Got my allies fixed, yay. Still can’t continue Harvestmen, but it’s nice to have an ally that raises Doc.
Failure result “Bad Trip” of the “Expand Your Mind” branch:
-[down your throat and into stomach] Shouldn’t there be a “your” there?
-[you realize of a sudden] Missing the “all”.
Rare success “It’s a Blood Pressure Machine” on the Doc grind card gives you a Cityslicker boost instead of an additional Doc boost like rare successes normally do. It also only gives one special item instead of two.
Failure result “Poisonous Ground” on the Cityslicker grind card: [everyone store closes shortly] Shouldn’t that be “everyone’s” or something?
Rare success “Ornithology” on the Doc grind card: Description says there are two revolver bullets, but you only get one.
Ah, nevermind, my Doc was just low. I’ve made it to the next step now.
By the way, is the Hallowed Ground card “Hook and Crook” supposed to be a Must card following immediately after the previous step?
Edit:
-“To Market, To Market” card: failure result for “Practical Logistics”: [horses are far to expensive]
-“Look for Signs of His Passing” branch of “The Rat Catcher of Amarillo” card: than/then mixup
…The Hallowed Ground card “To Market, To Market” disappeared once I hit Grocery Shopping 3. Is that supposed to happen?
Also, it still seems like we can’t purchase currency with Reputation. edited by Little The on 1/9/2013
[ul][li]Moving to and from The Guest Room at Burrow and Briar no longer costs an action.
[/li][li]Players can now change their avatar at The Guest Room at Burrow and Briar! Additional avatars can be unlocked depending on your story choices. (For example: both Paladin and Man in Black 3+ grant access to new avatars.)
[/li][li]Closed beta testers can now exchange Reputation for Dollars and Revolver Bullets at the Pony Express! See the Petty Cash card for details and rates.[/li][/ul]
-Rare success result “An Elephant’s Gambit” of the “Chess in the Park” option on the Doc grind card: [lets out a hiss when your Knights converged] Also, I’m pretty sure chess pieces aren’t supposed to be capitalized…? Not certain on that, though, maybe they follow a special rule.
-Rare success result “Discretion” of the “Criminal Transport” branch on the Gunslinger grind card: When “mother” is used in place of a name, it should be capitalized.
Also, pretty minor, but if your White Noise gets above 7, lowering it will yield the “all is become White Noise” message instead of the normal “White Noise is dropping” message. Probably an artifact of the way quality messages are displayed…? (Why is White Noise the only one that has a special message when it hits its threshold, by the way?)
Hm. I find it somewhat strange that the transition cards moving you to menace areas cost 1 action. Intentional, or will it be changed to free later?
[quote=Little The]Also, pretty minor, but if your White Noise gets above 7, lowering it will yield the “all is become White Noise” message instead of the normal “White Noise is dropping” message. Probably an artifact of the way quality messages are displayed…? (Why is White Noise the only one that has a special message when it hits its threshold, by the way?)
Hm. I find it somewhat strange that the transition cards moving you to menace areas cost 1 action. Intentional, or will it be changed to free later?[/quote]
Good catch on White Noise; will fix tomorrow.
No real reason for travel to cost Actions. We’ll probably remove it. Although the long term plan is to switch to a map…
Speaking of menace areas, I do think that I’m hitting them a bit too often. At first I thought it was okay, since the only way to raise menaces normally is by failing challenges, which gets you CP anyway to counteract the later decrease. But then there’s also stuff like the antagonist cards that rocket your menaces up without any consolation. I seem to be spending most of my time bouncing between menace areas now; just recently, I just escaped Rio Seco only to be thrown into the clinic on my first gunslinger card draw. And the same is probably going to happen once I get out of the clinic, singe my HHotL is at 4. With the stat penalties incurred while in menace areas, I sometimes feel like Sisyphus, my stats bouncing back and forth constantly. Obviously I can still make progress, but it’s very slow and seems to be making this content block take much longer than I remember Day 1 taking. Maybe bump all the thresholds up to 7 like White Noise, to at least make visits less frequent? Perhaps make the Thin Man antagonist card not quite so damaging? (2 ticks instead of 3, maybe?)
Oh, also, as I’ve now hit escape velocity on the Cityslicker card, so to speak (can’t play any options except discard), I think maybe something should be done with the grind cards once you hit the current stat cap – either give a FL-esque “you’ve hit the stat cap!” message on every possible branch to prevent players from going too high, remove the limit on the final branch, or possibly just remove the card’s availability once the cap is reached? (Although that could go bad places if the stat is raised outside of the card, hm.)
[quote=Little The]Speaking of menace areas, I do think that I’m hitting them a bit too often. At first I thought it was okay, since the only way to raise menaces normally is by failing challenges, which gets you CP anyway to counteract the later decrease. But then there’s also stuff like the antagonist cards that rocket your menaces up without any consolation. I seem to be spending most of my time bouncing between menace areas now; just recently, I just escaped Rio Seco only to be thrown into the clinic on my first gunslinger card draw. And the same is probably going to happen once I get out of the clinic, singe my HHotL is at 4. With the stat penalties incurred while in menace areas, I sometimes feel like Sisyphus, my stats bouncing back and forth constantly. Obviously I can still make progress, but it’s very slow and seems to be making this content block take much longer than I remember Day 1 taking. Maybe bump all the thresholds up to 7 like White Noise, to at least make visits less frequent? Perhaps make the Thin Man antagonist card not quite so damaging? (2 ticks instead of 3, maybe?)
Oh, also, as I’ve now hit escape velocity on the Cityslicker card, so to speak (can’t play any options except discard), I think maybe something should be done with the grind cards once you hit the current stat cap – either give a FL-esque “you’ve hit the stat cap!” message on every possible branch to prevent players from going too high, remove the limit on the final branch, or possibly just remove the card’s availability once the cap is reached? (Although that could go bad places if the stat is raised outside of the card, hm.)[/quote]
A little out ahead of us today. :)
A tweak will be going in today making the following changes:
[ul][li]All Menace states now require Menace 7 to access
[/li][li]Antagonists now reduce your Styles (by 3 points – equivalent to one success on a Modest difficulty challenge) instead of increasing your Menaces
[/li][li]The final branch on grind cards can now be repeated even if you exceed its Style cap, although they won’t raise your Style beyond that cap. (They can, however, still trigger rare successes.)[/li][/ul]
@Little The - Good sir, I wish I got a nickel for all our typos. From you alone, I’d be swimming in cash like Scrooge McDuck. Typos (the ones that are not on-purpose dalliances with the English language) have been addressed. Much appreciated!
I’ve got one more – success result “Community Action” of the branch “Cold Desert Nights” on the Humanitarian Aid card: The last sentence of the second paragraph is missing a period.
The grocery shopping card for Hallowed Ground is still mysteriously absent, but I’ve reached the conclusion for Harvestmen, so I guess I’m qualified to answer the feedback questions:
Haven’t finished Hallowed Ground yet, but Harvestmen…hm. Seems to end before anything really major happens, though promise of headway in the investigation is nice. It’s also good to snag another ally, especially one that grants direct and very useful help. The fact that the Harvestmen are now an active antagonist against me also heightens the tension and drama of the situation; really looks like things are heating up. I hope I’ll see some major breakthroughs later on in day 2.
(I guess the jobs part doesn’t really apply anymore) I think it’s interesting. Antagonists lend a sense of danger to the opportunity deck, but they’re infrequent enough that allies and grind cards usually balance them out (especially with the most recent tweak, thank you very much for that). I do think that giving story antagonists a tangible, gameplay effect is a good idea – gameplay/story integration and all that, really makes the player invested in trying to deal with them and everything. Interaction between allies and antagonists (Billy Brownson and the dog whistle) is also pretty cool. I am particularly interested in what’s up with the Distant Watcher…he’s (she’s?) the only one that can’t be circumvented, and gives the most damaging and widespread stat penalties to boot. I wonder if they’re going to turn out to be the main villain…?
What’s up with allies like the Excitable Engineer, though? Do they not get cards yet?
I believe I’ve said I already heartily approve of it. :-) Hm…can’t really think of suggestions, though. I think the current list seems to cover virtually every interesting plot thread I can think of.
They seem like pretty standard stuff. I thought they looked pretty pricey when I first say them, but I managed to buy one on rare success money alone, so I guess they’re reasonable. I guess it might be nice to have explicit labeling of what equipment slot they fill. I also notice there are some different items that have the same effects – is there any point in buying those, by the way? One thing I’m a bit confused with are the CP boosters. They only seem to work on grind cards, and even then only on successes, which is somewhat disappointing since I expected the boost to be on something like every Doc boost ever, though I know that’s unfeasible.
Reputation items seem decently priced. It’s really easy to accumulate a lot of the stuff – I have a little over 200 right now, and earlier spent 100 to buy one of the CP boosters. I think the menace reduces might be a bit pricey though? 25 Reputation is 25 successes, but 5 ticks of menaces are only 5 failures – a fifth of that. Seems a bit disproportionate, unless you’re getting far more successes than failures.
Hm…menace area exploration, maybe? I really like what you did with Rio Seco on first arrival. Would it be possible to have a sort of “introduction” miniplot for the other two as well?
[quote]6.) Anything you’re enjoying particularly? We love positive feedback, too![/quote]
Hm…the grind cards, maybe? They’ve eaten the majority of my actions. I found them to contain very interesting little tidbits about the world. They seem to be exceptionally well-polished. I was particularly interested in the Doc failures, for the supernatural weirdness – amazing how the failure results can at times be more interesting than the success ones.
To be honest, I don’t really go for that sort of stuff – I have little enough money as it is, so I feel the only thing worth paying for are things I literally cannot get any other way, like premium content. Regardless, I would highly recommend against that last point; that can go pretty bad places.
Best: New gameplay mechanics (antagonists, menaces). Least: Antagonists, menaces. :p Though you seem to have cleared up my gripes with the latter two. Honestly, though, it did feel a tad bit on the grindy side, though again, that could be a result of the tug-of-war with my stats.
Pacing is a little slow at times, but not significantly slower than Day 1, I think. It’s okay. Menace areas aren’t terribly difficult to get out of, so they don’t distract from the main story for very long.
Hm…have to admit I’m more a fan of the latter. The introduction of currencies and Reputation encourages grinding anyway, so there’s no harm in leaving the highest echelons of the grind cards for the grinders, I think. Although perhaps it would be different if played archively rather than serially? Hm.
One note: It seems to me like there’s not a very big incentive to tackle higher-level branches on the grind cards. FL gives rewards that scale with stat level, but here, you always get the same reward no matter what. (Rare successes on the higher tiers do give an extra reward, true, but there’s only one transition, and they are rare successes.) Then again, I suppose the main point of the grind cards is to increase the relevant stat, which of course is accomplished by taking riskier options. edited by Little The on 1/13/2013
Glad to hear that you enjoyed the D2 Morning section of The Harvestmen! It was a blast to write and I am especially glad that you are enjoying the interaction between Billy Brownson and the Harvestmen antagonist card!
The only added question I would have is what you thought of how the conversation with Billy Brownson worked.
Still working on getting to the end of the current content before I give Detailed feedback but I’ve noticed an odd occurance on the cityslicker grind card. Despite the option being locked as I’m far past the last level it’s available at the “gathering the masses” branch is still visible, despite all the other branches on grind cards dissapearing under similar conditions.
Is there any way to see which pinned cards are in an area before traveling to it? I am stuck on both Hallowed Ground and the Harvestmen right now, and I seem to be spending 3/4 of my actions hopping from place to place trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be, which is a bit frustrating! edited by Sarah Jean Brown on 1/13/2013
Oh! Yes, that was interesting. The fact that I couldn’t ask every question makes the completionist in me cry, but it’s an intriguing idea. Good for creating a tense atmosphere and all that.
Annabelle Dowd and Chief Carfora both have Ally actions in Doc Roslyn’s Free Clinic and the Amarillo Gaol, respectively.
The Excitable Engineer and the Governor’s Aide will have Ally effects in a future section of the game. Expect to see them more prominently in Day 3.
Reputation pricing is a little tricky, because the Reputation system is intended to do two separate things for two different kinds of players:
1.) For casual players, Reputation can defray Menaces; convert to Dollars or Revolver Bullets to buy gear or Connections; and provide access to some of the Reputation-advanced questicles, e.g. the Wounded Welkin;
2.) For dedicated players – that is, players who play through a lot of Jobs – Reputation is a way to unlock all of the Reputation-advanced questicles and see all the high-cost Reputation rewards, e.g. A Card from the Ashling.
So far, it seems like it’s doing 1.) for you just fine. Are you playing through Jobs? If you are/once you are, I expect the 25-Rep-to-eat-your-Menaces purchase will seem much less onerous. (If I’m wrong: please let me know. We’re open to repricing.)
Actually, yes!
Sometime soon – within the next month – we’ll be adding long-form plots to the other two Menace areas, as well as another chapter in Rio Seco.
The way the Menace plots will work: every time you visit the Menace area, you’ll get to see a storylet or two. I expect it’ll take ~10 visits to play through each of them.
I’ve said it before: the only real reward in SN is more plot. Failure and success are arbitrary; everything in ZS rewards. :)
I’m inclined to agree.
Some of that is a deliberate slowing of pace. We’re trying to balance between gamist players who LIKE to grind, narrativist players who HATE to grind, and our own desire to keep people engaged for a couple of weeks per content release that takes us ~3 months to write.
Some of it was certainly Menace issues. Hopefully those will be less onerous going forward.
Unfortunately I think we’re bumping up against a tech limitation. We can’t make rewards scale to level without doing a lot of very, very fiddly work with branches.
Wups! Missed a BWARK. That should be fixed. Thanks!
In the near future, we’ll have an item available that will track your progress through your subplots. You can reference it whenever you’re lost; it’ll have directions for where in the world to go.
Right now, though, your best option is to tell me what your Hallowed Ground and Harvestmen Qualities are. I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction – and update our storylet tooltips if we’ve been too inspecific. :)
I was saving jobs until I was finished with main storyline business, being sidequests and all. I’ve started doing them now, but I still think the menace reduction’s a bit pricey. Failures on job branches still incur menaces, and they’re actually more common since I don’t usually go for chancy challenges on grind cards. The lump sum reward is only enough to eat 10 ticks, yet requires…1+2+3+4+5=15 actions to get. The Pony Express badge might offset that, though.
[quote]Actually, yes!
Sometime soon – within the next month – we’ll be adding long-form plots to the other two Menace areas, as well as another chapter in Rio Seco.
The way the Menace plots will work: every time you visit the Menace area, you’ll get to see a storylet or two. I expect it’ll take ~10 visits to play through each of them.[/quote]
Sounds lovely.
Typos:
-Success result “Rain” of the “A Last Request” branch in Humanitarian Aid: [the doors are numered]
-Result for “Ask Why You’re Here” on the Wounded Welkin 3 card: “Longest Day” is incompletely capitalized. edited by Little The on 1/13/2013