Conflux 2 and flask. ***MAJOR SPOILER CENSORED***

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Metamorph
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Conflux 2 and flask. ***MAJOR SPOILER CENSORED***

Post by Metamorph »

Hi All

Found this board some days ago. Very nice place here.

Playing Conflux 2 and I desperately need the flask to heal my people they are so heavily wounded that I almost cant walk around. However I found the scroll which says 3 vinegar egg and liqoer. I think i got this components when i put it into the alcove I hear 3 clicks but nothing happens.
Whats my mistake ?
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beowuuf
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Post by beowuuf »

the flask doesn't appear in the same alcove - at least it didn't in pervious versions
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Post by Metamorph »

Ok.thanks. Will have a look around. hope its nearby.

Well found it. Have to say all in all quit embarassing for me. Hope I get better results by other puzzles.
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Post by beowuuf »

No problem. As for the other puzzles, just remember zyx is a Bad Man with a devious brain and he hates us all

umm, or maybe he just makes fiendishly good puzzles and dungeons and is cool...i forget which. Enjoy and welcome to the boards!
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Post by Zyx »

zyx is a Bad Man with a devious brain and he hates us all
How did you find out? :)

I admit it is not obvious when you complete the flask quest.
I wanted it as an anticlimax: wanting for an empty flask for so long, searching for the 3 components for so long, and when at least you gather them and get back in a rush to the alcove... nothing, the flask is not there.
Then you start banging your head against the surrounding walls out of despair and you finally find it. :twisted:
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Post by Zyx »

Oh, I forgot... By now you must have discovered that getting the empty flask for a heal wounds potion was only half the trouble...
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Post by beowuuf »

lol, how did i find out?

- anti-climactic flasks
- knock friend and enter
- BLOODY FISH!
- there's only about one creature type that isn't posionous!
etc : )
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Post by Metamorph »

"Oh, I forgot... By now you must have discovered that getting the empty flask for a heal wounds potion was only half the trouble"

:twisted: :evil:

Yes, indeeeeed.

I trained my people through some harsh priest sessions. Some are now on Adept priest Level. And the Result ? No working healing potion, severe wounds on feet and body and on the edge on starving to death.

Well, I found the food storage on the council level. But how do get there, no idea !

.... I would be grateful for a small healing hint, yes ?
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Post by beowuuf »

yes, finding that the healing spell wasn't where i left it was another thing that that made me scream in...happiness...

Small healing hint - what you trhink is the healing spell, isn't - so stop trying to cast it!
There is an obvious hint as to the new healing spell, if you think about something you would have seen in DM, and then compare it to how it looks in Conflux
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Post by Kliber »

Conflux II Healing Potion Spell:

(Power) + [censored] + [censored]

Once your party get more priest experience, you will be surprised when you realize what the old VI spell do :wink:



EDIT by Zyx: You really gave away too much! I'd rather have you send a private message for so explicit content :)
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Post by Gambit37 »

I changed the title of this thread to ***MAJOR SPOILER*** because you gave away one of the secrets that a player should discover for himself. In fact I might delete that completely.
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Post by beowuuf »

It did say spoiler wanted

Alot of these conflux threads should get big warnigns though, they all have major hints to major parts that are more fun when you have to figure them out yourself
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Post by Kliber »

LOL!!! Common guys! didnt you see the poor guy was suffering? sorry about that, :lol: you have no mercy :wink:

Heh! that reminds me when i was playing DM for the first time, in a rented ST (the only one public aviable in Valencia, my city, back in the 80´s) playing it paying 1,5$ the hour, we were a group of 5 people who actually sorta "understand" the game, it took us 3 months to finish the game, no manual, no Internet, nothing! and those fights about keeping the "secrets" and get angry about the "shoulder-surfing"; at the end, all of us agreed to give away our secrets in order to finish it, imagine how much money we all spend there LMAO!!
Last edited by Kliber on Sat May 22, 2004 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Metamorph »

Yes, I was suffering but NOW thanks to Kliber I am whole again. HEHE
Conflux I am coming.
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Post by Kliber »

You welcome Metamorph, but now, I must suffer the angry of the "Conflux II Masters" I think, will be hard for me to get a hint again :cry:
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Post by beowuuf »

lol ,you have to forgive us - zyx made a very cool dungoen, and it was playtested quite a few revisions before general release. He was very aware of things like putting hints, etc and when we were just whining because someone had taken our spells and favourite weapons away and was making us think : )

It's nice alot of people seem to be playign the dungeon after the initial playing by the regulars, so some spoilers we kinda go 'no, that's a great part, don't spoil it right away! The dark chancellor, discovering then defeating the balrog, some of the spells - i yelled at the screen and swore it was unfair then beat it anyway and remembered the dm feeling of 15 years ago all over again

things like the healing spell - there are hints around, the spell is on a scroll, and besides don't you remember the fun of DM when you tried out various rune combinations? Zyx went to all the trouble of defining all the spell runes afresh so spells are still logical too.

once you have healing, stamina, fireball and a decent weapon, i find alot of the challenge goes from a dungeon. Who needs rest, who need tactics and to be wary if you can blow people away and chop them apart and heal easily?

Anyway, i think for the time being, until conflux becomes an old duingeon, if you can limit it to just hints on the boards, and ensuring its in a spoiler labelled thread, then that should be cool. As zyx says, use private messages to convey actual explicit parts if a person really wants the info - it's too easy to cheat! when i find a tough area of a dungeon it's very tempting to go to an editor, it's very temptign to just shrug the shoulders and go 'bet it's a bug, i'll just give up[.' The tower of chaos was like that, and yet solutions were there when i'd used my brain, and i got huge satisfaction each time.

Anyway, that's all, don't mind us cummudgeons and we'll try to point you subtely i nthe right direction so you don't yank your hair out over puzzles, juist are on the verge of it! : )
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Post by beowuuf »

oops, ignoring the whole healing potion controversy -

food - there are certain areas early on that regenerate food if you go back to them. there are also shortcuts on later levels that take you to the food area of the council level.

try the start first, build up as much of a reserve as you have patience for, and look out for the shortcuts as you go back into the dungeon
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Post by Lunever »

To be honest: That jealous secrect-keeping is exactly what kept me from playing Conlux so far.
Parting is all we know from Heaven, and all we need of hell.
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Post by Paul Stevens »

I never quite understood the secret-keeping.
Either:
1) Someone is making the assumption that I will be happier
without knowing the secrets. But how can they know me
better than I know myself?
2) They don't want me to be as happy as possible.

It seems to me that it is my responsibility to decide what
I will enjoy most. And how can my decision hurt anyone else?

At any rate.........ConfluxII is quite a challenge. I decoded
it for testing CSBwin and it was not easy even with the editor
to make maps and search for objects.

What I would like to see is a large dungeon that is *****SO****
difficult that it will require everyone to share their discoveries
and knowledge. One that is pretty much impossible for one
person to solve.

CSB was solvable but even it had a few quirks that were
discovered long after everyone had finished it. For example,
the fact that only three keys were needed to get the four corbum.
And the ROS pit in DDD bewildered a lot of people for a long time.
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Post by Gambit37 »

I don't think the issue here is about 'secret keeping' per se, but the fact that a fairly fundamental change to the gameplay, and a discovery that a player should really make for themselves, was printed publicly in the middle of a thread unexpectedly. Somebody who didn't want to explicitly know that information might have had their enjoyment spoilt by seeing it by mistake.

I don't think those of us who have played it and who are sharing hints are 'jealously secret-keeping'. I simply prefer to give a hint rather than an out-and-out answer as i think it's more satisfying to work out something for yourself than to have someone give it you on a plate.

If someone wants a specific answer, fine, but ask me in a private message.

Of course, this all rather assumes that people aren't disciplined enough not to read threads that have the word SPOILER in their title, but that's another matter entirely...
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Post by Zyx »

For the explicit hints, Gambit explained prefectly the arguments why they should not be public, which seems reasonnable. Subtile hints are much more enjoyable, I think. I guess most people would rather have several hints to a riddle until they discover the answer than just having the plain answer.

As for the encrypted dungeon: please do NOT caricaturize my position:
I had many doubts about the goodness of encrypting the dungeon; so I shared opinions with PitD and Beowuuf and we finally agreed for a reasonnable compromise: giving the non encrypted dungeon to anyone who would complete 4 endings (and then claim the dungeon.dat)
So this is an "experimental" mode, another kind of gameplay experience (in fact, it reproduces the conditions of playing DM and CSB 15 years ago). I'm opened to hear the pros and cons.

So here are two cons. But Paul and Lunever, from what I understood, don't play the custom dungeons. I'd like to have some feedback from the ones who play them.

Answering to "how can they know better than I what will make me happier?": I don't even pretend to bring an answer, but a proposal. Though I probably have a general theory about what can give pleasure to the majority of players, I admit I'm not really seeking their happiness (otherwise I would fill the dungeon with "you're the best" messages:) ) but a very specific experience.

Having said that, I disagree with this socratic vision of "knowledge necessarily leads to happiness" (you can know what your want but maybe you're too weak to act as you know you should. That is, your will is subject to other causal mechanisms than just knowledge)

Going further I think that very few people know what will make them happy anyway (thinking the contrary leads to extreme hypothesis about why so many people are unhappy while they could)


Concluding: don't think I'm standing on my ground just because I'm stubborn. I am stubborn but eager to better my opinions by listening to the others. If you really want to have all the answers and the unencrypted dungeon, I will send it to you.

But this way of "publishing" my dungeon should not be the general rule, I think. For the common of players it should remain full of hard riddles and obstacles, so they can earn the merit.


EDIT: I forgot: I am not jealous. I never subscribed to the "keep the source for myself" way of thinking. On the contrary I tried in several instances to put my skills or knowledge at the service of the DM community.
I carefully design my dungeons thinking about the potential players; the competitions I tried to organize are not meant to flatter my ego - I don't have narcissic problems! :) - but to bring some fun to the players; I was aware and worried by this encryption affair from the beginning, long before any release, and made an genuinous attempt to obtain something reasonnable that would not frustrate anyone.
Enough for my defense. Please read all this comments with good mood and open-mindedly. I, for my part, am not hurt or angry or anything like that!
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Post by beowuuf »

from playtesting i can attest that zyx was very open with the hints, but you can't blame him for loving the shrieks of frustration that really devious puzzles bring, or the loss of a spell you have to re-learn

i think banging your head a time or two against a wall then actually figuring out the puzzle and cursing his name is a small repayment to him for making a gret dungeon : )

playtesting, and knowing how he tweaked puzzles and hints so they would be solvable and not to obscure, i get a little defensive if poeple just give up - it's like DM, fresh and a challenge. Just like when recently we all re-learned the love of playing through a tough dungeon with the newbies to CSB (and there we went the other way and kept spoiling areas mercilessly!) it's nice not to spoil area too much. Some are really easy once you know how - the challenge is everything sometime

i think this discussion is interesting, as it's a good highlight of what people like/don't like in both dungeons and the feedback about dungeons. Maybe even help people tailor some dungeons in the future!
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Post by Kliber »

Well, Im the kind of "Information must be free" guy, but I respect Zyx and the rest of Conflux II team position, afther all, its his baby; obviusly took him lot of time and resources to make that dungeon, and he have the right to get fun of it when people visit the dungeon (torture can be fun too, LOL).

And also share Paul point of view; he did an awesome job with CBSWin; and his editor its just great, he gave both for free to the community and also I can see he´s willing to help anyone in this forum with his software, kudos for you all guys for keeping this community alive all this time (and for the times to come). As the only one to blame for this "disclosure" controversy I apologize for any problem I could bring on the table, as I stated before, I just wanted to help too... :roll:

Peace, Unity and Respect :wink:
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Post by beowuuf »

lol, no reason to apologise, and no need to keep help people, just watch out for causing unintended collateral damage with revelations : )
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Post by Lunever »

I don't doubt that the Zyx' Conflux is probably a very brilliant piece of work, that much can be gathered from the various threads about it, and playing Conflux would be a very good reason to stick more to CSBWin than to RTC also for me.

I also respect that Zyx would prefer not to give plain answers. Of course cutting through the dungeon with editor-read-out maps, boosted characters and a walkthrough is not much fun compared to real playing, real challenges and real successes (and losses of course). But almsot every player is stuck at some point and does not discover the solution himself. These points are different for every player. Only the player himself can decide when such a moment has come, when he would resort to external help rather than banging his head for the 99th time, and whether he would be content with a subtle hint from his fellow forum visitors or whether he would rahter like to peek into the dungeon mechanix himself.
Being very busy with my job and my study I rarely, no, almost never have the time to walk a dungeon for hours and hours without getting any further. Don't mistake me: I do like challenges and, not being an imbecile child that uses every cheatmode available, I only resort to external help when I really really need it. But when I enjoy one of the rare moments when I have the time nessesary to play not some fast and silly in-between-game but a clever and challenging dungeon like good old CSB (which I know to good by now to become really challenged, except in Archmaster-RTC) or nowadays Zys Conflux, and reach a point where I am really really stuck, I would like to decide myself, whether it will be enough for now, whether it is sufficient to get some cryptic answer in the forum, or whether I will make a short and limited use of some editor to regain orientation.
So if I know that I myself can decide to use such means or not to use them, I will probably make only very little use of them. But if I am generally disallowed to use them I rather don't even start playing because I do not want to risk overly frustation (minor reason) and because I just hate being disallowed to decide myself what's best for me and my gaming experience (major reason).

So indeed I would like to have an unencrypted version very much if Zyx is willing to share it. If not, I will respect that too fo course.
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Post by Zyx »

Convincing. Convinced.
Send me a working email by pm and I'll send you the dungeon.
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Post by purple1 »

My mom remembers when she and her co-workers played Zork games... not at work, but it was sorta the same thing as you guys sharing secrets. They would say, "Oh, yeah, I can't open this door." "Oh? Have you tried sticking the letter opener into the keyhole?" Kinda fun, but Infocom certainly wasn't perusing internet forums divulging secrets to their games. It's fun for just the maker to keep a few secrets and tricks and then challenge groups of people to find them out.
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Post by Zyx »

purple1 wrote:It's fun for just the maker to keep a few secrets and tricks and then challenge groups of people to find them out.
Hello Purple1, maybe I misunderstood you: do you mean I shouldn't keep doing it (keeping secrets and challenging people) because I'm the only one to be amused?
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Post by purple1 »

Well, I think you should keep a few secrets, but not really game-important secrets (ones that affect your ability to complete the dungeon) but ones that are optional (such as finding a powerful or useful tool) or easter eggs. It's fun to have ONLY one person know the secret, but not say anything about it, maybe drop some suggestions or hints, etc. ad try to get people to discover it. Maybe create a group of people "The Clan" that know the secret and won't say anything about it. Then it's way more fun for people. Especially if the secret is ironic, or making fun of a DM character, or something like that. Make secrets worth finding, either gamewise or humorwise.
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Post by Zyx »

Ah, I think you misunderstood me too. The only secrets with no hints are just for fun, or easter eggs. I would like the players to discover them by themselves and then share them by a hint/suggestion system.
I was just checking -by mentionning their existence - if people already discovered them. I don't know yet how to give clues and how many about them.

As for important things, 4 endings are linked to the guilds'heads, and another one, secret, is hinted.The other endings are hinted and always reachable.

As a sidenote, I'm not realy fond of clannic attitudes towards secrets and keeping them buried. I'd rather have the "club of those who found a secret and will help the others to find it too". :)
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