Here’s this week’s question for any quick Fallen London threads! …er, check that; reverse it.
Why don’t reports from the Khanate and gifts from Balmoral reset with TTH like everything else?
They have two different methods baked into the game system for events resetting on a timer; why shouldn’t they take advantage of both of them? It would be really boring if everything worked in exactly the same way.
I have two ways to get to the store, driving and walking. Why would I use both when one method is decidedly inferior?
Most things can be claimed every week, including the new High Sancta, because they all reset at once. It takes more than a week for reports and gifts to reset+claim unless you are obsessive about ensuring you are where you need to be to claim them the very second they reset (and even still…). That means there are going to be weeks you cannot claim gifts or reports. This may be something you enjoy, but I’m not a big fan.
I think all such things should reset with TTH.
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You can’t influence TtH, but the other two are malleable, so it’s possible to set all those timers pretty close to each other. If you cash in Balmoral and Khanate roughly around your next TtH, it’ll be the same the week after. I have a routine that I always go straight to Balmoral after cashing in a weekly Professional reward. (I don’t bother about regular Khanate visits.)
Yes, but it is inevitable that you will be late.
For rewards that reset with TTH, that’s not an issue. For gifts and reports it is. I was resetting gifts on Fridays (do we all see TTH on Friday now?), but over time it slipped to Thursday.
Ick.
Your analogy would hold more weight with me if I ever used a car. I walk and use public transit for everything, and hate cars and driving culture with a passion. :P
Setting that aside, I don’t accept the notion that TtH timers are inherently superior to Living Story timers. On the contrary, I think the proliferation of things that reset on TtH has gotten out of hand. I have a long checklist of things to take care of all at the same time every week, and I feel pressure to get them all done ASAP lest I forget one of them and waste a TtH. Some of these activities like board meeting and High Sancta can take an entire 2-candle action refresh period, leaving scant time for other activities.
I actually like the feeling of accomplishment of tidying up the weekly tasks. but the fact that there are so many of them now and they are all front-loaded to the same day of the week can feel a bit overwhelming and bloated.
Conversely, I like the fact that the balmoral gift sends me a handy notification the moment it expires, so it is easy to remember to take care of it the next time I visit the Upper River to turn in favours.
I think at the very least, this exchange proves that you don’t have grounds to confidently declare one method objectively inferior to the other. People like different things for different reasons, and, setting aside any other reasons they may have for making it work this way, it would be a bad move for FBG to solely cater to one group of players’ preferences.
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Then I’ll assume you live in a city (which I hate more than you hate cars), but at least you get the gist of the analogy.
I hear your point, but I have to point out that the activities that reset with TTH can be done anytime during the week. The only pressure is to get gifts and reports as soon as possible after they reset, which will always be at least a little later than it was the week prior.
Last week I picked up my reports at 1am Tuesday. This week, I picked it up nine hours later. Given the constraints of life, it will probably be even later next week. Eventually, there will be a week when I cannot pick up my reports (this happens to me every few months). Not because something slipped my mind, but because the math prohibits it.
Note how you’re collecting your Balmoral gift the next time you visit the upper river. That means you are going to be more than a few minutes (if not days) later picking up your gift every week. How long before that adds up to you missing the gift?
Or if you want to stick with feeling pressure - for things that reset with TTH, your deadline is fixed, known, and easy to meet. For gifts and reports, your deadline is when they reset, and you missed it.
The reason these things don’t reset with TTH must either be intentional or an oversight. If it’s an oversight, maybe me asking about it will get it corrected, filling me with joy and neathly pleasures. If it’s intentional, I just want know why.
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It doesn’t “add up to me missing the gift”, it just means the average rate of balmoral gifts per week is slightly less than 1. That’s much less a stark penalty than outright missing a TtH turn-in.
I just don’t care that much about losing an hour or two here or there. Arranging things perfectly so that I am already in balmoral the second the timer expires would be too much trouble for me. I already do this for double Moulin wellspring, and I’m glad this doesn’t work the same way. Honestly I wish they would abolish the double Moulin trick while tweaking the EPA of that activity to still make it worthwhile for endgame players—it’s just such an annoying hassle, but with such a stark drop-off in value for not doing it that I do still do it anyway.
This is in keeping with my general approach to FL—I enjoy minmaxing to a generous degree, but I’m just not going to stress out about constantly keeping at the bleeding edge of profitability with every single action. The hassle to reward ratio is just not worth it to me. If I get 80–90% of the way there on average, that’s more than enough. The double Moulin trick discussed above is just about my limit.
I also want to reiterate my original point that has somewhat fallen by the wayside in this discussion—variety. Asymmetricality has been a pillar of FL’s design since the very beginning. I think it is good and cool that different bits of the game function in different ways and have their own idiosyncrasies. Sometimes this results in annoyances, to be sure; but I would much rather have a game with a thousand idiosyncratic eccentric game-mechanical nooks and crannies, giving rise to the occasional annoyance and friction, than a bland perfectly balanced symmetrical smooth porridge. Cf. all the Exceptional Stories that consist of “click-read-click-read-click-read”, which I consider universally inferior to ESes that actually have some game-mechanical texture—irrespective of the quality of the prose itself!
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Also, this glosses over a point I made, which is that I do feel pressure to turn in TtH activities as possible! As I said, I want to minimize the chance of forgetting about them, or running out of actions near the deadline and having to pay Fate to squeeze them in, so I tend to do them ASAP. And wasting TtH is definitely more of a severe penalty than being a few hours late on Balmoral.
When I first heard someone mention the double-wellspring trick, I immediately thought, “oh, that’s interesting and kind of cool that you thought of that. but it’s too much of a pain for anyone to ever actually do it.”
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I’m now imagining a world where, instead of being on the same weekly schedule, all the once-a-week activities popped up in the Messages tab at various times throughout the week, and it sounds like a nightmare
I do it after reading about it somewhere but unfortunately it clashes with House of Chimes business. So I am taking a break from the weekly expeditions for a bit. I just offloaded all my flasks anyway during Hallowmas. It’s a good time to get rid of scandal though very far from optimal for spirit. Luckily I have a leisurely approach to spirit.
On the topic at hand, I am content with a mix of Tth and more haphazard deadlines. Though I will say I did time Wellspring for a few hours before Tth to make sure I remembered.
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Indeed, the opposite extreme would also be bad. The unfortunate truth is that the more content gets added to the game, the more recurring weekly activities, not to mention World Events and festivals, tend to suck up the week’s available actions, no matter how you slice it. It feels like there are less and less free actions remaining for me to pursue whatever side activities—or even main grinds!—I feel like doing, and this problem will only get worse as long as they keep adding new stuff to the game without adjusting the 144-actions-per-day allotment. How much worse must it already be for more casual players who log in less frequently and don’t use virtually all of those actions daily like I do?
Double Moulin what now? I don’t usually bother with the wellspring.
Okay, fair point on rate vs. missing. Although the effect is not that different from missing a TTH turn-in, 62.5E/week.
But still, why should it be different at all? Why do these two weekly activities have different timers from every other weekly activity?
And that’s the question I’m actually interested in. Put another way, do the devs want those two activities to have payouts <62.5E/week for some reason? If so, what is it?
There are things I stop bothering with. The boardroom is one, the wellspring is another. I’d probably stop with the Khanate, but I like sailing and smuggling crates.
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Yeah, it feels a little backwards to describe having lots of content as a “problem”. Players can always just not do weekly things. It’s not like the weekly things are required and everything else squeezes in to the remainder, the weekly things are just one more thing competing for attention.
I’ve gone back and forth between 20 and 40 actions recently and sometimes I’ve had periods where I don’t bother doing various weekly things, because there’s a grind I’m focused on, and sometimes I lose interest in that grind and only log in for weekly things, it varies.
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The actual answer to this is probably that these activities were designed by different people at different times and there was no top-down mandate that all timed turn-ins must be done a certain way.
There are 168 hours in a week, so delaying a 62.5-Echo payout by 1 hour is a “loss” of 0.372 Echoes (62.5 divided by 168). Right?
To be clear, I’m not saying I think having more content is a problem. I’m not even saying I dislike the weekly turn-ins! I enjoy the sense of accomplishment from ticking these big profitable checkboxes; it keeps me engaged and looking forwards to the next goal down the line. All I’m saying is that I find it regrettable that the large number of actions required to—if one so desires— stay on top of these things (and world events and festivals and ESes) eats so significantly into the allotment of actions for “baseline” activities.
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