Coin Box Puzzle
Hey guys,
Loving PA2 so far, but I have to complain about the coin box puzzle. Without values on the coins, this puzzle is completely incomprehensable to those outside of the states, who don't immediately know the value of the coins. It forces the player to alt tab out, go and find the values, and keep refering back to them - and on top of that, it's a guessing game as to which one to pick, as the images mean little. In some situations this wouldn't be too bad, as it would just be another element to the puzzle. But in PA, I understood that the game gives you all the required information for a puzzle, and it's up to you to work it out from there.
Loving PA2 so far, but I have to complain about the coin box puzzle. Without values on the coins, this puzzle is completely incomprehensable to those outside of the states, who don't immediately know the value of the coins. It forces the player to alt tab out, go and find the values, and keep refering back to them - and on top of that, it's a guessing game as to which one to pick, as the images mean little. In some situations this wouldn't be too bad, as it would just be another element to the puzzle. But in PA, I understood that the game gives you all the required information for a puzzle, and it's up to you to work it out from there.
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The gold coin is a
Had to quit the game and come here to complain about the puzzle. No identification in the puzzle that it ought to be harder than other or require outside help. Even if there was such an advance warning I would've still thought the puzzle to be cheap and annoying.
Did you forget that people outside the united states are going to play this game?
This is poor puzzle design, sorry. At least give out the values of the coins in the first hint. I understood from the get go how the puzzle should be solved, but even after using all three hints I had no clue on what the correct answer is.
Bottom line is, the absolute minimum would've been to have some sort of "EXTREME PUZZLE" warning when you start this up, with a warning that you might need to look up some additional information to solve this puzzle. The game just presumed that I know how pennies and dimes work.
Even after knowin all values I would've actually thought quarters came next, as it was the next biggest coin in existence. The hints sorted this out but I had no way of knowing.
I had to alt tab out to look out the value of pi, and no soon am I back in the game I have to alt-tab back to read up on American currency!
Having said that, as soon as I knew the values I did get it pretty quickly after that. Might have been an idea to provide a key or something in the help text to avoid alt-tabbing out, but no worries.
I think my biggest complaint of the puzzles in the game would be that your 1s look like too much 7s. It took me ages to work out how you could make the clock-face connection from 71, 72, 7, 2...
Ah! Sorry. The coin you didn't mention was a nickel.
How do you figure out the answer if you don't know the penny and dime values? The game only gives you their names, and the puzzle is about perceiving the values. They're also valid choices for wrong solutions.
The quarter and dollar might have their names visible, but again, that doesn't help people know their values (the idea of a 25c piece is laughable to us Aussies, and I suspect that there are probably people in Euroland who might not know the value relationships between the other coins and a 'dollar').
Bad internationalization is bad.
Actually it was an obvious. Gold is more valuable in history than silver.
- The puzzle was about completing a sequence that required your knowledge of the exact coin value.. guessing which one is worth more doesn't really work in this case.
- For all it took the largest coin could've had a value of 200 cents (e.g. the 2 euro coin), making the solution quite illogical.
- Coin color and size does not always define its value, the 2 euro coin for example has a silver colored outline with a gold colored center, whereas the 50 cent coin is completely colored gold.
- A puzzle should be solvable with the given information (the rules page) and common knowledge (e.g. reading a clock, calculating stuff). Not by Wikipedia and regional assumptions (e.g. monetary value, measurement systems).
Well, it was made from more valuable material than the other coins in the puzzle. Not to mention it was the largest coin. It is rather clear how puzzle designer would not think that telling coins values is important as it is hinted.
Also all coins has "liberty" written on them, so they are all from same country and era.
I was recognizing the 1s and STILL don't know how you could make the connection. Perhaps I am just too stupid for those number sequence puzzles (and I really don't like those for that reason). And not knowing how much the coins are worth does not help either in this case.
I will provide you with the basic information that these are euro coins and the small one probably is worth 0.01 and the bigger one 0.10, but if you don't know the exact value of the coins you can only solve this one by accessing wikipedia or trying a lot of different combinations.
Fun fact: the Sacagawea dollar, while gold-coloured, does not actually contain any gold.
I don't think it should be expected that anyone in the world will recognise a big yellow coin as being one dollar.
UK coins
Euro coins
Argentinian coins
Australian coins
New Zealand coins
Given that logically figuring out the coin values isn't part of the puzzle, it's not unreasonable to ask that the values be provided.
I generally would have recommended buying some riddle books and IQ-Tests (and reading them of course), inventing some puzzles for a rpg for your friends, getting some understanding of logic & proper definitions, playing around with different ideas and finding out what's fun, asking others what they think about it, outsource the puzzle design and so on.
All such things which actually help coming up with a least average riddle design. The majority of the riddles of Puzzle Agenr 2 are so bad that you won't have a chance with it in a production without some already eatablished Grickle fanbase, actually they are already bad if you compare them with some free flash games. The riddles in PA2 feel like they were implemented by a complete newbie to video games without some sort of help from a experienced developer/designer and they also were technically very poorly implemented without any polishment. None of the better game portals would publish a game like this if you focus on the riddles.
Worst game design for mini games i've seen since a pretty long time.
Even if those puzzles are too easy for you, it is still puzzle game. Also just because you have easy time with the most puzzles, that does not make game bad.
Write out the coin values on the actual coins!
Don't mix up that easy doesn't have to be automatically bad, uninspired and repetitive. You can have easy and entertaining puzzles. The big majority of the puzzles is PA2 sadly is the opposite. Actually they are a lot worse than the ones from PA and those already got some valid critics.
Honest question: Why are TT productions continuing getting worse?
In comparison to all other puzzles in the games, I NEVER would have assumed such tricky questions.
I do appreciate more difficult puzzles, but I would want to know that you have to think more and maybe look up something in Wikipedia or somewhere else. Up to now every PA-puzzle I played wasn't THAT kind of hard.
BUT another big minus I am just experiencing:
I quit both extra-puzzles (the one with the digits and with the coins) to solve them later. Then talked to the person... and now after being back outside it seems I CANNOT GO BACK AND SOLVE THEM! The puzzles appear in my puzzle-list but if I click them only a message appears.
So because the game autosaved the only options for me are: Restart from the beginning or finish the game to the end. What a shame!
Edit: Well, luckily Nelson went back to the house and I could solve the puzzles. Nevertheless it would be better if the possibility of solving puzzles later on in the game would be implemented, i.e. Nelson could go back to the places.
I'm from the netherlands where we use Euros.
Though if the game would just include coins with numbers on them it would be much easier to solve.
First i thought the puzzle was going for the fibbonaci sequence, but then i found out something more... digital, anyways be sure to localize those puzzles.
The fact that we can actually speak/read english doesnt necessarily mean we know how to recognise foreign currencies.
Also this really broke the "flow" of the game since i had to get out to find info on US coinage, then start a account here to type this post...
Maybe that's an American-centric attitude too, though.
Ouch.
It's not a complaint about being forced to learn something about another country, it's about a logic puzzle that relies on "common" knowledge that isn't really that common. Would you have done the same puzzle with Myanmar kyats without providing values for the coins?
Thanks man. I haven't laughed this hard in ages.
Seriously though, if we're talking about directed learning experiences, players would get more out of it by having the numbers attached to the nicknames. For anyone who cares about currency, that would be enough to pique interest in finding out more (being an amateur numismatist, I went off and looked up which specific coins were showed), and for anyone who doesn't, they've still been exposed to new information, just in a more subtle, less jarring fashion.
I did not think about a specific currency at first, either. The comic characters on the coins let me think of maybe some invented coins just for the game. The term 'dime' and 'penny' did not ring a bell, too. I think the term 'penny' for example is used also in GB, so I assumed it is just a common name for a small valued coin. But you live and learn...
My suggestion would be, to include the term 'US coins' somewhere in the description of the puzzle. I think this would give the vital information, that the coin values might perhaps be important for this puzzle.
You might of course argue about the need for external information for the puzzles in the game in general. I personally would not have something against that as long as it is clear what you have to look up, but maybe it is worth a voting.
Just my 2ct ;-)
I don't think that's a great post for handling user feedback.. diminishing people who don't like to alt+tab out of a game to look up some trivial information as narrow minded foreigners isn't quite a nice thing to say..
But I do think you at telltale games should be glad people do voice their complaints instead of quitting the game, never to buy a telltale product ever again.. it means they actually care about your games.
But maybe that's my Non-American-centric attitude speaking.. (just kidding)
True that we "non-americans" like to learn stuff "about your country" or any other country/subject when the situation is fitting.
Though if you recognise this as is, then provide the learning material in your own game.
Instead of relying on people's internet connection to solve the problem.
I can imagine other people being without a active internet connection that got permanently stuck in the game. (or just having to do the guessing game)
My problem was - "Dime, ok, I think that's the 5 cent one."
My illustration of the problem for you US folks - what's your equivalent of a florin?
I don't think anyone is denying the fact that it's interesting to learn about other countries, just that having to load up the internet mid-game to find out the values of coins breaks the atmosphere and could have been handled better (the values could have been written on the coins or a key could have been provided, for example).
Chuck, that's really not a professional way to treat your customers. My complaint was that Puzzle Agent is a game about puzzles, where you are given the information and rules needed to solve a puzzle, and then asked to solve it. It is jarring, and poor game design to include a puzzle that requires players to alt tab out and research online. If Puzzle Agent was more ARG-oriented, or included a built in encyclopedia or web browser as an integral gameplay mechanic, that would be different. But in the context of Puzzle Agent, this is a bad puzzle. I'll thank you to not make any more snide remarks, and learn how to take constructive criticism.
I was already aware of the values of a dime, nickel & penny (through watching a lot of US TV shows), but the problem was the *other* coins present. Sure, one of them said 'quarter' on it, so I assumed it was 25c, but the other coin wasn't labelled at all, so I had to guess it was $1. I'd worked out the solution to the puzzle had to be 22c (not possible with a single coint) or $1... so I picked the coin that wasn't the quarter.
Turned out I was right.
Do the coins REALLY not have their value on them? Or is it just because we saw the "heads" side?
Australian coins wouldn't have worked, showing the 'Heads' side, considering it's always the Queen. The shapes & sizes & colours may have helped, but not to anyone who isn't familiar with our coins.
I think have 1c, 5c, 10c, 25c, $1 written on the coins would have helped non-Americans immensely.
I like that the oldest Aussie coins have a young image of the Queen, and the newer coins have an older-looking profile. If you get a range of different years you can do like a numismatic timelapse of the Queen aging, jowls and all.
And there was absolutely nothing snide about my remark, and I don't see why people are taking offense at it (apart from the obvious fact that this is the internet). I don't believe there's any such thing as useless information, especially within the context of a puzzle game. I'd much rather be working on a puzzle with a real-world counterpart than something made up like imaginary species of fish or matching socks. If it were a puzzle about, say, Japanese currency, I'd be excited to be learning something I didn't know before. (And it probably would've kept me from short-changing people in Tokyo!) But this is a game set in the US.
I've been playing on the iPad, so I can't speak to alt-tabbing out. But I disagree that it's a "bad puzzle;" I think it's the more interesting kind of puzzle -- taking real information that you've just learned (instead of arbitrary rules presented to you and immediately forgotten), and then applying them.
I like being presented with stuff I don't know or am unfamiliar with. But several times I've seen players complain about games for being "too American" -- here, with the Sam & Max games, and as far back as Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island 2. And I'm saying I don't get that. When I see European or Asian stuff in a game, I think "exotic;" I don't get offended or frustrated.
Where I think it's silly is when the complaint turns to one of "Ugly Americanism." In other words, treating the game as if it were a standardized test where "cultural bias" is forbidden, and any game that relies on US-specific cultural idioms is decried as if it were some kind of modern imperialism. Sometimes a monkey wrench is just a goofy pun, chopping down a cherry tree is an excuse for a time-travel puzzle, and people in Minnesota use American coinage. I know I wouldn't have minded if the puzzle used Canadian money, and I had to go look up what a loony was.
* In fact, when I was an employee, one of the most appealing things about the TTG forums was that they allowed open discussion between developers and fans that you don't get from larger studios. One of the things that quickly ruined that was when posters stopped acting like people united over an interest in games and started behaving like "customers" who were making complaints about a "product." Maybe that's inevitable whenever the size of the audience grows past a certain point, but it's still a shame.
Regardless, I don't in any way speak for Telltale, and it shouldn't be inferred that I do.
As for putting the values on the coins vs. alt-tabbing out: fair enough, but I'd still have to disagree. Putting numbers on the coins just basically turns it into a math problem, and I personally prefer puzzles with real-world counterparts than purely arbitrary ones.
And as for atmosphere, I think -- my own opinion, not the "official view" of the game or whatever -- that the PA games (and Professor Layton) flip the usual presentation of a traditional graphic adventure game, to where the puzzles inherently stand out as separate from the story. They're inherently artificial, whereas in a SCUMM-type game you try as hard as possible to make the puzzles feel like they're intertwined with the story. So I believe it's a lot better to have puzzles that require outside knowledge. You could even say that the second puzzle in the game requires
Also, your name doesn't make any sense to me. Please change it.
That'd be a "buck," right? Isn't "florin" slang or outdated terminology for a guilder?
Florin wasn't a good example as, as you say, it is outdated, but I couldn't think of a modern example except perhaps "quid". Our coins have silly names like ten pence piece, twenty pence piece, etc. Florin used to be slang for a two shilling coin, and post-decimalisation continued to be used as the coin became a ten pence piece (still 1/10 of a pound, you see.)
My point was that to US players Dime actually means something, but to people outside it might not. Enough US TV and film is exported that we probably know the word, but might be wrong about its value. If I'd never heard the word Dime I might have looked it up, but I knew it so didn't. Turned out I was wrong about its value. If "Buck" had come into it I wouldn't have bothered either - as far as I know that's slang for a dollar. Maybe I'm wrong.
Don't you intend the game to be the same experience in every market? Perhaps not, as you don't offer translations.
Not true actually - that wasn't my first stop when I solved it.
[ETA:]
Perhaps, if you're taking the "non-americans should first look up the names of american coins" approach, the first hint should have explained that a dime is 10 cents.
And, we're used to there being cultural references that we don't necessarily get in our games - Yakov Smirnoff in BttF is a good current example - but we're not accustomed to that being anything other than background. If a question asks us who the 43rd man to be made US President is, we'll go to Wikipedia and find it's Barack Obama (though we'll probably say George W Bush, as we believe most people get it wrong) as we know that's specific cultural information that's important, but it's easy to misinterpret coins based on knowledge of your own local currency.
Always blame it on the internet
Let me give you an example why some people think your comment looks snarly: "Maybe that's an American-centric attitude too, though." this part of your post will place your opinion in quite a different context, it no longer tells the reader "I love to learn new things about other cultures!", but instead people will interpret your opinion as being judgmental e.g. "you non-Americans don't want to learn anything about our culture!".
Being labeled as telltale team member, people will automatically assume your comment represents the opinion of telltale games (even though you've just explained you're not). Therefore they feel their complaints are being disregarded (and will turn into an angry mob).
Not me, no siree! I like the American appeal the games have, it makes perfect sense to have USD in Scoggings. It's not the currency that makes me frown, but the implementation of the puzzle (I would probably dislike this puzzle even more if it were with unlabeled rupees because that wouldn't even make sense story wise).
Lets say I agree to disagree on this one (otherwise this will drag on and on and on and on), and hope telltale will learn from this lengthy topic while making puzzle agent 3