Oriflamme's is not offering a book every season

[Azura_Zuzu]

I don't know if this is a bug, but... I've noticed in both my first playthrough and my current (second) one that, sometimes, Oriflamme's will just never offer a book for sale in a given season. I have found no common cause of this - it will just never proc for the entire season. At first I thought I was just not paying attention, or had my Sundries tab pulled up too high, but at this point I'm just waiting for Affairs & Visitors, and the seasonal Oriflamme offer. And then it doesn't come.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[ForestMagi]

It's sort of complicated as to why, but Oriflamme's skipping one season is normal; it will do this predictably if you're buying every book the first time it's offered, and slightly less predictably if you aren't. It should resume offering books again the following season, though.

As I understand it:

Oriflamme's deck works a little differently from the rest of the ones in the game. It has a "master" deck that includes all unique books that are not Secrets of the House (Numen, the Journal of Sir David Greene, and I think one or two others?), from which it generates an "offers" deck of 5 or so books (I forget the exact number). It will then offer only these books until you have purchased them all. If you don't buy a particular book, it will skip it and come back to it when it finishes the rest of the list, but if you've bought all but one, it will offer that one book over and over until you buy it.

When this "offers" deck runs out and it tries to draw from it, it instead skips that season, and uses that draw to make a new "offers" deck from the books remaining in the "master" deck of all books. It should resume with new offers the following season.

Because both Cataloguing books and Oriflamme's draw from the same "master" deck of tomes, a book pulled for Oriflamme's should not appear as a Catalogued book, as it is now in the "offers" deck, preventing you from getting multiple copies of a book that is not Multitudinous.

I'll do a dig into the code for this later tonight and confirm the specifics and issue a correction if I'm talking poppycock, but getting a single season every so often where Oriflamme's does not offer a book is normal, getting no offers for multiple seasons in a row is not.