The rules are:
IIRC there are no exceptions.
If you can remember these 4 rules you don’t need to keep the wiki open, because all actions have bold text reminding you if they generate Progress or not.
Could be boiled down to:
don’t fail checks and don’t play no check +progress cards
I was a bit surprised by which accomplices FBG considers stronger than others. In my opinion Roots and Gambles were never good, just best of the worst in Pages. More headache for those who will try to win Page distinction after patch, especially with Cod also becoming less frequent.
Thanks for the rule summary, that’s great! I had no idea the mechanic was so consistent. At a minimum I thought only some of the accomplices (e.g., mostly the new ones for season) participated in counterplay, rather than uniformly everyone. I suppose this doesn’t actually warrant signposting, though if FB could somehow communicate the gist of those rules in one of their “how does the game work” tutorial options in-game, that might be helpful.
don’t fail checks and don’t play no check +progress cards
Sadly I seem not to be positioning myself for such an outcome. It is mostly when I’m trying to do damage control over bad cards with only no checks due to insufficient prep and my own poor choices, and I’m trying to weigh options that I get muddled on thinking about counterplay. It would seem I’ve been overcomplicating it. Thanks all for the clarifications!
Which is good. You can show patience and earn more money. And rat market nerf will ruin a lot of assosiated grinds like tiger tribute, it will severe impact piracy and khaganate grind, etc.
It is a huge, nasty, dishonest nerf. Well, after that foul nerf FBG did with Noman I am not surprsed.
You keep going on about a nerf to Noman but I fail to see how making sure no one can keep it alive past Whitsun is a nerf.
We have no idea about new Rat Market design. Could be nerf, but not necessary.
It’s gonna be a nerf. But it’s a fair and deserved one.
Right now all good grinds go through the Rat Market, and a grind can only be good in proportion to how much it goes through the Rat Market. That’s incredibly homogenizing. An activity that rewards a 12.5-echo item has to give one of exactly 4 possible items, or it’s economically trash. It gives a 60% echo bonus for some items, and that’s the root of the problem, so that’s gonna have be curtailed one way or another.
I mean, “you can show patience to earn more money” isn’t a very fun game mechanic, it’s not surprising that they want to change that.
The original intent of the Rat Market was to create incentives for variety - like, this week the Rat Market wants night-whispers so you grind night-whispers, next week it wants ivory organza so you grind ivory organza, and so on. But it totally didn’t work out that way - instead, as you point out, the existence of the rat market just meant that “optimal” grinds often involved waiting weeks or months to cash out until the rat market cycled around to the right thing, and gave a big bonus to grinds that cash out in something the rat market takes.
I do not think it makes sense to call the upcoming change “nasty” or “dishonest”. The rat market isn’t having the game effect it’s supposed to, so it makes sense to change it.
Yeah, I can definitely understand being miffed about a nerf, but I agree there’s nothing dishonest about nerfing an overwhelming grind, and I can’t see it as being nasty unless it’s an incredibly harsh reduction, unbalanced, or pushes hard towards activities many players don’t like. Especially since they’ve said we’ll get a chance to cash stockpiles out before it happens.
Personally, I like the Rat Market’s ability to boost a resource’s value if you’re patient, and it hasn’t felt too limiting to viable grinds to me, so I don’t especially want a revamp, but I’d rather have a wider range of very profitable activities than to have a few really fantastic grinds, so if they don’t make it an excessively harsh nerf or change the format to be more fiddly or take even more tracking to use well, I think it might turn out to be worth a hit to EPA/SPA.
Given the advanced notice and the promise that there will be a chance to sell all accumulated resources, it’s about as far from “nasty” or “dishonest” as it’s possible to be.
TBH, that sounds more like a buff than a nerf. It’s not really either, but it puts a cap on the amount of resources you need to sink into it (for no benefit) in order to say you’ve done all you could for the creature.
I have no problem with the Rat Market. It enabled me to get a few pieces of equipment which were unobtainable elsewhere at the time (e.g., the Saintly Rat’s Whiskers relic) and once or twice I got a bunch on bottles of Tears of the Bazaar by using it at the right time. Mostly, though, I just peek at it on Friday and then ignore it.
Expect a more detailed explanation of changes later in May, with the actual update to come soon after. We’ll make sure you get a chance to sell off any accumulated Rat Market resources before the actual update.
I take it we’ll have 12 more weeks available to sell everything at the current rate which is fine. We knew an update was inbound to the market the same way we knew about spider-pope. It’s just sad when it comes!
My concern is with the Fate points of Mith and SA lost with the adornments update. I do hope we’ll be able to exchange or do something to get those back.
Other than that, the roadmap looks deliciouuuus!
As a side note, I like the new Advanced Skills icons. The new skills were always a lot more creepy than the original Persuasive, Watchful, etc. stats, and I always had the sinking feeling that advancing these skills was maybe not the healthiest thing for my character. Now I am sure that is the case. 
I’m not too keen about this new look. I understand why Failbetter may have gone for wholly new designs instead of reusing old icons, but for me the contrasting colour schemes look jarring.
I’m not so big a fan of the new icons… while I appreciate that the color scheme indicates that these skills are grouped together, and I don’t disagree with that goal in theory, they now look so visually similar that I can’t identify them without conscious effort at a glance anymore. Maybe that’ll change as we get more used to them over time, but I dunno—the fact is that they do all look the same now in a way that they didn’t before. :/
… at least for the foreseeable future I will alway be slightly more attentive when I see one one of the new symbols, as my brain is not yet trained to accept them as normal - so less routine, more rediscovery.
Same here, don’t like new icons, but it’s probably not a big deal.
My concern is that we’ll only be able to sell items for echoes, which is pretty useless in my case. The main utility of the rat market was actually for cross-conversion to scrip via diamonds, which is fairly useful for the 600K scrip grind to hellworm polish (worm, saddle, polish). Given the absurdity of that polish grind, having a slightly accelerated route to scrip was helpful, one that I’ve been ok with waiting for the once-a-year chance to exercise. It’d certainly be nice of the “cash out” phase for existing items included an option like diamonds to support that original utility.
I didn’t really know about the impending market changes nor the spider changes as being in the offing – I think folks on reddit and/or discord might have known as there is a lot of discussion about these sorts of things there with confirmations by FB staff, but I don’t frequent those fora and I don’t recall those factoids crossing my eyeballs here. To me, both intended reworks were a surprise.
I like how toxicology looks like a knife from a distance, but an insect up close. And, this helps give an idea what chthonosophy represents.
I agree that a little more distinction might help at some resolutions but I think they deserve unique and evocative art. Love the nautilus.
I do not. The old ones had a sort of… Diverse charm about them that conveyed that they were different, unrelated skills you were seeking out-now they look like parts of a group. Besides, as has been mentioned above, with the old icons I could tell which ad it was with a glance, now I have to look at them more closely. And besides…look, I don’t like bringing this up, but the readable-at-a-glance quality was also far easier for my autistic brain to handle for reasons I couldn’t explain for the life of me. I dislike the new icons strongly For all those reasons.
