Ah, quite past that part then. Well you’ve made sure no one else gets that particular pickle, so thanks again, and enjoy the game. :)
Sorry for the long delay- I was just wondering what the heck it was. I remember seeing it in a blog post, and wondering why I’d never noticed it. Ah, well. Also, a question. Is there yet a purpose to Character References that you get in the Gaol? I’ve never interacted with Tall Saul other than at his floating table (Which seems to be entirely unprofitable. definitely not worth the reputation, except to have unlocked more things.)
Hey rykarmalkus! The Character Reference you get in the Amarillo Gaol will, in fact, do something! It just ahem hasn’t quite been cough cough written yet. Hopefully in the next content release drop, or at the latest the one after that!
I see. Is there a reason I can get twenty character references? It doesn’t make much more sense than twenty job applications at the same company. Or am I just thinking about it wrong?
Whoops! That’s a bug. I forgot to make it so you could only take it once. What’s your character name?
Whoops! That’s a bug. I forgot to make it so you could only take it once. What’s your character name?[/quote]
Ridiculo has a handful of those too, IIRC.
Alright! The next time you sign on a card should fire that should fix things! Sorry it took me a bit to fix that. My computer was being dumb and needed to be reminded that it was supposed to work.
We’ve rolled out a pretty significant change today: Styles are now controlled by the same scaling difficulty scheme that Fallen London has recently switched to.
We have three goals with this change:
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To accelerate the rate at which your Styles increase. The base chance of success (when your Style and a challenge’s difficulty are equal) is now 60%, not 50%.
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To make content relevant for longer. Going forward, we can continue putting an entire day’s worth of grind branches on one card, instead of separating them onto different cards for each time of day (as we’d planned to do starting in Day 2/Afternoon).
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To switch Pony Express challenges from the Pony Express quality (which will still be used to track progress) to your regular Styles. This change has NOT been implemented yet, but will be soon.
If you run into any weirdness with this change, please let us know. We’re in uncharted territory and would love to know what you think. Thanks!
We have, in fact, changed Jobs over to function with Styles instead of Pony Express. Please let us know how they feel. We’re open to adjusting their difficulty levels, as this is new for all of us. :)
Nice idea! It did seem weird to have job success determined by a fixed percentage instead of the styles I’ve laboriously ground up.
It was an unhappy compromise: if Jobs challenged narrow-scale Styles, those Jobs would become irrelevant very quickly. With the broad-scale Styles, they’ll remain relevant for much longer. I think this will work much better.
I’m not a big fan of the broad difficulty in general, but maybe ZS will do better with it since it’s being integrated into the gameplay planning early on, instead of when the game’s more than halfway complete, as with Fallen London. Your arguments in favor for it seem reasonable, though. (And I think jobs will become easier now that the success rates will be more variable.)
Would it be possible to get some item that works like the Ridiculous Hat in Fallen London ?
Other than the “Antagony” card, I don’t think I have any way to raise “the Heavy Hand of the Law” anymore. (I’m trying raise “the Heavy Hand of the Law” so I can advance ‘The Casket of Amarillo’.)
My Cityslicker is 38, my Doc is 33, and my Gunslinger is 34
@Little The: I can’t speak to how Fallen London is handling the broad difficulty switch, but I hope it’ll work out well in Zero Summer. The Jobs change is the really important one, although content reusability will become more significant as we get further into Days 2 and 3.
@Andy_M: I doubt you’ll see anything quite like that. To address this issue, we’re considering spreading out the difficulty ranges for the PE 1 Jobs. (So: you’ll see diff 20 for one, diff 25 for another, diff 30 for another.) We think that’ll make it possible for folks to Menace grind, although goodness knows THAT isn’t a behavior we ever thought we’d see. :)
Thanks for writing!
My character-name is Rykar, sorry. (I keep forgetting to check back here.) And Menace grinding seems an unfortunate necessity- not including the %chance jobs, back when they were fixed %, I only visited each menace place either once or twice. Especially since the Distant Watcher antagonist is actually BENEFICIAL to you, on average, as far as menaces are concerned. Given that we need something like… 7-10, maybe more visits, per menace location to advance those plots as far as they’re currently written? We need either a way to advance farther per visit, or (god forbid) to be sent there more frequently. Or perhaps something like the house of mirrors in Fallen London, where (with some of the menace) you can just jump straight into the menace location (should you wish to).
rykarmalkus: Menace grinding is an unfortunate side-effect of releasing Menace state storylines between major content releases. We decided we’d rather give you folks new content sooner and put you in the awkward position of Menace-grinding than withhold all content until Day 2/Afternoon.
I plan to tweak some of the Jobs numbers this weekend. There will be at least one Job that should be challenging enough to make Menace-grinding easier.
We don’t plan to change the rate of advancement for any of the Menace storylines at this time. We might, at some point, introduce a way to increase your Menaces more rapidly… but that seems to rub against the grain of what Zero Summer is about, to us.
Please do let us know how this weekend’s Job difficulty changes impact you. :) Thanks for the feedback!
I haven’t noticed much change, other than only the level 2 job poses any risk of failure whatsoever. If I farm out my full set of gear, it won’t at all- but I won’t equip that gear, because the job is the only way to get Menaces, for me (and that’s only a 6% chance per action).
We haven’t changed anything yet. That might be part of it. :)
… whoooops. I probably should have checked that before I opened my mouth. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing how you change things in the near future! Watching an evolving game is a rare sort of treat.
Difficulty levels for most Jobs have been substantially increased to provide a wider range of challenge for characters at different stages of Day 2. As we add more Jobs, we’ll continue raising the available difficulty range.
Styles are now currently capped at 40. (Styles can’t rise above their cap.) The cap may soon be reduced to 35. We will continue raising the cap as we release additional content.