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shrimpbytes · 1 year ago

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Update to this:

Season 17 is actually out and pretty rough. For starters they added *back* the ability to buy ranks after 100 again.

You know, that idea that was so bad they patched it out 10 WHOLE SEASONS ago, just two seasons after rank 101+ were even added.

There are now atoms available in the "repeatable" area. But some math I forgot to include in the original post is that the amount of items you need to buy to unlock the repeatables is the same as total items available to non 1sters meaning there really is no freedom if you want repeatable stuff. Perk coins are also one and done now

Anyways, yeah. Told you so.

Fallout 76 SEASONS 4 years later

I spent a long time wondering if I should make this a video. Because I kinda don't want to put another 76 one on my channel, but my autism and desire to say "I told you so" is quite strong.

Then I remembered I have a blog I never use, so that.

Not to mention, I feel like I am less likely to accidentally get picked up by the worst defenders of capital here than reddit or youtube

Fallout 76 seasons is currently wrapping its 16th season. After somehow 4 years of this, I thought it would be ''''fun''''' to take a look back at how we got here and how depressing it all is.

SEASON 0

This journey actually starts before the scoreboard was made, what I will refer to here as Season 0. You see, for 76, the scoreboard wasn’t a brand new reward system from the ether, it replaced an already existing daily and weekly challenge system.

In the old days we were given challenges to earn atoms directly. No pussyfooting through ranks of nonsense. Just cold hard cash. Were the rates lower than the scoreboard? Not really. The weekly atoms one could expect 150-160 atoms free per week. When you consider dedicated players tend to finish the scoreboard in 8 or so weeks, that alone is pretty congruent with the atoms earned by the scoreboard…however. With daily challenges you can get 50-70 per week. Even if you only rolled 50 atoms per day, you could more than TRIPLE the weekly amount. 50*7+150 = 500 atoms per week 5 weekly challenges and 5 daily challenges. Let’s keep that 500 per week metric in mind. This is a small low-ball since some days would offer you more, but the challenges themselves were less engaging than the scoreboard, so 500 it is.

SEASON 1

May 2020. Everyone is happy and optimistic about Fallout 76 for the first time. Sure Fallout 1st came, but we also got Wastelanders. A story expansion with real NPCs, and a dialogue/skill system with varied ways to approach all kinds of checks that was arguably more in depth than previous Fallouts. And then Season 1 is announced and it’s not looking good as Bethesda gives us a set of numbers that don’t add up. You see obtaining the first rank would be 1000 score with each subsequent rank adding 25 score above the previous. So to get all 100 ranks you would need 220,275. You can otherwise get 7500 score from weeklies and 2000 from dailies for a total of 21500 score per week. Which given 10 weeks leaves you at 5000 short of completing the scoreboard. When this was pointed out Bethesda announced the repeatable score challenge for 10000 xp giving 100 score and that there would be double score events. So, not impossible but still a bit funky that they let us see numbers indicating they designed a system intending for us to fail.

Okay, shoddy math aside, what was Season 1 actually like? Well July 2020 rolls around and we finally get to see. I’ll lead in with the positives. Many of the annoying challenges go away. No more taking pictures of players or wearing specific cosmetic items to get your reward, but challenges otherwise stay the same. The format is more appealing as there is a fun little board game to help coax you through the grind.

What of the rewards then?

3 player icons 150

A bunch of junk

The single worst ui I have seen in a non-David Cage Game [Ammo converter]=500 atoms??

8 armor reskins 600-1200 each or 2000 for a bundle

6 weapon skins 500 each

1 pip-boy skin 500 ($5 for a pip-boy re-texture? Half the price of Nuka-World/Automaton/The Pitt/Broken Steel)

7 power armor reskins 600 each, 1200 for bundle

A brand new power armor skin and a reskin for it 1500? 3000?

1 chicken coop=500 atoms

9 camp decorations 300 each, 2000 for a bundle

1 deployable skin

2 backpack skins 1000

2 photo frames 150 each

2 poses 250 EACH

3,6,15, scrap kits 900?

3, 6, 15 repair kits 250+500+3*50? 900?

1 facial cosmetic item 300

2 jetpack skins500, 1000(bundled with their respective for 1800)

3 variations of the same outfit 1000? 3000???

39 lunchboxes: 1 = 50, 6 = 250, 15 =500, 40 =1000

1500 atoms

So if we take this favorably, we’re looking at 33.65k. Certainly nothing to sneeze at, right? Well..

Not at all

The above is a very generous way to look at it. One way that even Bethesda themselves wouldn’t.

After a season ends they try to recirculate the parts through either the bullion shops or the atom store. In particular, all of season 1’s tomfoolery can be acquired through bullion, or these two bundles: The captain cosmos bundle is 1800 atoms for just the jetpack and suit. In fact, less than half of what is in the Cosmos and Jangles bundle is even part of season 1. But let’s count the whole price anyways, why not? 1800+1800 is 3600, add in the atoms and now we’re at 5100 in ten weeks pretty on par with the old model, and I am just starting.

What of weapons? Well, what of weapons? Who is the person that uses specifically a bow, a hunting rifle, a super sledge, a combat rifle, a handmade, and a gatling gun? and uses them enough that they’d want a skin on each of them. But not a unique skin either, they’re really set on keeping them all the same theme? Yeah, pretty much noone. That’s probably why Bethesda sells so many bundles. They know you only want one or a few things so they trick you into paying MORE because it looks like a deal. If you get six skins for the price of two, you might think that’s really good even though you’ll only use one, so really you paid the price of two, for one. Like going back to the cosmos jangles bundle. The Default cosmos outfit alone is 1000 atoms. Over HALF the price of the bundle individually. The bundling scheme gets even more transparent when looking at armors.

Sure, you may use more than one type of weapon, but you will barely ever use more than one type of armor. Many armors are just de facto upgrades over the lower tier ones. Once you have Secret Service or T65 armor, there is barely a reason to ever drop down to a weaker set, save for like the excavator armor’s enhanced carry capacity. Furthermore, most people will either play with either power or unpowered armor, not often both. In fact, the jet pack skin unlocked in the same season itself invalidates the lower tier non-powered armors. it LITERALLY can not be used with any of those armors so including them together on the pricing sheet is pretty damn silly.

Believe it or not, the bundling scheme has yet to hit its stride, because if we could just take a moment to look at the consumable section. I have lunchboxes listed at barely more expensive than the scrap kits and repair kits, which well, they aren’t. They are exactly the same price in the shop. You get nearly double the amount of lunch boxes yet I rounded them to around the same price. Because lunchboxes get you one less than 40, so I rounded up to the 40 bundle for 1000 atoms, but the other consumables come out to 24, a weird number, that if I break apart using largest sums(ie the biggest discounts) ends up with 900 atoms. They are nearly the same price for nearly half the items. Because that’s how dramatic the bundle pricing is. Bethesda wants you to go for the big bundle every time, because it looks like you're getting more value, despite it not actually costing Bethesda a damn thing. Which raises the question, does that mean every consumable I unlock for free, the average price goes down? If I get two seasons worth of lunch boxes, totaling 78, is that like 1500 atoms instead of 2000? Well, something that might help this conundrum is to learn that scrap kits and repair kits are just useless. I have never once purposefully used a scrap kit in all my hours and boss fights just give you better versions of repair kits as well as many other goodies. They are ostensibly just bundled into the season to make it look more valuable than it really is.

The entire season pass is just one, big, bundle. If you actually sit down and look at what you want, you’ll likely find that even by the massively inflated 76 prices you probably would have gotten more under the old system. I wanted the marshmallow armor, something to put on my secret service armor. So for me personally, I would have to grind for 82 ranks to get something I actually wanted. Roughly 8 weeks or 4000 atoms in the old system to get a single skin that would usually be priced around 500 atoms, and I’d only have 1200 atoms thus far to show for it. The value being well under half of the old system.

I promise I won’t do this deep of a dive for every season, I just really wanted to hammer home that while the scoreboard system was more fun than the previous one, it has always been aimed at taking away our purchasing power. [foreshadowing]

CLOSING OUT 2020

Season 2 is not very noteworthy, although I do want to bring up again how artificial these prices are, with the Armor Ace bundle being 1400 atoms for some reason. The atoms earned was also bumped to 1850, which is nice, however 500, over ¼ are locked behind the final final rank. Once again hammering home the bundle method of putting what you really want at the end, so you’ll invest your way through everything else. All and all, a slightly better version of season 1 in my personal opinion. Which is probably why it’s the only one I actually finished. Oh. and it was 13 weeks, not 10. So in the old model that is now competing against an extra 1500 atoms when determining its market value. Oof.

Season 3 coincides with the Steel Dawn update. And as keen viewers guessed by the fact it is brotherhood themed, Bethesda’s worst traits begin rearing their ugly heads again. This is the first season to add 1st exclusive rewards. Meaning some content is just locked away from you unless you pay Bethesda $100 a year to artificially lock content from other players. This season drops the armor bundle entirely, so if you don’t use power armor, I hope you use one of the 5 weapons. What’d they make it up with? Uhh, just some camp amenities, most of which are just cosmetics…and two human beings. So is this season actually worth less than the previous ones, well as a power armorless hippy, I’d say yes, but it is hard to put value on a human life..

Okay okay. I know this really isn’t the point of the video, but I need to address this: You know how I mentioned some rewards can be bought with gold bullion? Well that means they’re purchased at one of the Wastelanders settlements. and idk, I just find it darkly funny that you can buy people from the settlers, who are the “good” side. What did Bethesda mean by this? Oh, and it’s 19 weeks long. So even if it had the exact same value as the two previous seasons, it would still really only be worth half as much, especially when you consider the classic system.

THE TEST

In my opinion, this is where the game begins its true death spiraling. Prior to now, 76 was known for two things besides its launch. Fallout 1st, Bethesda doubling down on their worst behaviors, and Wastelanders, Bethesda flaunting their best abilities. In hindsight, it’s hard not to notice that this one update both included another selling point for 1st, and a scaled down version of Wastelanders. Now would be a good time for Bethesda to see which avenue is more rewarding, and to be frank, Fallout 76 has a prosperity cult problem. That is to say, the most loyal fans believe the more money they throw at the multi-billion dollar company, the more rewards they’ll receive. So obviously, if Bethesda were to look at that data around this time, they’d see it makes more sense to milk 1st subscriptions than create quests that require significant resources.

And hoo boy, the milk is a flowing. TEST FAILED

You'll see after this time 76 starts getting given away, they no longer care about sales, only micro-transactions.

2021

Jan 2021, everyone celebrates as Nuclear Winter challenges are removed from seasons, and then they are quickly added back in

Season 4: Cold Steel. Not too much to say here, no more armor paints, but there are more outfits and some are early on for us normal armor peeps. To be honest, I greatly prefer outfits, because they can each be used no matter the tier of armor you wear underneath, so each one you get stands a chance of being used unlike wood paint. The 1st rewards are getting better though. Season 3 had a power armor paint job, but season 4 gets a brand new model and everything. That I guess uses some copy-pasted text. Because the description does not mention it can be used on either of the newer power armors. But hey, at least freebies still get 2ish new power armors right?

Season 5: Oh, never mind. Just one new power armor and it’s at the absolute max rank. great. The outfits in this pack are all Fallout 3 nostalgia…except the rank 98 uhh EVE Divine Cybermancy suit?

But that doesn’t matter, the notable part of season 5 is that it was released with Steel Reign and Finally implemented ranks beyond 100. Which I am going to use in defense of my season 3 'TEST' theory. Season 3 asked “More 1st bullshit, less story content?” and Season 5 said “More 1st bull shit, less story content.” Thanks 1sters! Oh, and it was 9 weeks long. The first season where you could technically keep earning atoms for additional play time like in the old days, is tied for the shortest season. The repeatable ranks are not worth too much. You can no longer grind repeatable challenges and you only get 100 atoms instead of 150 and nothing unique. So 100 atoms per 30000 or so score means 200 atoms per 3 weeks. Less than 1/7th of the olden days. Honestly, just take the time off and go hug your kids.

Season 6: The average length of seasons goes up from here, just under half exceeding 100 days, and all but one above ten weeks. Allows each season to take up less man hours and each player to get less stuff over time. Other than the aforementioned time skimping, I think the board itself is better than season 5’s, but I am also a capeshit enjoyer. (I also think it’s hilarious the power armor is based on the stealthy femme fatale hero)

2022-ish

Season 7: Generally average, but I can’t help but notice the clean blue suit which is quite literally the type of thing they give away in the atom store. Of note this time, you can no longer pay for ranks after rank 100. Not sure why you could ever do that, but props for taking it out…I think?

Season 8: A pretty bad season all things considered. Which much like the Brotherhood one, should have been obvious because they’re relying on vault tec again. Seriously, someone needs to confiscate Bethesda's nostalgia card.

The power armor paint is just yellow. It’s just yellow. There isn’t even one for T65 armor, the objectively strongest and thereby most used set for two years by this point. They brought back the useless low tier armor upgrades and 1sters now get a reward every 5 rounds instead of 10 including this Billy Bass mailbox.

This is it. This is what I will never forgive Bethesda for. Give me the bass Bethesda.

There is no unique power armor at the end and the rank 98 outfit? It’s a vault suit. With leather armor…really? And for some reason you get firehouse materials at the end in lieu of anything else. I guess Bethesda does care about the build community after all. In full honesty, a very obvious shift towards 1sters. Quite literally doubling what they were getting before (a reward every 5 ranks instead of every 10) and dropping a steamy one down our chimney. The fattest L yet, and what a way to end year 2. I look forward to many more years of quality seasons.

Season 9: Better than 8, but still clearly on the downward slope. Still shilling out useless armor skins and now having 1st rewards at yet again doubled rate(a reward every 5 ranks instead of every 10) , including locking this beaut away.

It’s no billy bass mailbox, but the Dullahan is nearly as fuckable and also this good boy.

Guess what? If you don’t pay for 1st(and grind to rank 100) you are spitting on Seymour’s grave.

SEASON 10

It got its own header, must be scary: This is the season that made me start working on this essay, because genuinely, fuck it. You see, Season 10 locks the Auto-Axe, a returning Fallout 3 weapon, and one of the best weapons in 76 behind rank 15.. As well as the union power armor, which for SOME REASON is split up like the pieces of Exodia

Forcing you to reach rank 75 before you are even allowed to finish the full set. Not to mention the plasma caster skin, a weapon I actually use is locked behind rank 92. Not that it matters since all of the skins in this season are just…brown. Well, you’ll probably be able to get them with bullion afterwards right? Nope, 76 instead adds another currency in the same update, stamps.

As before, it is really hard to explain why something is bad in 76 without explaining every other system in the game, but in short you need stamps to get these after the event and stamps were very hard to get. You could potentially get 20 stamps if you absolutely nailed one of two just two 10 minute long quests. It's been over a year and they added just two quests. You could only get the full 20 if you were the expedition leader, which you could only do once per day. Otherwise you can only get 10 per run. With each Power Armor piece being 800 stamps, that would mean 40 runs per part and I can not stress this enough: there were only two quests. Minimum runs: 200 in 200 days or Minimum Days: 1 in runs. Bethesda really hates Pittsburgh huh?

2023

Season 11: Same idea as the last few, the unique weapon is now locked to rank 85, a full ten ranks higher than exodia himself. But the paints are more interesting than rust

Feb 2023, Season 12 Rip Daring and The Cryptid Hunt adds rerolls. You get one per day and it allows you to change 1 challenge you got for a better one. Fo1st holders get a second one per day, the scoreboard drops some and you can buy them for 50 atoms. Okay, 50 atoms isn’t much and you get some for free, what’s the big deal. Well, remember those annoying challenges from Season 0? You know, say wear a specific armor while doing a specific tedious objective?

Yeah? Well, what if, we brought those back, but made you do them with ludicrously expensive or season pass related armor? Because that’s what happened. Some challenges were only completable with the Union Power Armor.

So now we’re setting up a precedent where lapsing on one season can cause you to struggle harder through the next, maybe even encouraging you to buy our brand new microtransaction. Fantastic. Also, when it first launched sometimes the rerolls would send you to do a seasonal event that wasn’t in season. This is more than 4 years into 76’s lifespan and what a way to cap off year 3 of season passes.

Season 13: This season we see that the 1sters are getting a lot less useless crap than they used to. Repair kits being swapped out for cute lil’ plushies. But do not fret freebie, there is a mothman plushie…locked all the way down at rank 97. The season locked weapon is thankfully only rank 5, but you also get a pipboy skin at rank 66? Ooh boy, don’t miss the rank 66 pipboy skin. It is also the only other 9 week season. They know the effect mothman has on people and rushed him to the atom store.

Season 14: Rank 5 gave us the second light machine gun skin ever. The first one coming out a full 4 years after the game’s launch. No I am not salty. Sidenote: giving an infamous nazi gun the “fight for freedom” paint job. What did Bethesda mean by this?(The only other skin is enclave..) There is not a single outfit skin, but at least we got winterized metal armor…That’s the worst chafe of your life. 1sters get an exclusive item that prevents spoilage entirely. Marvelous.

Season 15: I actually quite like the styling of this one, but it still curries the same bad habits. No real improvements to speak of save for style. I really wish I had more to say, with this being the last scoreboard, but it honestly just leaves on a brutal whimper

SEASON 16

Finally we arrive at the current season. Maybe this is the one where it will finally turn around. And I regret to inform you that

THERE IS AN ASSAULTRON IN FISHNETS!! 76 is back baby. 76 is ba-!

Oh no

In the interest of full disclosure, I was planning a 4 year retrospective well before season 16 was actually announced since I had more than enough solid evidence in my case(looking at you season 10), and let me tell you if that announcement wasn't just the most damn monkey paw curling moment of my life. All of these years one of my biggest problems with the system is that most of its “value” comes from things I never wanted nor used. So to see them say “we’ve changed it. Now You get to pick what you get. Just like the old days! ain’t that grand?” should be what I wanted right?

…If I may bring out the math once more, my point with the “you get to choose” of it all was that in the old system, it was much faster to save up for the handful of things you wanted rather than be forced through all these ranks., but you have to get to rank 100 anyways to have access to all the stuff, so the grind isn’t actually lessened.

You need 3,735 tickets to complete the whole thing, at 25 tickets per rank that means you have to reach rank 149 to get everything. There aren't even more rewards. There are a total of 140 rewards with 45 being locked behind Fallout 1st. That means only 95 items for people without 1st. Previous seasons had more than 100, with one reward at each rank and then a bundle at rank 100. So you're doing well over 50% MORE grinding for LESS reward

That said, the tickets you save not buying T45 might allow you to buy all the rank 100 rewards when you actually reach them. So, if you actively save up money, you can finish the scoreboard AT rank 100. I repeat, you have to intentionally manage your resources to “complete” the scoreboard with the same amount of grind. They also went back to their old strategy of not having armor skins, but they still have low rank power armor skins? I guess for collectors...except both the X01 and T51 skins are locked behind Fallout 1st. These are two of the most iconic nostalgia armors representing Fallout 2 and Fallout 1 respectively. They are even locked behind a higher rank than T65(a much stronger armor), proving that they are just doing it for aesthetic reasons, ie to bait collectors. Yet again, another clear instance of Bethesda strong-arming people into buying Fallout 1st/participating in SEASONS via nostalgia bait.

You know what else? It's not even possible to get all of the rewards just doing weeklies and dailies as a free player.

The tickets necessary to get all non 1st items is 3010 tickets I believe. So reach rank 121. Each rank after 100 takes 3,500 score. So with weekly score of 31k(300/day, 100/week) this would take you until the tenth week. This season was 11 weeks long, so it's possible until you remember that there are technically rewards at rank 150. Seeing as you can barely make it to 121...you simply can't get that far. There are ways to increase score gain, but players who have maximized that still find themselves coming up short. One reddit user only reaching rank 145 after playing as optimized as they could without outright grinding the early levels with just xp.

To place the final cherry upon this The Help Pie: atoms are just plainly and objectively less available in this season. For one they're not available as a repeatable after rank 100(and you have to reach 150 to get repeatables anyhow). There are 2200 available for 1st players and only 1200 for f2p. That's right, a full 300 down from season 1 4 YEARS AGO, 650 lower than most seasons and 800 less than the previous ones, but hey at least Fallout 1st subscribers get 200 more. So a 40% decrease in income for us peons and a 10% raise for the bourgeois...except no. Because if we consider the loss of repeatable atoms, even many 1st users have experienced a cut.

Wrapping up, and a Hopeful Future?

So yeah. Fallout 76, despite public opinion, has been gradually getting less worth money and time as the years go on. We get new content less often than we did back in 2020, and our time keeps being worth less in-game currency.

But I do have a slight ray of hope.

As I mentioned before, I have a hypothesis that the reason we stopped getting story content for nearly 3 years after season 5 was because of the 'TEST'. To explain it more thoroughly: The last big story content was 5 main quests way back in July 2021 and it coincided with adding 1st only rewards to the scoreboard. By adding both at the same time they could see if the sales of new quests could rival an influx of Fallout 1st subscriptions. That seems to have failed since it would take nearly 3 years for us to get another story update in March 2024, all the while season passes became more and more geared towards selling Fallout 1st.

But this new story content is important, because it released in conjunction with Season 16, the worst season so far with the greatest disparity between 1st and f2p atoms. More importantly, however, it released in conjunction with the show.

The Fallout TV Show brought a massive influx of new eyes to the series, and of course, its latest game. I find it hard to believe that such a radical change to the Season system and the first story expansion and three years were just a coincidence, this feels like another marketing test.

You see, Season 17 has been announced, following the same model as season 16, and along with brings the FIRST EVER IN 6 YEARS map expansion to 76. So they have a new mass of players, who may not be aware of the severe decline in season quality that, if steam numbers are to be believed, outnumber the existing population(who were there before 16) by a factor of around 4.

Maybe if the map expansion proves as a viable way to keep this huge population going, we could see many more similar updates in the future. However, if the new season pushes significant 1st sales, then it's likely we'll just see the same decline we have been for years.

Unfortunately, I am expecting the latter since we have seen a large portion of the new population already fall off. The thing is, at its core, 76 is still not a very good game. It's easy to forget that when old players all have builds that circumvent most of the problems, but to a new player, the issues will be glaring.

That said, I still believe in the potential. The team has some very clear talent even if it's so often hidden from us.

Some Sources:

Proof you can not reach rank 150: https://www.reddit.com/r/fo76/s/4wcIpN7aJz

Some Math:

Season 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/fo76/comments/gjom2q/score_rank_math_hours_played_and_cost/

Season 16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF0po3MfJ2w

Some Lies:

https://segmentnext.com/fallout-76-will-not-have-a-season-pass-or-paid-dlc-pete-hines-confirms-again/

#fallout 76 #late stage capitalism #rant post

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