One of the Hallowmass rewards available this year was Feducci’s boon, a single use item that automatically preserves your making waves for a single week. This cost 12 Feducci’s favor, requiring a minimum of 2 confessions to obtain. You cannot save it for a future time the healer.
A way to preserve MW is a cool idea, and a long requested feature, but I have trouble seeing how Feducci’s boon was useful. During Hallowmass most POSI players are frantically grinding and spending notability to earn confessions, which could make the boon useful if you’re trying to reach 8 or 9 notability around your TTH, except that it would be entirely counterproductive to spend two confessions in order to make it easier to earn another confession.
It seems that Feducci’s boon is only useful for players that happen to be pursuing high notability around Hallowmass, and also have spare confessions. Considering that 8/9 notability is hard for even advanced players to grind, spare confessions are unlikely unless you don’t care about obtaining every Hallowmass reward and/or are willing to spend 30 fate just for the boon. Perhaps the intention is to help players that are willing to spend 30 fate rebuild their notability after Hallowmass? Or help people that bought Hallowmass rewards with fate, leaving their high notability intact, and also are willing to spend 30 fate to assist themselves in reaching 15 notability?
Does anyone here fall into those categories? Why did you purchase the boon?
I might have considered purchasing the boon if it could be saved for later, to either use when it’s really needed, or kept as a keepsake. Or, if it could have been be purchased with something other than confessions, so it’s actually useful for obtaining confessions. As is, it doesn’t seem widely useful for most players.
I would have used it on my Seeker alt if she was in a bind going for the 11->12 Notability normally needed for St. Destin’s candle (it’s a pretty heavy grind as she has rather low BRD). I mainly bought certificates with the free confessions and I didn’t spend any notability on obtaining more.
Mostly though the boon seems useless, Time the Healer is a well expected moment for anyone who’s been playing for more than a few weeks, so timing around it isn’t that hard. Even if I could have kept it for a future week, I doubt I would have really needed it.
I used it just for curiosity’s sake, and yes it’s pretty useless. It’d be only situationally useful even if it was available year-round, and being only available for a 2-week period meant that the number of people for whom it would be a life-saving grind-shortener was even smaller.
The quality was kinda cool, but Feducci didn’t say anything fun upon conferring the boon, and TtH takes the quality away with no souvenir to remember its passing. Ah, well.
I used it on Tanith. She has 13 Notability and the last couple of points are going to be a slog. She only had four companions that she really cared about upgrading.
I think that probably most players don’t care about obtaining every Hallowmass reward. I think most people just pick a handful that seem coolest or most in-character.
Compared to a ~6 Echo value for one of Feducci’s bundles of oddities, that boon cost roughly 24 Echoes with a ~2 Echo regular grind (not that I have access to a grind like that). Worth it? Depends on what a player does for Making Waves. But it seems worth it if Notability is fairly high compared to BDR (relative numbers, not absolute ones) and the player is slowly gaining Making Waves through Polite Invitations and other means that still give profits rather than costing resources.
Personally I handed most of my confessions to Feducci, because I’m quite done with collecting pets and companions that don’t serve a purpose. Sometimes less is more. So if I was still building Notability, I might have gotten the boon to help out with that. 24 Echoes for a level of Notability is pretty cheap.
[quote=Estelle Knoht]It was a little counter-intuitive to be buying something to preserve Making Waves temporarily while everyone around is doing the opposite.
A longer version that last a month for a higher cost, perhaps?[/quote]
I think notability decline is an incentive to keep playing the game on at least a weekly basis, so I’m not sure a long-term method of preserving notability would fly.
Some other cost would make sense though. Something expensive, but a price that also provides flexibility in when to use it. For example, if you could buy Feducci’s boon by spending a Favorable Circumstance, that would be perfectly fine. You could spend your notability in order to assist yourself in reaching higher levels of notability later on, or purchase it with fate when necessary.
[color=rgb(255, 255, 255)]"My dear," Feducci is practically purring. "It would be my pleasure." He leaps to his feet and shakes your hand. He clicks his fingers, and whispers to the servant who comes running. "Done!"[/color]
I purchased it today just before Hallowmas ended, basically for the reasons given in the third paragraph of the OP. Since the Court was my primary focus these past few weeks, I opted to just pay Fate to gain extra confessions in order to preserve my Notability. I had some confessions left over after I obtained the rewards I wanted and figured the boon could help on my way to Notability 15.
Yeah, this item would be a lot more useful if you could choose when to use it. There’s very few times that high Notability is necessary and even fewer times when TtH is a significant issue. Having an emergency MW preserver would be a nice reward, though it would probably need to be more expensive then.
Of course, rather than spending (at least) two confessions to help grind Notability, you could also spend seven confessions and get St Destin’s Candle directly. And give it to someone in the process.
The reasons I think it would be a good fate purchase is:
Useful if that time of the week is fast approaching and you didn’t plan well/had bad luck.
Purchaseable with fate means available when you need it, instead of at holidays or on random cards.
Will probably be used a decent bit by new POSIs, making FBG some decent money.
I might also suggest extending it to Notability loss; while under the effect, your notability will not drop, even if you lack the normally necessary Making Waves. This will give some use to advanced players who forgot/didn’t have time to play that week. Downside though is that it might be seen as a less pleasant form of monetization to those that hate maintaining notability.
I’d argue that even at Notability 15, you only need 92CP to go from 7MW (after TtH) back to 15, for which there are a variety of grinds. It should normally take less than half a day of playing (I think around 66 actions, using the slow method of side-conversions - I say slow because there’s probably ways to optimise around the absinthe desert, not to mention the possibility of using dinners or Dante’s Grill etc.). This is comparable to most menace areas - yet nobody is complaining about the fate options to fast-track out of there. Finally, there are few reasons to ever maintain Notability 15, other than roleplaying, so those that really hate Notability and MW absolutely don’t have to do so (unlike with menace areas, where if you accidentally land there you have no choice but to grind out).
Tl;dr: I agree with you and moreover believe that it would be a useful, fair and balanced way to spend Fate.
[quote=Barse]I used it just for curiosity’s sake, and yes it’s pretty useless. It’d be only situationally useful even if it was available year-round, and being only available for a 2-week period meant that the number of people for whom it would be a life-saving grind-shortener was even smaller.
The quality was kinda cool, but Feducci didn’t say anything fun upon conferring the boon, and TtH takes the quality away with no souvenir to remember its passing. Ah, well.[/quote]
It might have been a useful boon for someone who needed to make a final Notability threshold (15 Notability, say, in the last category necessary for Paramount Presence) during the two weeks of Hallowmas. I was not in that position, and for the majority of people who weren’t, I agree it probably was not worthwhile.
The Boon doesn’t make sense as a reward, but I think it does make sense from a different perspective. It fits in Feducci’s general theme of “#YOLO break tha rules!” which also covers several of the other rewards. We’ve never had a way in the game to reduce Criminal Record, but there it was… I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that never occurs again, ever. The Lance is somewhat form-breaking, just because of the stats. So alongside of those is a reward that breaks another rule that’s never been broken, Time the Healer. Not because it’s good or useful, but just to do it.