FATE AND NEX
Hi everyone. From today (Thursday 16th August) we will stop selling Fate in Fallen London. Instead, we’d like to introduce you to the Nex, a new currency that you can use in Fallen London – and in all other games on our forthcoming StoryNexus platform. First things first: your existing Fate is still worth what you paid for it, and always will be. If you currently have any Fate, then you can spend it in Fallen London as normal. We’ll always use up your Fate before we use up any of your Nex.
Why Nex?
Very soon, Fallen London will be just one of many games on our StoryNexus platform. You can use Nex in any of those to buy premium choices and extra actions and whatnot.
But what about my Fate? I have a stack of it!
Don’t worry, you can still use it! But only in Fallen London. In Fallen London you can spend either Nex or Fate to get stuff. In all our other games you can only spend Nex to get stuff.
Does Nex cost more than Fate?
No, the prices are identical.
Is my Fate worth less?
No. It will buy exactly what it always did in Fallen London. It won’t buy anything anywhere else.
Is my Fate going away?
Only when you spend it, as usual.
What if I have some Fate and some Nex?
When you buy a premium option in FL, we’ll always charge you Fate first, if you have any. When that’s gone you can pay for the rest with Nex.
Okay…so if I have 40 Fate and 40 Nex and I want to buy an option that costs 20…
We’ll charge you 20 Fate and 0 Nex.
..but if I have 40 Fate and 40 Nex and I want to buy an option that costs 50…
…we’ll charge you 40 Fate and 10 Nex.
My God, you’ve thought of everything!
We probably haven’t. But ask questions in the comments section and we’ll answer.
Why have you done all this? Fate was working fine. Couldn’t you just use that as a cross-game currency?
We’d have liked to. BUT we’ve been giving out occasional bits of Fate for years, for significant story conclusions or compensations for that one time we lost some user data. There’s a lot of it sloshing around the system, and you can still get free Fate here and there in Fallen London.
Now, StoryNexus will be an open platform – creators will be able to charge for their content. And although we take a cut, the majority of the revenue from currency spent in their games will go to them.
So if we made Fate our main currency, then – for instance – an unscrupulous creator could create a hundred Fallen London accounts, stack them up with starting free Fate, then go and spend that Fate on their game. And suddenly we would owe them a stack of cash for their share of ‘currency spent in game.’
Eek!
Our exact reaction.
So can you sum up?
Nex is more useful than Fate, because you can spend it in any StoryNexus game.
Fate is worth the same as it was, because you can still spend it in Fallen London. (Think of it as a bit like FL-specific gift tokens.)
You can’t buy Fate from tomorrow, but Nex is just as good as Fate in Fallen London, and Nex is the exact same price as Fate used to be.
StoryNexus is coming very soon.
All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
Aha, I was wondering why a value for Nex suddenly appeared.
how about awarding me the 10 fate for getting those free car insurance quotes…
will the free fate rewards inn FL still happen?
So can I buy Nex in Fallen London the same way I used to buy Fate, or do I have to go somewhere else to buy it?
@atheistcanuck – yes, for the foreseeable future.
@Alice – Yup! same interface.
@Darryl – sorry if you’ve had problems with offers. Can you contact SuperRewards via the Help link in the first instance? and if you have no luck with them, follow up with us via the support address.
Alexis – tried help thru superrewads – it doesn’t recognize my existence. I log in thru twitter (not even an option when trying to click thru to support for superrewards) I’m guessing that’s why it didn’t register, but something should be posted along those lines…I can’t find the support address
Darryl – the place to look is the orange Get Help button on the Fate panel, just above the payment options. That will take you through to a support area. Do follow up through that, because if there’s a dodgy offer that isn’t paying out, this is how they’ll find out that it’s dodgy.
I clicked on that button – it goes to a page that says no recent activity. IT has 4 tabs – Games, Support, SignUp and Login. When I click Log in it wants my user name and pw. I log in to Fallen London via Twitter, which isn’t an option on this login page. (Facebook is.) SO is the twitter login the issue? How am I supposed to follow up via that help button when I can’t log in?
I think you’ve implied the answer, but I still feel it would be worthwhile for you to add the following questions (and answers):
Will “free fate” handed out by Fallen London still be handed out as Fate? Or will new players start out with Nex now?
Will the ability to hand out Fate/Nex disappear (=be restricted to Fallen London)? Or will other game creators be able to hand out Nex as game rewards? How will that even work?
‘Free fate’ is still Fate, and only occurs in Fallen London. Fate cannot be bought. Nex cannot be handed out.
Other game creators will never be able to hand out Nex. (We’d have to charge them for every Nex they handed out, or else they’d land us with a bill of arbitrary size.) We *may* at some point enable the ability to hand out Fate-like substitutes that can only be used in the world where it’s handed out… but in the medium term we think that’s likely to cause player confusion and associated support issues.
Will free offers (Videos and the like) offer fate or Nex?
Nex. But honestly, we want to turn off the free offers as soon as we can sort that out with our payment partner. It makes us very little money and (see this thread) it causes us support issues.
Will you be giving out Nex the way your currently do fate for some stories? Or will all that go away, and Nex will become pay only?
We’ll never hand out Nex – we’ll only allow it to be purchased.
Would you still have free Fate offers with SuperRewards? I understand that free Nex would muck things up, but keeping the free Fate offers in Fallen London wouldn’t really do any harm, would it?
The free offers still provide Nex, yes (we do get paid for those, or we wouldn’t offer them!) But as my answer above, we’d really like to lose the free offer mechanism anyway, because it’s more hassle than it’s worth.
Just wanted to say, when you dont have enough actions to do something, you’ll still be asked to buy fate for more actions.
Thanks for that! We’ve logged it for fixing.
I thought the price was staying the same? Did I miss something – I bought 100 fate last week for $19.95, and $20 now buys be 80 Nex. I understand if there is a need to raise prices but just wondering about the difference.
The price is still the same, but the bulk discounts weren’t applying. We’ve fixed that – thanks!
Thanks!
Hm. It looks like Nex is more expensive than the last lot of Fate I bought – which to be fair was two months ago. £12.71 gets me 80 Nex. The same amount of money bought me 100 Fate. I’d blame it on fluctuations in the dollar, but the price increments are the same. It’s just that the amount of Nex you get for your money doesn’t increase as much as you go up the scale.
Yup – sorry about that, the bulk discounts got lost in the mix. They’re back now.
But will the world still shift a little on its axis each time we use Nex? Cryptologozoologists need to know.
It will, but in the opposite direction.
Shouldn’t that be -random- directions?
Re the free fate offers – I would be sad if you removed the videos, as they’re a reliable way to earn a little free fate and they don’t have any of the issues of the other offers.
PS. I still find the blog hard to read, sadly. I would suggest either going back to black text on white, or making the white text much bigger – it is legible on the ‘about us’ page mainly because it is large and bold, I suspect.
Will selling items at the bazaar continue to accrue fate, or will that swtich to Nex soon as well?
I suspect you’re thinking of ‘Echoes’. Selling things at the Bazaar doesn’t get you Fate. Or it shouldn’t!
D’oh!, indeed, you are correct good sir.
I confused the in story economy with the external meta-game economy
understandable. Neither of them are obvious currency terms. Since we rejected ‘Failcoins’.
Given that you are creating a new Fallen London game (your Kickstarter is actually how I learned about FL in the first place), are you planning on coordinating Fate across the two games? So, if I earn Fate in Fallen London: Echo Bazaar, will I be able to spend that Fate in Tales of Fallen London: The Silver Tree?
This should answer your question…
http://about.failbettergames.com/2012/08/15/fate-and-nex-dont-panic/
But “Fate” is such a better name for money in this setting and it draws you deeper into the atmosphere of the game than “Nex”. “Nex” would be cool in a sci-fi game, for example.