ADVANCED MEMBERSHIPS

Written by Evie Ende

Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed the long weekend!

Today’s announcement is going to give you some more details about the update to our Advanced Memberships. Here are the important points:

-With an Advanced Membership, your travel games will now be treated as home games for the purposes of build. The previous 2 bonus build per year will remain the same.

-This change includes the increased rate of build that exists for new characters. Note that this will only affect the speed at which this higher rate of build is gained, and not the total number of games at which you get the higher amount before going down to 3.

-We’re doing a promotion for the month of July: Anyone who buys or renews their Advanced Membership during this month will receive one Ottoman’s ABC national currency, deposited into their LIT account.

-If you renew your membership during the month of July to take advantage of this offer, but your previous membership doesn’t expire yet, you will receive your +2 Advanced Membership build now rather than when the previous one would expire.

-We will be selling Advanced Memberships on the national website, in addition to your local chapter websites.

We know you guys will have a lot of questions about this, so we’re going to try and address some of the main ones that we’ve seen so far.

Will travel games be treated as home games in all other aspects?

This will only be the case for build. Other restrictions based on home chapter, such as PFA lessons or chapter-specific item cards, will still be in place at director discretion.

What is an ABC, and what does it do?

An ABC is a national currency, used by The Ottoman Collective national faction. Its main use is as a way to interact with this group, through things like research or arranging potential deals. Keep an eye out at events, particularly Premier and National events- you may come across some unique opportunities to use them, or even other players who are eager to recruit your help in pooling them.

ABCs also have the following mechanical effects:

-One ABC may replace any one Crafting Component required by a blueprint. This is not a raw material, but a crafted item that is a material for a larger project, such as a Radioactive Compound or Cooking Oil. This does apply to procedure blueprints.

-One ABC may replace any three raw materials (scrap, herb, etc) required by a blueprint. These materials may not be region-specific and must be one of the universal named or generic raw materials.

Do I get an ABC for each of my alts?

There will only be one ABC per player, not per character. It will be deposited in LIT under your primary character’s inventory. If you want a different character to have it, you can ask your director to transfer it in LIT, or simply cash it out at a live event and use it for the other character.

I’m concerned about a potential growth in build disparity, and folks being able to pay more to get ahead. Could you talk a bit about your considerations on this?

Absolutely! We get the concern here, and it’s something that was discussed at length with the rest of the team while this update was being developed. In the end, we decided on this specific perk and its limitations for the following reasons:

-Currently, the normal build for a home game (not including the period of new character build) is three, and you get two for a travel game. This means that starting now, for every travel game that someone with the new Advanced Membership attends, they get an additional one build. 

-We did it this way because that additional build can add up for players who travel a lot, but not so much that they completely leave other players in the dust. We wanted to be able to give the perk without completely unbalancing the game.

-This new feature will be particularly helpful for newer players and characters for two reasons. First, since travel games count as home games for build purposes, this means that if they travel in between their first few games, they actually get that new character build faster. And second, since skills and stats scale the more of them that you buy, a newer player or character will be able to get some extra bang for their buck with the build from their travel games. That scaling is a huge part of why we’re comfortable introducing a perk like this-  since older characters grow more slowly as time goes on, while newer characters grow more quickly, the disparity can be minimized. 

-In addition to new players and characters, this can also help give a boost to players whose home games don’t run every single month, or shut down for short periods each year.

So, to wrap up the answer to this question- our aim is that with the existing scaling in the system, the new build perk will end up being a nice bonus while remaining fair and balanced.

What are the reasons for making this change?

There are two main reasons:

The previous Advanced Membership benefits included 2 build per character per year, and the ability to check in multiple characters per event. While this was great for players who had multiple regularly-played characters, it meant that players with only one main character didn’t find much benefit in having one at all. With this new update, we’re hoping that it will become more helpful to a broader spectrum of players.

We also know that since the pandemic began, many chapters have been going through a tough time- especially once they returned to live events. Sites have become more expensive, and harder to find and book. Some chapters even lost their inventories to weather and mold when they had to unexpectedly close in 2020, and had to start from scratch. All of this means that we’ve been working hard on ways to help give chapters a boost, and this update is one of them. We hope that players will take this as an opportunity to travel more, supporting other chapters in the process.

At the end of the day, no system is ever perfect- but we’re excited about this change, and we hope you are, too.

Stay safe, stay cool, and we’ll see you in the wasteland!