fareseries
Posts: 16
3/8/2013
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Nigel Overstreet wrote:
fareseries wrote:
I've noticed (read: been frustrated by) the fact that it's now very difficult to put together a good edition of a newspaper. You need to be able to pass tests somewhat reliably to avoid wasting time and thereby wasting a whirring contraption, and that's not really doable any more. Is this intentional?
Yes. All the carousels are now significantly less profitable by design.
Doubt Street seems to have been hit far harder than any of the others, though. With most carousels, there are two effects which make it less profitable. The first is increased failure chance in going through the carousel, which applies equally to non-carousels, and the second is increased failure chance in completing the carousel and getting the reward. Except for that last test (for which a second chance can be used to make success more likely), failure doesn't have any special consequences. For Doubt Street, there is no final test - instead, you get locked out of the best rewards if you fail too many of the tests in the main carousel. This ends up being much harsher, especially since second chances aren't a realistic option for that many tests. You can mitigate it by waiting for specific opportunity cards which don't decrease Hours Before the Deadline on a success (increasing your expected gain of copy), but this a) takes weeks of real time and b) ends up requiring more actions than the usual checks.
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Nigel Overstreet
Posts: 1220
3/9/2013
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fareseries wrote:
Doubt Street seems to have been hit far harder than any of the others, though. With most carousels, there are two effects which make it less profitable. The first is increased failure chance in going through the carousel, which applies equally to non-carousels, and the second is increased failure chance in completing the carousel and getting the reward. Except for that last test (for which a second chance can be used to make success more likely), failure doesn't have any special consequences. For Doubt Street, there is no final test - instead, you get locked out of the best rewards if you fail too many of the tests in the main carousel. This ends up being much harsher, especially since second chances aren't a realistic option for that many tests. You can mitigate it by waiting for specific opportunity cards which don't decrease Hours Before the Deadline on a success (increasing your expected gain of copy), but this a) takes weeks of real time and b) ends up requiring more actions than the usual checks.
Yep. Them's the breaks. The broad difficulty is meant to make things less easy, which means fewer echoes per action. So when you ask if this was by design, it is. Everything got harder and less rewarding. Maybe Doubt Street got hit harder than you like, but that's what the broad difficulty was designed to do; be harder. Hence why folks don't like it.
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fareseries
Posts: 16
3/9/2013
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There's a difference between making everything uniformly harder and making some things dramatically harder than others.
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Fhoenix
Posts: 602
3/9/2013
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I agree that there is a difference between, "now it takes a couple more actions to finish a carousel" and "now it takes a couple more days to finish a carousel". The newspaper was the hardest carousel to do in first place, and not even particularly profitable. Now it's downright nasty.
So I second, that it should at the very least be looked at and maybe rebalanced.
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Nigel Overstreet
Posts: 1220
3/9/2013
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fareseries wrote:
There's a difference between making everything uniformly harder and making some things dramatically harder than others.
Everything is not now uniformly harder. It's increasing difficulty by degrees. The low level stuff is now a bit harder and the high level stuff is now monstrously harder. That's the point of the broad difficulty.
Doubt Street is one of the highest level storylets, so it's going to be one of the hardest storylet's hit. The higher level storylets are now not supposed to be a guaranteed success. You are meant to fail them. The higher their level, the greater the chance of failure. That's the design.
In terms of Echo per Action, it's still on a par with the Foreign Office or The Affair of the Box. The longest part of the grind, the Whirling Contraption, is much easier in comparison and you never walk away from Doubt Street with nothing. It's harder to get the Quality, sure, but it's harder to do everything now.
It's not "dramatically harder" than anything else in comparison to it's level. It just seems that way because that's what you're doing right now and you remember when success was guaranteed.
The idea that Doubt Street wasn't profitable before is just nonsense. It always provided at least 1.2 Echoes per action before the broad difficulty. Now it provides something on par with carousels of it's difficulty. True, the Qualities are now harder to get, but yes, that is the design. It now takes a lot longer to get Cardinal of Conspiracy and the like, but this is not an accident.
Complaints up to this point about such increased difficulty have been met with a pretty resounding "Yep. It sure is."
Yes, it sucks. I don't know what to tell you. Them's the breaks. It's why everyone is upset.
If you don't like Doubt Street, don't play it. No one's putting a gun to your head.
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Fhoenix
Posts: 602
3/9/2013
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The box carousel provided 1.4. So no, 1.2 was not profitable, especially for something so difficult to do (and people were complaining about how hard the qualities are to get even before the broad difficulty).
A bigger issue is that the punishment for failure in the newspaper is much bigger than in almost any storylet in the game. All we are saying here, is that it should probably be looked into, as whoever wrote that game mechanic probably did not expect the broad difficulty change.
Also. let's just say the newspaper carousel is changed and the "hours before the deadline" no longer decrease on failure. How would it make that story worse? It's still possible to fail, it's still as hard (and relies on luck, really) to make a great issue, it would still take more actions than before. What would be the problem really?
edited by Fhoenix on 3/9/2013
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Nigel Overstreet
Posts: 1220
3/9/2013
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Fhoenix wrote:
The box carousel provided 1.4. So no, 1.2 was not profitable, especially for something so difficult to do (and people were complaining about how hard the qualities are to get even before the broad difficulty).
It came out about a year before the box carousel when 1.2 was about as high an E/A ratio as you were going to get in Fallen London. Just because something isn't the best method of obtaining Echoes doesn't make it not profitable. To say it's not particularly profitable because it's not the most profitable is absurd. By that logic the Fidgeting Writer is the only profitable thing to do in Fallen London. Heck, by that logic only one thing in Fallen London is profitable.
As one of only two known people to have achieved 10 in all three Newspaper Accomplishments, complaints about the pre-broad difficulty are unfounded.
Fhoenix wrote:
All we are saying here, is that it should probably be looked into, as whoever wrote that game mechanic probably did not expect the broad difficulty change.
I'm not saying this doesn't suck, I'm saying it sucks on purpose. I think this is something that was looked into and the conclusion was made that people can just deal with it. It's been said that increased difficulty is not a bug to be worked around, it's a feature.
Could it be made easier? Certainly! Should it be made easier? Not for me to say. Will it be made easier? Don't hold your breath.
edited by Nigel Overstreet on 3/9/2013
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
3/9/2013
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This is exactly the kind of possibly unintended consequence we wanted to hear about, so I've added it to the list. That's not a promise it'll change! but it deserves a look. Thanks all.
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
3/9/2013
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This is exactly the kind of possibly unintended consequence we wanted to hear about, so I've added it to the list. That's not a promise it'll change! but it deserves a look. Thanks all.
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Nigel Overstreet
Posts: 1220
3/9/2013
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Alexis Kennedy wrote:
This is exactly the kind of possibly unintended consequence we wanted to hear about, so I've added it to the list. That's not a promise it'll change! but it deserves a look. Thanks all.
My mistake. I thought this was precisely the kind of consequence you'd intended.
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Corran
Posts: 401
3/10/2013
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I read about The Alleys of Spite but haven't done them yet because I was busy doing other things. Now with the new difficulty level I have to say I don't really fancy even trying it from what I've read here.
Is this another one that might get looked at?
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Sara Hysaro
Moderator
Posts: 4514
3/10/2013
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The Alleys of Spite are 100% under the current system with Shadowy 55. It may be 100% with even less Shadowy than that. I don't think it needs to be looked at.
Edit: Well, the Shadowy Jack option is 81% at 72 but that's still not that bad.
edited by Sara Hysaro on 3/10/2013
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Tesuji
Posts: 161
3/30/2013
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I really wish that "Straightforward" would be reserved solely for 100% checks.
Apparently, the scaling factor recently changed again, dropping down to 0.65. Even more frustrating than unavoidable failure is having it come out of the blue, as that DL 100 storylet that you didn't need gear for yesterday, now needs you to get dressed up for or you'll suffer a small chance of failure.
"Straightforward" used to mean 100% chance of success. It would be nice to have a description like that, so that we don't have to double-check each time or be caught unaware by a change like this.
And, while I won't bother getting into the discussion as to whether this is a good system, if you're going to be expanding the failure range, shouldn't the stat caps get bumped up as well? I can understand (even if I don't agree with the value of) a message of "You're failing because you didn't do X". If there's nothing the players can do, then the message seems to be "You're failing because we want more failure in the game".
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Sara Hysaro
Moderator
Posts: 4514
3/30/2013
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Maybe the color of Straightforward could change? Use the color it is currently for stuff that isn't 100% (but in the range of Straightforward), and a different shade of green if it is.
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Zeedee
Posts: 276
4/7/2013
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Public Service Announcement!
Folks, Broad calculators are out now. Get one, two or all three here for the bargain price of 1 click:
http://fallenlondon.wikia.com/wiki/Broad_difficulty
There is also a redirect page which is somewhat easier to remember:
http://fallenlondon.wikia.com/wiki/Broad
They were made by Esterhazy.
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Catherine Raymond
Posts: 2518
4/7/2013
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Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook wrote:
Whoops, yep, that's a bad problem. I got 1302 Certifiable Scrap instead of 1! Guess I'll hold off playing until they fix this'n...
Darn, I wish that glitch had caught me! :-)
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Spacemarine9
Posts: 2234
4/7/2013
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you still got the correct amount of stuff when that glitch happened, it just gave a buggy message that made it look like your item stocks had doubled
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