A suggestion for Rat Market -> Scrip

Fallen London
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With the removal of Fabulous Diamonds from the Rat Market, there is no decent way to get scrip through it. The implication is that FB wants this conversion to be either slow or costly. Well, I have come up with a way to preserve that intent without running through bones or excavations.

Add an option to the Clay Marauder’s Camp in Balmoral allowing players to buy a crate of 25 Balmoral Boots for 200,000 Rostygold.

That’s a 28% increase in price, so it puts a cap on how quickly a player can make the conversion without losing money on the deal - 4 weeks at the first tier of saturation.

Not only would it be lore/narrative friendly, as they would be stealing boots and selling them for the violent currency, it would also fit with established payout rates. Specifically, the 62.50E/4-week passive income from completing an ambition.

Besides, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a late-game use for all that Rat Market Rostygold?

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You could convert Rostygold into echos and buy Heptagoat, Cider, Woeseller, etc. Sounds like endgame use for it.

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Oh, whoops, I forgot to put, “besides just selling it”, as I had intended.
Full disclosure - I’m grinding scrip to saddle my hellworm. It’s the only useful big-ticket item I have yet to get. I’m not worrying much about pure vanity items like the heptagoat.
But this isn’t just about my endgame character, it’s about late game players looking for scrip. An activity for which the reworked rat market ceased to be useful.

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You could buy Correspondance Plaques and go digging at the Hurlers.

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I recently finished railway by my alt. You don’t need that much scrip to do it.

It’s funny when people talk about hellworm being “useful”. It costs more than you need to finish all free and paid content in the game. It’s only “use” is to grind “useless” vanity items/qualities a bit faster.

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The saddled Hellworm is best in slot for 4 stats. It’s the most mechanically beneficial huge grind.

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Yes, exactly! Before the railway there was a big content gap and some players amassed quite a lot of echoes. By making the conversion slow or costly, scrip gained value in game and didn’t become another name for E.

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Yes, and I often do. It’s a slow but quite profitable (>12SPA without counting the conversion to plaques) grind. What I propose is far less profitable, slow in real-time but not an action sink.

And my idea currently requires completing the Clay Highwayman’s story but could be further gated if there were to be some concern about making the railway too easy. Heck, it could even be a card at the CiS or tucked away in Marigold. Heck, it could be on the roof for all I care, though it wouldn’t make as much sense in terms of narrative.

I think I have preserved that, though I’m not sure how important it is now that there is no gap for players approaching railway content. If someone wanted to convert Echos to scrip by purchasing a ton of Rostygold, they would do so at a massive loss. I sure wouldn’t spend 4000.00E for 1562.50E worth of scrip.

I think it would also be more emotionally satisfying despite not being as fiscally rewarding as the other options. That big chunk of scrip would feel better than it would really be.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the popular Brass Lolipop method of converting shillings to scrip has been slowed down by the introduction of primate weeks at the bone market. Prudence dictates waiting for those skeletons to be fashionable, now that they can be.

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Has been sped up by primate week.

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That 12SPA is very misleading. If you take the echo-costs into account and make a table similar to this one then digging at the Hurlers loses out to Brass lollipops even during non-primates weeks.

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Only in terms of profit per action. I’m talking about real time frequency. Have you sold any lollipops since the first and only (so far as I know) primate week?

According to this the raw profit is 9SPA, but that doesn’t factor in acquisition from the Rat Market (32% boost), the conversion actions, or the impact of nightmare-reducing items. I’m not sure how that works out, don’t have time for the math right now.

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Doing the math is actually quite simple assuming we trust the information on the wiki. From the page you link we find that the best digging grind gives 180 scrip taking 14.2 actions and costing 21 echoes. We additionally need to add 0.6 actions for reducing nightmares and 0.4 actions for up-converting to plaques (as per the second comment on the page). Using the formula from the scrip-making table we find that a 6 EPA grind combined with digging becomes
180/(14.2+0.6+0.4+21/6) = 9.62 SPA.
Compare this to the 10.38 SPA for licentiates and 9.73 SPA for non-licentiates for Brass lollipops during non-primates weeks and we find that Brass lollipops are better.

If we assume lots of nightmare-reducing items, then you’ll block approximately half your nightmare gains and so we can assume you only need 0.3 actions to reduce it, it that case we get
180/(14.2+0.3+0.4+21/6) = 9.78 SPA.
Surprisingly this actually barely beats the absolutely worst case for Brass lollipops (non-licentiates during non-primates weeks).

However, as you mention, this doesn’t properly factor the 32% boost from the rat market into it, as that boost can sometimes give us grinds as high as 7 EPA. The table for Brass lollipops doesn’t go that high, but we can directly use the given formula to find that 7 EPA combined with Brass lollipops for non-licentiates during non-primates weeks gives us
155/(5.52 + 62.5/7) = 10.73 SPA,
but digging with nightmare-reducing items only gives us
180/(14.2+0.3+0.4+21/7) = 10.06 SPA.
So for high EPA we see that the worst case SPA for Brass lollipops easily beats the best case SPA for digging.

In fact, if we set
155/(5.52 + 62.5/x) = 180/(14.2+0.3+0.4+21/x)
then we find that the solution is x=6.08, and so for any grind with an EPA higher than 6.08 it’s better to do Brass lollipops than digging. Of course, if you’re either a licentiate or if it’s a primates week (or both) then it’s always better to do Brass lollipops than digging.

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Brass Lollipops for non-licenciates has one core problem: 5 clicks per headless skeleton.

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Well, I was thinking about it last night and I realized that there were two mistakes being made. One was that we weren’t treating the two cases the same way - gross return for lollipops vs. net return on digging. The other is that we should be looking at this as value added per action to a shilling-to-scrip conversion, so we can ignore the 32% bonus and inputs to the rat market.
How we get the shillings is irrelevant, all that matters is how much value we add per action when converting to scrip.
(Brace yourself, this will take a while)

The value-add situation for lolipops over the process of building and selling it looks like this for licentiates (like me, most players are not):
(action - value)
1 - +2.5E for the headless skeleton
2 - +0 for the skull, we don’t count it as it is what we are converting
3 - +0 for declaration
4 - +10E for the 20 bonus scrip the constable provides, +6.75E as we assume primate week.

That’s 19.25E added over 4 actions → 4.81E in value added per action.

For non-licentiates
1 - +2.5E collecting the torso from Marigold
2 - +0 adding the torso
3 - +0 for the skull, we don’t count it as it is what we are converting
4 - +0 for declaration
5 - +10E for the 20 bonus scrip the constable provides, +6.75E as we assume primate week.

Value added per action: 19.25/5 = 3.85

Now, I’ll have to show the Hurlers a little differently thanks to the fractional actions and my disinterest in calculating the LCDs.
I’ll show it in Echos to remain consistent, even though scrip is the goal.

90E-21E = 69E total value added
69/(14.2 + 0.3 + 0.4) = 4.63E added per action.

From this we can see that non-licentiates with woesels, lit roads, and nightmare reducers (which we can assume for all late/end-game players) will see a greater return by digging in the Hurlers. However, the rate of conversion is always much higher at the bone market, as that converts shillings to scrip at a rate of 12.5EcPA + EaPA, vs. 1.41EcPA + EaPA.

If not clear, that’s
EcPA - Echos converted Per Action
EaPA - Echos added Per Action

Now, here’s the kicker that prompted my original idea - a late/end-game player can assume a base payout of a little over 5EPA/10SPA in the CiS, albeit annoyingly dependent upon the RNG. More if you take your payouts as Verses of Counter Creed and sell them for 30 Scrip at the Library. That adds 7.5-8E depending on where you built the city (3.75-4 EaPA). Or, 10.5-11E if you have a submerged rector and get the right opportunity card (5.25-5.5 EaPA).

This means you can effectively ignore the Rat Market as a source of scrip. Once the conversions are factored in, even licentiates garnering shillings at a rate of 7EPA are barely better off than they would be if they just hung around with tracklayers all day.
Hence my unquestionably brilliant and universally applauded idea of providing an option to purchase 25 boots for 200,000 Rostygold.
And cheers to FBG for agreeing to implement it.

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Sure, the value added per action might be higher when using digging as scrip-conversion, but the overall SPA is still lower for the same source of echoes, as I explained in my post. The reason for this is that an added value of 4-5 echoes per action is terrible compared to an echo grind giving 6-7 EPA. You’re basically losing ~2 echoes for every action you spend converting instead of echo grinding, and so you want to spend as few actions on the conversion as possible.

The only time you should care more about the added value of your scrip-conversion method instead of the overall SPA is if you consider echoes as a precious resource that you need to make the most out of. In my case I accumulate echoes faster than I convert them, and so I want to convert them with the best overall SPA instead. That means Birds of Brass and Bone, and Brass lollipops.

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Highjacking the topic quickly: what’s the current non-profession locked Echoes grind?

Mostly asking out of curiosity since I have massive stockpile of correspondance plaques I’m still burning through at the Hurlers.

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The best ones are related to the rat market and various other weekly activities, but if you want the best unrestricted grind then the fate run in the stacks should give more than 6 EPA. If you don’t want to spend fate then going for the glim-encrusted carapace from the stacks combined with good recipes on the bone market should also be pretty good. As an example of that, the classical mammoth ranching (now combined with roofpopes) should be back among the best grinds (not sure if it is back to ~12 SPA after all the nerfs and buffs, but I think it is at least close). I’ve also seen estimates that just making Birds of Brass and Bone during bird week not only gives the best EPA → SPA conversion, but it also acts as an amazing grind on its own (the added value is apparently 12 scrip per action, so you can actually use it as a 12 SPA grind).

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Interesting. I suppose I’ll end up diving back into the Bone Market eventually.

Thanks a lot!

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So, you agree that having the option to buy 25 boots for 200,000 rostygold would be great.

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Sure, I’m always in favor of more options. Even ones I might not use. Not sure why you’re specifically asking me this, seeing as I’m the only one who liked your initial post.