F-Zero AX in Herne, Germany

Contributing to the dedicated F-Zero AX Cabinet Log. I figured that it was easier to have everything posted here. I'm expecting to post something like this once every few years, when the opportunity arises. Today's archive is for the AX located in Herne, Germany: Insert Coins e.V. The condition of the machine is good, but it's starting to show its age.

Prior to this blogpost, the condition of this one was last publicized in 2023. Most notably, a functional GC memory card slot (2023) and a pilot license reader (2022). The memory card is still functional, but the license reader is not. It's set to "OUT OF SERVICE" (page 92); see video: "The F-ZERO LICENSE CARD can not be used or purchased at this time", at 1:18. I've asked the staff about this, but unfortunately they were unfamiliar with the license card feature. Tough luck.

For the sake of brevity, here's a summary of the machine's condition. For reference, Juni's video is a solid benchmark.

• This is a single, Deluxe F-Zero AX Cabinet. No multiplayer. Game is set to English.
• English decals, but was missing some on the dashboard, license card reader and above the roll cage. The condition of most decals are good. Note the peeling decal on the back of the seat.
• Minor cracks on the monitor box lid, most notably around the screw on the right side. See video.
• It no longer has the Toshiba CRT monitor. The LCD replacement is good, albeit wrong aspect ratio.
• The fluorescent lights on the back are still functional. Coin chute lights were offline.
• Audio exclusively came from the TV. Speakers from the seat and the subwoofer were offline.
• Memory Card reader works, but the License Card reader was set to "OUT OF SERVICE". Custom vehicles from memory card works (see video). 20 tickets per race, regardless of how the race went.
• Steering works fine, including tilt. Calibration is decent, but the steering is not sensitive enough to register small inputs. Steering rumble works. All buttons on the steering wheel works. T-drifts are possible.
• Seat motion works. Seatbelt not included, it plays without. No issues with the chair itself. Calibration of the seat motion is good. You cannot adjust the seat, it is bolted down. The safety sensors work.
• Accelerator is in poor condition. Earlier on the day it had trouble registering inputs, but that got better after several plays. At best it was about 70% of a vehicle's expected speed, but at worst it was under 100 km/h. Your mileage may vary. Staff mentions that it's an ongoing task, but a difficult problem to fix. Brakes work.
• Pricing: the machine is free, but there's an entrance fee of 15 euro for 3 hours (early afternoon), or 20 euro for 4 hours (late afternoon/early evening). Tickets must be ordered (online) one month in advance. Venue is only open once per month. That said, it's massive and the selection of (racing) arcade machines, pinballs and (retro) consoles made it worthwhile. The staff are involved and passionate about their arcade, so it's safe to assume that this specific machine will remain operational and preserved in a good state.
• Gameplay wise: it's perfectly fine for parents and children that wants to play only once or twice. A decent experience for F-Zero fans, arguably great when the accelerator is fixed. Beating the hard tracks is unlikely because of the latter issue, so keep this in mind.

[EMS] Mystic Frontier is a mistake

It's the spooky season, and nothing is more terrifying than waking up to another episode of exploit o'clock.

Mystic Frontier is a blessing and a curse. It perfectly encapsulates the worst aspects of Inkwell's design philosophy, where it's designed to be as frustrating and manipulative as possible. It's predatory in such a way that customers are fooled into thinking that spending money gives them an advantage, but in practice it's a zero sum game. However, his carelessness is an advantage: Mystic Frontier's highly exploitable, to the degree where it's the second most important weekly content (after ghetto muling) as they both substitute the Potential revamp and are arguably more effective at it.

This blogpost assumes you understand the basics of Mystic Frontier, and that you're familiar with ghetto muling. Right now, progress is gated by the quantity of characters. The more you have, the faster progression becomes. For ghetto muling you need 6th Job, but Mystic Frontier only requires 5th Job. The other thing you'll need is something the EMS market has plenty of: a sheer quantity of common familiar cards with blue Potential. They're cheap, abundant and an one-time purchase. It requires a few billion mesos, but you'll then have a weekly supply of Additional Potential cubes. At this point, the Potential revamp is worse since each roll costs a fortune, whereas Frontier only has the initial cost and once set up, becomes profitable in a few months. You might as well make the most out of it, while you still can...

 

Every day, you can open Mystic Frontier to roll for three random expeditions. You can do this on every character that has unlocked Mystic Frontier. Each week, you can only enter up to 15 expeditions, but this limit is shared across the same world. With enough attempts, you can brute-force fifteen 24 hour (Legendary) expeditions. For the presets, we have a nearly infinite supply of familiar cards. Expect to require between 500 and 1000 cards per character to build a preset that's good enough. Mystic Frontier's deliberately designed to fail rounds, but we offset by improving our odds. Now that you understand the idea behind this exploit, let's discuss how all of it works and what rewards to expect.

It took me longer to write this damn blogpost than to set-up and research this exploit.

The preset you ought to aim for when running this strategy is one that exclusively uses the following lines:

• If all Familiars on your active lineup have the same type, Dice Total +2, Final Multiplier: 1.2x
• If all Familiars on your active lineup have the same element, Dice Total +2, Final Multiplier: 1.2x

It doesn't matter which or how many you have; the lines are interchangeable. Always run three of the same monster.

It doesn't take long to create a preset from scratch. You can add up to one hundred familiar cards at a time and reveal their potential all at once. You skim through the results and lock the familiars you want to keep. You then extract all of the unwanted familiars and repeat this process until you have a preset. When starting from scratch, I'd recommend to start rolling for 24 hour expeditions first and then create presets for these characters, rather than creating presets for 60 characters before doing anything. You do not need more than one preset per character, but out of convenience it's worthwhile to build additional presets whenever a character finds more than one 24 hour expedition on the same day.

The Dice Total +2 lines are crucial for this strategy, as multipliers are additive and far more common from round ends. Dice Total also compensate for bad rolls and it's guaranteed to roll enough to win round 1 Green pouches on neutral difficulty (I'll discuss this later). Of course, it'd be better if we ran higher ranked potentials on each character, but that's not worth it. This strategy is the sweet spot for obtaining crucial resources while keeping the cost and time spent low.

The pouches we're after are Orange and Green. They are not guaranteed every expedition. Each week* has given me Additional Potential cubes, but not every week won Orange/Green pouches. Despite that you have 15 expeditions with 5 rounds each, it's still beholden to luck. At minimum I've always seen two Orange pouch rounds every week. At best, I've won two Orange pouches and three Greens for 33 Additional Potential cubes in the same week. You shouldn't be worried about losing a few Orange/Green pouches because there's so many of them and there's always next week.

*See images. Forgive the inconsistencies; I mainly kept track of cubes from Orange/Green pouches. I left out almost all Meisters. Hindsight is 20/20.

Blue pouches can yield a Meister cube, Purple can give you one Additional Potential cube. Orange can give you three or six, Green can give you ten. Each individual pouch has a chance to rank up. There's no limit to how often this can happen. I've seen Purple ranking up to Green and Orange ranking up to Diamond. It's worth picking up any pouch, but if you haven't scored any Orange/Green pouches before the fifth round, always prioritize reaching it to make sure you didn't miss any. You always need two rounds to replenish Action Points. Clear two whenever possible or else you'll risk having to skip rounds. Always save rerolls for Orange/Green/Pitched Box and CoR*; settle for rolls of at least 3 each.

*You can bank the CoR voucher and equips from Pitched Box, but you cannot bank the CoR totem or Pitched Box itself, or any Familiar Ring (Box).

Before we wrap up, I'll mention the ways how Mystic Frontier forces rounds to fail. Every round has a chance to add a yellow/purple border and/or to change the space from blue to purple, increasing the required roll to succeed. It stacks. Round ends add extra dice multipliers, but some will reduce your Dice Total or become a clock (worthless). These are all the more reason to opt for mules, seeing as a single character rarely finds an Orange/Green pouch every month, let alone Legendary expeditions every week, or find anything useful on a regular basis. Suffice to say, I'll assume you're familiar enough with how shit Mystic Frontier is as a system and thus can understand the appeal of this dumb exploit.

But what about the rates on Pitched Box? Familiar Rings? Chains of Resentment? I don't care, really. I'm mainly doing this for the Additional Potential cubes, as everything else is already covered by ghetto muling. Now leave me alone.

[EMS] 19 years of Rayque!

Today is day 6941, the 30th of September - which means I've been playing EMS daily for 19 years now!

Starting this year, EMS is now longer under the management of Nexon US than it was under Nexon Europe. Last year I've talked at length about the state of EMS and hoped that things would be better. Unfortunately, we're in a race to the bottom and next week's going to add another dumpster fire to the long list of Go West flops. It will burn... very brightly. To be honest, it's not even worthy of attention and it's funnier to just give future readers no context about any of this.

That said, we make do with what we have. For all of the abysmal exclusive content we got instead of major updates and events, as we'll discuss in next month's blogpost: there's still some good to be found. Not good for Nexon that is, as explained in my acquisition of a Breath of Divinity, all of their thoughtless choices have resulted in several baffling oversights that drastically changes the way we progress our characters. For a while I felt kinda stuck with the lack of the Additional Potential revamp, but with Mystic Frontier and the Star Force changes I now have a clear path forward.

It's this ample supply of busywork and tinkering that keeps me coming back every day. Having been able to achieve a Breath of Divinity has been rejuvenating for my motivation, since that challenge also solved other problems including the need for large quantities of cubes and mesos to buy resources. Potential and 6th Job are now solved over time, and that allows me to save up mesos to work towards six Union Champions. While I certainly can try to increase my Star Force to 22, the game doesn't provide me enough incentives to choose that over building more powerful mules.

The plan moving forward is to copy my entire build on Rayque and to run the same on my Union Champions. I'm not too concerned about whether if that's possible. I have already achieved this once, and each subsequent character will progress faster with how the game is designed. I'm in no rush to achieve this ASAP; it defeats the point of having fun. But make no mistake: I would absolutely not recommend to return to the game any time soon. Now is not a good time.

Cheers everyone, I'll see you guys again when we'll discuss how stupid Mystic Frontier really is. Now leave me alone.

[EMS] Level 294!

Ding! I figured that with today's level up I'd write a separate blogpost for this, since it otherwise would've had to be part of another or be November's blogpost. At that point I might already be (close to) Level 295, because the time between Levels 293 and 294 was only forty-four days. Either way, events end tonight so the next update is around the corner.

To my surprise, I got really lucky with the Sunday discounts on Star Force, so I only have my cape left to upgrade. For now I'd like to save up just to have mesos on hand whenever I want to purchase something from the Auction House. 

I'm expecting to want Sol Erda Fragments in bulk with Blitz Shield VI releasing soon, as I've been leveling skills on my Wild Hunter. It has its Ascent at Level 29 already, but with Extreme Lotus taking 24 minutes and costing boss potions, I'd like to focus on Blitz Shield VI to shorten these runs and cut the need for finite resources. While Blitz Shield VI and Rage Explosion are the cheapest within their respective skill groups, they both cost 4000 fragments each and there's less than four months between them. They'll probably start releasing a new 6th Job skill each season after Nexon has done most of the class balancing that's scheduled for later this month. We'll see how that goes. Now leave me alone.

[EMS] Level 293 and more!

It's time to catch up on recent progress. The expected goal of the year (Level 293) was achieved earlier thanks to the tremendous event support. Level 294 is likely to happen before the end of the year. Last season's Hyper Burning got my Erel to Level 260 and in a few days I should have Kinesis done as well. My Union is at 9900, so I'm guaranteed to achieve the 10k milestone within the next two Hyper Burnings. If only we didn't skip so many of them, but at least we got another Burning Max so my Marksman's 270. Rayque's now my first SSS-Rank Union Champion! 100b well spent.

Now, in terms of low hanging fruits, my main is almost at that sweet spot. The relevant 6th Job skills are maxed out so we're waiting for Blitz Shield VI to arrive. Tallahart Symbol's done, so we're waiting for the next one at Level 295. I only have two items that need an additional Star Force each to reach 18, which might take a while with the Mechaberry tax from this event. My Breath of Divinity is already done with its Potential for now, as I've managed to roll a triple %-STR in the same month that I got it. I'm not going to use many Additional Potential cubes on my main anymore as it's more interesting to use those on my Wild Hunter. With only three items left to roll triple %-STR on, I'm preparing to dedicate all resources on Wild Hunter soon. It rushes Easy Lucid and working on it has been a great exercise in learning what works best in the early game environment with the mesos earned from bossing, which is now five billion every week.

In the laboratory I've been researching the ins and outs of Mystic Frontier and finding stupid ways to exploit it beyond its intended purposes. Obviously there's some silly oversights since "Team GMS" are idiots, but the sample size on my research is still on the lower end. I'm expecting to share my results in the October blogpost, seeing as September is always reserved for my EMS anniversary. Last year I wrote something fancy but I don't have much to add on what I've already said in other blogposts since. Besides, I'm not expecting to be healthy enough to write anything substantial for the foreseeable future sans the year summary. I'm not looking forward to it because I've nothing to celebrate anymore.

On a more positive note, the leg design of Ouroboros is able to carry over eight kilograms! I haven't recorded any of it as I'm working on improving the frame, so the ankle joint slots deep enough inside the lower leg frame. Either way, it's going to work but I'm taking extra time to iron out some concerns regarding the many EV3 this'll require. They are not the easiest to hide so I'm trying to see if it's possible to hide them between the linkages. I also need to run tests to see how many motors can be stacked on each port as it'll decide if I have to add more EV3, or scale down the amount of motors. For that reason I'm working with modular builds because my energy is limited and the decline in mental health have both been major hindrances. Anyway, seeing as I'm sticking with EV3 I figured it's worth understanding its quirks and limitations (beyond its retail capabilities) early, as that avoids the dead ends that have plagued both Hailfire Droid and Constructor many times. I trust the design process as it has served me well to this point. We now know that buggy motors with linear actuators works, but it helps to know how many EV3 and motors I'll need, as this'll decide the sizes and weight for every project moving forward, y'know? I hope to be able to write something for Ouroboros in November.

That's it for today. Now leave me alone, as I have a second dispute against the UWV. Thanks for nothing, Jojanneke.