[quote=Harlocke]I think the problem is that very little attention has been given to end game grinding. After a while the game becomes just waiting for exceptional stories, grinding echoes towards cider, and roleplaying to break up the monotony in between. For the most part I think that’s OK, we can’t expect the dense story of the early game to continue forever. But there could be a little more care to make grinding interesting.
Perhaps storylets could unlock at 50k echoes, 100k echoes, 150k echoes, to mark your progress towards buying cider and encourage you to continue. … There could be slow building long term stories like seeking, but that do not destroy your character. Imagine a mechanic like marsh-mired, that encourages you to come back once a week to progress a story, that provides a slow dribble of lore and intrigue that lasts for years, albeit in a brief once a week morsel. It’s okay for the end game grind to be a grind where nothing much happens, but there’s s happy middle ground between the rich densely packed story of early game and "go buy cider! See you in two years!"[/quote]
I don’t know how much I agree with this. I despise grinding as much as anyone, I think (being an old MUD/Everquest/World of Warcraft player will do that), but the "end game grinding" here is pretty much solely for self-imposed challenges. Mine always had a very clear purpose: Become a Shattering Force; get all the four-card lodgings in time to upgrade them with holiday events; go NORTH. Extra snippets, especially one-offs, tossed in among them would suffer the same issue as rare successes during a grind: players miss them and never even realize it. Clicking through the same loop to burn your candles knowing you have another 1000 or whatever actions to go doesn’t lend itself to making sure you aren’t arbitrarily clicking through new and unexpected lore tidbits.
The mechanic that would most appeal to me – which hardly seems reasonable to ask for, if I’m being honest – is to effectively "rebirth" your character. Wipe the slate clean, keep 1/4 of each of your skill values and unique items (such as from EF content), maybe a fraction of your cash total, and begin again from New Newgate. I’d consider it something like the "scion" option from Sunless Sea. But, again, the mechanics for this on the back-end, plus the unexpected issues that would arise, are unknown and unlikely to make it really "worth" the effort when there are so many other things vying for attention.
(Among which are, I assume: Bugs in Sunless Sea from new content, bugs in Zubmariner from release, dealing with server/latency issues, testing/releasing forthcoming EF content, figuring out whether new Hallowmas content is actually going to burn everything down in a of Correspondence-riddled firestorm, resolving issues in the iOS/Android apps, resolving issues in the browser experience induced by the existence of the iOS/Android apps, trying to find those notes written on napkins from That Night in That One Pub when everybody decided how the Ambitions were going to eventually wrap up, whether "more advanced professions" were going to be implemented at any point and how they would work, etc.)
I think this already exists in the forums. Letters exist in-game, too, but the FL interface is not designed for a full-blown multiplayer experience. Roleplaying and whatnot beyond what is already in-game is better served through an external system for the sake of simplicity AND character/player freedom. Even then, what my character does in RP – and what she even possesses – is different from what is "in-game". She frequently possesses a number of items in FL that I think would not actually be in-hand, that are solely to advance certain storylines. This is, I presume, fairly standard for a lot of players.
Tangentially-related shameless begging: I’ll be honest, the thing I most want is more Port Carnelian. I want to live there. I want to start a revolution there, become one of the tigers, and fight a war against snakes behind mirrors. I don’t anticipate anything like that ever being an option – I don’t consider FL to be the sort of game experience where "player housing" and "hometown" options would ever be more than what they are – but I’d add it to the wishlist given a chance. In the meantime, I’ll keep doing all that in out-of-game RP.