Ahoy-hoy, it’s time for another Fallen London roadmap blog post! Featuring: hearts, eggs, rats, plants, the roof, &c. Feast your eyes and minds on the blog.
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More horticulture! Hooray! And I am excited to see the return of the Summer Schoolmistress; her appearance in the Licentiate activities was frankly tantalising and I can’t wait to see what Bazaarine lore she comes with.
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As one of the people asking for more horticulture, thankyou! 
And suitably intrigued by the Summer Nursery and the Rat Market redesign.
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Rat Market redesign. I am extreemly dissapointed.
Well, after that horrible and dishonest nerf of Noman I had not my expectations high.
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What’s her situation there? I’m excited by baby monster possibilities, but I didn’t know she was a pre-existing character.
Also, sounds like we’re getting Enlightened bellic augmentations this time?
She appears in the little storyline for Licentates where they get their Professional Specialisation, and she’s pretty cryptic in that one appearance. She describes herself as “If you have seen a barn owl eat a mouse, consider the pellet. I was all that remained of one parent after the other consumed her.” She takes care of baby Whitsun creatures without other parents, (but hates human children, having apparently never been one herself) although the Bazaar dislikes her because taking care of the Bazaar’s children implies it should be doing that instead. As a result, Licentiates are constantly sent out to kill everyone connected with her, so maybe fending them off will be part of the new activity?
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I wonder what was the original intent for Rat Market, should we read “redesign” as “nerf” and how exactly we will be allowed to dispose of rmatket assets (and what will be considered as one).
In my opinion Rat Market was and is huge mechanical success, which created or reinvigorated many good grinds and added a bit more of much needed complexity to the game. What’s not to like?
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At last, the horts will become cultured, hooray! The Whitsun nursery sounds cool too.
Don’t love the idea of card frequencies for Hearts’ Game; I don’t actually tend to go that heavily with the teams that strategists talk about as the best or have a strict strategy at all, but being pushed towards certain cards that aren’t my faves (even though I do actually use Talons often enough, if I’m thinking of the right card) still seems like it’ll be annoying. I don’t play the Rat Market that hard, so I’m more wait-and-see on the Rat Market revamp (and I’ve already got my Hellworm and saddle), but I do hope they keep it providing an incentive to use various Zee items and varied grinds.
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As pleased as I am at the counterplay nerf, I must say this comes as a little bitter because I’ve literally just come upon this update announcement after losing 3 straight runs due to counterplay spam
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That’s a good question honestly. Back when I still engaged with it I thought the Rat Market was functioning as intended? An advanced grind of sorts where you can turn in resources for a different exchange rate for unique equipment and if you’re lucky buy useful resources at a tidy profit in exchange for stuff you don’t need as much.
The most significant problems I can think of with the Rat Market it were not having a separate tab to keep track of my rat currency-which you could haphazardly work around by just trying to buy lowest-cost items and see how many you can in one go, but it would’ve been really nice to have a separate tracker in the browser just like I wish it was easier to count stuivers. And after a while, the lack of variety for unique items on offer. But neither came across like the Rat Market wasn’t functioning as intended so much as (it seemed to me, at least) like FB was prioritising other content at the time and not updating as much. I suppose there’s also the issue of market seasons making everyone invested in it scramble to minmax resources to sell at the rodent mart, but that’s just the nature of the game.
So yeah, I’m genuinely curious what the original intent for RatMart was too if it’s not considered to be working right.
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The current rat market isn’t all that interesting, is it? It’s basically a list of resources that are actually worth 30% more than normal, if you hold on to them for a few weeks. And an implicit nerf to any grind that doesn’t pay out in a resource that’s on the list. E.g. the Parabolan war vs. Yourself is the worst option, because it’s the only one that doesn’t give you a Parabolan Parable.
I assume that just means we’ll have 12 weeks notice. That’s enough time to sell everything as it rotates through
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I, for one, think it’s downright boring from the little I’ve engaged with it, which is why I have managed to not use it at all so far in my playthrough, and I frankly hope this “redesign” won’t Force me to use it more than the game already does. However, from what you’ll say about it, the 
market seems excellent for those who enjoy it, so I really don’t see a reason for a redesign. Well, we’ll see, we’ll see.
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My understanding was that the Rat Market was intended to encourage players to engage with a wider variety of activities in the game, by being a place that one could acquire rarer or trickier-to-find resources.
Instead, it became the opposite of that: the end-all, be-all to grinding. Earning money revolved around one question: can you cash out the items this activity gives you at the Rat Market? And if the answer was no, then it wasn’t worth doing, and that was that. Like sure, you could go do this activity that rewards you with Particular Whatsits… or you could go do this other activity that rewards you with items that can be cashed out at the Rat Market and directly buy 1000 Particular Whatsits with the change.
As a midgame-to-early-endgame player, I really did appreciate the Rat Market for expediting a bunch of grinds (zub club, anyone?) but it did become grating to look at my options and go “oh, the answer is to spend 1000 years in Underclay so I can cash out ballads, again.” From my understanding, the endgame endgame grinds that use the Rat Market are somewhat less repetitive than that, but I can see why they would prefer to not have every single economic activity measured in whether it can be cashed out at this one place eventually.
I do hope, though, that there will still be a place for those of us who need to get 50000 Correspondence Plaques and the like, because while being pigeonholed into the Rat Market sucked, it was either that or like click one button over and over in some other place for an even lesser payout. Having a place that could ease some of the pain for midgame players was great, it just needed more variety.
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I am (and probably few other endgamers) mostly interested in Tears. And many other players mostly interested in Diamonds. As far as I understand both are irregular and may not appear in 12 weeks.
Nah, that is exaggeration. Rat Market is more like sidekick for Bone Market, where old money were converted and new fortunes made.
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Tears and Diamonds are not resources you’ll want to sell off before the redesign hits, so I doubt their availability will be relevant to that part of the plan
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The Rat Market is only ever an accelerant to another grind. But it’s true, it did the opposite of encouraging weekly diversity of grinds, and instead narrowed grinds to those which fed into the Rat Market. Because players with large time horizons would hoard for upcoming weeks.
I think the Rat Market most lived up to that original design goal on Diamond Weeks, actually. The call would go out to all corners. Players would rush to the input available that specific week, and grind or cross-convert. It wasn’t business as usual, it was jumping in on a time limited bonus.
And it’s because Diamonds, for some players, are worth more than their Bazaar sell value.
I think the only other notable thing I saw players announce was ray-drenched cinders. Because they have some important uses, and are otherwise hard to acquire. The rotating qualities at the Bone Market do more to change play on a weekly basis.
I suspect the root issue is that it was too easy to convert rat shillings to echoes.
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Ah, that makes sense. The initial goal of the rat market was to give players a different thing to target each week - “this is parable week, so time to do a parable grind! This is hoard week, time to get some hoards!” Instead, since the items the market used were predictable, instead it just meant that you did the same one optimal grind all the time, and just waited for the right rat market week to cash it out.
Sounds like they’re going to take another stab at how to make it an incentive to change around your activities each week, rather than an incentive to hoard resources waiting for the right week.
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Grumble, grumble. Looks like I’ll be shoveling my hundreds of night whispers into the closet where I recently dumped my hundreds of holy relics of saint fiacre. I suppose I should quickly purge my stashed treasure before piracy diamonds dissipate, insofar as presuming long-term stability of design seems unwise…
I hope for the rework of Heart’s Game they add signposting for options that increase Counterplay. I think some options increase it on success and others on failure only, but I can never keep track. An indicator would be helpful: pre-counterplay, the existing signposting for Progress and Prep were good enough to obviate needing the wiki to play.
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It’s the options that give progress but don’t have checks that give counterplay on success. It’s not exactly signposted, but it’s pretty consistent.
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Thanks for the tip! And is there some consistent pattern to those that give counterplay on failure only? If it is all fairly consistent, I suppose I could jot down a reminder. But if there are exceptions, I’d prefer signposting. I play HG rarely, so I’m not really going to remember partial rules with one-off exceptions after a few weeks absence from it.
At core, the game went from me having enough information to reasonably choose which card to play to suddenly that information no longer being sufficiently available, and with the result of annoying popups as the cost. It is just a change of experience, making me dread dipping back in after a few weeks. If it is intentionally designed for that new experience, ok., but I recall the release notes originally saying “It is possible – though difficult – to completely avoid Counterplay. It’s also possible to simply accept the risks, or to manage which Counterplay cards you can get and which you’d completely avoid.” Hard to see how I’m supposed to manage the risks without the wiki open in front of me or signposting on accomplices or cards that advertise the risks. It sounded like it was supposed to be clearer to the player what was going to happen by intent, but maybe not. Anyway, just a hope it’ll be added, but maybe it’d look too cluttered or have other downsides. I’ll no doubt get used to the change after slogging through the next 5 seasons!