so lets keep on grinding?
Hi - i kinda know the answer to my question, but since i used to love this game i have to tjeck. When you reach the high levels, will the grinding ever stop? I quit the game in december, because even though i love the story, i hate hate hate feeling like a pidgeon tapping away at a button to get a tiny reward - mayb once a day.
Congratulations. You have run out of (new) things to do and reached the heights of the capped players. Welcome to the club. Unless new content is released, then yes, you either redo what’s available, or you grind. And high level things can require a lot of grinding. It’s intended to keep us busy in between new content releases.
What are your stats, what stories do you have active, what are your present goals? We can’t really answer without knowing those. The game hasn’t become an FPS or a bouncing castle since December, no - it’s still a one-button RPG and probably always will be. (That said, I would play the ---- out of an adaptation in another format or genre.)
Well i stopped before i got all the content. I know there is still storylets i havent gotten and “quests” i havent fulfilled…but im not gonna grind a week to get one item to collect 10 items to get 5 points of progress in a story! and its a weird “reward” for liking and playing the game.
and i was trying some of the “person of some importance” but couldnt se the fun in grinding for every pinch of progress…
edited by Monica Hjort Traxl on 1/26/2012
There are some interesting stories higher up the dangerous chain that are well worth pursuing. The Labyrinth of Tigers is especially rewarding.
You’ll need 100 in all your qualities anyway if you do decide to follow the PoSI Path.
I don’t know how you’d quantify and calculate the rate of work-to-story-rewards… but stats stop taking more effort to raise at 50, while monetary returns only keep increasing. I’m not saying you’re not genuinely bored, but the game’s remained consistent - maybe it’s you that’s changed.
No, the game changes significantly as you reach the higher stat levels. Up until, hmm, about 60-70 or so, there are a lot of different things to do, and gaining stats gives new storylets fairly regularly. After 70 or so though, there’s more of an emphasis on the kind of storylets that require grinding - such as the Black Ribbon duels, where you repeat the same actions again and again to raise a quality that then affects your later success. While these were certainly around earlier, the sheer quantity of other storylets means that they were well mixed in. Later on though, there are less options, especially once the Court and the first part of the University are no longer available.
You don’t have to become a Person of Some Importance immediately, and can go through a number of things before this will become essential (most notably Mahogany Hall), but eventually it does become necessary. This marks the changeover point. Previously, you were able to play around casually, dipping into whatever you like, knowing that you don’t have to commit too much work to reach a goal. After you start PoSI, you find that things are very, very expensive, often requiring you to collect thousands of items to advance a storyline. The change is unpleasant and jarring for a lot of people and many stop playing at this point. As for monetary rewards increasing, well, that’s true to a point, although, for example, the rewards for the Flit casing jobs and both the Black Ribbon and the beast collecting sets at the Docks are significantly below par for that level. When Mahogany Hall was released almost a year ago, the storyline with the best payoff was the Pygmalion line which gave (hard to be precise) roughly 1.2E/action on average. Now, almost a year later, the very best in London is the Velocipede Squad, which pays 1.22E/action. The best source of Echoes in the game is Hunter’s Keep (too many factors to give exact figures), which was released in May of last year. Nothing has come close to that since, and in fact most new content has provided less rewards than did Mahogany Hall.
Quantifying and calculating the rate of work-to-story rewards is actually very easy, and just requires a good knowledge of the game and a couple of minutes with a spreadsheet.
The POSI induction is a significant slowdown, but once you get past it, most POSI components can be picked up as story rewards. They still require a time investment, but much less spreadsheet-making, item-counting-and-trading business. I’ll concede that we could use a few more areas like the pre-lockout University and Court - a lot of work went into them and they’re bloody fun out of sheer variety of stories and rewards. However…
Humbug! No spreadsheet can account for enjoyment of story being personal and situational. The upper levels are thick with mysteries that would be unimaginable (or, more likely, unbelievable) in early Veilgarden or Spite, but there’s no telling what a given player will respond to. If I want to know about London’s system of trade, the entire Palace-and-Court storyline - so aloof, so artificial, so distant from the mercantile world - is wasted time. If I enjoy Lovecraftian horror and find mundane worldly concerns dull, the entire Shadowy path is wasted time until the very end of Mahogany Hall. If I like talking animals, the Plaster Face is unbelievably rewarding, despite the enormous investment of time, money and patience. The only chart I can imagine attempting to account for all this would be one where all paths ended in, to quote the dev team, Go Mad, Hallucinate Lizards.
“The change is unpleasant and jarring for a lot of people and many stop playing at this point.”
Actually, our usage logs show there’s about the same dropout rate there as at previous tiers. As Sir Frederick says, a lot of the material requirements are story rewards. If you come back whenever there’s new content and have another go, then there’ll be more variety: if you want to grind to get all the Constant Companions and whatnot as soon as you can, there’ll be less variety while you do.
If you’ve played through all the huuuuuuge quantity of mostly-free content (700,000 words or so) and run out of content, then yup, you’ve had most of the fun we can provide for now. Updates have been a bit slow lately because we’ve had so much else to do: but we really enjoy writing for EBZ, so there’ll always be more in time. (There’s about another thirty storylets out today.)