Fhoenix
Posts: 602
1/27/2013
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Ah, I played everything I got on the first trip, so I did not know they were undiscardable ^^
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My Character
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Urthdigger
Posts: 939
1/27/2013
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Actually, I'm fairly certain playing the option at the shop to go window-shopping raised my Unseen by 1 while LOWERING my progress. But I could be wrong.
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Looking for second chances to maximize your loot output from those troublesome storylets? Check out our handy gang of volunteers in this thread, or even volunteer yourself!
@Urthdigger on twitter
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Aximillio
Posts: 1251
1/27/2013
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Urthdigger wrote:
Actually, I'm fairly certain playing the option at the shop to go window-shopping raised my Unseen by 1 while LOWERING my progress. But I could be wrong.
This is correct. That's why it's so awesome =).
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Possibly returned after a long hiatus. Please do not send live rats or tournament requests.
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Blast_Fantastic
Posts: 63
1/27/2013
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The first two times I tried The Pickpocket's Promenade I got Pickpocket Trophies into the high 30s, and it seemed like a fun challenge to get more. But after that, the game decided I was going to lose right away each time by only supplying harmful cards (along with bad luck just to twist the knife). I hope they didn't tinker with the odds to eliminate the strategy element.
Having the Loiter option luck-based (which I have failed every time since those first two rounds) and making the Curiosity Shop card so rare (it hasn't even shown up for me the last few tries) removes any hope of using strategy to win and takes all the fun out of it. You're simply at the mercy of the cards.
Having one or the other is fine, but both together they're a game-killer for me. It makes the process 100% arbitrary instead of enjoyably interactive like a good game should be. The storylet had a lot of potential, but I'm done with it until they work the bugs out.
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protonsinthedark
Posts: 106
1/27/2013
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Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook wrote:
I'm sure a lot of it was just luck - drawing a good number of Curiosity Shops. Otherwise, target the high-value marks first - from memory, in roughly descending order, that's Special Constables, Blue Jack, Constables, Shopkeepers, Actresses. Rat-catchers are also good targets to clear the hand out a bit. And you can stretch it out a bit longer if you get lucky with loitering twice in a row, but it's a hell of a risk.
Pickpocketing Jack-of-Smiles is also nicely lucrative--10 trophies--although it does raise approaching your destination by 2.
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Mio, a midnight, sinister, irresistible, and breathtaking lady of mysterious origins.
Calling cards, social actions, menace reduction requests, and newspaper interviews (Nemesis ambition) welcome. No boxed cats or Affluent Photographer requests please.
Other Characters:
tinyassassin, an orphan trained as an assassin, currently hunting the Vake.
Alexandre and Adriana, a pair of hedonistic twins betting their souls on the Marvellous...if they don't lose them to the devils first.
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Aximillio
Posts: 1251
1/27/2013
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San wrote:
Pickpocketing Jack-of-Smiles is also nicely lucrative--10 trophies--although it does raise approaching your destination by 2.
I haven't seen this one, is it locked with the Jack case? (If so, why - we didn't destroy all the knives)
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Possibly returned after a long hiatus. Please do not send live rats or tournament requests.
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
1/27/2013
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Blast_Fantastic wrote:
I hope they didn't tinker with the odds to eliminate the strategy element.
Funnily enough, I'd like to share an excerpt from my dev diary from last week:
Fri daytime: completed initial implementation of Crowds and final copy. Tested, tuned, reworked, rewrote, retested.
Fri evening: stealth-launched it to gather data over the weekend.
Saturday afternoon: suddenly realised to my horror that Pickpocket's Promenade had the potential to be fun. Immediately tinkered with all the odds to eliminate the strategy element. Also, strangled a kitten and doubled the cost of everything at the Bazaar.
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protonsinthedark
Posts: 106
1/27/2013
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Aximillio wrote:
San wrote:
Pickpocketing Jack-of-Smiles is also nicely lucrative--10 trophies--although it does raise approaching your destination by 2.
I haven't seen this one, is it locked with the Jack case? (If so, why - we didn't destroy all the knives)
I am on the Jack case right now, so it's possible? I'll have to check the next time I pull it.
ETA: I'd just like to note that as soon as I say that I'll check, I absolutely can't pull the card at all.... >_<
edited by protonsinthedark on 1/28/2013
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Mio, a midnight, sinister, irresistible, and breathtaking lady of mysterious origins.
Calling cards, social actions, menace reduction requests, and newspaper interviews (Nemesis ambition) welcome. No boxed cats or Affluent Photographer requests please.
Other Characters:
tinyassassin, an orphan trained as an assassin, currently hunting the Vake.
Alexandre and Adriana, a pair of hedonistic twins betting their souls on the Marvellous...if they don't lose them to the devils first.
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friendshipranger
Posts: 274
1/27/2013
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Alexis Kennedy wrote:
Blast_Fantastic wrote:
I hope they didn't tinker with the odds to eliminate the strategy element.
Funnily enough, I'd like to share an excerpt from my dev diary from last week:
Fri daytime: completed initial implementation of Crowds and final copy. Tested, tuned, reworked, rewrote, retested.
Fri evening: stealth-launched it to gather data over the weekend.
Saturday afternoon: suddenly realised to my horror that Pickpocket's Promenade had the potential to be fun. Immediately tinkered with all the odds to eliminate the strategy element. Also, strangled a kitten and doubled the cost of everything at the Bazaar.
So what you're saying is you're what happened to Mittens. Funny, I just thought Mr. Wines had spent the weekend with it.
Also, while you're here, you mentioned that this was more for flavor/fun rather than minmaxers, which is of course fine. It's fun to have the opportunity to roleplay. Do you ever have to resist the urge to develop content that lends itself to that? And does it ever frustrate you when content is boiled down to the most efficient method of resource gathering/grinding? I mean, I try to force myself to smell the roses, but I've been playing JRPG's and MMORPG's for so long min-maxing and completion-ism just gnaw at the back of my brain.
edited by friendshipranger on 1/28/2013
edited by friendshipranger on 1/28/2013
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/J.L.%20Moriarty
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Urthdigger
Posts: 939
1/28/2013
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friendshipranger wrote:
And does it ever frustrate you when content is boiled down to the most efficient method of resource gathering/grinding?
As someone who frequently does said boiling, I wonder this myself.
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Looking for second chances to maximize your loot output from those troublesome storylets? Check out our handy gang of volunteers in this thread, or even volunteer yourself!
@Urthdigger on twitter
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protonsinthedark
Posts: 106
1/28/2013
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On an only marginally related note, it amuses me that Diamonds are Contraband items, yet Ostentatious Diamonds (which you can get as part of the 'Jewels' reward) are categorized as regular Goods items in your inventory. You would think that if regular Diamonds are contraband, then Ostentatious Diamonds would be even more so...
(On an even less related note, I sort of feel that the 'new' Diamond artwork is more ostentatious looking than the artwork for the Ostentatious Diamond, which uses the 'old' Diamond artwork...but that's really a matter of preference and a very minor one at that. So don't mind me.)
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Mio, a midnight, sinister, irresistible, and breathtaking lady of mysterious origins.
Calling cards, social actions, menace reduction requests, and newspaper interviews (Nemesis ambition) welcome. No boxed cats or Affluent Photographer requests please.
Other Characters:
tinyassassin, an orphan trained as an assassin, currently hunting the Vake.
Alexandre and Adriana, a pair of hedonistic twins betting their souls on the Marvellous...if they don't lose them to the devils first.
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
1/28/2013
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friendshipranger wrote:
does it ever frustrate you when content is boiled down to the most efficient method of resource gathering/grinding?
Oh, totally. It makes me want to replace all the content with a giant storylet with 200 150-difficulty 10-action-cost branches for gathering every resource in the game. But I do get why: (a) we can't attach an economic system to the game and lock content based on resource without expecting people to want to optimise for that, (b) of course capped players don't care whether content was designed to be playable by characters with stats of 30 or 70, they only care that their experience was suboptimal for them, right then. Which is understandable.
>Ostentatious Diamonds...Contraband
Yah, that was just an oversight - we'll be fixing it at some point.
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Diptych
Administrator
Posts: 3493
1/28/2013
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Does it make you laugh uproariously when people level wild accusations against you because the RNG turned against them or they simply didn't understand the content?
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Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
1/28/2013
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Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook wrote:
Does it make you laugh uproariously when people level wild accusations against you because the RNG turned against them or they simply didn't understand the content?
depends on my mood. sometimes I growl like an aggravated pug. I do have a polite c/p response about basic probability for people who actually email support and say 'your RNG is broken, I've failed five modest difficulty tests in a row.'
But, again, I understand where people are coming from. If you keep failing something, it's frustrating, whatever the larger picture. Sid Meier's 2010 GDC keynote had some good stuff on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY7aRJE-oOY (from 18:30). There's no obligation on players to understand randomness: the obligation is on the designer to provide an experience consistent with player expectations. (not necessarily a fun experience.)
So grumpy complaints about the apparent experience of unfairness, even if they're outliers, are useful feedback, because that person's still not happy, no matter how sound the invisible reasons for building the content that way may have been; and unless there's a strong creative reason why not, all else being equal we want players to be happy. Of course if an experience is beautifully tuned to be a challenge for 98% of players and savagely disappoints 2% of players, and the 2% complain, then that may not practically speaking be fixable.
And, of course, some parts of FL are better-tuned than others, and none are perfectly tuned. We do go through and change stuff, but there's never enough time, and there's always a risk with tweaking individual parts of a big complex machine.
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Lady Red
Posts: 517
1/28/2013
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I have just sent a bug report, as there are a couple of things that appear to be genuine bugs. But...
Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook wrote:
Does it make you laugh uproariously when people level wild accusations against you because the RNG turned against them or they simply didn't understand the content?
I am not sure if you are including me amongst the group of people who 'didn't understand the content'. However, in my case, I have played through the longer route three times now, and none of these times have I seen any cards with options to loiter or anything regarding a curiosity shop. This is why I said it seemed impossible to get to 50 trophies. I wouldn't have known that cards which lower your 'Approaching Your Destination' score even existed, if I hadn't read it on here. This may not be a bug, after all, but I think it's fairly clear why I initially thought it was one 
Anyway, I think the content is fun, and the text flavourful, and now I know that it is just me having bad luck with the RNG, I may play it again and see if I have better luck this time.
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Lady~Red
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Diptych
Administrator
Posts: 3493
1/28/2013
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Perhaps I was unkind there... but I certainly didn't have you in mind. Rather, I was thinking of past posts and Twitter rants and so on, which have alleged - far more vociferously than Blast does above - that various systems are rigged, that there's a cynical conspiracy to ruin everyone's fun, and so forth. Fallen London gets off lightly compared to most game communities in this regard, of course.
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Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
1/28/2013
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I've said it before but it bears repeating: I bloody love you folks (and that 'you' includes BlastFantastic and Tesuji, who I replied to a little mischievously above, as well as everyone else in this thread). The most negative and aggressive comments I've ever seen on this site are tea and cucumber sandwiches compared to the kind of things routinely expressed on any major MMO board. By and large the community is helpful, courteous and enthusiastic. This, of course, is the huge advantage of making your game one giant reading comprehension test.
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Ewan C
Posts: 4
1/28/2013
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Alexis sent a very polite 'working as intended' response to my bug report on this . So yeah, RNG at work - I echo the comment above about playing through several times and never seeing any 'loiter' or 'curiosity shop' options, only marks. i did try to hang back a couple of times, but failed all those luck tests :-/.
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Lady Red
Posts: 517
1/28/2013
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Sir Fred - good, good! I didn't think you did, but you never know when it comes to online communication. Tone is so hard to judge!
Alexis - we only moan because we love you too, honest!
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Lady~Red
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Diptych
Administrator
Posts: 3493
1/28/2013
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I was being snarkier than I like to - I apologise to all present! We really do have a charming little community here, and outbursts are infrequent and of little consequence.
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Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
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