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[Jonathan S. Fox]

I think the game would be improved if each site visit generated a finite pool of people to meet. Random encounters would draw from this pool, starting with groups of people you haven't seen yet. After you've seen everyone, you start getting groups of anyone still in the pool. So you go to the Internet café, and if you don't find any liberal programmers, then there just aren't any today.

The problem with this is, how will we know when the "pool" of people has been exhausted? Otherwise, it sounds like a pretty good suggestion

I agree, both with the concern and the interest. Well, I'd also probably say the latte stand and park don't logically follow this pattern -- the way I see these is that people are always coming and going. You probably could spend all day at the latte stand and never see the same face twice.

[irmo]

I agree, both with the concern and the interest. Well, I'd also probably say the latte stand and park don't logically follow this pattern -- the way I see these is that people are always coming and going. You probably could spend all day at the latte stand and never see the same face twice.

While it would be slightly more realistic for the latte stand to have people coming and going, it's unrealistic to have far more people wandering the walkways at the apartments than could possibly live there, for example. We gain realism on one front and lose it on another, but we also gain (I would argue) a massive improvement in pacing.

The latte stand and park could be special-cased, but then either the game is exactly as grindy as before (since the latte stand and the park are also the places where you can meet people of every profession) or we need some other mechanic to represent the amount of time you're spending chatting with people.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I agree with the reservation that making a special case of the latte stand and park would tend to defeat the gameplay benefits of making the change in the first place. I'm still a bit concerned with what Ringmaster mentioned about making sure this functionality is clear to the player, though.

[Capital Fish]

If a finite pool of people was added to the game, would it result in individual apartment units having dedicated owners? For example, if you went to the university apartments, and broke into the first apartment on the left, would you ALWAYS run the risk of encountering a 20-year-old collage student named John Smith?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Not if implemented naively, no. Theoretically, we could do it that way, but it would require a lot of changes to the way the encounter system is currently designed to support location-dependent encounters. Right now, we can force an encounter if you walk on a special tile (eg, meeting the apartment manager), but we can't say that one room has certain encounters.

Apartments are really funky right now and they don't follow a really clean logic. As long as you don't look to closely, it probably looks alright, but apartments use the same random encounter tables that the hallways do, and that doesn't make sense. I guess it's not an important thing to worry about, which is why the only thing I've done to wrestle with it was to make encounters in apartments have like 1 to 3 people each instead of up to 5 or 6.

[E. Albright]

I agree with the reservation that making a special case of the latte stand and park would tend to defeat the gameplay benefits of making the change in the first place. I'm still a bit concerned with what Ringmaster mentioned about making sure this functionality is clear to the player, though.

About the latte stand and park, two trains of thought occur to me for limiting their appeal for grinding while still giving them unlimited passers-by. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive, and in fact the first tact would certainly be improved by the addition of the second.

First, make the nature of the environments alter recruitment mechanics. E.g., in the park most people you meet will have their true profession masked à la CCS members. That Doctor isn't listed as a Doctor, but as a Jogger or suchlike. This still means you could just recruit everything on two legs and judge their worth back at the safe house, but it'd act as a somewhat effective deterrent to grinding, anyway. At the latte stand, people are bustling in and out and just want to grab their drinks and go, so slap on a large brushoff penalty to talking about the issues. This latter is more problematic, since the logic of "inappropriate venues" applies even more strongly in some other environments, but still.

The second tact would be to make recruit-grinding there riskier early on. As these locations have no value beyond recruitment... place a time limit on how long you can stay there before you start running the risk of getting arrested for loitering, disturbing the peace, walking while Liberal, thoughtcrime, whatever. How long you have before the Man starts hassling you could be tied to one or more issues (e.g., free speech and police behavior), so as you liberalize the country, you can get increasingly unlimited access to these areas to fish for that one specific Liberal you're lacking.