Metroplexity

Hey, everyone! Despite sickness, getting better for twelve hours, and re-sickness, I seem to be back to my old self again. As such, it's probably about time for the next podcast questions thread.

As usual, I'll close this thread off when we've reached a critical mass of questions and answer them in podcast form.

To pre-answer a question, the Survivors' Quest is looking more like mid-march now. That still depends a lot on me not screwing up the schedule, but I just straight lost two weeks being sick.

Cheers!
Kinak

Do you have upper limits in mind for things like melee/ranged/etc. power and defense? Or will things just keep on scaling up linearly as more powerful opponents and zones become available?

Are you planning on releasing any bits of new content before the big Survivor's Quest rollout?

From what I can tell of the story, we're pretty much sitting at Early Phase, or possibly even Mid Phase (We're still in the Rising Action of the story), how many more solid 'chunks' of story can we assume are still coming? (The Survivors Quest answering a lot of questions seems like it may be an Action phase, or possibly simply a narrative bridge from the rising action.)

Do some of these bizarre metalshop shows on TV give inspiration on upcoming metallic foes?

Can we expect more answers on the Etheric Sciences front?

You made a minor mention of a pet system at some early point (I think it was 'you don't want something that's a rip off of Familiars' or such), given the moderate toxicity of food in the cheaper parts of town, what kind of pets might we expect (if any)?

Speaking of TV, can we maybe finally buy Cable? Or Satellite?

The Drone Signatures appear to have been cracked! …Have we found everything relating to those?

We seem to be boiling down to a small dedicated player crowd. Should we try advertising, print out business cards, or are we still waiting until the game is closer to done?

Does the system get alerted with each tool you use during net combats? Does the alert grow in proportion to the intensity of the tool used?

Yay, podcast and healty Kinak.

-Will the storyline become more personal? Currently, it's you doing stuff for others, not really for yourself. And most of the memories of and info about ourself that you can find are not (integral) parts of the main quests. The Hammer making it very clear you are a nigh immortal freak is one of the few exceptions. I'm not complaining, love all the hidden (and unearthed) tidbits of the puzzle that is our past, just wondering if the storyline will be about our character more, other than us driving it forward as catalyst.

-Do enemies now have a "has pants" checkbox due to the elegantly torn pants?

-Inject venom, while cool, seems a little bit… underwhelming considering that you can only make them quite late in the game when many fights are getting tougher. It does its damage after all the other actions (like dynamite, but that one you get early when you have less choices), so in order for it to be really worth using you will need to last more than at least two rounds of combat, which can be difficult at that point, especially with a technique that acts at the end only. Sure, ~15 damage each round extra is nice, but a tech that deals more damage once and immediately is probably preferable and beneficial to your survival & victory nearly always, because (one of) the opponent(s) will be out of the fight quicker, which means one less source of damage for you. Of course, future content might completely change this. Does it maybe weaken the poisoned opponent behind the scenes or something else?

-Was the previous question too long and/or whiny?

-The Sell-button of the Ad-Spider makes me anxious. I do not want to press it, because I only have one Ad-Spider and getting it was not an easy matter. I'm greatly afraid of a misclick (it's so near my Blackthorn and the top where a lot of clicking happens) that will make me very sad. Is this mental torment on purpose? ;)

-(m)any mysteries in the game that we're not even aware of being a mystery? Unknown unknowns, so to speak. :)

-Not sure if that was asked before, but can we get different housing in the future?

-Want to give us maybe like a one word teaser of upcoming content in the survivors quest?

-How are you doing?

Glad you're feeling better. Can't wait until mid March!

Question(s):

Is the breakpoint where crystal strike start doing more damage (when you can "overwhelm them with Etheric Power") based on some pre-existing monster attribute, or did you go through and assign a new attribute for everyone? It doesn't seem to correspond to the opponent's etheric power or defense.

Any subtle hints on how to find the missing stuff for the puzzle box, crystal flame, or torn pants?

Are there any factors other than you and your opponents Reflexes in determining the chance to run away? (Except for obvious things like when the ghostly hands hold on to me.)

Do you type

Cheers!
Kinak

every time you post a message or just have a "insert signature" button on your keyboard?

Sup.

-Does it surprise you that no-one has found the undiscovered avatar(s)?

-So when people use /me (or /em whatever) in chat, it's pretty hard to tell as just removing the colon is kinda hard to see. Maybe the names could not be underlined or something to make it more obvious? I know it's minor as all hell but I get all confused when it looks like people are asking questions without a question mark and terrible grammar or something >.>

-In other less trivial news, your game is awesome and I'm sad because my internet is too slow and broken at the moment to play at any reasonable…pace. Also sad is that I couldn't think of a better word than pace to end that sentance with. With which to end that sentance.

-Regarding the Mad scientist avatar; is it possible to do whatever needs to be done to get it and then still not get it due to being unlucky? And never get it if very unlucky? I ask this solely for the benefit of other people because I am concerned and kindhearted person, who has no reason to ask this on his own behalf…

… not anymore now anyway. ;)

I'll probably be podcasting tomorrow, so if there's anything else folks are wondering about, consider this your last call :)

Cheers!
Kinak

Any chance of Etheric hacking encounters? Seems like all sorts of amusing things could happen, although it probably wouldn't be very conducive to actually hacking effectively.

You've said that you don't want to let people perm skills while the game isn't finished so they don't get a head start while things are shorter, which I agree with. But what about, er, temporarily perming (I wish I could think of a better way to put that) skills, and tying it to the leaderboard resets when new stages of the quest come out? So when the leaderboard resets people would lose any non-donation permed skills that they have. It seems like the code for having permanent skills is in place, and people would get to start testing interactions between skills earlier, rather than it all happening at once. (This comes to mind because I really want to find out what happens when you have both Ocean Eyes and Fae Eyes.)

So, high-level hacking is still very difficult, and the new enemy in the lab is made more difficult by the even more limited resources you have to fight him with(since it does not seem possible to get there without the slags ID equipped).

Are there some optimal hacking tricks that we don't have figured out yet? Some uber powerful code we haven't found that doesn't have as many weak and status skills in them? Or is hacking supposed to be brutally tough to get to high levels of security, such that it takes a good deal of luck to be able to do so at all? Or is it just that it's balanced for the survivor's quest content, and we don't have access to the "great" abilities and equipment yet?

It'd be fine if it were possible to buff for a big hack but at the moment the only basic way is ancestral code, since fractal understand require the goggles, and the blue eyedrops require you to hack a high level site to get in the first place, and not get booted by an alert while trying to clear it.

Have you ever accidentally put an encounter or something in the Midgard Laboratory instead of Midgard Biotech (or vice-versa) because you momentarily forgot which one was inside The Slags and which one was Outside the Slags?

I know at some point one of these had the name changed already, and that changing the name again would require a lot of global changes and clean-up wiki-wise, and presumably also in the actual game code. Still, it may be worth it. It sure would be nice if at least one of these locations had a name that made it obvious at a glance where it was.

I've taken the liberty of brainstorming a few names for the place inside The Slags. Maybe they're too cheesy and cliche, but FWIW how about:

• Slags Prime
• Slags Omega
• Ground Zero Monitoring Station
• Hostile Enivronment Training Center
• Research Station 13
• Jotunheim

/em lights "ON AIR" sign.

Cheers!
Kinak