Theres seems to be a problem with the content. I have Spending Secrets 4 and counting the days 6 and I still cant use any options other then the ones that need just spending secrets 4. Anyone else have that problem?
Alright boyos, the rule, when you can’t access content and should be able too, send an email to the good people at fallenlondonbugs@failbettergames.com. They can’t fix it if they don’t know about it.
Be kind, provide your account name, the stat, the opportunity cards you can’t use.
~MF
edited by MaurnaFrost on 4/15/2012
In my case I’m not sure it is a bug. I’m maxed out on stats, and it’s possible that the Regretful Soldier doesn’t work in that situation. I tried it only after reading the post here, and as I said, I got little from it. It’s possible that players maxed out on stats can only gain these qualities through Opportunity Cards.
The lovely folks are also kind enough, in my experience, to let you know if that is true as well.
~MF
For the love of all that’s rubbery, what color stockings does a boy have to wear to get the card that increases Spending Secrets to four?!?!
Best. Quote. Ever.
Well put… well put.
It just takes drawing the oppertunity card… One of my charecters got it almost instantly… the other, it’s been nearly a week and no card draw yet.
Alignment storylets:
Learn the spy’s arts (Card) - Aligned The Great Game (increased CtD and A Pocketful of Loose Change)
~MF
A Lady planning
It turns out the answer was ‘red’.
As a person aligned with the Great Game, I appear to also be able to play dice at wolfstack docks despite it listing “bohemians.” Notably, other options with this same indicator are closed to me. (Though those I cannot quote, it appears.)
My favorite part of this storylet is that after days upon days of card flipping and about three and a half hours of waiting for actions to refresh, trading in your Loose Change for a Mark of Credit is a luck challenge which resets your CtD for no discernible reason. So it’s possible to never, ever get this item no matter how much time and effort you put into it.
It combines everyone’s least favorite parts of the Fidgeting Writer storylet with the never ending grind of the pre-Wilmot’s End PoSI content.
Why? To what end? To pad an already over padded game? Just to say to the most dedicated of players “Ha ha, fooled you. You’re ugly and you smell funny. Start over you worthless bastard!”
If the luck challenge is 50/50, and that’s a big IF, that’s 1050 actions to get this thing done. That’s 3150cp or 63 levels of Quality advancement(past 50.) Think how long it took for you to go from level 50 to level 103. That is what this storylet is asking of you. And that’s just the action cost. It doesn’t even begin to account for the card flipping.
Yes, I understand the need to pad a story to write more content, but why do we need to pad an already action heavy story with a card flipping grind with a luck challenge? Just to make the game longer? Why not make every action a luck challenge? Why not make every action an impossible challenge which grants half a cp, that way the game will take forever to complete?
Because that’s asinine and it makes the game worse.
Wasn’t the luck challenge ‘pretty good odds’ - i.e., better than 50/50? Also, given how many incidental cards give CtD boosts, I suspect the point here isn’t grinding, but to give us a parallel path to the Someone is Coming quality - a use for cards we would have otherwise discarded and actions we would have otherwise spent grinding for Echoes. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been working pretty hard for my Marks of Credit this past couple of days, using the regular storylets, but once I’ve had a bit of an explore, I’ll let them be and just take the CtD card options when they appear, meaning that every few weeks, I’ll get a surprise bundle of First City Coins or whatever. Perhaps that’s numerically inefficient, but frankly, I can live with that. I’m a chap playing a game, not a robot designed to mechanically separate sausages for packaging.
Theoretically, but I recall someone wiser than I doing the numbers and finding that “Pretty Good Odds” is more like 50/50 while “It Could Go Either Way” to be more like 60/40 given the law of large numbers.
But even were there no luck challenege the storylet would require 525 actions or 1575cp or 31 and a half Quality levels. No small amount. That’s a pretty heavy story investment for no Echo reward, even if you are only card grinding. Adding a luck challange to that for no other reason than to add grind seems asinine. It’s already one of the most grind heavy storylets in Fallen London. Why make it grindier?
edited by Nigel Overstreet on 4/11/2012
[quote=Nigel Overstreet]My favorite part of this storylet is that after days upon days of card flipping and about three and a half hours of waiting for actions to refresh, trading in your Loose Change for a Mark of Credit is a luck challenge which resets your CtD for no discernible reason. So it’s possible to never, ever get this item no matter how much time and effort you put into it.
It combines everyone’s least favorite parts of the Fidgeting Writer storylet with the never ending grind of the pre-Wilmot’s End PoSI content.
Why? To what end? To pad an already over padded game? Just to say to the most dedicated of players “Ha ha, fooled you. You’re ugly and you smell funny. Start over you worthless bastard!”
If the luck challenge is 50/50, and that’s a big IF, that’s 1050 actions to get this thing done. That’s 3150cp or 63 levels of Quality advancement(past 50.) Think how long it took for you to go from level 50 to level 103. That is what this storylet is asking of you. And that’s just the action cost. It doesn’t even begin to account for the card flipping.
Yes, I understand the need to pad a story to write more content, but why do we need to pad an already action heavy story with a card flipping grind with a luck challenge? Just to make the game longer? Why not make every action a luck challenge? Why not make every action an impossible challenge which grants half a cp, that way the game will take forever to complete?
Because that’s asinine and it makes the game worse.[/quote]
I managed to fail the luck challenge. Your CtD quality only resets when you WIN, making it like a lot of other carousel actions like the university, war of assassins, etc, except that you can’t always win the challenge due to stats.
Just got my 5 mark reward.
I actually had some weird bug where I wa son 4 marks of Credit, and then I got a couple of full failures for the 5th, but when I finally got my 5th ‘success’, I actually had 6 marks of credit. Had to grind CtD back up a 7th time for the card to get the prize.
I also noticed a couple of weird/interesting things whilst I’ve been doing this, as the last week or so has progressed:
(1) Going for Marks of Credit, on the card ‘Secrets and Spending’, used to only affect your ‘Pocket full of loose change’ (PfolC) quality.
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Typically this would be at 6 by the time you have 14 CtD, so you would get a 2nd go if you failed the luck challenge, as it would only knock it down to 4, which was enought to try again), and if you succeeded the PfolC would fully reset, but CtD would remain the same. Thus allowing you to also go for 1st City Coins or Surface Currency once the ‘Secrets and Spending Card’ re-appeared - meaning that everyone who had raised the stats could get 5-10 echos for the 14 or so actions it took - which was very nice for people who were unlucky going for the Marks of Credit.
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My first 4 marks of credit worked like this - and I also got myself a lot of surface currency. I actually couldn’t start getting PfolC again, until the ‘Secrets and Spending’ card re-appeared, allowing me to claim my ‘CtD’ reward too.
(2) There now seems to be 2 levels of failure on trying to gain a Mark of Credit. One only knocks PfolC from 6 down to 4. The other resets it entirely. They also both have unique text. The harsher one definitely also removes all your CtD - which is quite unfair, considering the fairly paltry rewards on offer for the amount of actions required, (outside of the unique one).
(3) Success on gaining a Mark of Credit also now seems to reset CtD. Thus, I can’t see anyone bothering to go for the non-mark based rewards any more, as the value isn’t worth it. They’re also a goods item, and have no option for item conversion.
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Surface Currency gives a better return on actions from Shaking down your Agent in Veilgarden, (though non-POSI’s don’t have that option so this is a good alternative in that regard).
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1st City coins are really only of value to us players of the Marvellous.
It’s a nice alternative to the old grind for them, I’ll admit. I had no friends to help me steal any - so a gift fromthe masters, and a lot of help from Connected: Criminals had to do it all. (Plus there’s some also available from good luck on one item level conversion, which is also cool).
Has anyone else had the same observations?
It just seems to me, that the storylets balance and reward mechanism has been changed entirely for the worse - very rare in this excellent game. My only quibble was the time it seems to take for the Numinatrix’s card to appear to get you from Spending Secrets 3 to 4, (and how easily you can mistake it for your Aunt, and nearly throw it away).
I still havent gotten the card to choose my alignment! Im going mad waiting for it!!! Is there something special I have to do to get it?
Theoretically, but I recall someone wiser than I doing the numbers and finding that “Pretty Good Odds” is more like 50/50 while “It Could Go Either Way” to be more like 60/40 given the law of large numbers.[/quote]
Vyrkolar on the Fidgeting Writer thread reported 60-70% for the “pretty good odds” challenges and 50-60% for the “it could go either way” challenges there, and he’s racked up hundreds of attempts at the earlier levels: [color=00ffff]http://tinyurl.com/CSGrind[/color]
[quote]But even were there no luck challenege the storylet would require 525 actions or 1575cp or 31 and a half Quality levels. No small amount. That’s a pretty heavy story investment for no Echo reward, even if you are only card grinding. Adding a luck challange to that for no other reason than to add grind seems asinine. It’s already one of the most grind heavy storylets in Fallen London. Why make it grindier?
edited by Nigel Overstreet on 4/11/2012[/quote]
How are you getting those numbers? Level 14 in a quality requires 91 cp, but I’m pretty sure the actions grant more than one cp at a time, so a loop would take less than 87.5 actions.
Increases seem to give a pretty consistent 5cp to Counting the Days (Sorry, but CtD just makes me think of Crash to Desktop), although getting to 14 in a stat requires 105cp (not 91). Bearing in mind that the majority of cases where you’re increasing Counting or Change, you’re not getting anything else - no piles of goods, no stats, no story progress - the fact that the effective rewards have been so heavily reduced is a kick in the teeth. Once you’ve got the instrument, it’s just not worth ever touching these again, as the rewards are just that bad. Previously, the rewards were passable - a bit low for many and a bit high for mid-level. Now, they’re sub-par for everyone! It’s easier to just buy them outright. It’s not the nice buff to the often useless Connection training cards etc. that it was before.
[quote=Aspeon]
Vyrkolar on the Fidgeting Writer thread reported 60-70% for the “pretty good odds” challenges and 50-60% for the “it could go either way” challenges there, and he’s racked up hundreds of attempts at the earlier levels: [color=00ffff]http://tinyurl.com/CSGrind[/color][/quote]
There was some work done with much larger numbers than Vyrkolar’s a year or so back. The numbers might have changed since then, but we can’t know with data only in the hundreds.
My mistake. My numbers were indeed off(thought I divided more than I did.) Level 14 requires 105 cp, or 31 actions. 32 to get a Mark of Credit. Getting 5 Marks of Credit requires 160 actions. That’s still a hefty load of actions and a heftier one when you consider the card flipping.
Adding a luck challenge can boost those numbers tremendously and I still don’t see what it adds to the storylet other than padding for the sake of padding.
I only got mine two days ago and it was several days after I was able to interact with other players on the “Pocketful of Loose Change” card. It will come, just takes time.
~MF
A Lady playing a game