Hey folks. This may sound somewhat crass, but I’m gonna come out and say it:
Sunless Sea lets you gain things from linking your Captain to your FL character. It makes sense, many captains have wealthy sponsors. Are there any discussions at Failbetter of doing the reverse? Allowing specific resources and echoes to transfer back to the FL character? That would be cool, especially if it piggybacked on the Time the Healer mechanic.
[quote=friendshipranger]Hey folks. This may sound somewhat crass, but I’m gonna come out and say it:
Sunless Sea lets you gain things from linking your Captain to your FL character. It makes sense, many captains have wealthy sponsors. Are there any discussions at Failbetter of doing the reverse? Allowing specific resources and echoes to transfer back to the FL character? That would be cool, especially if it piggybacked on the Time the Healer mechanic.[/quote]
I can’t find the exact post, but I’m fairly certain they’ve said it’s only going to be one way FL → SS, and even then not much as they don’t want people to feel they’re missing out by not playing FL.
It’s not only they don’t want people missing out by not playing Fallen London. It would be taking away from their steady source of income, Fallen London, to allow you to transfer wealth from a single player game to a FTP browser game
How so? FL revenue works by selling Fate/Nex, which can’t be bought for Echoes. Even if I was able to transfer a million echoes from SS to FL, it wouldn’t help me access the Fate-locked content.
That said, I can see it causing game-balance problems for FL.
Fallen London is a F2P game, and while there is content locked away behind a pay-barrier, you can complete all the major storylines without paying a cent. You could theoretically accelerate your game by buying refreshes with Nex, but it’d be extremely expensive to do so.
Sunless Sea costs $20, which is 100 nex; as cool as allowing a Sunless Sea captain to pay their investor back would be, giving SS players a limitless source of wealth for their FL characters would not be fair.
[quote=Snowskeeper]Fallen London is a F2P game, and while there is content locked away behind a pay-barrier, you can complete all the major storylines without paying a cent. You could theoretically accelerate your game by buying refreshes with Nex, but it’d be extremely expensive to do so.
Sunless Sea costs $20, which is 100 nex; as cool as allowing a Sunless Sea captain to pay their investor back would be, giving SS players a limitless source of wealth for their FL characters would not be fair.[/quote]
That’s certainly a consideration. But the comment was about it cutting into FL revenue, and I just don’t see how that would happen. Like you say, spending Nex to accelerate the free content is prohibitively expensive, so I’d assume 99% of Nex expenditure in FL is on Fate-locked content; allowing SS players to remit Echoes to their FL characters doesn’t give them a free way of accessing the locked content.
If anything, letting them get through the non-locked content faster might give them a little more incentive to spend Nex on the locked stuff.
I agree that letting players send any significant amount of money between games would be a bad thing, I just don’t think FL revenue is the reason why it’s bad.
The longer stories in FL can be drawn out, the more times you fail at tasks, the more likely you are to purchase nex for some points or some opportunity card refills. If Echoes (coming from a single player game where the amount of money earned is potentially limitless) could be transferred from Sunless Sea to FL and you equipped your FL character with all the best stuff, you’d be less likely to fail challenges. If they were cool with echoes not earned inside FL, they’d allow you to use NEX to purchase echoes. And, I mean, it could work. I just see it being very difficult to balance… near impossible, probably
But I could be dead wrong. It’s just the way I see it
I use nex on occasion to get opportunity cards and AP, for one, cause I’m impatient, and two, I really enjoy Failbetter’s work and want them to be able to continue doing so
edited by GerbilSchooler on 9/20/2014
I think one of the bigger issues is that the games run on very different economies and very different scales?
For instance: in Fallen London, even as a Person of Some Importance, prices in on the scale of "a couple hundred echoes" seem pretty substantial - such purchases would involve liquidating a noticeable fraction of my accrued stuff, and aren’t something I can do repeatedly.
In Sunless Sea, a couple hundred echoes represents a reasonably successful 10-15 minute voyage! Significant purchases are in the thousands or tens of thousands. Which is perfectly fine: as a game that a) runs in real time and b) can permakill you, things simply have to happen faster in order for it to be any fun. (In FL, it’s actually kind of cool for a trip to Mutton Island to take the better part of an afternoon! It makes it feel like a substantial trip. But holy crap, do I not have the hours in the day to sit down and do that in real time.)
And I think that in general, the idea of grinding [x] in one game to send to the other feels unpalatable to me. (As opposed to a model where actions in one game just create fun little cameos in the other, like a retired Zee-Captain sharing stories in Caligula’s or harried London scholar fleeing an island with the Fleet of Truth hot on their tail.)