Good points, GB2K. I still have 175 existing NWs to cash in along with a few other items. I can get another 12 in this CotWE run and probably cash them in next weekend.
I had ~700 nightwhispers between my main and alt (~450 and ~250). I wonder how many scrip I am losing by not having the diamond route and, instead, just selling all the NWs, buying solacefruit, and selling the solacefruit for scrip. I do not even want to think about it. Oh well.
Searing Enigmas can feed into Bouquets of Eight Spines, which can hold a bunch of Brass Skulls bought with echoes during bird week
There’s no telling how many years you would have had to wait for Night Whispers and Diamonds to line up, so you’re losing value but might be gaining time 
Good point, PJ, especially when I am not paying much attention to the rat market. In the ~2 years that I have been collecting NWs, there was only one weekend where I cashed some in for diamonds and that was 2-3 months ago. I am sure there were other weekends where I could have done this but I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
And who are we selling those Flamboyantly Fake birds to? I don’t think we are in profitable territory, when selling the skeleton is unlikely.
I made a table a while back to see how often Diamonds and Tears came up (the only ones for which it is generally interesting to grind more than 1 or 2), and given the news figured I’d update it to include the last few months. Turns out we were actually abnormally lucky with Night-whispers → Diamonds lining up: Across 139 weeks we’d expect roughly 8.7 Diamond weeks (we got 9), and with 4 possible 62.5 item cash-ins we’d expect about 2.2 each, but we got 4 for Night-whispers! 2024-02-05, 2023-06-05, 2023-05-22, 2021-10-11.
Mrs. Plenty’s rewards are a bit worse, but the checks are about twice as easy (I think the preferred candidate is the Author of Gothic Tales, though, so that there’s some proper secondary reward scaling). I don’t have the numbers handy, but I remember seeing that the profits were better even including a few failures and dealing with the arising suspicion. Personally I don’t like grinds where “don’t worry, just fail a few times and deal with menaces later” is baked into it – feels bad, even if the numbers say things are going quite well in aggregate. But a single over-skulled bird can get you about 0.5% of a worm, which is quite tempting…
If you sell a “single over-skulled bird”, does this increase your bone market exhaustion?
They’ve given you the chance to sell everything this weekend! What are you talking about?
They did deliberately change the rules to make it easier to sell everything, they even set two jubilee weekends when everything was sellable to make sure nobody was stuck having collected a lot of items they couldn’t get rid of!
You missed the “as planned”. The plan was to amas as much as could be sold in a single weekend, then wait however many years it took for that weekend to line up with a weekend when Fabulous Diamonds could be bought.
It doesn’t seem like a great plan to me, but it was clearly a very common plan
You seem to have misunderstood their comment. They are not upset that they don’t have enough time to sell their collected goods to the rat market; they are upset that there isn’t a final opportunity to exchange for diamonds before diamonds are discontinued.
Exhaustion is based on secondary qualities (menace, antiquity, amalgamy). For the Author of Gothic Tales you need menace*antiquity below 20 to avoid exhaustion. Selling to Mrs Plenty never generates Exhaustion. Brass Skulls add value, which does not increase how much exhaustion is generated.
8 Brass Skulls generate 16 implausability at minimum, making selling to Mrs Plenty a difficulty 720 check (25% at shadowy 300). The Author of Gothic Tales theoretically has a difficulty 1200 Check making selling even harder.
Exactly. Now it not only means less profit than expected but, much more painful, no easy conversion to Scrip.
It feels like having 190k scrip saved already and then they just double the price for a worm.
GB2K, If the checks are so hard to pass, then how do you sell the skeletons?
Brass birbs are usually constructed with only 3-4 brass skulls, not 7 or 8. 25-30% Shadowy check with second chances is not that bad.
That’s the point I was trying to make earlier. There isn’t much reason to jump the extra hoops to turn skeletons with 7 necks into bouquets of 8 spines (and thereby converting some value of 3 Searing Enigmas into scrip), when using all those 8 skull slots for Brass Skulls makes the skeleton very hard to sell. I guess if one has lot of trembling amber, many searing enigmas and free access to helicon house, this might even be efficient scrip conversion of those 2 materials, but as long as night whispers are rattable, I doubt searing Enigmas into Bouquets is more profitable. One never knows, though. Spider Pope wasn’t intuitive either…
If it’s 190000 Scrip still in Night Whispers, you are probably riding your worm faster cashing those in, converting through Brass Skulls and grinding the rest directly, than if you waited for enough night whisper into diamond weekends. With our without the upcoming change.
No one is asking for hand outs. The Rat Market was just a way to enhance existing grinds. It didn’t print Echoes/Script on its own. It still took an investment of ones time/actions elsewhere to work.
Its their game and they can choose the rules, but finding ways to limit players abilities to actually generate a “high” amount (at least relative to anything else we have) seems to be a constant thing that they nerf. They seem to talk more about it than making new content at times.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d just improve some of the older grinds/content, especially for those who have reached a certain point or have a special quality. For instance, I’d be playing on the Chessboard if they’d only add a new way to get the option that requires the retired “Chess: Mastery of the Game”/" Recollection of Your Chess Mastery" qualities. But no, they retired the Social actions that could generate that and didn’t put anything in their place. Instead, they’re “fixing” something that doesn’t really seem to be broken.
I think we are getting a lot of new content, free and fate. Maybe not as much as around anniversary (when they decided to add GHR and finish all ambitions), but respectable amount.
You could always sell the implausible skeletons at Balmoral, where those silly surfaces don’t know the difference between a good old-fashioned Terror Bird and a colossal eight headed monstrosity. As long as you can make it to the dumbwaiter they’ll buy it.