1 I'm proud to say that I understood what "Peccavi" meant.

2 That's because you're a military history fanatic. (As am I. I got the reference, too.)

3 Pixy, did you receive the email I sent you? I need some help.

4 Steven - yep, sorry, had some major system blowing-uppage at work yesterday and got a bit distracted.

1

Sometimes when this kind of thing happens I find myself hating the hacks. But other times, and this is one of them, I find myself feeling a bit of admiration.

It's like that plague in WOW. That was genuinely awesome.

2 I don't know why people call this "XSS" when there is no other site involved. There's only a failure to escape the content.

3 Good point Pete.  Corrected.

1 I lost a lot of brain cells scanning through an angst-fest.

2 I tried to be witty.  

3 How many tiles you need? I've got a hundred or so non-appraised ones...

4 I'm good for tiles for the moment.  PW and MJ really eat through your stocks of goodies though.

5 Tell me about it. Took me forever to get my steel set.

Have you been told of the taco-farming technique yet?

6 I know of Taco Tuesday, but nothing more.

7 Spent a couple of days running and shooting in the blazing sun (downed 3 liters of water each day), and 4 days to drive to location and back. Got a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVZdP9lpCNU

8 If you know you're going to be spending the next day farming tacos, set your filler themes. Effectively increases your drop rate by a good bit, 50% to double. Current consensus is that this happens because there is a hidden bonus to the taco drop rate depending on which month it is (and probably whether it contains T, A, C, or O in the name), and the filler themes activate every month at once. So you get the bonuses for every month... at once. ;p I'd been running low, now I'm up to 400 or so. Don't know if it works exactly as advertised, but it works. (Ordinarily you don't run your filler themes because of the NASTY penalty to stamina - 150 stamina lost for running all three, and you could have gained up to 70 if they'd been set to other things.) Apparently this was found out by someone who had set filler themes to get access to sugary candy (they were trying to get a Hat of Sakurya) and ended up farming tacos on a Tuesday. Go fig... Just leveling up here; need another 10 base levels in each stat or so before I feel confident of taking on the end of Pizzawitch, hard mode. That 40d45s/4stat check...

9 I swear that had line breaks in it when I typed it!

10 So Tuesdays in October will be a good time for TACOs.

I swear that had line breaks in it when I typed it!

But I eated them.

And yeah, 40d45 is a leetle high.  I was running PW at 33 crank, but that trick won't work for a quest.

11 I was running PW at 33 crank, but that trick won't work for a quest.

I couldn't get the first three Wasteland companions (Jaws, Palmface, Venus) when I was running a 3 crank, and you're doing PW at 33?  Either you've got every bonus known to Ninja, or I just suck at BvS.

12 Or I'm playing Legacy and using Flying Thunder God Technique and doing PW   r e a l l y   s l o w l y . . .

13 So you're aiming to finish PW sometime around the heat death of the universe, eh?

14 Around that time, yep.

15 Eh. You only have to do 50 PW missions, and of those, you need a drop from four of them (the basic-level gear) and an ally level-up from two (Su-chan 2 and Lulu 2). Then you get access to a few more missions, of which you get a new ally from one (Blondie) and a level-up from one (Robogirl lvl 3).

And that's it. When that's done you're done with regular PW missions for the season. And the gear and 50 PW mission count loops, so in future seasons you need nothing but the ally level-ups and Blondie.

You need to do plenty of other stuff to finish PW, even in easy mode, but it's all other stuff besides PW missions. (Notably, you need to have a Lab Coat in your inventory, sacrifice a Polar Star, and spend a Lost Weapon, and not one of the easy ones, to build a Digital Keychain.) You get a neat ally (Cipher's +50 appetite bonus will earn him a permanent spot in your dayroll team), a good item (the PizzaWitch Cape gives a 20% AP bonus, as well as +1 level), and you can easily go on to get the Shift to Drift bloodline (+10 Edge on normal missions) and you're a really hard Ride way from getting the Hikari Overworld theme song (+5 Edge on normal missions).

The Edge is an amazing bonus for a high-level player, because the game rolls separately for -every level you have-; your total Edge is the percent chance that you'll get a bonus level each time. An extra 10-15 levels (effectively) means you can run your crank quite a bit higher...

The bonuses for beating it in hard mode are quite good too, of course, but the "hard" part is a LOT harder. Can't cheese it with FTGT, you've just got to be one bad mutha.

16 Yeah, I know.  I was just having fun running it at max crank (33, now 35).

1 Who knew starch was good for packets?

-j

2 I think what bothers me most about this is learning that you have shirts which require ironing. You call yourself a nerd, and wear clothes like that?

3 So I hear you needs yourself some wooden tiles, eh?  I have 21 not doing anything...

4 Steven - I need pockets, man.  Where else am I going to keep all my minor digital widgetry?  And any good shirt with pockets needs ironing.

Wonderduck - unfortunately, you can't trade tiles after they've been appraised.  Still, one more day of Wasteland farming should do the trick.

Keep all those spares, because once you start Pizza Witch you'll need them!

5 Pixy, if you wear a plastic pocket-protector in your shirt, then we'll forgive you and readmit you to Geeks International.

6 Pixy, something's wrong with the server intermittently this evening. Earlier when I tried to load my own site I got an HTTP 500 error after a long wait.

7 Yes, it was running very slow for a while.  I had to restart the Minx back-end (which has been up since April).

8 Fixed it some more just now - it looks like theres a new virus or worm doing the rounds, and it's spamming our servers with requests.  I've identified them and blocked them for now.

1 Sounds like it's got some interesting concepts, but it's also open to some outright griefing.

It's also difficult to reconcile the paradox system with gradual advancement. Sure, you can work like a beaver, getting various tickets and gaining access to more/better cards and pieces... or maybe you can just time-loop stuff irrationally, create as many paradoxes as possible, and wait for the Big Shiny events to occur. You're not really trying to play the normal part of the game, so negative events that get in the way don't bother you much there... and since you point out the design philosophy of BvS ("you never lose more than a day or two of progress"), it's unlikely that Big Shiny will be counterbalanced by Big Stinky. And if it's doing odd things to the game world, eh, so much the better...

Now multiply that by dozens of players. Suddenly the odd events you envision are CONSTANTLY going off. Players will be lucky to get from Town A to Town B without having one or the other warp across the game world while they're in mid-transit.

Trying to put together beneficial combos will be of limited utility, especially at the world level; the higher chance that it's useful, the higher chance that some high-level player will play a random crappy Foul just to knock the interesting stuff off the map.

It sounds like the sort of game I wouldn't mind sitting down and playing as a board game, but playing it with random internet asshats? Griefproofing it would be awful hard.

2 Your points are well-taken, but I probably need to clarify a couple of things here.

Just as there are three levels of play, there are three sets of cards.  Each player has a deck that they build up over time, each city has its own deck, and the world at large has a deck.

Normally, each deck can only have one of each card; I'm considering allowing trading of duplicates, but you won't be able to put found (as opposed to time-looped) duplicates into play.

Now, the normal run-of-the-mill player cards only affect you personally.  City cards affect the city, but there's only one of each card per city, so they're a lot harder to come by.

And there's only one of each world card for the entire world, so getting your hands on a full hand of world cards is really, really hard.  Well, supposed to be, anyway.

So it takes a lot of effort to manipulate the world as a whole, and one you've done it, the hand you used to do it is discarded and you have to cycle through all the remaining cards in your deck, reshuffle, and then try to draw another such hand before you can try again.  And the more players active at that level, the scarcer world cards become, and the more wheeling-and-dealing you need to do to actually assemble a workable hand.

Also, it's intended that the world cards have a greater impact on higher-level play.  A World Foul that switches the season (for example) from Summer to Winter might only give Book 1 players a +1 Turn penalty for travel and leave them otherwise unaffected; Book 2 players (the ones running cities) find themselves suddenly facing a whole different set of production bonuses and penalties; and Book 3 players find all their Fire cards at half effect and their Frost cards doubled.

Another thing is that to play a successful foil or foul, you have to beat the opponent's hand.  So you actually have to have a strong hand to even attempt it; if you lose, your end up foiled yourself, or in the case of a foul, your hand gets forcibly discarded.  There are ways to exploit that too - if you have a bad hand (deliberately or through random chance) and fail a foil, the penalty can actually improve your hand, but which cards and how many are affected is random, so you takes your chances.

And the other other thing is that time travel is also accomplished through cards - you need Clock, Time, or Eternity cards (depending on the scope of the action you're attempting) to do it - and the cards are discarded after use and can't be used again until you've run through your entire deck and reshuffled.

Overall you're quite right though; balance and gameplay are my main focus at this stage of the design.  I definitely want to have a meta-game going on, but we can't have it messing up the regular game too much.

1 No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in...

1 ...in your copious spare time, eh?

2 Exactly.

Well, it's something to do when I'm too tired to work and too stressed out to sleep.

3 Any chance of a look at the draft design for Cities? I'm especially intrigued by the go...

4 I can certainly post some more details.

The mid-game (what I called Book 2 above) is largely involved with forming contiguous territories on the world map - and preventing other groups of players from doing the same.  That's where the similarity to Go comes in.

However (a) it's played on a hex grid that actually expands over the course of the game, (b) the largest territory any single player can build by themselves is only three tiles, so it's all about co-operation, (c) you need the players in Book 1 (the Mornington Crescent part) to provide you with the potential to make any moves, (d) the players in Book 3 (the Contract Bridge part) can change the nature of the lower game levels from one day to the next, (e) there are computer players coming in from the six sides of the map to mess things up, and (f) there's time travel involved.

So it's not exactly like Go.

5 If you're even half serious about this, sign me up for the beta.

6 My motto here is Not beta, just broken.  We're going to launch straight into the game, and if anything goes wrong, I'll blame it on those rascally Book 3 players.

Soon as I find a decent graph database to run the transit network.