all of that. I point furiously at it, go read my mega-post on it in the SMEN afterparty thread. There are no words.
As a veteran seeker, I went above and beyond the call of duty in seeking out these bugs, to brave the uncharted waters of being among the first to try out particular pieces of seeking content, and to find the "safe paths" through it. I would gently guide newbies away from such landmines as the matriarch glitch, and protect them from harm beyond what they choose to do and what was necessary. I was a navigator of these rough and dark waters, and my only reward for this was to become super visible and a prime target for menacing social actions ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. ILU seeker friends, y’all are literally the best and the worst at the same time </3[/spoiler]
I could go on for days about other sufferings you might expect from smen, but the four examples above were definitely some of its rougher edges. I didn’t even touch on stats halving, high level or rare item and echo sinks, the Wild Hunt, or the core of the storyline mechanics and losses. But hopefully these tiny examples help to dip your toes a little in what is to be expected if you participate in SMEN. It can be, uh, quite savage indeed XD
EDIT: Hopefully this is okay to post since SMEN is retired, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it gets taken down. Talking about SMEN was a forums taboo and the moderators would delete posts containing spoilers on a regular basis. I’m hoping that these don’t count as spoilers since there’s no guarentee the content will come back the same as it was before.
edited by NiteBrite on 1/31/2016[/quote]
actually that is what make it funny, is it?
@Phryne: a watered-down SMEN would be no SMEN at all, and there has already been a lawsuit (quickly withdrawn). But when/if SMEN becomes official content, the disclaimers will have to be VERY strong. All will NOT be well, and a player should understand this before he goes in. There is no in-game upside to the content.
– Mal
Ooooookay. I think saying I had no idea doesn’t suffice to describe it.
I’m not going to run an Alt, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do that to myself. So I think I’ll be cheering you (fearing for you?) all on the sidelines.
[quote=phryne]NiteBrite, thank you for that post. Sounds like a masochist’s wet dream! I guess I’ll never understand why anyone would punish themselves like this…
I mean, it’s one thing to give it a try on a throw-away alt you don’t really care for, and walk away when it gets too punishing. It’s another thing completely to play this with a character you’ve spent lots of time and maybe Fate on to make progress in the game!
Though I’m pretty sure that they can’t do most of those things you described with official, supported content. Too risky. Meaning, if SMEN ever comes back, it’ll have to be pretty toothless compared to what it was. Still hardcore-mode compared to the rest of the game, sure, but not something begging for a lawsuit.
edited by phryne on 1/31/2016[/quote]
[spoiler]For me, it was… I loved community. I started out my social career by accidentally becoming one of the first people to get a shroud of little midnights back when there were only 7 of those in the entire game. Only 7. In the entire game. And Alexis publishes the list of people who have them and says (paraphrased) ‘hey everyone check out the new theft mechanics by stabbing these jokers’. I learned real fast what it means to find allies through common struggle and hardship as I proceeded to go from having 2-3 friends to having hundreds of ‘stab friends’ overnight without warning. I wasn’t a seeker back then, but because it was mandatory for seeking, a lot of my new friends were seekers.
It was an odd thing, having seeker friends but not being one. Struggling with being a high profile target, but not falling into the category of ‘successful seeker who angered many other seekers’. I would talk with my new friends and hear of their hardships. Time and time again I saw new friends banging their heads against the same problems. Too often the culture of silence surrounding SMEN caused suffering to be tainted with tones of abuse and mistrust. The narration was all ‘there can be only one’ and ‘betray them all’. And I thought to myself, "only one? we’re so disadvantaged fighting it out like this there’s no way there can be -even- one at this rate. We’re all in this together. Why sling abuses and suffer when we can band together and form a union of trust and compassion. Consensual seeking and community was my vision.
You know why hallowmas was so successful this year? It’s because it is a microcosm of seeking, effectively social seeking, and I have spent literal years perfecting ways to bring order to the madness. You can ally or betray and you need to do it on a massive scale, but betrayal is -always- more profitable personally than allying. So why ally? I really hope people learned about the power of trust, communications, and consent this year, even if only a little. Harm your friends, but in a good way. And yes, there will always be those who harm others without consent, we saw how that was reacted to in the hallowmas threads too. But imagine the sting of that betrayal turned up to 11 and involving items worth 1000s of echos, menaces galore, and stats loss instead of just a few cp of making waves. Just imagine how vastly different last hallowmas would have been if everyone was too frightened to share their names because betrayal was practically a guarantee. You would watch as the few brave souls (or fools) out there stick their neck out and get the chop so that a handful of people can lick up the tiny amount of scraps available from one or two betrayals. It would have been completely different from this year’s triumph no?
I sought mr eaten with my main because K&C had made me a seeker before I ever even knew about the name. In my unique position of having hundreds of contacts (now thousands), I was able to gather information and connect players in a way that would have been impossible before. We could organize. We could take care of one another. I saw my friends hurting friends and knew I couldn’t stop it. But, if I could make things a little less terrible for them through my own sacrifice, I had to at least try. I very much wanted to bring order to the chaos, to protect my friends, and to dive head first into troubled waters so I could find the "safe" way through for them. I dunno, in a storyline about personal obsession, betrayal, and mistrust I strove to prevent harm and build trust. Where the game said there could only be one, I made our numbers grow and helped to coordinate and spread the harm out so it never concentrated too much on any one individual. They used to say if Feld is a king, NiteBrite is their god. High flattery, but to be honest, everything I did was contrary to the spirit of harm and suffering. I was a seeker who didn’t betray your trust. Basically I was terrible at seeking, and didn’t follow the spirit of the narration at all haha. Like not even a little. The culture of silence must be torn down! I will always speak about seeking, and I will always protect you and guide you seeker friends in all of your ways (to the best of my ability).
Why seek on a main? To care for others, unconditionally, and to create a community of trust and love in the midst of shared hardship no matter what the personal cost. That’s my answer at least.[/spoiler]
edited by NiteBrite on 1/31/2016
Is this thread random or did i miss any recent hint of its return?
What is the purpose of hoarding massive quantities of things, numbers, resources? To be able to use them up, or throw them away? Upon death… or without postponement?
Is this thread random or did i miss any recent hint of its return?[/quote]
i’m afraid that this is just a random post