Registered just to vent. The Fidgeting Writer has done me in. A long chain of luck-based actions that I can’t influence at all, burning resources and actions, go back to start if you lose a coin toss? Why not just make it one "odds are against you" 8-cost action, burn all the resources in one shot? There’s no fun in this storylet, no real decisions, just a painful grind exacerbated by the loading times.[li]
I’ve got 55K echoes worth of Coruscating Souls from the Fidgeting Writer so I feel your pain. It’s a high risk/high reward grind and I generally fell below average on the results. It isn’t the most profitable grind in London, but it’s up there and there are people who swear by it. Anyone really dedicating themselves to it (as I once did) tends to convert things in waves. So you pick a number and roll the dice on X Tales of Terror, then take the result of that and run all those through the next step, etc. I did groups of 100, but the usual advice is to do groups of 1000. It takes a long time to push through each level of the grind, but the advantage of doing it in bulk is A) you can use "Try Again" to speed things up and B) Unless the RNG really hates you you usually come out with at least something in the end.
It’s obviously a lesson in gambling.
One action wouldn’t be nearly as useful, as the different stages of FW can get you different items. Sure, going to the end is probably the most profitable one in terms of echoes, but if you need comprehensive bribes or Night-whispers, then stopping off at earlier points gives you those items instead.
I’m not at the "grinding" stage - playing for fun and exploring the stories. This line felt like a waste of actions - it would take me 2 days just to transform 100 ToT, let alone the rest.[li]
I still use the Fidgeting Writer whenever I need bribes.
A bad one if so, since the odds are in your favor and not the house’s.
I sympathize, bralex, but this game has many stories and you don’t need to play every one. The Fidgeting Writer story is designed to make other players happy, not you.
True enough, still felt good to vent.[li]
Fair enough!
[quote=Kaijyuu]I still use the Fidgeting Writer whenever I need bribes.
A bad one if so, since the odds are in your favor and not the house’s.[/quote]
Exactly! The odds are in your favor so that you stick with it thinking you will make a profit.
[/li][li]I feel your pain. My husband loves the storyline–he’s earned a hefty character income and managed to buy Hesperidean Cider with it. I’m lucky if my character can score 1 or 2 Coruscating Souls when starting out with 100 Senses of Deja Vu.
That being said, the grind is less painful if you undertake it for some of the intermediate by-products; there’s a stage, for example, where failures (I think) gain you Making Waves, which can be nice. If that mode of playing (heavy on exploitation, light on role-play) doesn’t suit you, you’re probably better off ignoring the Writer and playing other storylines, as another poster has suggested.
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I’ve recently used it twice on my alt: one series of runs to pick up 20 Collated Research, which was pretty nice and quick, and one to get a Night-Whisper, which was bloody painful (although it was for SMEN, so fair enough); and I think that’s it for me and the Fidgeting Writer for the foreseeable future. I definitely don’t have the patience to law-of-large-numbers my way to the projected 1.8 EPA (although I have nothing but respect for those who do).
The 1.8 EPA isn’t even the correct value, that’s the value not counting the materials you use up I think… counting those, the EPA is below the EPA of the Affair of the Box grind. So it’s not even the most profitable grind out there.
I did a big grind, starting with a few hundred tales of terror, just to ensure I got at least one Coruscating Soul (I want one of everything) and to say that I’ve done it once, but I’m not going to come back to that again unless I have a very, very good reason…
Now, has anyone done the math on stopping the grind when you trade a Deal With a Devil for a brass ring? Because iirc, after that is when you start getting even odds rather than pretty good ones, and I wonder if the math works out more favorably.
Best output is from the Souls, but seems there are other ways of getting ToT and the other materials. Don’t really have time to compile a full guide, but ToT can be obtained from Rubbery vs Rev CC and pick the 3 AP option. You’ll gain 7 ToT and 2 Mysteries which are two conversions away from ToT; slightly better than heists in Flit. For Identity I think it’s better to Swap Gossip via card every time, but didn’t do the whole part (from getting the gossip to actual conversions), but the wiki success rate seems to be accurate.
I’ll try this weekend to compile all my notes and see what other ways of improving this grind I can find. I do want a soul at least! :D
It’s true the later ones have 50% odds, however their rewards are more than twice the value the items you’d get by immediately cashing in. So you come out on top, overall.
The one except might be the second to last one. Yes, the sell values of the rewards are less than half that of a coruscating soul, but that Comprehensive Bribe is hard to get elsewhere without spending ~60 echoes in materials or opportunity cost.
edited by Kaijyuu on 3/3/2017
Blew another 50 ToT and 250+ actions on this one for no gain. As best I can tell, as an enquirer, this is part of my path to PoSI, right? If so, are all professions bound up in pure-luck quests, because I might try to switch or (frankly) abandon this account and start over. Lost my correspondence stones though a careless reading anyway.
You definitely don’t need to grind the Fidgeting Writer to reach POSI — the two aren’t connected at all. (Also, your training profession doesn’t determine your route to POSI, as far as I know.) Where are you in working towards the POSI reqs at the moment?
The Fidgeting Writer is a descent late game grind and occasionally useful for obtaining certain items, but it is completely optional. You can safely never look at it again if you like. The POSI status isn’t linked to your profession at all (and your profession doesn’t so anything other than change your weekly reward and some of them grant a useful item). To become a POSI, you just have to get all your stats to 100 and pass the requires on a number of steps that usually involve you owning a number of things or having certain qualities, none of which are Fidgeting Writer adjacent.
Well that’s…annoying. W 111/ S 61/ D 108/ P 83. I guess I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing for POSI at all.