For people who wanted to just engage with the bone market a little bit, to get items that would otherwise be a major barrier to their progress, Ivory Humeri were perfect, giving people an easy template for how to get into the bone market, get the items they needed to progress elsewhere, and get out. Some people love the Bone Market, but for those who don’t, Ivory Humeri made things bearable. And considering all the actions involved (orange-apples etc), they weren’t crazily out of whack with the rest of the game.
This one piece of the changes should really be reverted.
For what it’s worth, I agree that 15 Echo is too little given the hoops you need to jump through and the expenditure necessary. Ideal cost would be between 20 and 25 IMO, given the other bones and generally sources of income. At 15, and not having any qualities, the Humeri are now in fact subpar, especially compared to the Amber-Crusted Fins.
There is no reason to go for Ivory Humeri through the Parabolan tree method anymore, really. The conversion from Orange-Apples to Ivory Humeri is still far from a guaranteed process.
Little reason to use Human Ribcages anymore either.
Yeah, I was surprised they nerfed that. When I did the simulation for what an actual skeleton grind is, using the ivory humeruses, it was like 3.3 EPA overall. There’s just a lot of overhead in making skeletons that even a really powerful action pair (buy a humerus for 11 echoes in bone fragments, attach it for 3000 skeleton value in pennies) didn’t really overwhelm all the other pieces of the skeleton construction. edited by Amalgamate on 12/4/2020
Completely agree, the effective EPA for a full cycle was completely on par with other methods at that stage of the game.
[quote=Amalgamate]Yeah, I was surprised they nerfed that. When I did the simulation for what an actual skeleton grind is, using the ivory humeruses, it was like 3.3 EPA overall. There’s just a lot of overhead in making skeletons that even a really powerful action pair (buy a humerus for 11 echoes in bone fragments, attach it for 3000 skeleton value in pennies) didn’t really overwhelm all the other pieces of the skeleton construction. edited by Amalgamate on 12/4/2020[/quote]
I have been in avid pursuit of Ivory Humeri, a veritable collector and connoisseur, and, having realized that my efforts were bounded by withering gazes and even accumulation of Scandal because of the company I had to keep during that pursuit, I resolved to spend much of October dedicated to the pursuit of Parabolan Orange-Apples, whereupon, like the proverbial ant who repeatedly goes back and forth laying in provisions for the coming harsh winter, so also did I trudge back and forth to Parabola with prodigious stocks of shards of bone, which, I should add, did nothing to remediate my reputation, and I did this in anticipation of Hallowmas, during which my scandalous behavior was not seen with derision, nay, but rather with praise in harmony with the season, and I accumulated something more than twice one hundred of the valuable bones, a frankly improbable number, most of which still remain in my possession, so I was greatly surprised when I learned this morning that there had been a great panic and thankfully that my preparations of such a large position had insulated me somewhat from The Great Bone Market Crash of '98.
Good for you. Foolish and imprudent were those of us who instead endeavoured to stockpile harvests upon harvests of parabolan fruit produce, only releasing them when in particular need of false-bone constructions.
While the Orange-Apple market did not crash quite so severely, we were denied even the indubitable honour of having our sad entrepreneurial efforts immortalized, never mind about recouping our losses.
Surely there is a lesson to be learned from our sad predicament, but I can’t seem to fathom it.
IF the Viscountess ever gets into action. If she’s anything like my cat, she’ll only just have finished taking very important and necessary naps by the time the next Election rolls round.
At this point I only ever used them for Railroad Steel and Bone Fragments. Everything else was either better farmed elsewhere or was best created from a once a week, market-destroying skeleton.
shrug. I just wish I’d gotten the cool, one-time special title from hoarding. 20 isn’t that many!
It is the source of the info that 53 people had a lot of ivory humeruses.
It also explains why they made this change: …because apparently, humeruses were always supposed to give 1500 in skeleton value. In the game’s internal documentation, it had always said 1500. It was just apparently mis-entered when it was first implemented. And nobody really noticed until they ran across it when doing this economy rebalance.
The change from 3000 to 1500 wasn’t some big balance tweak that they gamed out. It was just a bugfix, like fixing a typo - “oops, someone entered 3000 when it was supposed to be 1500, better fix it.”
ivory is essential a process of increase the value of bone fragments, which at a cost of about 5 actions, the increment is originally 1900, that roughly about 380 pennies/action , now its only 80 ,not worthwhile at all. The vaule is not simply halved. ivory humerus maybe was the only good thing about bone market ,now it is trash , just use any arm instead ,thanks to FBG.
（ok,now there’s ivory femur,cost more, but not very sucks at the first look
and there is A Victim of the Great Bone Market Crash of '98 , Ok, now I’m just laughing ） edited by ugo on 12/5/2020
And since enter / exit the lab cost nothing now, maybe they should as well retire the 3 card lab mechanism. Because the menace cards were undiscardable, you were supposed to leave the lab or use the menace card(which is inefficient), either way it would cost you . Now you can just leave the lab and ask "a friend" to send you a xmas card. So why should we suffer the stupid 3 cards lab anylonger? Oh, oh maybe the update is meant to make us to be suffer, to buy fates, not to "improve" anything like "user experience"? edited by ugo on 12/5/2020
Well, Sacksmas cards are finite and will go away in a couple weeks. The in-lab menace reduction is one of very few ways to relatively straighforwardly reduce menaces without relying on chance, spending echoes, or also increasing a different menace.
So, actually, since entering the lab is now free, it’s incredibly valuable to be able to reduce menaces at will.
Further, reducing menace via potions is trivial when you’re endgame. Which is when you have the lab.
Failbetter does plan on reworking the lab at some point. I suspect it won’t be like the Bone Market change; instead they may incentivize playing each card rather than searching for a single card over and over.
IMO menaces also need rethinking in the endgame. Challenge difficulty spikes, but there aren’t better menace reduction opportunities to compensate. It’s ridiculous that the best method not only is exploiting alternate accounts, but that it also remains uncontested after many years. edited by Optimatum on 12/6/2020
[quote=ugo]Oh, oh maybe the update is meant to make us to be suffer, to buy fates, not to "improve" anything like "user experience"?
[/quote]
Hmm… I’m somewhat lucky that I’m currently involved in other actions that the bone market… I really have to read myself into the topic again with all the changes and new opportunities opened by the railway over time.