Metroplexity

I figured it's been a bit about a month since we've had a podcast. As usual, I'll leave this thread open until it reaches a critical mass of questions, then bundle them up into a delightful podcast.

Let the questions… begin!

Cheers!
Kinak

Haha, I actually wrote some down this time when last I thought of them.

Are any items in the game based on real-world counterparts, besides the festive knit hat?

Do you have a favorite item or skill in the game, and have they been discovered?

Would you ever consider an expensive full-gang donation item so Argeth can finally be persuaded to join the Hounds? ;)

What's the word on cybernetics? Any chance that will be implemented along with the next leg of the main story quest?

-Glass

Any chance we could get a vague hint for some random thing we haven't discovered yet? :D

Feel like telling us what the most popular IotM is so far? I'm curious as to what people are finding the most interesting/useful.

It sure seems like there's some things to be done with Stolen Artistry and the resulting items that we haven't figured out yet, but are there still more art subjects that we haven't discovered?

Will there be any more people with beards showing up in the game? There's Professor Evans and… I think maybe the Eurasian guy in the VIP room. It's a little hard to tell with his hands in front of his face. Even the bums are clean shaven! (Although the friendly one looks like he's got a bit of stubble.)

And by the way, I received my Third Eye shirt. Very nice. Now I just need some Eclipse to go with it!

Bah Vholes! BAH!

On the usual theme of 'so… are you gonna at least give us a fraggin' CLUE??', we've pretty much turned up dead on the various theories on the Candy Bowl… any clues that could help us solve the mystery before this Halloween?

I'm about to break 1k for Curiousities (Tomorrow's Roll. Broke 1k for drugs a few days ago), and I'm more or less not expecting anything, but it brings up the 'Are there any in game 'trophy' range numbers we should be looking for?' question. Not avatars, which I suppose are the closest thing to trophies this game has, but more directly 'this unlocks Y during your current run' (like the Happy Dragon chinese restaurant food substitute ad for TV usage… although not really a 'meet a goal' type thing)

We found the Gym, but there still seems to be a slight lean to the Gun Slingers, what with the advanced range. Is there an advanced gym we just haven't parsed out yet?

How goes work on the Survivors? Are we being good on not suggesting things? Be honest. Name names. We'll even buy pitchforks and torches for the angry mob from the supplier you suggest.

Slightly odd question: We never really DO anything with Amundsen's ruined office. Not searching the rubble, no hunting for additional clues at a perception limit, no eye drawing reaction to eclipse, and her room stays damaged and third eye marked even when finishing up with the main quest. I can understand nobody else coming to check on it because they don't want the order giver to know Amundsen is out (Although when they hear about the murder of the generals/Hawk giving them up they should know something's up anyway), but.. umm.. there's nothing out of the ordinary? Nothing worth collecting? Nothing unusual that must've been looted by the third eye and can drop since we recognize the void in the sun damage on a book/the familiar shape of the <item> case/package wrapper/anything? Or is the suspicious normalcy just supposed to be plot progression and nothing else? Or possibly even, we'll stake it out for other people looking for clues on 'meddling' for the survivor's quest? Or what?

This might be an odder question… It's been parsed out that people cannot really survive/endure in a completely urban sprawl environment. We enjoy small plants, the 'fresher' air, trees, etc. Southside park looks like an urban center's mostly trash and scraggly green-thing laden park. Uptown probably has real/more realistic plant like things. I suppose the question is just what's keeping the pollution levels down in Metro? The sheer availability of production areas (Various supply shipments around town you redirect with hacking, the metal/flesh/gunworking the smuggler gets done), the limits on water vegetation (The Docks don't fish up seaweed, but the Slags do… which may be connected to the slags poison), the prevelance of 'pollution worn' buildings (mostly southside, hard to tell if slags buildings were broken by the event or otherwise)… I mean, how are we not choking on smog on a daily basis? Or is everyone else choking on it and we're not noticing it? Or what?

Mild suggestive things have been removed, so I'll wait until the Survivor's quest for actual suggestion thread spawning.

Questions abound! (I too wrote down questions to ask later.)

How many flags can each player have? How are they stored?

Why no message for losing items/credits like there is for gaining them?

Does all energy gained from food come in integer ranges? Or does anything give 9-10.1 energy, meaning 90% of the time the max is 10, but 10% of the time it's 11 (like in KoL)?

The gang chat channel seems to be ID #5 - are there four other chat channels?

We can figure out opponents' Perception, Will and Reflexes now. Is a technique that can be used to spade Strength in the works?

(((Not a question

The prevalence of air pollution is brought up several times. I imagine it lowers life expectancy considerably in the poorer / more polluted areas, i.e. the ones we can actually reach.

This is not unheard of, either:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog]

)))))

Why does anyone ever want to learn an eleventh Punch technique aaarrrgh

With regard to Dr. Johnson would you be willing to tell us if there is anything we can do directly to solve him, or if he is like Stone was where we were missing a key part of the puzzle to BE ABLE to solve him?

Or if you aren't willing… is there, in general(not necessarily related to Johnson), a zone in particular that you feel is under-spaded, or is the community hasn't found something important in?

Actual knowledge is great, but in some ways awareness of your ignorance is even more important. If you don't realize that there are things you don't know, how will you be motivated to investigate them? Hints on anything are always appreciated, but all I'm asking for is a sense of the depths of our ignorance about things. I mean, some time soon (right—soon?) there will be a massive new chunk of content for us not to know things about, so we had better try to get existing mysteries sorted out in the meantime.

I remember not too long ago you made a comment about balancing that surprised me. I tried searching your forum posts for this but couldn't find it, so it must have been on a recent podcast. The gist of it was that somebody had asked you about balancing melee vs. ranged or something like that and you said it'd be weird to put in balancing fixes based on our incomplete understanding of the relevant mechanics. In other words, it sounds like there are still major mechanical things we don't know, significant enough to have a big impact on in-run combat strategy. Is that right? Or is it more along the lines of an extremely useful early-game technique we haven't found yet?

Now that we're coming up on Year Two for unearthly items, this is a good occasion to take stock of what we do and don't know about the inaugural year's offerings.

Starting with one coin items, we've got:

• The prototype coat - Thoroughly spaded?
• Urban Legends, Vol. 1 - There's almost certainly something more to the Dark Specter and its drops. Anything else?
• festive knit hat - Other than the precise mechanism governing the bonus XP, seems like we've got this one figured out, although it might get a buff …
• hungry ooze - You've said there's more to know about this one. Maybe we can hatch the egg?
• Extreme Tackle Box - The mechanism behind determining how many and what kind of items you get from it could use some work, and there's certainly lots we need to learn still about fishing, but otherwise it looks like we've found what there is to find in the tackle box itself. No?

Oh, before I get to the two coin items, a fishing question. There are several different ways to increase your chance of surface fishing, but as far as I can tell all that does is get you more soaked newspapers and the like. I guess it could be helpful as a spading tool to figure out what kinds of things are deep fishing-only. Is there some other advantage to surface fishing we're not seeing yet, or is it just in there because, well, if you can increase the chance of deep fishing it only stands to reason you could do the opposite?

On to the two coin items:

• mysterious puzzle box - IIRC you said there was only one more very minor thing to be found here, but with the new powder pouring system there's probably some more. The mysterious ash is, well, still mysterious. How big of a mystery is it?
• red-lensed goggles - Dare I say that it looks like we've found what there is to find out about these?
• crystalline flame - You've said there's still an unfound technique. Are we missing something big with all the messages you can get, or is the reward for finding those narrative satisfaction?
• elegantly torn pants - Apparently there's some "kind of interaction" with these that we'd find easily if we knew to look for it. And it's not just limited to this item, right? Anything else going on here that we haven't found?
• feathered cloak - I'm almost positive there's still some major chunk of content we haven't found here. The ability to use the cloak and see what your chain state is helped a lot, but now that we've tried what look like all possible chains, I'm stumped as to what to try now.
• Midgard Player - Well, this one is pretty new, and the fact that you can make up a chart and the do some brute-force spading by filling it in is kind of nice, actually. Once we find Suspicious Seed, though, it looks like we'll have pretty much reached the limits of where brute force can take us. There are almost certainly some more effects to be found. I mean, the advanced "seed" effects say "seed". And a seed can't be the final tier, amirite? How much more is there still lurking around with this item?

Oh, yeah, what was the method you had intended to have us use to get rid of the "gummy" message from massive tentacle-derived sushi before you decided to let us outsource some of our chewing to a ghoul maw?

And with that I'm pretty sure we have enough questions :)

Edit: ON AIR

Cheers!
Kinak