‘UPPER RIVER DIRIGIBLE DISASTER!’ Residents of the Upper River have reported seeing a dirigible in flames – and a slew of crates falling from its hold. The Gazette implores readers not to open any crates they might encounter, carrying a letter from a man at Ealing Gardens who claims that one 'blew up his whole d__n house!'
To the Upper River's criminal element, this spells opportunity. The Constables, meanwhile, are furiously trying to get these 'misplaced' crates safely out of circulation.
Players with access to the Upper River can help ensure that the crates get into the right – or the wrong – hands. At the end of the event, a new Opportunity Card will be added to the Upper River deck, offering the chance to gain Favours with the faction that has amassed the most crates. The event will run for one full week, ending next Tuesday.
I suspect those of us who have seen the effects of using a Hillmover (or indeed merely read the flavourtext for them) can guess what kinds of “not good” are likely to follow from incorrectly applied force
Assuming 100% success, two actions and seven scrip (to buy and then open a crate) gives a profit of 9SPA (~4.5EPA), so it’s good but not mammoth ranching. It is much simpler than mammoth ranching, of course, but then so is quantum electrodynamics.
I wonder what happens if folk just prefer to open rather than hand them in? After all, there was an unexpected rash of people who rather enjoyed setting up statues to themselves. Personally, I’ve been giving in to temptation.
Those were the most challenging options for a statue and people down here love useless challenges. In the end, it proved it wasn’t that useful to get all the statues for yourself as it unlocks something. I’m sure that was a bugger turning point for more players to love themselves more!
Another option ended in me shooting myself with a bunch of blunderbasses (and recovering a few of them), that is, wounding myself for something like 4-5 CP.
A fun diversion, not sure I’ll commit a full week to the tug-of-war, but surely I have to get the new quality (measuring total boxes donated) to 77. I’d like the Criminals to win, but don’t really want Street Signs, and I’m intrigued by either possibility. So I suppose we’ll see!
I do like excuses to blow second chances, and the text on all the options is fun.
I think the fact that the cards are all multi-stat challenges means the annoyance of fiddling with equipment outweighs any potential interest the event might otherwise hold. We desperately need an option to just auto-select the best equipment for every action with zero clicks.
Yeah, this whole thing really falls directly into the category of “thanks, I hate it” for exactly that reason. Not to mention having to re-equip hellworm after each skill challenge to draw new cards. And you can’t really ignore the cards either since then you waste all your draws.
All in all it’s a hard pass from me, I’d like to like it but the mechanics of the event are just far too obnoxious for that to be possible. I don’t mean to be overly brusque, but it shouldn’t really come as news to the devs at this point that relentless, fiddly inventory management isn’t something anyone actually likes doing in this game.
I’m going back to London until this is over.
I don’t mind the equipment management so much (I mean, I don’t love it, but it’s, er manageable) but it’s tough to find good balances-- which may just be a feature of the particular pieces of boots, hats, etc. that I have.
The thing that gets my (over)goat is that when I do manage to get one stat at 100 and the other at, say, 75-80, the lower one fails suspiciously often. It’s almost definitely just the RNG being itself, but one gets a feeling sometimes of being put upon.
It seemed to me pretty obvious that the reason for this is to slow things down to avoid a situation like “all the crabs slaughtered before half the players get to them”. However, they may have gone too far in the opposite direction. Like others here, I have little use for the “competition” goods, so I’ve been opening the crates. But I did manage Nightmares 6 and Wounds 4 within a very short time. Given the numbers being aimed for (50,000, is it?) this is going to be with us for a very long time.
Argh, sure, I could abandon three of my current outfits and make ones for the three cards, but I don’t want to. This is just a reminder of how awful equipment-shuffling is and why it’s so important to ise multi-stat challenges sparingly until they get around to implementing a system to automatically optimize equipment.
Well, in the same time people like multi-skill challenges, BUT
This is an option, but the big issue here is that the challenges for this event require very high levels of both skills.
The skill checks are aimed for high-end players that spent some Fate too. That pool of players has access to bigger EPA grinds.
All these factors the event very, very unappealing!
Too hard for players that just unlocked the Hingerlands
High end and Fate gear is somehow required
This means specialized equipment slots (again Fate)
Rewards too small for those that meet these requirements. In the last 14-16h the world quality dropped less than 2%.
I still got almost all echoes and the writing is good. My favourite is getting a box from the terror bird. I was expecting something fighting and blood, not singing!!!
Regarding mixed skills, I temporarily made 3 outfits to get D84%/M.A.100%, S81%/Mith100%, P82%/Zee100%, which is fine with Second Chances but once those run low I don’t think I’d bother gambling when the failure is nothing (or a wound, even). I think I can shuffle it around to get a few extra % in those outfits, but not enough that it’d change my outlook.
I don’t mind not getting 100%s if a failure is still something (like the initial Lab setup, where failures were likely but just meant “less progress than a success”, which flips a success into a “bonus” so to speak, and higher stats become “more reliable bonuses”. See also that check to buy skulls from the Bone Market where excessive Persuasive just means a more regular discount). But as an end-game player it still feels bad when one possibility is “nothing”, even if the success were commensurately more profitable (this is especially compounded as a Card, where “failure” also means you don’t get to try again).
This “something/nothing” divide is perfectly fine if I only need one or a few successes and then I can walk away, but here if I walk away I’m… just ignoring the event. Which is fine, I can definitely do that, but that feels contrary to the intent of having such events.
To be fair, it’s another tug-of-war quality so we aren’t trying to deplete it. Turning in a box to Constables increases it, turning in to Criminals lowers it (theoretically by “1”, although I’ve gotten different results which might just be several players using the action at the same second?) . Much like the Urchin War, I doubt we’re supposed to push it all the way to one end, although the Constables may be unpopular enough to make that happen! (probably not, 7% drop on the first day, but I imagine many players will slow their efforts or drop off as the week goes on)
