Hello, delicious friends. We’re finally ready to announce some upcoming changes to the Rat Market. These changes will not be going live immediately; we want to give you all an early heads up. Read on for details on why we’re making these changes, and what exactly we’re changing.

I’ve talked about this informally in the past, but the Rat Market isn’t really doing what we intend it to do, in the game. The Rat Market has a few different goals. It’s meant to aid players in obtaining certain economy items. The equippable items you can buy from it act as a flexible secondary goal for players.

But the main effect the Rat Market has on the game is the way it affects the endgame echo-grinding aspect of the game. Right now, the Rat Market reinforces whatever the most overtuned source of economy items is; the dominant strategy is to stockpile resources over several weeks and then sell them on the Rat Market when it reaches that season.

This is an inherent problem to the Rat Market’s current design, and one that was apparent from the start. The Rat Market was intended as an experiment more than anything, and so its design valued clarity and simplicity over effectiveness. But now that it’s become such an ingrained part of the game economy, it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the problems that it causes. So, we’re redesigning it substantially. These changes will go live beginning on the week of May 28th.

Putting some brakes on

The first and most important change is adding a limitation to the Rat Market that prevents this dominant strategy.

Selling at the Rat Market will now increment your Rat Market Saturation. Saturation always clears completely when the Rat Market closes, so you won’t have to worry about managing it week to week.

Saturation has a few different breakpoints.

For the first 400 echos or so, your sales at the Rat Market will get the full Rat Market markup.
After that, for another 1000 echos or so, your sales will continue to get a markup, though a lesser one.
After that, you will still be able to sell at the Rat Market. You won’t get a markup, but you’ll be able to gain Rat-Shillings to exchange for other resources or for items.
Because we’re changing the Rat Market’s use of actions, Saturation will eventually hit a hard cap that prevents further selling. This cap is set several times higher than the ‘soft’ caps; for the most part, you shouldn’t hit it, and it shouldn’t prevent you from buying the big-ticket items you can buy at the Rat Market.
- We’re changing the Rat Market’s action economy; read below for details. But we never want to have a 0-action cost branch in the game that progresses something or generates a resource, and which you can just click indefinitely. So the hard cap is there to guard against potential bugs or exploits, or just very out-of-band player behavior, in the same way that the action cost on selling did previously.

These breakpoints are set so that late-game players with access to the most lucrative activities in the game can’t generally run too much of the value of their actions through the Rat Market profitably; we might tweak the exact breakpoints up or down depending on player behavior after this update.

Changing how the Rat Market shifts week to week

We wanted to make the Rat Market more dynamic than it currently is, with a greater emphasis on players reacting. But we don’t want to simply make it twice as random as it is at present. So, we’re moving the randomness around – making some elements more predictable, others less – and we’re changing the pace of how the Rat Market changes.

The selection of items you can buy at the Rat Market will now no longer be random; we’ll mostly retire the Rat-Wind and Phase of the Rat-Moon qualities. These items instead will be tied to the Rat-Season, and thus cycle on a predictable schedule.

In exchange, the selection of items that you can sell will be unpredictable, but this unpredictability will work very differently from how the Rat Market is currently randomised.

Sellable items will be grouped into a handful of groups that go together – for example, Uncanny Incunabula and Catrographer’s Hoards will always be sellable together at the same time. Every week, those groups will have a chance to become sellable in the rat market. Once they do, they will stay that way for two weekends. Afterwards, they will ‘cool down’ for a few weeks, and won’t become sellable again for at least another three weeks.

This means that while the shifting of the Rat Market will be relatively unpredictable, it will be slower-paced. The variety and value of items that the Rat Market desires will also vary over time. Some weeks, the Rat Market will be buying multiple things. Other weeks, it’ll be buying only one or two things.

Starting on every Tuesday, you will be able to see a preview of what exactly will be sellable on the next weekend, so you’ll be able to plan and prepare.

Changing the Rat Market’s action economy

Currently, the Rat Market gives more of a bonus to lower-valued items, reflecting the action cost of selling. This is a bit ungainly, as the value of an action is different for different players. So, we’re adjusting how the Rat Market’s action economy works, and adding different limitations on the Rat Market’s clickiness.

When these changes go live, selling at the Rat Market will no longer cost actions. To compensate and maintain some action cost to using the Rat Market, entering the Rat Market for the first time in a given weekend will cost more than the usual amount of actions. You will be able to preview the state of the Rat Market before committing to going in.

We’ll be adding branches that allow for selling batches of 5 or 25 of lower-tier items, with the intent of greatly reducing the number of clicks required. The hard cap is a final guardrail on this, safeguarding against unanticipated exploits or unintentional uses of the Rat Market.

It’s set at a value high enough that if you are using the Rat Market in its normal, intended way, you should never see it. That is, you’ll be able to get enough Rat-Shillings to buy a significant amount of stuff, including any one of the equippable items, without having to worry about the hard cap.

To safeguard against clickiness on the other end, too, we’ll be adding a buying hard cap (known as Rat Market Depletion). This hard cap is really rather high and, again, exists only as a guardrail against unexpected exploits or severe balance issues.

Other Miscellaneous Changes

Selling Crackling Devices and buying Fabulous Diamonds will both no longer be available. They may or may not return at some future date, but first we want to see these changes in action without them, insulating the Rat Market from items that have their own extra-value mechanics attached.
Currently, when the Rat Market closes, you get your remaining Rat-Shillings converted into Rostygold. In the future, you will get an assortment of items. This assortment will include one or two Fourth-City Echos, so a little bit of extra Rat Market value will ‘carry’ week to week.
We’re not adding other sellables to the Rat Market immediately, but we expect that we might – these changes make it easier for us to expand the gamut of Rat Market sellables.

Related tweaks, and things we’re looking at

These aren’t Rat Market issues per se, but we’re monitoring them as related.

We know that right now the Nemesis ambition has a specific resource gate in the middle of it that puts a lot of pressure on some midgame players' ability to generate Echos. We’re halving the cost (and resale value) of Skyglass and Ravenglass Knives, on the Bazaar and in the Ratty Exchange. This is already live.
We’re keeping an eye on how relevant the Unterzee is after these changes, and on whether players feel like there’s no more reason to go to the Khanate and other further-afield ports.
We’re also keeping an eye on the Tribute loop, and whether that’s dominating the economy too much or overriding other things, but we don’t want to change it before seeing Rat Market changes settle.

When and How We’re Implementing these Changes

May 17th and May 24th: These are the final two weekends of the ‘old’ Rat Market. These weekends will be a Rat Market Jubilee – all items that can normally be sold at the Rat Market will be sellable, so you’ll be able to divest from an existing stockpile, if you have one.
- The set of items available to buy will be randomized normally.
May 28th: By reading the Gazette in your lodgings, you’ll be able to see the initial state of the ‘new’ Rat Market, starting on this day.
May 31st: The first weekend of the ‘new’ Rat Market.

We’ll observe and adjust after this, of course, so you may see further future changes.