The "A Sure Bet" option at Watchmaker’s Hill now appears to give out a random amount of jade, rather than a dependable 240 pieces. Anyone else noticing things getting switched up?
I’ve noticed that some cards and walking around the Forgotten Quarter has seemed to become random to some degree.
yeah, the “Prince of…” one is just sad now.
1 soul outcomes :(
I’ve noticed that a number of the Unfinished Business grinding options have begun to give seemingly random amounts of loot. This can be good ("hey! 134 souls! Yippee!") or bad ("you mean I just spent an action for SEVEN proscribed materials?!?!").[li]
It’s an interesting change, but… maybe if there were a more reasonable lower bound for how much stuff you get?
edited by Anniken on 12/22/2013
The range is a bit much.
There’s a card named The mechanics of progress that also went from giving out a set number of Cryptic Clues to giving out a random amount: 2-216 x Cryptic Clue recorded so far.
My hypothesis is that the player gets a random number between one and current Watchful, so I’ve begun to keep track of what I get at which levels of Watchful. And so far it seems as if I’m getting more the higher Watchful I have. I only stated getting 200 x Cryptic Clue (or more) when my watchful was over 200. So that might be worth considering for these unfinished business things as well, in case people aren’t already maxing the relevant qualities. Would be interesting to see what a character with Watchful 57-87 would get from that card. That was the original ‘unlock window’, but when the reward turned random, the upper lock was removed.
(I’m not a PoSI, so I haven’t checked out any unfinished business myself. But at the time it seemed to me as if The mechanics of progress was a test to see how it would work, because I encountered that before I read about changes to unfinished business, and they both sound like exactly the same thing.)
If the reward is based on a random number between 1 and your stat, and if all numbers in that range are equally likely, then the reward is going to average out at half your relevant stat, which in turn means that these options will have a very poor return for most people :-(
Well, I guess that might depend on your definition of "most people"? And I was thinking that the actual numbers would depend on the value of the single items, and 100 x Cryptic Clue seems pretty good money to me. Or 200 x Rat on a String, though the wikia has the range of those at 49–152, so that is indeed a very poor return. (And I have to assume that someone would’ve tried with Shadowy 200+ and not gotten a better result than 152.)
Well, if we take the “reward based on a random number” to be the pence you’d get for selling it (which we actually see most storylet rewards based on: Most storylets below stats of 100 reward pence equal to their difficulty), then yes, the average would be a poor return. Even at 200 stats, you’d just average out at 100 pence per action… the old amount, and what I put in my old guide as the bare minimum to be worth it as a PoSI.
Though, on the plus side I suppose this makes other moneymaking options a bit more useful: Things that gave a little less than 1 echo per action, but which may give an item you used to farm via Unfinished Business
Just so it’s said, I don’t think we’ve found the full range yet on the wiki, so there could be surprises.