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.
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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.
The Dumbwaiter does not pay out in scrip, though. We started at “what item to get from tribute for scrip” before we landed on Flamboyantly Fake Birds.
Not saying we’re not getting enough new content. Recent years there’s been alot and I am thankful for that. What I meant was that they talk in more detail about these sorts of nerfs at times than describing new content that they’re working on. We did get an entire long news post just to try to describe this upcoming change to the Rat market.
Looks like this weekend won’t even have diamonds. Oh well, guess I’ll end up making brass lollipops even though its super boring.
You can buy Maniacs Prayers to fuel digging at the hurlers (it was mentioned earlier in this thread), you can buy Solace Fruit to sell for scrip, you can construct more complex brass skeletons. There are alternatives, if lollipops bore you.
I did fund most of my Hellworm with said 8-skulled monstrosities. Not even using tribute; I got Searing Enigmas by selling Secret Colleges.
You can always come up with your own complex multi-step grind that you find interesting; there’s no requirement to be optimal or do math
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Well, presumably new content is supposed to be a surprise - they don’t talk about it, at most they say it’ll be there, then they just release it and people play through it.
Mechanics changes, on the other hand, work better explained. People are up in arms enough about this change, imagine how much people would be frustrated if it was just a sudden one, where suddenly one weekend everything was different and previous grinds didn’t work.
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I mean, sure, time restrictions could be seen as a cheap and lazy way to get players to constantly come back (which it is to some extent). But what if we looked on the other end of the spectrum? Say, actions came at your theoretical five minutes each. Instead of the usual three hours and twenty minutes it takes to fill up a candle, it’s now one and forty. People would have to spend more time clicking through all of those actions, which nobody really ever has the time for, especially if they have multiple accounts. There’d probably be so much to do that there isn’t really a point anymore to keeping a limit on them.
But I do agree on the EPA cap, it’s much better game design for the player to be able to do more than less. Grinding was never fun anyway, so minimising that as much as possible would increase engagement for players. And working for things like Hellworms already seems to be a slug with how much EPA the Ratket generates now, so there’s still no reason to worsen it.
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Action caps are artifacts of the initial design too.
Imagine that free players have 150 action cap (refills in a ~day with current speed) and paid subscribers have 1000 actions cap (~week). You can log in 1-3 times per day, read a short story arc or two, burn actions left in a grind or keep them you if plan to log in today again. To reduce amount of clicks in this imaginary situation, they could add grind options with high actions costs (say, standard carousel, but with 10-50 actions cost finishing move).
Imagine how much more appealing that would be for most potential players, free and ES alike. You don’t lose anything if you sleep longer than 3 (6) hours a piece. You could read stories at your own pace (instead of running out of actions and deciding that you will finish next day or after few hours pause). You grind with less clicks.
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Okay I’ve never tried to profit cash out at the Rat Market but am going to take advantage of the Jubilee to do so. What’s my best conversion?
Any of the items that cost 1 Rat Shilling are what you want to go for. Alternatively, if you want to get some of the equipment on offer, the Rat Market sells things at a significant discount so picking up something like that can be worthwhile if you have any use for it.
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228,750 Rat-Shillings have a cash value of 22,875 Echoes. 28,593 solacefruit have a cash value of 14,296.5 Echoes (not counting ham arbitrage, since your goal was to get scrip anyway).
So, you evaporated 8,578.5 Echoes of value (equivalent to 17,157 Scrip). Hope this helps! ^_^
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Wow, that’s insane, Two weeks of straight grind at max EpA just evaporated. If he turned those echos into licentiate lollipops (takes two weeks), he would have ended with +55k scrip instead of +28k.
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Ahh, but you are ignoring the incredible wear and tear on my mind that spending two weeks in the bone market would have caused. I think it was well worth losing 17k of scrip to stay out of the bone market.
To probably bolster your argument, I have ~100 custom engraved skulls so I could use those instead of the brass skulls a couple of times a week and am still glad I could avoid the bone market.
I have to admit I almost did the same thing! I did lollipops for my hellworm originally and at the end of that I was super burned out on it as I think there might be an outfit change or two involved and correctly clicking on the right options in the long list of skeleton parts (scroll, scroll, scroll) is so Vastly tedious that I vowed nevermore. So I thought with my NW stockpile, screw it, I’ll just directly convert and accept the losses and go the piracy route for diamonds for future scrip (I sure hope that is already considered EPA-balanced and isn’t going to get yanked away next, but based on my track record of helicon stuff, diamonds, and spiders I’m not holding my breath).
Somehow I just couldn’t quite bring myself to tank so much value though and decided to follow someone else’s appreciated suggestion of hurler grinding (which I didn’t know about) just because it is at least something new. Turns out that is rather tedious too with outfit swaps (More! Slots! Please!) and the long dangerous ride to the Hurlers, but at least it is just for a few weeks sufficient to burn off new plaques.
I was amused to find that it was just not in me to burn EPA even if I have no actual real need of it!
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You still could have just cashed out for something at value and earned scrip a different way, lol
For me it’s very hilarious tradition. Don’t know who started it and where, but evolution of it amuses me a lot. People now even take pride that they hate bone market and wear it as some kind of virtue. FBG should eventually add ironical achievement or something to recognize this feat of social madness.
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A brass lollipop is a skeleton made by putting a Bright Brass Skull on a Headless Skeleton.
Well, if like me you were looking for diamonds… damn.
Then that is a good idea. I still don’t think we should touch action generation, but your concept of a “daily quota” you don’t have to use until the end of the day seems very well-fit for a renovation on the action system. It doesn’t force players to constantly pull up FL all the time, just a handful of, say, 10-20 min. sessions and that’s it for how much space one would have to set aside for the game. I could definitely envision myself advocating that to Failbetter.
Though from how I understand your idea for click-reduction, either you’re trying to say “leave the entire action cost for the payout storylet” (which of course doesn’t make sense) or “provide a 2-click alternative with all non-straightforward ability checks and materials needed to all grinds”, which I could see.