xKiv wrote:

ETA: specifically, I don't like the idea that spending favours would lock me out (almost all?) ways to gain favours.

I'm not sure where this worry is coming from. In the opening post:

An individual Favour is very valuable, so it won't be straightforward to grind them. The main ways to acquire them will be opportunity cards, rare successes, one-off stories, and individual branches that form part of a wheel. In particular, you'll always be able to gain Favours using branches on the existing Connected cards. So you'll always have at least one reliable source.

None of those sources will lock just because you've spent Favours. It is true that Carnival branches will have a limited number of uses, but they're a peculiar special case with very limited bandwidth.
edited by Flyte on 8/14/2015

I can understand where the worry comes from. We have been told that favours will be harder to get than the current connections; will be capped but also be used for a lot of the things we currently spend connections on ... item conversions; conflict cards; etc. You also need connections to do other things in game at the moment - gaining a profession (and some of the weekly payment for certain professions comes in connections as well); opening a Salon; etc. So this is a really big change and until it goes live we are left with the uncertainty of how things are going to work.

Keep in mind that the current conflict cards -- 10 of which appear as soon as you have only 5 of two types of connection -- will be appearing much more rarely because they'll require a significant amount of two types of favour. It'll be easier to keep those cards out of your hand by not accumulating lots of conflicted favours, and when you do draw one, playing it or getting rid of it will mean zeroing out one of the types of favour that causes it to appear. Overall, this sounds like the deck is being thinned.

If the Docks/Widow card works similarly to how it currently does, cashing in Widow favours for several Strong-Backed Labour would zero out Widow favours, but not Docks favours, so you'd only need to gather up Widow favours again. That may or may not involve a new Widow connection card -- those might be grindable via this new "branches that form part of a wheel" thing, which sounds like it's a carousel of some sort that you'd use instead of say, attending an audience with the Widow 40 times.

Similarly, if Favours give boosted amounts of things that Connections currently do, like a larger amount of stat increase on connected cards, the same could be applied to item conversions. Right now doing one conversion of 25 Extraordinary Implications to 5 Uncanny Incanabula costs 4 actions' worth of Benthic connection. If a Benthic favour is harder to get (it seems like they might be worth say, 50-100 CP of connections) then the conversion might give you a larger quantity of items (even at the same ratio) or give a more valuable success bonus.

Addendum: looks like force-drawing Implausible Penance costs 11 CP of Criminals, in case anyone's wondering.

On a more germane note, will the Criminals change happen before all the others? I don't want to sell off all my connections and then regret it...

And because Connected qualities are used so widely, we won't be making the changes in one go. To begin with we'll use this system for just one of London's amorphous factions, the criminals.