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Hot Take: Nar Shaddaa Nightlife is boring


Gamer_Auto

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The intro and daily quests are nice bits of flavor, and I would love to see these expanded upon in coming years, but that's just the garnish. The real meat of the event - the Smuggler's Luck, Kingpin's Bounty, and Emperor's Grace Roulette/Slot Machines - are extremely boring. You just sit there and click right-mouse until you run out of spins. As I wrote this (4am on 11th of September 2022), I was spending chips and grinding my Jedi Knight's Treasure Hunting Crew Skill at the same time. And Free Plays are insultingly common, especially on Kingpin's Bounty. The new "Max Bet" machines in the VIP section of the fleet is a rather half-hearted attempt at trying to streamline the process. The way I see it, there are a number of ways to fix this.

 

Fix #1 - The most brute force fix is to pull page from the mobile game book. Now, say what you will, but at least some are considerate to the player's time. When they have roulette/slot machine guises for their "use resource to get a random reward" mechanic, they at least let you auto-spin so you, as a human being, don't have to waste time constantly tapping "SPIN!!", waiting five seconds, tapping through reward pop-ups, and repeating five hundred times. You just hit "auto-spin" and check back on it later. I've no doubt the devs could make a UI like that for NSN and properly program it in the course of two minutes. Considering that you can hold one hundred thousand of the Smuggler's Luck chips and ten thousand chips for the other machines, I think it's only fair to the people that stock up over the course of the entire event just to blow their load on the last day.

 

Fix #2 - Make the machines a little more interactive. If you have certain companions (example: TeeSeven, Mako, Risha, Fen Zeil), make it so they can rig the game for you in exchange for taking on some Dark Side karma. Your chance of winning the better rewards goes higher, but it also adds the ever-increasing risk that you'll be caught and kicked out for a period of time, or even thrown into a micro dungeon that you have to fight your way out of. And for the max level players, such a set-back would be trivial.

 

Fix #3 - During Nar Shadda Nightlife only, add a fourth button to the Crew Skills menu that allows you to give your companions a number of chips (let's say one thousand for this example) and send them off with explicit instructions to return when they use up that many spins, and bring you the rewards. Then they're gone for a period of time (five minutes for SL, ten for KB, twenty for EG) and come back with everything they won, alongside generating some influence. You could also bring the proposed cheating mechanic into it as well.

On Smuggler's Luck, everyone plays it straight most of the time (because let's face it: SL has the worst rewards by far), with only a small cheating chance (let's go with five percent) for whom it would be in-character to cheat (Risha, Tanno Vik, HK-51, for example). On Kingpin's Bounty, because of the better rewards, those who would cheat have a higher chance of proc'ing the cheat per spin (twenty-five percent), and those who are more "law-abiding and morally upright" have a small chance to cheat (five percent). On Emperor's Grace, because those are the real rewards you want, the natural cheaters are buffed to cheat on a coin flip (fifty percent), and even the morally upright characters are more likely to cheat (fifteen percent).

Then, depending on if they're found out and how many times they cheated, a number of things could happen (percentages based on Influence Level). They could return with all, half, or none of their winnings; or they could be held prisoner by the Hutts and need you to bail them out, either by paying a fine (based on the value of any confiscated rewards) or fight your way into and out of the holding facility (with the chance to defeat an Elite unit with all the confiscated rewards).

You could even add a couple of reputation tracks to this and develop a bit of a side-story. One track shows you getting buddy-buddy with the owner of the two casinos, leading to you earning Golden Certificate discounts and maybe even unlocking spin-exclusive rewards in the redeem vendors (on top of the usual fair of Reputation Gear and Character Titles); while the other encourages you to cheat while providing the same benefits (all depending on how you want to play a particular character).

 

Last two points on NSN - I earned far more Emperor's chips by killing random enemies than I ever did playing Kingpin's Bounty, thus adding to my point of the tedious nature of the event; and this is an event where rewards really need to be in the Collection, given that the entire event is based around luck.

 

And I was still spinning as I finished writing this down. See my point yet?

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The event is meant to be a time and credit sink. The little additions they made with the missions are for flavor and that's it. I personally would not expect more but QoL changes would totally be welcome. I skipped it entirely this year because of my disappointment at how dry it is during this extravagant celebration.
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The event is meant to be a time and credit sink. The little additions they made with the missions are for flavor and that's it. I personally would not expect more but QoL changes would totally be welcome. I skipped it entirely this year because of my disappointment at how dry it is during this extravagant celebration.

 

See, you just defined the problem. I can forgive being a time/credit sink. Every long lasting game needs them at some point. What I can't forgive is the lazy and half-baked way they went about it. It doesn't feel as polished as the other events (even the Gree and Rakghoul events, which are glorified arenas).

 

Swoop Racing has the three storylines of the Beks, Razors, and Screamers, and it's just a fun minigame to boot.

Pirate Week gives us a reason to explore Dantooine.

Bounty Hunting actually lets Bounty Hunters live up to their name, and each planet's clients are unique enough from each other to stave off repetition.

The Gree and Rakghoul events at least have the in-character urgency of salvaging Gree tech or staving off the plague.

Feast of Prosperity and Life Day are fun, tongue-in-cheek ways to have Thanksgiving and Christmas in the game; and FoP even has a mini-story to it!

But Nightlife? It's boring by comparison.

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The Night Life event's main problem is lack of great stuff available with the Golden Certificates. It's all old and mostly gross.

 

That's where you and I differ. I think the Rewards are great and work really well with the Bounty Hunter and Smuggler. It's just the acquisition of these rewards that's a pain.

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The nightlife event wasn't too boring if you skipped most of it. Mostly what I did was to do the base machines to get the Feeling Lucky* and then just use up any Emperor tokens that I'd gotten as 'drops' in the wild.

 

* I'm not sure if FL has any affect on the Emperor slots. 🤔

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The nightlife event wasn't too boring if you skipped most of it. Mostly what I did was to do the base machines to get the Feeling Lucky* and then just use up any Emperor tokens that I'd gotten as 'drops' in the wild.

 

* I'm not sure if FL has any affect on the Emperor slots. 🤔

 

I think FL only works on Kingpin's Bounty. I used up around 60 EG chips I'd looted from random enemies and was able to get quite a few rewards with them.

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This is not a hot take. I don't know of anyone who thinks the Nightlife is a fun play experience.

Indeed!

I think FL only works on Kingpin's Bounty. I used up around 60 EG chips I'd looted from random enemies and was able to get quite a few rewards with them.

This is correct. I got quite a few Emperor's Grace tokens from doing the Manaan dailies & farming syndicate plans and I was lucky enough to get every single new jackpot item from the normal Emperor's Grace slot machines plus the glasses without having any FL buff. I used the slots in the VIP area on the fleet; I don't know if this makes the jackpots more likely or if I was just very lucky. The new max bet machines imo are a waste of time; I got way more failures/losses from the King Pin's Max bet machines with the FL buff then I did from the standard King Pin slots.

Edited by Sarova
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The new max bet machines imo are a waste of time; I got way more failures/losses from the King Pin's Max bet machines with the FL buff then I did from the standard King Pin slots.

 

That's exactly what I said. It's a half-measure towards fixing a bad event. Like putting a band-aid over a missing arm. I appreciate the dev's intent with it, but it just feels wasteful. I'd much rather just have the wheel be spun automatically while I do other things (Crew Skills, Stronghold Decorating, reading a book).

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I want to see the casino open all year and for the love of all that is right; add Pazaak tables and other games. I would little mini games like that added across the galaxy. I could just log in and play some Pazaak if I didnt really feel like grinding the same old content today.
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I want to see the casino open all year and for the love of all that is right; add Pazaak tables and other games. I would little mini games like that added across the galaxy. I could just log in and play some Pazaak if I didnt really feel like grinding the same old content today.

 

This. This right here. This guy gets it.

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