Best Of

This is a companion post to my previous post comparing Essentia to Glory store pricing, which was posted here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/412485/analyzing-essentia-store-pricing-comparing-essentia-to-glory

I did not look at the Battlegrounds store in-depth at the time, because I thought that would be a simpler comparison. The Glory store has escalating pricing, which makes any comparison more complex than a straight apples to apples price comparison would be. However, I was prompted to take a closer look at this due to the discussion in this thread: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/413079/bg-rewards-have-been-secretly-nerfed

In that thread, I did a couple of spot comparisons that I thought would be reasonably representative of the store values, but there were several things pointed out to me that did not fall within that comparison range at all, meaning my initial evaluation of the Essentia / BG Token comparison was heavily skewed, and at least somewhat wrong. So I decided, since I couldn't find one anywhere, to just do a complete price comparison and see where the chips landed.

Unit recently the only reference point we had for comparing Essentia to BG tokens was the Essentia store trade. That bundle values Essentia at a 35:100 ratio, or about 2.9 tokens to one Essentia. Kinda three to one. However, now that the BG Victory track has been updated to award Essentia, we can see that the in-game reward ratio appears to be 5:1. For every five BG tokens player used to earn in either the Victory track or participation milestones they will be getting one Essentia. This lets me compare the BG pricing to Essentia pricing directly, since we now know what players will be earning in an apples to apples comparison.

I'll spare everyone the calculations and just jump straight to the tables. Here's all the stuff in the Essentia store, with some numbers to show a price per unit value which we will be able to use to compare to the BG store:



And here's everything in the BG store, including items in the BG store that are not in the Essentia store:



The BG store shows the BG token prices, and then uses the 5:1 ratio to convert that into an Essentia price. This is the Essentia price that would have been identical to the BG token price. In other words, the price point where players would have been able to buy exactly the same amount of stuff for the Essentia they earn instead of BG tokens in the updated Battlegrounds. To make things easier to compare, here's just the Essentia price and the BG-converted-to-Essentia prices side by side for comparison:



The red highlighted items are all the items that are, on a normalized basis, more expensive in the Essentia store than they used to be in the BG store. The cost ratio column shows the actual relative increase or decrease in costs. It is a mixed bag. T7B is *massively* better. T4A is somewhat better. T6B and T3A are somewhat worse. T5 anything is ludicrously bad.

[Note: I am just covering prices here. Discussing purchasing limits is a separate discussion I don't want to entangle here, although the purchase limits are listed in the tables above.]

I don't have a good explanation for these wild swings in buying power. One possibility would be that the Essentia store has to set one price for things that were sold in two different stores for two different value points, and so it could not possibly get the price "right" in both cases. But looking at T6B and T3A, it seems difficult to justify the prices using that idea. For both items, their Essentia costs are not just widely high compared to BG store prices, they are also somewhat high compared to their previous Glory store prices as well. The prices are better than Glory store prices if you buy enough of them, but compared to other items that leverage advantage is at best minimal or non-existent. In other words, the prices aren't bad because they were pulled up to meet Glory store prices.

Shrug. I think in this case the players have a justifiable complaint. Some of the stuff is genuinely great compared to BG store pricing and for that matter Glory store pricing. But some stuff seems more costly than necessary, and some stuff seems inexplicably expensive.

There is a potential economic explanation for this, kind of. The devs could argue that although the prices are worse for individual items than the BG store used to be, most players won't be using only BG tokens to buy things. They will get the combination of all three/four currencies to buy what they want. And that's true: that is an advantage many players will exploit. But that only works for some items in my opinion: items that are marginally more expensive like say T6B and T3A. It doesn't work at all for things like T5B that are twice as expensive on a normalized basis. And even for T6B and T3A I think this explanation doesn't work well, because combining currencies doesn't help when the prices are only marginally better in one store and much worse in the other. That won't average out in the players' advantage.

Another explanation is more global, but also more slippery. The devs could argue that the original sources of tokens, glory, and artifacts are not going to be the only sources of Essentia, and the overall net effect will be for players to have more Essentia to buy more stuff, so individual store comparisons don't reflect the whole truth. This is also a reasonable explanation on the surface, but again I don't think that one works because a) we actually *lost* a source of currency with Incursions turning into a special event game mode and b) the numbers are high enough that any new sources of Essentia would have to be pretty big (and the new 72 day Essentia event appears to be only temporary) and c) this would affect different players in different ways based on their activity level. Even if it was true that most players come out ahead, it would be extremely hard to prove it in the general case, and I think at this point Kabam needs to engineer a system simple enough for players to *know* they come out ahead, rather than asking them to have faith it will work out. I give the devs a lot of benefit of the doubt in general, and even I think that's too big of an ask at this point.

I still think in the long run the Essentia store will be better for players. Unifying the currencies is to the benefit of everyone in general: players who play only some parts of the game won't be pigeonholed into one store that only has a subset of what they want. And the overall prices suggest that Essentia prices can be better for the players: it isn't some blanket nerf on resources. But the fact that this is highly inconsistent in the Essentia store in ways that I personally can't explain is problematic, and the fact that at least at the moment there exists players who given what they do and what they buy will end up penalized in the Essentia store relative to the legacy stores is I believe a problem with the system Kabam needs to address.