They didn’t stop it, they reduced the %chance.
Figured I might as well throw my two cents in on this. I’m not convinced it’s nearly as much an issue as some are making it out to be. Most of the game seems to reward curiosity and finding the best solutions to problems. Sure, you COULD grind out 30,000 echoes through trading wine, transporting clay men, or saving up on port report commissions for the next three weeks… or you could do some digging and find more profitable means (like sunlight).
Add to that the necessity of buying new mirror-catch boxes after delivering to the Isle of Cats, or smuggling souls for the Blind Bruiser if he’s your sell-point, and there are actually quite a few hurdles involved in earning money by sunlight-smuggling. And Salt help you if the admiralty confiscates your sunlight back at port!
Might not be a bad idea to tie the sunlight trade into a story though, having some kind of prerequisite would make sense.
edited by Garthand on 2/16/2015
With enough Veils you get 100% chance to keep your box at Isle of Cats, so it’s pure 400e/box/trip profit at that point. Also no excise, no dealing with the Bruiser.
They could easily nerf this by just adding a "Selling sunlight in the Isle of Cats" quality that increments every time you sell, maxes at like 3 or 5 or SEVEN or something, then you can’t sell more there and have to reset it by a trip to London (that actually hits London with SAY, maybe certain values of time the healer reset it?) or something. Or a permanent cap like the Sphinxstone or something. Or you unavoidably kill off customers sometimes.
Additional ways of dealing: enough points of a sun-smuggling quality increases Suspicion a lot, maybe even they start instituting mandatory searches on ships returning from the Canal, even the best hiders w/ secret compartments can only keep a few boxes?
I also like the idea that carrying around a shitload of mirrors becomes increasingly dangerous, but thanks to TM’s storyline we already know they can safely trap dream snakes? Still maybe with ENOUGH mirrors they could reach critical mass or something.
Also, even aside from the mirrors, carrying a ton of sunlight around could itself get pretty dangerous. It is trapped, but maybe it could reach critical mass or something. A Judgement is not to be postponed indefinitely.
edited by Impish Axile on 2/16/2015
If this "exploit" is such a big deal, then I agree, add a certain element of challenge to hauling all those sunlight-filled boxes. Don’t cripple it just because it’s a good source of echoes and unrelated to any finite story.
It’s hardly an exploit, really, given how it requires substantial upfront capital and a pretty long roundtrip. Needs some tweaking, perhaps, but that’s about it.
wouldn’t be an issue if mirror boxes were as rare as long-boxes, or if there was a chance to wound when filling boxes in the surface. As it is getting money is ridiculously easy, yeah. Fortunately it gives me something todo while I wait for them to patch the stutter bug.
[quote=Shadow]If this "exploit" is such a big deal, then I agree, add a certain element of challenge to hauling all those sunlight-filled boxes. Don’t cripple it just because it’s a good source of echoes and unrelated to any finite story.
It’s hardly an exploit, really, given how it requires substantial upfront capital and a pretty long roundtrip. Needs some tweaking, perhaps, but that’s about it.[/quote]
Indeed, 80 mirror-catch time 300 echoes margin, 24.000 echoes. This is hardly an exploit.
Sarcasm off ;-)
If I may weigh in, I don’t think making collecting sunlight cost wounds in the surface is a good idea. It bothers me that visiting Aestival can kill crewmen and give you wounds when you can hang around on the surface just fine. Making it cost wounds to collect sunlight on the surface would be the perfect balance, right?
Except that it’s really annoying. I also personally dislike the idea of making the Zee event that costs you sunlight more common, it is, again, just plain annoying.
My ideal solution would be to remove the wound factor from sunlight collecting, and as was suggested earlier, simply make the boxes themselves difficult to get. Not capped per captain, but only acquirable through quests or special interactions, like trading the Icarus in Black to Khan’s Shadow, or maybe something in the Isle of Cats.
Ideally, an entirely new quest would be added, involving you raising the supremacy of Khan’s Shadow, but that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
I would LOVE for the different Supremacies and the whole political side of the game to get even more writerly/game-developmental TLC. It’s funtiems!
quote=Dash. Making it cost wounds to collect sunlight on the surface would be the perfect balance, right?
Except that it’s really annoying. (…)[/quote]
Indeed, that’s the idea! As a stop gap measure, something that can be done in 5 mn by a developer with the tool they have to change events, that would be enough. They could do that for the next patch. Ideally yes, I would prefer to have the mirror-catch only obtainable through quests.
It takes a lot of capital to get going, aye, but once you are, it’s 32k echoes profit with 80 boxes, for at most 5 minutes (less with a certain click-helper script) per run and no chance of getting caught or losing them (even if you don’t abuse SAY here, it can still be done with very high Veils). I’d say it’s a wee bit broken. Admittedly, there are a lot of steps along the way where a fix could be applied.
Probably the two most broken parts are how easy it is to acquire boxes, and the various ways to avoid customs (especially dumping SAY, though Veils is a problem too given how you can just buy more from Irem).
edited by Olorin on 2/17/2015
Ehhhhh… idk if i agree about making the boxes only obtainable from special events. Already there are lots of neat uses - the TM’s quest, that itself can be a source of Viric, smuggling, various times you can use them to bring light into dark places, having sun on hand as an emergency terror dump, let alone various risks they might introduce as a consequence of having too many mirrors or too much sunlight on board… strongly limiting all that just to curb a broken trade route seems excessive.
And there are so many other ways - limiting the total number you can obtain (by eg removing it from stores and making the purchase at Khan’s Shadow a storylet locked with either 3 empties or 3 sun-filleds, so you can get 4 at a time max; limiting the max sold to Isle of Cats at a time or permanently; tougher London excise; dangers collecting it (someone’s gotta go out in the sun to close the thing); dangers carrying it…
There is another argument, that they shouldn’t change it (much). I mean, if this is changed, people would just switch to selling sun to Gaider’s Mourn (if boxes are still readily available and fillable), or coffee to Vienna and once that dries up followed by the wine from London → coffee from (Adam’s Way or Empire of Hands) → parabola-linen from Irem trade route. These all require moderate amounts of capital (mainly the ship), realistically carry almost no risk, and offer good profit margins. Arguably routes like that last one are more in the spirit of the game, get you to stop at more ports, etc… but in the end it’s the same low risk money grind with similar entry costs - just much, much slower. Sunlight is so unreasonably more profitable than anything else right now, but maybe that just means there should be other similar money grinds, rather than making profit much slower and more grindy.
(Also in re: save files and reloading for better results - with Merciful Mode on, you already can “legitimately” savescum as much as you want. savescumming will always be possible to some extent, and it doesn’t really belong in a conversation on game balance because it’s arguably not possible TO fix it in a game like this.)
This opinion confuses me terribly. I simply cannot fathom how the knowledge that someone else is cheating on a single player game can ruin a game experience. Anyway.
edited by SporksAreGoodForYou on 2/14/2015[/quote]
I think there’s something to it. Many, if not most, players in a given game are both going to want to play as well as possible, and be reasonably challenged while doing so, so I think even just the act of deciding to deliberately avoiding a part of the game so things don’t become trivialized can make the game feel less natural and fun.
I somehow doubt that most people want to be challenged. What they want is to feel gratified from winning.
But anyway, I think the margin profits are slim enough in the game and the grind is heavy enough that at least a couple of options here and there are needed for people who want to have fun breaking the game. People enjoy finding loopholes and backdoors. When those are removed a lot more will complain.
I’d say just put high stat requirements on the trade so that it is only super-profitable in the end game. That way you can’t trivialize all the other content, but there is still a way to make tons of money for an experienced captain.
Seems to me that for this exploit to truly be exploitable you already need to have the game tagged and bagged. Empty mirrorcatch boxes are 250 each which is a lot at the start of the game. I’m seeing people saying you can get 80+ which would be up 20000 AND the ship that needs to carry all that which is probably the merchanter which is another 8000. It’s a lot. If you’re using this exploit at that stage is it really worth it? Aren’t you already more or less done?
I’m going to use this (got the game a few days ago) to build a nice nest egg for a scion that’s gonna have the ‘establish private kingdom’ ambition (that is coming soon right?). Not that I have the echo to start but yah know, getting there.
Not really. You can earn a few thousand in your first couple of hours. That gives you more than enough capital to get started.
Tell me your secrets senpai.
I’ve told everyone!
Considering there are a couple of ports that give around 200-400 echoes worth of stuff per SAY without a need for luck/stat checks, I’m leaning more on the “limit mirror boxes” opinion. More specifically, ONE box at a time that can only be bought again if you lose it.
Or just make it as rare as… Judgement eggs. 1 egg = 1 box. Haha.
Looks like there has been a change to collecting Sunlight on the surface - I wan’t getting any but noticed a possible lock on how much you can get.
Yeah, if you farm too much, you start to go insane and open boxes at sea. It’s pretty neat. I’m just adding the interactions to the wiki.