I need Chase as a challenger sad face I'll delete the swashbuckle if I have to!

XD It doesn't seem like that's enough moves for the 4x4 Reflection. Unless you get 100% lucky, you can barely make a few moves on that game difficulty. I know a lot of it is supposed to be luck, but still...

Are the prizes the same for both difficulties, item-wise?

Nope, you're pretty much spot-on. There is no longer much incentive to actually finish the game, which makes this game into a total sP faucet. Making the Swashbuckle an achievement prize sounds like such a great solution to this issue.

Oh man, I hadn't even thought about Recycle Beast stuff. You're absolutely right about that.

: Yup. Between the inability to unlock Chase and the unavailability of certain RB items, there's a lot of collateral damage which suggests to me that they hadn't fully thought through the consequences of this.

They said they're planning on a way for players who've already beaten Item Hunt to unlock Chase, but it feels like they're not really willing to talk about dealing with any of the other stuff. Not to mention they seem to be specifically avoiding the topic of "what's the incentive to actually complete Item Hunt now"

:

That's...a super good idea wow. And if they make the new weapon an achievement prize from the start, then restarting Item Hunt using the Tome shouldn't be as much of an issue. And it does seem like Item Hunt was designed to at some point have more than 100 levels, anyways.

: Thanks! I agree with you that using the achievement system to award the prize would be more effective.

Yeah but if they up the levels now they just get back the same problem of people being able to pass level 100, go back to zero and pass 100 again, getting multiple swashbuckles. :/

Which is solved by the Swashbuckle becoming an achievement prize. Then it's absolutely only obtainable once.

Yep! ^_^ I wish they would give that idea the time of day. I'm worried they would rather get rid of IH altogether before they'd ever do that. And I can't tell if it's out of stubbornness or if that solution is just way harder to implement than we think.

Only read a couple pages here on my phone but there's some sort of sick irony about people complaining that poorer users won't be making any more sP when these same users were championing the reduction in Mage Amulet drops, which was probably the most direct way poorer users recieved sP from richer users. If I could put a Kermit meme here from my phone I would

There's a big difference between the two, I think. Item Hunt is, essentially, a questing game where you earn sP in exchange for random items. The Mage Amulet drop rate was an issue because any time a whole bunch of a specific item is introduced to the site, the value of that item drops significantly. And since the Mage Amulets are directly tied to stat boosters, that'd have a ripple effect in the economy for other stat boosters. Overall, something like that will cause more harm than good to the overall economy.

But besides all that, I'm not sure where you got that we were focusing on the impact this would have on poorer users? I just reread the thread because I didn't remember that really coming up, but I'm still not really seeing it. I can't speak for everybody, but I think most people were talking about earning sP through Item Hunt as a general case, not at all specifically poorer users earning sP through Item Hunt. If anything, I think this situation has less of an effect on poorer users than any other group.

Second or third page the conversation shifted to that point.

In terms of how item hunt should be fixed, I'm surprised staff doesn't focus on the larger task at hand (fixing the price pulling mechanism) instead of this duct tape fix. Even an achievement based swashbuckle would be fine, with quests looping back to one after hitting one hundred. Most of these were already shared, so I didn't feel the need to reiterate, but the mention of helping poorer users gave me a good laugh this morning, considering the people writing it. If you look back you'll find it.

As for Mage amulets (I don't want to get too off topic) but with the cap increase, there's still such a high demand. It would be like reducing shinwa booster payouts. Making amulets cheaper moves sP down the ladder, with 4 amulets @ 250k being more profitable for the quester than 1-2 @ 400k. It also makes it more likely battlers will purchase amulets, essentially increasing quantity demanded. I feel like the amulet market hadn't reached the equilibrium point before supply was artificially messed with (again).

Not really surprising that no prizes were being awarded from Reflection when the chances were so bad. I remember calculated the probabilities when the game was revamped(here) - we were toying with a 1/1152 chance. 1/175 should see a fair number entering the economy.

It's definitely easier to win the 4x4 difficulty level now -- I've won twice since the change. I believe (but am not 100% sure) that the prizes are not the same between the two difficulty levels.

The prizes are different across difficulties. It's pretty easy to see which comes from which - just look at the list and compare the prices. :P

Yeah the prizes are different. The most recent change hasn't really helped me though, it got me to start playing again but I'm still losing a whole lot. I haven't won at all since this change, but I've come within 1-2 cards a few times.

Either make the Swashbuckle a prize you only get it once from Chase OE turn it into an achievement prize like people say. If I ever have the joy of completing this game, I'd like a chance to it again and again.

Just beat IH recently - I had no idea I wouldn't be able to keep playing so +1 for I WOULDN'T HAVE BEATEN IT IF I HAD KNOWN. That was one of my best ways for getting SP! Honestly, I didn't even know about the Swashbuckle as the final prize and that was a pleasant surprise to get...but it's something I would want to hang on to since I went to all the effort to get it. Also I know it was mentioned something was being worked on to unlock Chase as a challenger for IH beaters but meanwhile it was really disappointing to me to learn that I couldn't unlock him anymore at this time.

Regardless of what unlocking Chase solution there is, I will -always- feel really grumbly about losing IH has an SP-making mechanism. Achievements were my main incentive for beating IH but I would totally give them back if I could because SP earnings were my real purpose for playing and if I saw a window to get the achievements, cool. Hopefully I could unlock Chase too. If not, ah, well, hooray SP. The reasoning "you beat it, so you're done!" is foolish to me - I can beat plenty of other games and continue to enjoy them. I didn't get locked out of playing Spectrail when I got that elusive final achievement. I didn't get locked out of playing any of the other games by beating them. Since I got my achievements, I have no incentive to keep going on IH unless it's profitable now. With a, in my opinion way simpler fix anyway, change to make the swashbuckle an achievement item, that would be anyone's incentive for playing again.

But really, I just feel super cheated because I had no warning of this and now I'm just stuck with it.