Wasting Credits in All New Ways

The Nightlife event and I have a somewhat awkward history which I won't go into again in this post. If you want to read more about it, feel free to go back to this post from last year, in which I summarised it at the start and provided further links.

The important thing about last year's event was that Bioware added a prize to the event that I actually liked and wanted to win, namely the High Roller Shades - but in the end I didn't succeed at getting them. Still, based on past experience I was hopeful for the future: "The event will likely come around again next year, and if Bioware follows their previous track record, the shades might end up being added to the Kingpin prize pool or to one of the vendors at that point, which would make them much easier to get."

Naturally, the one time I was really relying on them to stick to the script, they decided to mix things up, meaning that the shades I want are still only available as a prize to be won from the Emperor's Grace slot machine... and on top of that, Bioware also further diluted the prize pool by adding half a dozen new prizes, meaning the odds of actually winning what I want are worse than ever now. Not loving that, Bioware.

To be fair though, they also made some other new changes that I do like. For example they added some new slot machines to the VIP area on the fleet, which I've found to be much less busy and easier to use than the ones in the casinos on Nar Shaddaa. Big thanks to Swtorista for writing up a guide to the event and all the changes (like she does for everything else) - I'm not sure how people were supposed to find out about these new machines organically unless they hang out in the VIP area all the time.

They also made Emperor's Grace tokens purchasable from the vendor for the first time - at 7.5 million credits a pop they're not cheap, but considering that getting enough of these from random drops in the world was the big challenge for me last year, I appreciate this change. I've spent a few hundred million credits on them already - I'm not sure how far I'm willing to go in pursuit of the shades, but then again, it's just funny money and I so rarely find anything I really want to spend it on, so why not splurge a little bit on this project? All the new weapons that can be won as prizes are also bind on equip, meaning that you can sell them on the GTN. While that isn't enough to make your money back, it does help to offset the cost of the chips to some degree.

In addition there's also this new thing called "max bet" tokens for all types of slot machines, which are very expensive and are supposed to give you better odds. Swtorista doesn't recommend them herself after doing a bit of testing, and I personally don't see the entertainment value of such high stakes gambling, but what makes them interesting to me is that you can trade in 20 of the regular chips for a single max bet token - which means that I finally have a way of getting rid of all those free Kingpin's Bounty chips without spending hours and hours clicking away at the stupid machines, something that drove me absolutely nuts two years ago. I don't even care if the odds are better or worse that way - just the fact that I can get through the process of "claiming my free prizes" twenty times faster is definitely worth it to me.

I will say that even though the odds of me actually winning the prize I wanted have gone down, the other changes Bioware have made to the event this year have actually made it more interesting to me. I like that the ability to just buy Emperor's Grace tokens from the vendor allows me to just cut to the chase if I want, and it's nice to actually have a use for some of my spare credits for once, even if it involves gambling. Simultaneously the high price per token serves as a deterrent to spending too much time and money at once (well, to me anyway). Plus the introduction of the max bet tokens and machines allows you to reduce the time spent just mindlessly clicking to get rid of spare chips.

So what I've been doing the past few nights is buy ten or twenty Emperor's chips and use them one at a time - if I get the Smuggler's Luck buff, I'll switch to the max bet Kingpin's Bounty machines until it's used up, and then I go back to the Hutt. The hundreds of free Kingpin chips that I win from the Emperor's Grace machine get converted to more max bet versions to save time, and all this means that each "session" at the slot machines actually requires me to pay a bit of attention and doesn't take all that long - which is a big improvement from the hours of mindless clicking, at least in my book.