1 Day Run Completed

Summary:

Wyrd and I had been planning to do one of these just before the food nerf halted our machinations. Now I just did one spontaneously with the help of Valera and Zelandoni.

Mall Run Completed

Vholes 10 Aug 2009 05:14

Now that your Docks supply of luxury food doesn't give you a silver spoon train to the University and mall access on day 1 (a service now only provided by a too-hard-to-recover-from banquet of ancient candybars and cups of Joe), 1-day runs are very hard to plan for. Today, when a lucky Fang hideout let me get to the university using only 1 hunger on an ancient candybar, I realized that a 1-dayer was possible.

Enlisting the help of the most active people in the chat (Valera and Zelandoni, both of clan Ø), we managed to plan out and successfully complete a run begun and ended on the same day, all the way from talking to Mikhail to rescuing Hel. In all, they used the mall to give/lend me:

• 3 bunches of grapes and 2 helpings of cut Nova
• a gas grenade, Third Eye shirt, and electrical kit for the abandoned building
• a reinforced surgical mask, retro assault rifle and reactive pants for all-around combat usefulness
• 4 sticks of dynamite, for opening the boiler room and for blowing up the crates on the 3rd floor
• a scrubs top, scrubs bottoms, and Slags cheatsheets to get the medical ID to get into the slags (the last one we actually forgot, which cost me an additional energy since I ended up having to skip 5 choice encounters in the biotech)
• a containment helmet, containment suit top, and containment suit pants for Hel
• a personal focus and an Eclipse sapphire to boost the 5th floor Eclipse pill to (an unneccessary but comforting) 9 energy instead of 5.
• 30 Omnitech trauma bandages (of which I used perhaps 15)
• (self-supplied: prototype coat, unearthly coin, and a mysterious puzzle box that failed to do anything I wanted it to)

Like I said, I didn't plan on this being a 1-dayer, and so didn't record the first part. I used my prototype coat to give me confused loner in the park, sped my way through Carlos, blackmailing, sewer-fairying, and an aggressive hideout (I had an Autodoc from the smuggler, and was brave enough to challenge the enforcer duo).

By the time I got mall access, I had 0 energy, 9 hunger, and 9 body. I had used 1 ancient candybar to get to the University, and taken 1 Eclipse to find the sewer fairy.

Taking 3 bunches of grapes and 2 helpings of cut Nova gave me 54 energy total, and left me with 0 hunger and 1 body. Here is the run as it proceeded from there:

Abandoned Building:
gassed trio x1
bribed trio x1
bum x1
thug x2
replace x1
bum x1
electrocute x1
killed by Shard x1 (they drew phenomenal hands and killed me first round, though I took out Shard with me)

Asylum:
thug x2
got journal x1
thug x1
sorcerer x1
whispering door x1
sorcerer x1 (oops, should have read journal)
read journal x1
thug x1
got key x1
got creamed by Saber x1

Biotech:
(with scrubs top and bottom on)
change subject x1
skip test x1 and miscellany x6 = 1 energy total (damn cheatsheets, easily remedied but lost me 1 energy)
took test x1

First Floor:
(unreasonably long, compared to my tests on the damaged building discussion page. Perhaps it's an 'encounter counter' not a kill counter?)
drone hound x1
spider drone x1
drone hound x1
spider drone x1
writher x1
spider drone x1
drone hound x1
stairs x1

Third Floor:
blew up crates x1
scientist x1
filtered rain x1
stairs x1

(Somewhere around here Kinak came into chat and discovered what we were doing. Apparently there had been an impromptu rollover that gave everyone energy and logged some people out, which fortunately had not happened to me.)

Fourth Floor:
hound x1
(ignore dying man)
scientist x1
bury the corpse x1
hound x1
scientist x1
stairs x1

Fifth Floor:
(took +duration'd Eclipse for 9 etheric; equipped containment top and pants)
eye x1
high road x1
stairs x1

Sixth Floor:
gave suit to Hel x1

I had 10 energy to spare, which I used to open 9 crates of Eclipse and take a well deserved nap in the Biotech locker room. Attempting to reset got me nothing but this rather disappointing message:

Sorry, you already reset today.

Thank you once again, Valera and Zelandoni!

---

In the beginning, men were mortal.

Last edited on 10 Aug 2009 19:17 by Vholes Show more

Re: 1 Day Run Completed

Kinak 10 Aug 2009 05:24

Congrats! :)

And sorry about the "rather disappointing message." If you'd like, I could liven it up. Maybe:

It's dark in the beta reset, you might be eaten by a grue.
You should probably wait until the sun comes out tomorrow.

Thread Jack
Feel free to start a dialogue about whether you'd rather I plan around stuff like this or restrict Mall access until the end of runs. My only real input is that the latter will make the eventual gift system (which will have a restriction like that) easier to implement and cut off inevitable complaints when someone "snipes" an item that's being laundered this way.

Oh, and "make reset filled with options" is definitely in the plans. It's just tied into how the actual final equivalent works, so I'd really rather not have to do all the work twice and invariably get chewed out by the people that liked it the old way, even if it's terrible. Just sayin' :)

Cheers!
Kinak

P.S.: I really need to work on Survivors' Quest stuff, so this isn't a threat of an imminent nerf or anything. That's actually why I put in that message, so I wouldn't need to come down with the hammer the moment someone threatened a one day run.

P.P.S.: Ooo, or a haiku!

You are really fast
But one day makes Kinak frown
Come back tomorrow

Okay, I'm done now… seriously… getting back to work…

Last edited on 10 Aug 2009 05:35 by Kinak Show more

Re: 1 Day Run Completed

Vholes 10 Aug 2009 05:37

If name =/= "PaidPiedPiperPal" & =/= "Vholes"

You can't reset today already, your name's not Vholes!

If name = "Vholes"

You can't reset today already, you stole that dude's name!

If name = "PaidPiedPiperPal"

Smartass. Get back to where you belong, spader.

:P

---

In the beginning, men were mortal.

Re: 1 Day Run Completed

TheWyrd 10 Aug 2009 11:04

Grats, Vholes!

It's a good thing that disappointing message was there (I somewhat know how you feel, not getting gunslinger with my pugilism) so all the people who like resetting do need to murder you because you made Kinak remove resetting. Kinak-hammer bad. :)

and was brave enough to challenge the enforcer duo.

I am glad my melee runs have been an inspiring example for your courage. ;)

Re: Threadjack

My only real input is that the latter will make the eventual gift system (which will have a restriction like that) easier to implement and cut off inevitable complaints when someone "snipes" an item that's being laundered this way.

Are you happy with mall items being laundered this way?
I feel you should absolutely be able to order stuff from the Net in the future as soon as you get Net access, but this is like using Ebay during some kind of survival hiking challenge to instantaneously order an SUV and running over the other contestants.

A delay with mall transactions (Delivery through gangwar-torn areas takes time) could work, but is annoying to everyone, especially if it's long enough to really hinder 1-day runs.
Minimum sales prices could also put a dent into mall rat runs, though possibly some ancient coins and gold foil could be laundered to the runner at min price, who then sells those and uses the credit to buy more laundry.
A mall-bought item delivery delay only for those who have not rescued Hel might work. Renegades activity blocking the delivery route, coincidentally gone at the same time as Hel is freed.

Threadjack 2
Will the gift system include a trade system? So one can make deals and not have to go through the mall to make it happen. Especially handy if you're trading items instead of an item for credit.

Re: 1 Day Run Completed

Kinak 10 Aug 2009 15:58

Are you happy with mall items being laundered this way?

Enh. If I were a player, I'd be more pissed off than I am as a designer. It's a lot of extra work and clicky-click to keep up with the Joneses.

On the other hand, I'm okay with folks buying things at actual market values in-run. Which was the idea of allowing the Mall in-run, but there are some factors I completely didn't account for (which, Vholes, coincidently, is just scratching the surface of).

Having the Mall in-run was an experiment. The end result of the experiment (even ignoring this run, I've been meaning to have this conversation for a while) is that it can work, it just demands some serious design changes for all content after availability.

So what I'm basically asking is "do folks want things designed going forward assuming they're getting gobs of items and credits through the mall or not have a mall in-run?"

I feel you should absolutely be able to order stuff from the Net in the future as soon as you get Net access, but this is like using Ebay during some kind of survival hiking challenge to instantaneously order an SUV and running over the other contestants.

The Net will eventually have a fair number of NPC shops. It's just that we don't have the need/content for most of them yet. The Net's long-term main purpose is not shopping, though.

Minimum sales prices could also put a dent into mall rat runs, though possibly some ancient coins and gold foil could be laundered to the runner at min price, who then sells those and uses the credit to buy more laundry.

Minimum prices aren't off the table by any means, but can be subverted so easily I'd just be adding clicks and taking cheap items off the market.

A delay with mall transactions (Delivery through gangwar-torn areas takes time) could work, but is annoying to everyone, especially if it's long enough to really hinder 1-day runs.

I could make deliveries appear the next day, but it'd take a large rewrite of the Mall code and the reset code (to catch deliveries that hadn't made it yet). And, as you said, is really just annoying.

Nothing that's real-life-time based will work, though, other than hooking into the existing daily cycle. Which is fine, really. Don't want to bring real life into it more than we have to.

That said, a delay would really just shift the point of "having to design assuming you have access to every tradable item" forward however long it's delayed. So day two if we're delaying one day. I'm not sure that buys us enough difference to really worry about.

An option that might work, related to this, is having a limited number of transactions on OmniMall per day (increasing daily or lifted when you complete the run). I don't honestly think it'd restrict things enough to matter, but figured I might as well think out loud.

Will the gift system include a trade system? So one can make deals and not have to go through the mall to make it happen. Especially handy if you're trading items instead of an item for credit.

Probably not, to be honest. I've never found trade systems like that to be worth the amount of work involved.

Cheers!
Kinak

Re: 1 Day Run Completed

Vholes 10 Aug 2009 19:17

Oh man, I completely forgot I was going to call it by Wyrd's name, a "mall rat run".

This was an exceedingly exploitative run. I'm rather surprised that you call this "scratching the surface", since I did absolutely everything possible to reduce turncount. In a less crazy run, I suppose you could sell something to a friend for an inflated price so you could buy the guard's full containment suit and miscellaneous mall stuff, but I'm not sure how to abuse the mall worse than I just did. :P

Restricting daily transactions is just irritating to everyone who wants to use the mall for its basic purpose.

Assuming nothing else changes, a trade system will become more and more necessary. As the game gets more active players, there's an increased chance that your item will be snatched up from the mall before your intended buyer can get to it. Since you are restricted in what buy orders you can put up, this is a bit of a problem.

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In the beginning, men were mortal.

Re: 1 Day Run Completed

Kinak 10 Aug 2009 22:05

Restricting daily transactions is just irritating to everyone who wants to use the mall for its basic purpose.

Agreed. I also doubt it'd really solve the problem, just make it a slightly more interesting problem. Just thinking out loud.

Assuming nothing else changes, a trade system will become more and more necessary. As the game gets more active players, there's an increased chance that your item will be snatched up from the mall before your intended buyer can get to it. Since you are restricted in what buy orders you can put up, this is a bit of a problem.

Honestly, if I were going to put in trades, the items requestable for trade would be restricted the same way as Mall purchases. The listing restriction is something to fix by… fixing the listing restriction, not by adding another more complex system on top of the Mall.

Cheers!
Kinak