Betterblog

I know a lot of people who stopped playing when their actions were lowered from 80/day to 50, and who will be ecstatic to hear that you plan on doing away with the limit altogether.  Not me, though.  I'm one of the ones who lost sleep.  My insomnia is bad enough without you people making things better!

Well, that is interesting. By which I mean exciting, and possibly a bit scary. I'll be interested to see how my character and my day job respond.

But well done for continuing to experiment and trying to make Echo Bazaar a better experience for everyone. Very exciting. I mean interesting.

You are beautiful people. I started playing last week and this is the best Echo Bazaar-related news I could have hoped for!

And now I'm even considering coming back, and I only left due to time constraints. Oh the delicious irony.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I read this. Can't wait to see it implemented! I know I will feel better about the game overall if I don't feel like I have to rush in order to "maximize" the actions I have for the day.

I dare say, I'm quite impressed and think you're doing something fabulous here.

I am pleased with the change, and impressed with Failbetter's willingness to give everybody a price reduction on Exceptional Friend status--a highly desirable commodity.  Bravo!

I will admit that having no cap did bring me back from not playing, but I still find the refresh time to be the biggest hindrance to me playing.  I'd still rather play 50 actions at once and then go about my day than have to play in dribs and drabs around everything else I'm doing.

I'm often a really really bad data point, though, so I'm glad to hear that you folks are making it better for the majority of players.

How lovely! I'm very excited! And thank you for announcing the fate refund on the Exceptional reduction; I had *just* purchased Exceptional Friendship again.

I'm one of the folks who came back as a direct result of the Festival. Look at that, it worked!

Well played. I've been waffling on whether or not to purchase some Fate for my Real Hard-Earned dollars and this makes it that much more likely that I'll do so.

I guess I'll be the lone voice of dissent, then. I never used up my actions anyways and with the change to the refresh time, I will probably end up using even fewer of them after the change.

I half suspected that the Festival of Endless Actions was intended to test out just such a change ... how glad I am that half-suspicion turned out to be fully correct!!

Not to be greedy, but ... for those of us who are not only currently Exceptional Friends, but had extended that status for another month (I've currently got 41 days' worth of EFiness), can we expect a larger refund?

Oh help! Now I can never sleep again.

It might be cool if you made it possible to buy more than one extra candle, perhaps on top of an EF subscription, to cater for people who like to play a lot of actions at once.

Wow! Thank you! I have to admit that I've never bought Fate, but that's mainly due to ZERO disposable income. I've been wanting to buy some for a while now, just as soon as I have $50 to spend on something frivolous of my choice. I actually think that this will make the time I take to play more relaxed and will be less likely to get my wife pissed at me. I think it might even make it so I don't stay up too late and have one less thing to make me late to work.  Now, I just know that I'll have some indeterminate number of actions per day that will likely be larger than what I had before and I won't feel the need to get through as much as I can as early as I can.  At least, I hope. And best of all, it'll make grinding less dreadful; I hate blowing through my actions early in the day with grinding the something, waiting through hours of nothing, only to blow through them quickly the next day on the same thing.  Now I'll be able to grind all day, and get what I need sooner!

This is really the kick in the pants I needed to post to my Wall why my friends really ought to play (and give me coffee).

Keep up the amazing work!

This is exactly why I got so tired of Night Circus, I had to have the window open all the time or I was wasting opportunity to get ahead! >_<

Although I am extremely happy to hear this news, currently it seems to have broken my game.
When can we expect this change to take effect for good?  I noticed unlimited actions seemed to be back last night, briefly, but now my cap has been reset, I have 0 actions left for the day (when I very definitely had actions when I went to bed), and no refund for my EF status.  
This is my confused face @_o

When does this take effect, exactly? Cool update though.

Also, if the twitter you used original for Echo Bazaar is deactivated, is there any way of attaching a new twitter to it or is it just my Facebook only now?

As a fellow insomniac, I've found that the unlimited action deal made not sleeping far less boring than normal.

Personally, I'm okay with the longer refresh time.  My schedule is better adapted to spending 5 minutes playing 10-20 actions and then going away for an hour, anyway, so it doesn't make much difference to me. *shrugs*

Interesting...if you're tweaking the action refresh time anyway, maybe reducing it for people who have paid for EF? That way your servers are still protected, but EF is more valuable.

Agreed with Evans partly; unfortunately, I fear (as in, do not hope) that the reality is that people will chew through actions quickly, still have a 45-minute window to play, and instead of receiving 6 actions, they'll have four to play with. With the addition of large-quantity clicking options, for me, waiting a few more minutes to use "my associates" to gain casing in the Flit is awful. With my work day sucking 9 potentially hours from my schedule, this change unfortunately hurts me. I want to progress when I have a storyline to go through... it seems that if this sticks, then when I get home I will be dealing with EBZ in smaller ways than I already get to.

Likewise, I don't think this is so good for newcomers who aren't likely (perhaps they are?) to use all 50 from the get-go anyway.

Alexandra said: "I will admit that having no cap did bring me back from not playing, but I still find the refresh time to be the biggest hindrance to me playing.  I'd still rather play 50 actions at once and then go about my day than have to play in dribs and drabs around everything else I'm doing."

Same here. But yeah, no longer having an action cap will be brilliant! That was a very smart method of working out how much your servers can take.

All - we briefly went endless-actions yesterday due to a (benign to you!) glitch. The new regime is now properly live, though.

@Chris - how did you manage that?? I thought we removed the ability to extend subscriptions a while back (precisely in case we needed to make changes to EF in mid-stream)

@George - you should be able to link a new Twitter account via the 'My Friends' page. Mail us at ebbugs@failbettergames.com if you can't.

@Chris - my mistake! We restored it as a card below the main block on the Fate page, I remember now. I'm afraid, no, we don't want to complicate things. You do have your 15 Fate refund though.

I did enjoy the Endless Actions festival.  In my heart of hearts, I do wish it had taken place on a weekend where I could have taken better advantage of it (sadly, work does interfere with game time), but I appreciated the extra actions when I could get to them.  

I also am a returnee from the festival.  Had run out of content I enjoyed before hitting the level cap.

I am very pleased to hear this news, and also to find new snippets to play and better ways to grind.  I much prefer the new lossless exchange!

Thank you.

I'm worried about this. One way I'd tempered my playing was through the daily cap. Once I hit 40, close the browser. No more echo bazaar for you! Go do something productive with 100% of your attention! Now I have to go find some willpower or self management skills instead. I think this is exciting but I'll have to learn to balance my time now. So thanks for the challenge?

Hurrah! I was actually online when things were moving around - I saw I had nearly 10k actions and then the limit disappeared and then I suddenly had more Fate and I was like "what is happening!" So happyyyyyy. (Also this makes it a bit more like Night Circus, except there's no book and the story is all in the game.)

@Alexis, Ahh well, no harm in asking.  Thanks for the attention and, as always, the excellent work you all do!

I love that there's no longer a cap of 50 actions, but I still have two annoyances.
1) The time it takes for actions to refresh.
2)That you can only get 10 actions from a full candle.
I would be able to deal with the time taking longer if we got more than 10 actions at a time. I sometimes feel like I'm losing out on gameplay when I go to bed because, after a couple of hours, I know my candle is completely full. If we could get a bigger candle, say maybe 50-100 actions at a time, I know a lot of people who would play and enjoy the time! I would be able to play all of my actions and then go to sleep, knowing that my candle will take a while to reload, and I'll be able to play all my actions again when I wake up. Then, I can go do other things with my day and come home to play some more. Having only 10 actions at a time makes it hard to do anything else while trying to enjoy the game.

Super sweet! I just purchased EF. I am very happy that there is no mor eaction cap. Don't worry I am not a hardcore player but on those days when I do want to play more, it's nice not to have an action cap.