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STATE OF THE GAME - AUGUST
Welcome to our third State of the Game! For reference, our last State of the Game was in June; you can check out our SotGs in the tag.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE, VERSION 2.0: Life for the both of us has not relented compared to June's SotG. We apologize for how this has impacted our ability to mod. We have been doing our best to keep up with questions, but it means that some of our efforts to info-gather and create new pages have fallen by the wayside. This is something we hope to work on.
Since the knowledge of certain concepts lives in our heads for the most part, it falls to us to continue creating these pages. This includes the pages on Wild Souls, Katalyth, Kelesis, and more. We are welcome to the offer of help, but know that we have list-keeping and clerical tasks well taken care of. They are nice organizational tasks that are nice to do when the brain isn't agreeing. If any players have anything to offer we're happy to hear you out! At this stage, we might need to simply ask your patience. We're excited to compile new pages for the game, but circumstances haven't allowed it.
One area that might be wonderful as a volunteer effort is to go through our FAQ page and categorize each response by its relevant information. This is us pitching an idea of something that could complete a project we've had on our list, as well as something immensely helpful for other players! An example of such categories would be:
- Patho-Gen (anything related to Patho-Gen as an entity, its operations, what they're like, how to interact with them, etc);
- Katalyth (all questions about Katalyth and arcane radiation);
- technology (anything related to what is seen on the tech page);
- the world and its locations (to create a bulleted list of minute details about the world, whether that's The Woods, Karteria, Eparsis, Apparallaxia, Doxa, etc);
- Natural Souls (even better if the list is narrowed down by Natural Soul type so that they can be appended on the bottom of each individual soul type);
- character housing & the Valentia;
- and Karteria's people and its classes (government, upper, middle, lower, impoverished, and outer city; to be appended to the Reputation page in particular).WILD SOULS: In our June SotG, we mentioned the elusive Wild Souls. Our progress on this as been coming along, though at a pace more plodding than we'd like. Siren has worked hard on 3/4 of these, and Prince is still adding some finishing touches and fleshing them out. Though they need some TLC, we're happy to show what we have done thus far. Our first completed one is 🍄 Fungi-type! 🍄
You may choose to redeem this soul effective now on the Recollection & Retribution page. It requires 800 points, even if you wish to switch to them. They cannot be a freebie switch.
That said, yes: these Wild Souls can either be added as a secondary soul, or they can displace your character's current Natural Soul. Your Carnivora-type can be a Carnivora- and Fungi-type, or you can drop the Carnviora and be 100% Fungi-type.
"What do we do with clashing traits? If my Terra-type requires photosynthesis, but Fungi-types do not, what do I do?" You may approach this in any way you prefer. You can have your character be a mess of warring needs at all times; you can have them sometimes require photosynthesis, and other times not (sometimes preferring light, other times preferring dark and dank). You may also choose one trait over the other: your Terra-Fungi-type can be a glutton for the sun despite Fungi-types needing none of it, and perhaps even preferring the dark. (Whether your character is frustrated by light or not is up to you.) Whatever's most fun for you!
The main landing page for Wild Souls, as well as the other three souls, are in the works. Please wait for us...!
TAKEN PAGE: We've added some cute emojis to the taken page to indicate soul types. Just a neat little thing!
PROXY RESERVES: Based on last SotG's feedback, we have decided to allow proxy reserves.
KEEPIN' ON TOP OF THE LOCATIONS PAGE: With this introduction of both Aparallaxia and Kelesis, what we've done so far is at least transfer the information from our recent logs to the locations page in the interim while things are smoothed over. This way, those who wish to access information about, say, Kelesis, can see the same information that players received when it was introduced.
THE SQUID OF APARALLAXIA: There hasn't been an opportunity yet to disclose how things blew over with Squid-chan, who characters got to meet in June's event log. Squid shall be back: characters were benevolent with the violent squid, inviting communication and attempting to understand the squid. The squid was immensely lonely, having had little socialization in... god, years. In its excitement and agitation it seemed violent, but Augmented Ones treated it with patience and curiosity.
Squid is an ally. It views all Augmented Ones as potential friends, and sees them as similar to itself. This hasn't fixed all of the Katalyth growths on its body, which still feel miserable to be around, and the way it attempts to psychically communicate still inflicts migraines... aaaaand it might accidentally get excited and knock an unfortunate person into the water. But it means well. Someday, when it manages to calm down, who knows? Maybe it'll even be able to communicate something of importance.
This information is also reflected under the Orexian section for Aparallaxia.
TDM #3 OVERFLOW: There is an overflow for those of you dabbling on the TDM right over here.
We would also like to ask our playerbase for their thoughts about a few other ideas, tweaks, and other miscellany. Pertaining to these following bullet points, please feel free to voice your thoughts; we haven't decided whether or not to implement these changes as of yet, or in what direction to go in.
VELVET CLAW AS A QUEST BOARD: We had a few suggestions to make the Velvet Claw prompts into a separate updating page. We've enjoyed updating the prompts with the posting of whatever log or TDM goes up so that these micro-prompts can be relevant to the atmosphere of what's happening in the log proper, but it's something we're open to doing. How it would be updated... The suggestions we received last time was to update these prompts mid-month, but I can only imagine that we'll end up wanting to update them at the beginning of the month to help folks plan their top-levels and logs for the month. We don't see there being too much difference here aside from the prompts being on a separate page; perhaps the drop-down "details" tag is proving to help scroll past the bulk of this, if the Velvet Claw isn't relevant to players.
Thoughts? Is it preferred to have the Velvet Claw as a separate page, and if so, any suggestions for how to structure it to keep it relevant to early-month plotting?
"DETAILS" DROP-DOWNS TO HELP NAVIGATING LOGS: You guys were very sweet about our concerns regarding wordiness in June...
Especially for those of you who live life in the fast lane by RPing on mobile (neither of us have mastered this talent, you are strong), but also for those of you using PCs like us: have the drop-downs been helpful to easily pick through information as you need it? Is there anything that would improve the experience of reading the logs and parsing information? How about the summaries, do you like them?
Finally, we want to ask: How are we doing? Let us know if you have any thoughts, feedback, or ideas. You are always free to shoot us a PM, or otherwise visit the mod contact post if you'd prefer more privacy.
We read everything posted here, even if we don't respond to anything directly in favor of simply digesting your thoughts and turning that into action. Thanks a bunch for being part of the game!
Premise • Rules • FAQ • Reserve • Apply • Taken • Hiatus/Update/Drop • Activity Check • Calendar • Mod Contact
Locations • Businesses • Housing • Natural Souls • Patho-Gen • Culture • Technology • Reputation
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I did go through the FAQ page and made an attempt to sort questions into different categories here, if anyone else wants to take a crack at making it more organized! What I suspect is that a lot of info regarding Patho-Gen, Katalyth, and the World/Locations may be spread across different Event and TDM Questions threads outside of the main FAQ.
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I might also have missed something as I was skimming through all the questions and picking apart anything that wasn't heavily event/TDM specific, but hopefully not orz
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what I'd quite like is to make it more like a searchable database, so we can go "hm, have I seen the word 'Apokatastasis' anywhere before" and just crtl+f it.
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any and all are welcome to edit/add stuff
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Splitting it between the "what's going on" and "where to go from here" is also helpful, imo, I do like it being organized that way.
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As always, thank you for all the hard work you do, mods! It's very clear a lot of thought and care is put into the world-building, and it's just as exciting to play around with it. It makes everything so much fun.
RE: Velvet Claw as a quest board - As someone who particularly always plays around with them, I do very much enjoy having them in events, but I can also see how it can feel a little out of place from the general tone of events/TDMs, maybe? I'm totally ok with it being a separate page that is updated at the beginning of the month, given it's not more work for you guys on top of everything else you do.
The thing is, I do very much love missions/quests being incorporated in games. I think they're exciting and gives the vibe of "side quests" to the "main quests" that are events and TDMs. However, if I were to put myself in a new player's shoes and, say, in the TDM post there were a heads up that Karteria has a page for the Velvet Claw quests that can also be played alongside the TDM, it would feel like... too much? Like, as a new player TDMing, why would I go out of my way from the TDM post to check another page just for quests, especially when the idea of it feels almost like it's "exclusive" to players in the game... if that makes sense? So having them in the TDM itself feels and looks inclusive imo, but as a player in the game already, I do love the idea of being able to check the ~quest board page~ at the beginning of the month to see what "side content" I can do throughout the month.
All in all, I'm happy with the way the Velvet Claw quests are incorporated at the moment, but that's my 2c on the topic!
RE: Drop-downs for easier log navigation - as a PC player, I do very much like how neat the logs became. It feels more clean and organized, and if there's any prompts I'm not playing/interested in doing it makes it easier to skip them without scrolling down forever. Love love love the summaries too, they provide quick info on the prompts before I'm ready to fully read all of them. Yes, technically we already know what's happening from the plotting post, but I like them nonetheless.
And I almost forgot my own suggestion...! I'm a sucker for how the reputation works in the game, it's probably my favorite mechanic. I just love when actions have consequences. That being said, do you guys think it would be possible to add a little extra thing to the reputation page? Namely, I would love to be able to tell at a quick glance whether the Augmented's reputation has improved or worsened. Of course we can use our Eyes and just Read the blurbs, but I think having something like ⬆ — ⬇ next to the "reputation trend" to express "increased", "unchanged" and "decreased" respectively would be nice? Or right under it, something like Reputation has increased/decreased/not changed? These are just suggestions, but considering the different parties in the game and how everyone wants to approach Karteria/Patho-Gen/the locals, I think it'd be fun to be able to tell if we need to try harder to be good/bad!
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Or if the augmented failed miserably at a quest, it could be updated to say "withdrawn - request incomplete" So another way to feed back into how we do.
If this is done, I'd want to see it separated into a few different dropdowns. Current quests (new/updated) current quests (all) finished quests (new/updated) finished quests (all)
Another thing that might fit nicely into that would be "event quest" results, such as the squid. A "news" banner that includes messages to the augmented just letting them know of information like "everyone tried to make friends with the squid, it likes you now and has swum down to the bottom of the lake for a rest after all the excitement" you could update that out of cycle since it shouldn't prompt any rping, but it might be easier for you to do it with everything else.
I feel like the point someone else made about making sure people testing feel that they can do the quests is valid, but easily managed by crossposting the new quests to the quest board and having them in the tdm post, too. exactly the same content in both places!
"DETAILS" DROP-DOWNS TO HELP NAVIGATING LOGS: Love them, I tag from my phone sporadically and it's a big help not having to scroll through 100% of the text and there's not so many sections that clicking the headings when I need to do a search is an issue at all.
I really like the OOC chatter threads! It's nice being able to put things up for everyone to see, not just the people I have on plurk.
even if what I'm talking about is just a pet mushroom theoryif we get a complete FAQ with all the questions and answers on them, this isn't super needed, but it might be nice to have a link in the event log question thread to the plotting post question thread (or potentially not have a question thread in the log, and only have it in the plotting post, and post a "FULL PEREMPTORY FAQ" in response to the initial thread when it goes up?) just with this month in particular I found I was looking between the two quite a bit.
Really having just so much fun with the game, you're doing such a great job and all the work you do is appreciated! I sincerely don't think you need to put pressure on yourselves to do better finding the time to do the nice to have things, you have absolutely all my patience, particularly when I'm asking 15 questions at once. (And please always feel free to say "we will answer X and Y a bit later, but here's the rest" if that would ever be better for y'all)
also, the note on tighnari's app acceptance about "his tail arrives pristine, and will remain unnerfed" made my day. little details like that show the fun y'all are having too and I'm so glad.
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tldr to me it seemed like the spirit of the Velvet Claw prompts was easy numis + reputation, along with added flavor for us to use in our prompts during off-event months, so I'm just hesitant about seeing it become something bigger! There's already so much happening in the game!
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With the event plots "news" section it would be largely about having a centralised place to look for those resolutions! Since at the moment it's like "oh was that said on the next tdm event, or on the answers of the event questions, oh no maybe it was on the state of the game" etc. So it could be done with the state of the game, but just located in one spot.
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The Velvet Claw stuff, I don't have a super strong opinion? If it stays the same as what it already is (updating with new quests at the same time events are posted every month), then there's no reason it has to be in a different spot. Like it could be cool to have ongoing quests (e.g. helping the blind) and closed quests with results posted under (e.g. "The Augmented found plenty of food for the summer solstice festival, gaining reputation with the middle class Karterians"), with a link to the board on every event post so it's easy to find. It's also not super necessary, though? I'm fine with whatever you guys prefer.
The drop downs have helped a ton! There's a lot to absorb, but the drop downs/summaries/bolded parts definitely help me. Usually when the event post goes up, I skim the whole thing to get the broad vibe, then go back through and start opening drop downs. I'm also one of those people who rps on mobile a lot, and now the page doesn't scroll for miles, which is much better just in terms of general usability.
I even wonder if some of the same things could be done elsewhere, if it's not too much extra work? Like having a summary at the end of long FAQ responses, or bolded important words/phrases? I know I've spent time going back through, looking for some specific thing I KNOW I saw answered so I don't want to ask it again, only to realize I've scrolled past it more than once because more than one question was answered in a single reply. Though, that might also be alleviated with the searchable FAQ doc too, so idk, just a thought.
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Do take a look at the doc jay has made here, which links each faq response with a short summary in different topic categories. I'm planning on doing a more
ridiculousthorough version building on it. But that might take me a bit to get around to and this is very helpful for the moment.no subject
regarding your velvet claw question: i actually like having them integrated with the main event post very much and would prefer this over a dedicated quest page. maybe you all could run a poll to see what the playerbase in general prefers?