I’ve been silent awhile. Tiny Speck has not been silent with Glitch, but there hasn’t been much for me to write about. It’s not a game that works well for a play journal — and most of the fun I have there is impossible to explain without sounding completely demented. But while I’ve stayed mum, they’ve worked bugs, added a simple lowbie quest (quietly), tweaked the UI, extended skill prereqs so that playing the game is even more necessary to advance in the game, added new music to a unique pair of regions that deserved new music, and probably a few dozen other things they haven’t told us because they relate to unreleased content or mechanics.
And rumors are flying about upcoming releases. And solid confirmations, like stoot letting us know that Potion Making III and Master Gardening are around the corner.
And then, on Thursday, a solitary Glitch was wandering the world and stumbled onto this odd looking fellow:
According to stoot, this shady individual is of the same species as the Smugglers.
He is called the Extremely Rare Items Vendor, and he has some pricey, limited edition goods to sell:
The spigot on the left is 250k, the “Imported” Yeti on the right is 3 million. Previous top dollar items in the game were under 20k.
Although two of the items show as out of stock, they are not unavailable yet. The total stock has been released gradually, with the first round Thursday evening and the second during the day Friday. The third and final release has yet to happen.
And there’s a kicker: these items are not just available “for a limited time only,” there will only be a certain number of them in the world. Period. There will be 300 of the Yetis, and then they will never be available again. Which of course makes me happy — I’m all about unique items that you “had to be there” for. Even better to me that they are rather pointless. Decorative and amusing, for sure, but they do not affect game play in any way. My recent rant about hating “fairness,” while perhaps off a bit about WoW (that game is annoyingly hard to account for), should make it no surprise that I think this idea was brilliant. And apparently this is something they will likely do again in the future.
If the vendor is intended to sap some currants from a runaway economy, something many in the community tend to believe, it is at least partially successful. The first two rounds did indeed drain currants from most of the vets. But I think the delay between the second and third round has actually encouraged currant grinding:
Here we see my friend Kristen, with her rares on the shelf above her, standing in a pile of yellow seeds gained from constant yellow flower farming and a crap ton of flower shucking. End result? Moar currants.
I’m betting the net result will be for the total currants in the game to go down despite all the grinding, but this vendor has also encouraged players who never cared much about currants to learn how to get them as quickly as possible. And I know I’m not alone in saying that from now on, if I have less than 6 million, I’ll feel naked.
If it is a currant sink, I think it’s quite possible, and have heard a rumor or two, that there will be new content requiring currants, and they are trying to limit how quickly we run through it or how quickly we flood the market with new resources. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it seems feasible. In the past, Rook attacks, which require players to donate items to fight off, have been stepped up before things like street projects released.
And in the last week or so, Rook attacks are coming more frequently than they have since last fall. Always possible they are just showing off for the newbies, but also possible they are trying to level out the economy before new content.
Either way, I’m pleased with Tiny Speck for preferring unique and weird over fairness and the “welfare epic” attitude of most of the rest of online gaming. Huzzah!
Gaming with Sauce 