Without Fate, you can only get these at Hallowmas and Neathmas AFAIK.
i’m not sure about rare, but its unobtainable. Searing enigmas were made purchasable at the bazaar once, and the ones bought were turned into false leads when failbetter realized the mistake.
Also the bottom of this link has a good amount of no longer obtainable items, and how they were gotten.
[quote=suinicide]
Also the bottom of this link has a good amount of no longer obtainable items, and how they were gotten.
http://echobazaar.wikidot.com/goods[/quote]
Old art, neat! This IS a history class
edited by Gonen on 6/5/2016
Without Fate, you can only get these at Hallowmas and Neathmas AFAIK.[/quote]
Dangit, I haven’t been around long enough to see one of those. But that also means that the one on my mantelpiece is actually rare enough to give me bragging rights.
@Julius: Elemental Secrets have also been part of the reward packages for sundry Excellent Friend stories (which is not, strictly speaking, Fate content). They can also be gotten as Rare Successes in FQ expeditions. So, rare enough, but not more so than other items of that tier.
– Mal
[quote=malthaussen]@Julius: Elemental Secrets have also been part of the reward packages for sundry Excellent Friend stories (which is not, strictly speaking, Fate content). They can also be gotten as Rare Successes in FQ expeditions. So, rare enough, but not more so than other items of that tier.
– Mal[/quote]
Oh, cool. I got mine from a certain quest to the Elder Continent, available in the fate tab…
E.F. stories become Fate content five months after release, so as long as you maintain E.F. status you’ll be eligible for the new stories as they are released; it is common for a reward of that tier to result from the story.
– Mal
Sorry, NiteBrite.
On a more interesting note, I heard that the Apples were awarded to the top 100 players of the old Knife And Candle.
What WAS the old knife and candle like anyways? That was before echoing, yes?
The old wiki says Apples of Discord were given to the top 30 plays, no clue if that’s correct.
[li]
A few corrections. Exceptional Story seasonal tie-ins cost money to access, thus they are Fate-locked. Elemental Secrets cannot be obtained through rare successes in expeditions; they can be obtained through either Fate expedition with luck. Exceptional Stories become available via Fate three months later in theory though some suffered delays. Most Exceptional Stories pay out with one item or items with a collective worth of 62.5 echoes; Flint and the seasonal tie-one are the only ones to give 312.5 echo items.
I’d assume the absolute rarest items are those obtained from the Kickstarters, like whatever items or qualities are associated with the “only one person can ever get this” stories.
For the rarest non-fate-locked non-time-locked items, that’s harder. Obviously it’d be something you can’t keep in normal play (something added during a story and removed by the end of it) and I would guess it’d be part of one of the Ambitions (as a relatively small number of players get far into those and then suddenly stop progressing, plus only a quarter (roughly) of players are on each one.)
If I had to pick one from memory, it’d be “Drop of Gaoler’s Honey”, which is from fairly early on in Ambition: Nemesis, but late enough to screen out most people who are likely to abandon the game at the drop of a hat. And it potentially exists for only a single action, between when you acquire it and when you consume it.
Right now, the rarest item is a Noman since literally nobody has one ;)
A complete mess, to be honest. Buggy. Rife with cheating. Not very narrative. There was a leaderboard, and crazy people fighting like rats in a sack to claw their way up it. The whole game was quite a bit less sophisticated at the time, and K&C was the very basic PvP end of it. But I think we did have echoes by then? I could well be wrong, the memory cheats.
Knife and Candle Mark I: My Part In Its Downfall: There was a gang who ganged up on people, I was in it. This understandably provoked a certain degree of ill-feeling, though there was no rule against it at the time. There actually weren’t many rules governing original K&C at all, and it wasn’t at all clear what constituted cheating, and eventually someone outside the gang gamed the system to such a spectacular extent that the whole thing got taken down. Which served us right, no doubt.
It was fun while it lasted. I don’t think I could do it now, though. Not nearly crazy enough! I always mean to try the new version out. One day.
Looking forward to Seeking again, though. That was my other big thing I was crazy about, though I’d flounced over missing the time-limited Sunlight event by the time of Winking Isle. (True story: while the Sunlight thing was happening, I was sitting on the steps in the British Museum, recovering from having seen (a replica of) this for the first time. Funny old world. I suppose I shall never have a Gilded Crustacean now. But I met a Lion Man.)
Oh, and has anyone mentioned Exceptional Petals? Those were similar to Apples of Discord, only you got them for scoring in the top five on the leaderboard for the original Feast of the Exceptional Rose. You had to collect Admired, which was what we had before Making Waves. I was terrible at social action stuff, as indeed I still am, so I ground my way up there by clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking, like someone with too much time on their hands and not enough to do, as indeed I once was. And nudged poor old Iskandra out of her spot, if I recall.
I still think Apples should give you loads of Dreaded, and Petals… I dunno, Bizarre or Respectable? Either way, I don’t think they’re going to! And the hundreds of hours I must have spent clicking to get them! But I must have had fun at the time. And I made friends. Non, je ne regrette rien.
Wait, how was the original K&C susceptible to gaming? I was under the impression it was fairly difficult to win consistently.
A complete mess, to be honest. Buggy. Rife with cheating. Not very narrative. There was a leaderboard, and crazy people fighting like rats in a sack to claw their way up it. The whole game was quite a bit less sophisticated at the time, and K&C was the very basic PvP end of it. But I think we did have echoes by then? I could well be wrong, the memory cheats.
Knife and Candle Mark I: My Part In Its Downfall: There was a gang who ganged up on people, I was in it. This understandably provoked a certain degree of ill-feeling, though there was no rule against it at the time. There actually weren’t many rules governing original K&C at all, and it wasn’t at all clear what constituted cheating, and eventually someone outside the gang gamed the system to such a spectacular extent that the whole thing got taken down. Which served us right, no doubt.
It was fun while it lasted. I don’t think I could do it now, though. Not nearly crazy enough! I always mean to try the new version out. One day.
Looking forward to Seeking again, though. That was my other big thing I was crazy about, though I’d flounced over missing the time-limited Sunlight event by the time of Winking Isle. (True story: while the Sunlight thing was happening, I was sitting on the steps in the British Museum, recovering from having seen (a replica of) this for the first time. Funny old world. I suppose I shall never have a Gilded Crustacean now. But I met a Lion Man.)
Oh, and has anyone mentioned Exceptional Petals? Those were similar to Apples of Discord, only you got them for scoring in the top five on the leaderboard for the original Feast of the Exceptional Rose. You had to collect Admired, which was what we had before Making Waves. I was terrible at social action stuff, as indeed I still am, so I ground my way up there by clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking, like someone with too much time on their hands and not enough to do, as indeed I once was. And nudged poor old Iskandra out of her spot, if I recall.
I still think Apples should give you loads of Dreaded, and Petals… I dunno, Bizarre or Respectable? Either way, I don’t think they’re going to! And the hundreds of hours I must have spent clicking to get them! But I must have had fun at the time. And I made friends. Non, je ne regrette rien.[/quote]
Thank you, imeja, for your take on the original incarnation of K&C.
The original K&C had a mechanic involving a test against your Shadowy as to whether your opponent could detect you within 15 minutes, REAL TIME, of your attempt to stalk and ultimately attack them. As imeja said, there was a public scoreboard; one was forbidden from attacking anyone who was not within 10 places higher or lower than oneself on the score board. Other stats (including Dangerous for likelihood of scoring a hit) were also involved but my memory as well as imeja’s has faded.
I remember it became known that certain players had figured out how to reliably score hits on opponents no matter what those opponents did, though I did not know until today that imeja was one of them. I do believe that this discovery was one of the reasons FBG shut the original K&C down, and completely revised it into the form/s of K&C we had until recently.
I also want to thank imeja for the bit about Exceptional Petals. I was not aware of those (probably because I was never within 5 steps of the top of the leader board). That must be a nifty souvenir to have. Optimatum is correct: Apples of Discord went out to the top 30 players on the leader board at the time FBG ended the original K&C. I was somewhere around 26th, I think.
Re: Echoing–Echoing was a feature of the game from when I started (can’t speak to what happened before that) though I don’t think K&C generated material that one could echo; it was content-poor, as imeja said. Originally, one could get rewards by echoing one’s FL activities to Twitter (and originally that was the only way to access the game); Failbetter invented the Journals when it became clear that Echoing every last move to Twitter was annoying more people than it was attracting new players. :-)
Well, we seemed to manage it! But you only had to win more often than you lost to gain points, and you’d rise over time. An Overgoat helped. I remember getting the worst of it when other people started to get them, I had to have a bit of a fire sale to afford one. And it helped if you knew which defensive strategy the person you attacked was using. Once you knew that, your mates were sure to beat them, at least until they got on and changed it. So it also helped to know what time they were likely to be online… and so on. The more mad you were, the higher you placed.
I don’t think I understood how the eventual winner was doing it at the time, though I daresay it was explained to me. Farming alts for the slaughter, possibly. Whatever it was, it was thoroughly unsporting of them to cheat better than us! I seem to remember I placed second in the end, although only because they’d given me a boost by spamming me with failed attacks shortly before the curtain fell.
Cheers, I’d completely forgotten the mechanics. And Watchful was tested against their Shadowy to hunt them down, surely. That’s why an Overgoat was the must-have edge for a while. I was pretty good cos I was pretty crazy, but I got gradually ground down until I got one.
How many people even participated in the original K&C?
Now that Seeking is back, do you still have those Calling Cards, NiteBrite? And do they work again?
I’m not asking for you to pass them to me (I don’t have a use for them yet and I would just hoard them), but I’m curious if they work.
[quote=th8827]Now that Seeking is back, do you still have those Calling Cards, NiteBrite? And do they work again?
I’m not asking for you to pass them to me (I don’t have a use for them yet and I would just hoard them), but I’m curious if they work.[/quote]
Not at the time that you asked, but sending went live today. True to my word, I went to send my cards on, but there was a nasty surprise, as there often is with SMEN. Sending the card sets your card total to 0 so my three extra cards were destroyed in the process. I no longer have any Mr Eaten’s calling cards. All shall be well.
edited by NiteBrite on 6/10/2016