Cthonius
Posts: 362
10/19/2016
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Ah but them how many players do the cider grind and such? In fact that kind of thing was explicitly addressed, I think by Alexis. "We could write content for Ubergoats and cider, but how many players would that be for" or something like that. The early game is the most important part to keep new players interested and invested. Only a vocal minority here would benefit from the high level stories you suggest.
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Cthonius, gone North. Gone.
Oneiropompus, a Scarlet Saint, eager to help make your dreams realities. Accepting all social requests for now.
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Harlocke
Posts: 506
10/19/2016
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Cthonius wrote:
Ah but them how many players do the cider grind and such? In fact that kind of thing was explicitly addressed, I think by Alexis. "We could write content for Ubergoats and cider, but how many players would that be for" or something like that. The early game is the most important part to keep new players interested and invested. Only a vocal minority here would benefit from the high level stories you suggest.
The long term players are the ones buying exceptional memberships, contributing to kickstarters, spending fate. I'd argue that retaining/increasing the number of long term players is perhaps even more important than just keeping new players interested.
And I think there is a balanced amount of content that should be written for late game. I'm not saying FBG should throw all their resources at stories that unfold over two years. Just that it would be nice if there was anything at all.
Heck, it wouldn't even have to just be entirely new stories from scratch. Just opening up new branches on existing loops would be interesting enough. Imagine if the box grind gave you a new brief storylet each time you go through the loop 1000 times, up to your 10,000th loop when it repeats, as a sort of meta-grind to make grinding more interesting than just a straightforward slog.
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I welcome social actions, and can visit your salon as an author.
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Harlocke
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Saevitia
Posts: 58
10/19/2016
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Harlocke wrote:
I think the problem is that very little attention has been given to end game grinding. After a while the game becomes just waiting for exceptional stories, grinding echoes towards cider, and roleplaying to break up the monotony in between. For the most part I think that's OK, we can't expect the dense story of the early game to continue forever. But there could be a little more care to make grinding interesting.
Perhaps storylets could unlock at 50k echoes, 100k echoes, 150k echoes, to mark your progress towards buying cider and encourage you to continue. ... There could be slow building long term stories like seeking, but that do not destroy your character. Imagine a mechanic like marsh-mired, that encourages you to come back once a week to progress a story, that provides a slow dribble of lore and intrigue that lasts for years, albeit in a brief once a week morsel. It's okay for the end game grind to be a grind where nothing much happens, but there's s happy middle ground between the rich densely packed story of early game and "go buy cider! See you in two years!"
I don't know how much I agree with this. I despise grinding as much as anyone, I think (being an old MUD/Everquest/World of Warcraft player will do that), but the "end game grinding" here is pretty much solely for self-imposed challenges. Mine always had a very clear purpose: Become a Shattering Force; get all the four-card lodgings in time to upgrade them with holiday events; go NORTH. Extra snippets, especially one-offs, tossed in among them would suffer the same issue as rare successes during a grind: players miss them and never even realize it. Clicking through the same loop to burn your candles knowing you have another 1000 or whatever actions to go doesn't lend itself to making sure you aren't arbitrarily clicking through new and unexpected lore tidbits.
The mechanic that would most appeal to me -- which hardly seems reasonable to ask for, if I'm being honest -- is to effectively "rebirth" your character. Wipe the slate clean, keep 1/4 of each of your skill values and unique items (such as from EF content), maybe a fraction of your cash total, and begin again from New Newgate. I'd consider it something like the "scion" option from Sunless Sea. But, again, the mechanics for this on the back-end, plus the unexpected issues that would arise, are unknown and unlikely to make it really "worth" the effort when there are so many other things vying for attention.
(Among which are, I assume: Bugs in Sunless Sea from new content, bugs in Zubmariner from release, dealing with server/latency issues, testing/releasing forthcoming EF content, figuring out whether new Hallowmas content is actually going to burn everything down in a of Correspondence-riddled firestorm, resolving issues in the iOS/Android apps, resolving issues in the browser experience induced by the existence of the iOS/Android apps, trying to find those notes written on napkins from That Night in That One Pub when everybody decided how the Ambitions were going to eventually wrap up, whether "more advanced professions" were going to be implemented at any point and how they would work, etc.)
Harlocke wrote:
There could be expanded roleplaying options for end game players, beyond the old coffee and chess, so they can interact in new and fresh ways over the months and years.
I think this already exists in the forums. Letters exist in-game, too, but the FL interface is not designed for a full-blown multiplayer experience. Roleplaying and whatnot beyond what is already in-game is better served through an external system for the sake of simplicity AND character/player freedom. Even then, what my character does in RP -- and what she even possesses -- is different from what is "in-game". She frequently possesses a number of items in FL that I think would not actually be in-hand, that are solely to advance certain storylines. This is, I presume, fairly standard for a lot of players.
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Tangentially-related shameless begging: I'll be honest, the thing *I* most want is more Port Carnelian. I want to live there. I want to start a revolution there, become one of the tigers, and fight a war against snakes behind mirrors. I don't anticipate anything like that ever being an option -- I don't consider FL to be the sort of game experience where "player housing" and "hometown" options would ever be more than what they are -- but I'd add it to the wishlist given a chance. In the meantime, I'll keep doing all that in out-of-game RP.
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Saevitia's profile and appearance! [Gone NORTH]
Now playing Esméralda, Saevitia's former helmswoman and moralistic Campaigner; she looks like this.
I'm usually up for RP. Social actions are generally accepted; those with in-character RP invitations are most likely to be reciprocated.
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Harlocke
Posts: 506
10/19/2016
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Saevitia wrote:
Extra snippets, especially one-offs, tossed in among them would suffer the same issue as rare successes during a grind: players miss them and never even realize it.
You wouldn't insert the new storylets in an easy to miss way like that. The game could unlock a new story in your lodgings or add a new opportunity card to your deck when whatever quality reaches high enough level.
Saevitia wrote:
I think this already exists in the forums. Letters exist in-game, too, but the FL interface is not designed for a full-blown multiplayer experience. Roleplaying and whatnot beyond what is already in-game is better served through an external system for the sake of simplicity AND character/player freedom. Even then, what my character does in RP -- and what she even possesses -- is different from what is "in-game". She frequently possesses a number of items in FL that I think would not actually be in-hand, that are solely to advance certain storylines. This is, I presume, fairly standard for a lot of players.
Yeah, I don't expect it to be a fully built out social experience. But a little more variety in social actions would be nice. I'm always happy whenever I draw a social action like a cat box or mysteries of the neath, mainly for the diversity in roleplaying more than for any tangible reward.
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I welcome social actions, and can visit your salon as an author.
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Harlocke
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genesis
Posts: 924
10/20/2016
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Eh, I dunno. Questions of variety and content come up constantly. I feel it's a distinct issue from the question of outstanding projects/features and one that the developers (with very good reason) are less likely to engage with publicly. So by focusing on that we are only diminishing our ability to engage the developers on the questions of unfinished projects.
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http://fallenlondon.com/Profile/mikey_thinkin
Keeping track of incomplete content and loose ends in Fallen London
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MidnightVoyager
Posts: 858
10/21/2016
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I think it's a little weird how the penultimate update for Light Fingers seems to have not come up, and how they said the next faction to be updated would be Urchins and then it just never happened. Overhauling favors came to a stop for long enough that I've ground up Criminal favors to the max. Also, I've been holding up my notability forever for eventual job updates... and I have my own final ambition update to wait for.
I've honestly forgotten what happened in a lot of stuff on the unfinished stories list, to the point where I'd have to reread it to know what's going on. But I can't actually do that because of how the journal works.
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Midnight Voyager - A blood-cousin to predators. Collector of beasts. Affably mad.
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Mr Sables
Posts: 597
10/21/2016
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MidnightVoyager wrote:
I've honestly forgotten what happened in a lot of stuff on the unfinished stories list, to the point where I'd have to reread it to know what's going on. But I can't actually do that because of how the journal works.
Ironically, I think fixing the journal was another promised feature . . .
Around the time they got rid of 'reminiscing' for Ambitions, I vaguely remember them saying: "it's fine, because we'll be sorting out the journals, so it won't interfere with anyone and their ambitions". Funnily enough, they removed the 'reminiscing', which has caused nothing but trouble for my alt . . . I mean, I don't know, maybe there was a reason for removing that feature, but it seemed like everyone liked or wanted it . . . it's like with the cost changes; feels like they 'fix' what's not broken, then leave broken what needs to be fixed.
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