I was more having issues with the fact that raising renown or spending favors using the brass skull requires you to arrange for someone to sell their soul. If it was just hanging around with devils or something it wouldn’t be an issue.
That said, I’m sure I can raise it to ten. It’ll just take a bit longer.
Ah right, never had to do that. None of that kind of thing was required in my day (i.e. before this week!.
Still, that chap seems pretty eager to sell his soul, it’s not like you’re forcing him into anything. And sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good…
Eh, if someone is really eager to drink bleach, you’re still doing a bad thing by giving them some :P
And once we get into the “greater good,” we can start justifying all manner of evil, so I won’t use it as an excuse ;)
While selling a soul might go against a character’s principles, it seems pretty clear that something like that isn’t necessarily permanent. You could just pretend to steal the soul back for whoever sold it. I mean, it’s not as if you turned the soul into some kind of beverage, is it? That might very well be a permanent loss of souls, unless individual souls can still be extracted from such bottles.
Favors work well for the most part, however I find that their uses are limited, since you can only spend them on a few options and they can not be stockpiled thanks to the cap at 7.
Renown is a bit more frustrating, as the usage of connected items and renown acts as a massive bottle neck and orientates the entire system around opportunity cards.
I feel that their need to be many more opportunities throughout London to spend favors on, and likewise earn renown (up to a point) by spending them their, and not just the connected item. Likewise I feel that it would be beneficial if Renown increased the maximum number of favors you could hold, and unlock additional storylets throughout the city. As is, once you get the related connected items there is little purpose the renown or favors left.
Neutral for now, though I think from a narrative standpoint using Favours to increase one’s Engaged in a Scheme: a Salon status feels more right than using Connections. (I say this knowing that neither the Society nor the Bohemians factions have been converted yet.)
edited by Eadweard Zenobia on 6/4/2017
Ugh, so you can only raise Renown: Hell to 5 at the carnival. I thought you could get it up to 10. So I literally can’t even use the soul shepherd card at all now because I can’t grind for souls without Renown: 10 and I can’t raise renown without helping people sell their souls.
Making soul shepherds assist in the selling of souls so they can practice their craft is NOT cool.
[quote=Kukapetal]Ugh, so you can only raise Renown: Hell to 5 at the carnival. I thought you could get it up to 10. So I literally can’t even use the soul shepherd card at all now because I can’t grind for souls without Renown: 10 and I can’t raise renown without helping people sell their souls.
Making soul shepherds assist in the selling of souls so they can practice their craft is NOT cool.[/quote] I practice my craft as a soul shepherd just fine without assisting in the selling of souls and not a lick of Renown: Hell. Running Thieves’ Cache expeditions on the regular has left me with a stockpile of souls north of 28k without ever using Unfinished Business.
It stands to reason, though, that if you want to be able to fool spirifers, you need to put some questionable work into becoming a double agent.
Forcing them for become the very thing they’re fighting against is pretty crappy though.
That said, thanks for reminding me of an alternate way of grinding souls. It really stinks that now I’ll have to spend copious amounts of money to grind for souls, making the card even more worthless.
Perhaps you can play the shepherd card immediately after raising renown, and consider it your efforts to restore the soul you arranged to have sold.
Perhaps you can play the shepherd card immediately after raising renown, and consider it your efforts to restore the soul you arranged to have sold.
I got with Kaigen as it is indeed true. Since I started doing only Thieves cache, I never touched unfinished business, used the card many times and still have about 12k spare souls.
There was a long discussion about expeditions and Thieves is more profitable specially if you finished Soul Trade no matter of the picked side.
EDIT:
Interesting RP point! Also, can you delete your second post, please? :)
edited by Skinnyman on 6/5/2017
I like both Renown and Favours. Renown probably feels grindy to stat-capped veteran players, but to new players it is something that will grow with them and their stats, bit by bit, as they play. I feel the Renown-increasing items are a bit too pricey for this right now, though. Not by much, but I feel lowering those prices would make Renown growth feel much more organic.
Granted, I don’t have an alt, so I haven’t actually played this as a fresh character. This is just what I imagine it is like.
I don’t believe so.
For new players, Renown will be something they never encounter. Only a tiny percentage of players read the forums, and since Renown does not change organically with game choices (as Connected used to be), there’s no reason for a new player to know about ts mechanic. At best they might find the options in the Carnival which raise Renown up to 5.
That’s the problem with a game feature which is 100% mechanics and 0% story/narrative/choice related.
[quote=dov]For new players, Renown will be something they never encounter. Only a tiny percentage of players read the forums, and since Renown does not change organically with game choices (as Connected used to be), there’s no reason for a new player to know about ts mechanic. At best they might find the options in the Carnival which raise Renown up to 5.
[/quote] I don’t think that’s entirely true. For one, there has always been game text pointing players towards Mrs. Plenty’s carnival to make contact with factions, so it is not unlikely that players will investigate there and see their renown rise. Secondly, any option that is unlocked with a renown requirement can be moused-over to see a pointer towards the necessary item to increase it. So a new player who takes a look at grayed out options on a faction card will see that they need a certain quality to access one of them, and that a specific item can help them with that quality. I don’t know that it will be any more confusing to a player than "I need 25 Connected: X for this profession, how the heck do I grind that?"
That is a pretty cynical conclusion, and not, I think, one based on actual evidence.
For contrary evidence: I began the game in between the first and second waves of Renown conversion. I started working on Renown well before I got onto the forums, or even before I started reading the wiki. I have also maneuvered several of my friends down into London, none of whom are on the forum and one of whom avoids all sorts of helps and possible spoilers like the plague. All of them also have Renown with various factions. Frankly, as a player exposed to both Renown and Connected at the same moment, Renown made a lot more sense to me, and having a faction forget my existence because I called in a favor most certainly did not feel organic.
Also, as they’ve recently demonstrated, Failbetter keeps tabs on storylets activity. If Renown were something that was only being utilized by the sliver of people who argue about things on the forum, they would be aware of this, and would no doubt take steps to correct it. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, they do rather want to make a top-quality game for everyone.
I’m not sure most casual players (we here are an outlier) would often look at the mouse hover text.
Seeing a requirement for Connected 25 is much easier to understand because throughout normal gameplay you see this quality rise and fall with any interaction you have with the faction. At a minimum, you see a recurring faction card which always has an option to increase this Connected quality.
So, a casual player might not know where to find the optimal way to raise Connected, but the can very intuitively see that this will rise naturally if through regular play they choose options favouring that faction when such opportunities arise.
That is a pretty cynical conclusion, and not, I think, one based on actual evidence.[/quote]
I wouldn’t call it cynical. And of course it’s not based on evidence. This is why my first sentence (which you’ve trimmed) was that this is my belief.
That’s good anecdotal evidence (really - no cynicism!), but that’s all it is. Neither you nor I have a way to know if this reflects the general player base’s experience. Also, by the very fact that you now visit the forums and read the wiki you are not the typical player. So even before doing these things, your approach to the game is not representative of the wider player population.
Are you talking about Connected or about Renown here? When did a faction "forget your existence" in the Connected system? This terminology ("forget") is relevant for the new Renown (how much they know you), not to Connected (how much they are close to you).
In the old Connected system, a faction didn’t forget about you. You became slightly less close to them if you called in Favours. But this has nothing to do with Renown. I haven’t seen anyone complain about how Favours were implemented (except for discussing the rate in which they can be collected). So assume we still had Connected, but with the new Favours. So you gain and lose Connected same as always, and Connected is used to unlock branches as certain levels, as always. But that calling in Favours is using the new faction Favour items you get from the same sources it does now for converted factions.
Given this scenario - does Renown+Favours make more sense than Connected+Favours? To me, at least, it doesn’t.
They do keep tabs and they have better data than all of us. Whether they would take steps to address such issues depends on several factors, including time and resources.
As an example: when FBG implemented the change that in the Bazaar Side-streets and Forgotten Quarter branch unlock costs are displayed differently, people have immediately pointed out to them that this is worse than before, since now you can’t see how much you have of an item before deciding to play the branch. Even worse, you won’t be told you’ve spent the item and how much is left. And now these areas behave differently than all other areas, which only adds to the confusion. It’s been years now and this hasn’t been fixed, even though they’ve acknowledged it’s a problem (to the point of modifying the results in expeditions to explicitly tell you how many supplies you have left after each action). This should have been reverted the same day.
Now that is quite cynical.
I have nothing but respect for Failbetter and its staff. I’ve been playing this game for years now and quite frankly have spent more money on it than on any other game before, without regret. Of course I trust them and their desire to make the best game they can. That doesn’t mean that I think 100% of their choices are the best, and these forums are an arena to discuss such views and exchange ideas with fellow players.
[quote=dov]I’m not sure most casual players (we here are an outlier) would often look at the mouse hover text.[/quote] I recognize that we are making surmises because we do not represent the average player, but unlock requirement indicators are ubiquitous and only intelligible via mouse hover text. It is something the game itself instructs the player to do via the help tab. And if the casual player truly does ignore mouse hover text, then they would be just as stymied by the Connected system because they would have no idea what they needed or how much in order to do anything.
FBG has really detailed data on how much each storylet sees use and people working on analyzing this data. If renown was a fringe fun of a few forum-goers, they wouldn’t be putting in active work again and again at new factions without changing anything, had they seen almost zero interest after the first factions converted. It wouldn’t just be not fixing a mistake, it’d be going the extra mile to keep making the same mistake they’d already be aware of.