UPDATED: Fallen London comes to iOS in 2015

[nitebrite]

@an_ocelot

[quote=NiteBrite][ . . . ] But what about time the healer as another example? Could someone go offline to avoid it just long enough to grind out that last level of notability? To keep their noman alive that much longer? To prevent Christmas from ending so that they can stay in penestock’s wicket a few more days and create a noman even after the wicket is closed for everyone else?

These are fascinating questions, but I think TTH is an easy one to manage: set it to the device clock when the player first logs in, and have it auto-fire within the app if the player doesn’t go back online in the meantime.[/quote]

Ah but that assumes time the healer never changes. There’s quite a bit of seasonal variation in the actions it performs however. Time doesn’t normally melt strange catches, but after the fruits of the zee festival it does. Same with pails of lacre, masquing, spirit of hallowmas, and other such seasonal currencies. Would there need to be a maximum amount of time you could be offline before your offline session &quotexpires&quot? I suppose these currency melts could be made into living stories that you enroll in when you first get a currency item, but that would make it a relative melt date instead of a fixed date that is the same for everyone. I don’t believe story nexus currently has the ability to say &quoton January 1st, melt all buckets&quot as in a calendar of events programmed into it. A lot of this stuff is set manually by the devs when specific dates roll around. It would also cause troubles with manual broadcasts like when they gave out river-in-a-box a few years back, or how prize tokens were distributed in the early days of K&C, or even how marsh-mired dreams were given out in the currently retired Mr Eaten content. It’s interesting to think about all the little things that could break, and what it means to the future of live changes and maintenance of the game.

Bonus, FBG has a history of soft launching experimental content to small groups of players so that it gets tested live before being released to the masses. Think how K&C was invite only for a while, but there are other examples. Sometimes this stuff is massively broken (remember when robbing a drunk gave out free tasseled sword canes, or that 15 minute period of time where they first introduced making waves to item conversion and every step of the fidgeting writer gave out like ~15 levels~ of making waves)? It’d be interesting if you could grab an experimental soft launch of content like that, take it offline, and just reap the benefits of a break long after it was patched online. Little details and things like that are going to be very interesting to watch.
edited by NiteBrite on 6/15/2015

[snowskeeper]

But to get Strange Catches/Pails of Lacre/etc., you’d need to go online in order to get the new content, wouldn’t you? Couldn’t FBG set the game to update Time: The Healer’s effects during that period of time?

[nitebrite]

The longest living story timer possible at present is 4 weeks. Pails are presently available for like all of December and January which is about 8 weeks. They could do what you said, but it’d mean cutting the period where the winter feast currency is available in half. So you would have to limit pails to either December or January or halfway through each. But yeah it could be done. It’d just make the Noman grind like, exponentially harder.

[snowskeeper]

@NiteBrite

The longest living story timer possible at present is 4 weeks. Pails are presently available for like all of December and January which is about 8 weeks. They could do what you said, but it’d mean cutting the period where the winter feast currency is available in half. So you would have to limit pails to either December or January or halfway through each. But yeah it could be done. It’d just make the Noman grind like, exponentially harder.

Would it be particularly difficult to set up a version of TTH which would act as a countdown? I’m only literate in Java, computer sciences-wise, and even then only barely, but Java has a command that increments a hidden variable by one every time a loop repeats. Could they say, &quotdo thisOne until you reach this during this event, then do thisTwo&quot, thisOne being the ordinary TTH and thisTwo being the version that removes Pails of Lacre?

EDIT: (Or, of course, they could just make events unavailable to anyone who isn’t playing online, but I refuse to accept anything but the most convoluted solution possible.)
edited by Snowskeeper on 7/12/2015