As soon as the Crystal is loaded the champ is decided.
Not when it is loaded, when it is actually spun or popped. Simply purchasing the crystal from fragments or even loading it into the opening screen does nothing on its own. It is when the crystal has passed the point of no return that the contents are decided.
The reason we know that buying the crystal doesn't determine its contents at purchase time is because players in the past have bought and then sat on crystals, and then opened them much later and champions that did not exist in that pool when the crystal were bought subsequently dropped. So we know the contents weren't frozen at purchase time (if the pool that the crystal is tied to never changes, the crystal can seem like it is frozen, so this test has to be performed on a crystal tied to a pool that gets updated periodically, like the basic 5* pool).
The reason we know that loading into the spinner doesn't determine a crystal's contents is because it is possible to load a crystal into the spinner while the game is actually disconnected from the game servers or the network connection is down. Since crystal contents are calculated on the server side, not the client side, the game can't actually be doing anything at that moment, or the game would immediately hang in a network connection error. Instead, that network error happens when you try to spin the crystal, because it is at that moment that the game client tries to ask the server for the crystal pull and discovers it cannot fetch one.
As soon as the Crystal is loaded the champ is decided.
Not when it is loaded, when it is actually spun or popped. Simply purchasing the crystal from fragments or even loading it into the opening screen does nothing on its own. It is when the crystal has passed the point of no return that the contents are decided.
The reason we know that buying the crystal doesn't determine its contents at purchase time is because players in the past have bought and then sat on crystals, and then opened them much later and champions that did not exist in that pool when the crystal were bought subsequently dropped. So we know the contents weren't frozen at purchase time (if the pool that the crystal is tied to never changes, the crystal can seem like it is frozen, so this test has to be performed on a crystal tied to a pool that gets updated periodically, like the basic 5* pool).
The reason we know that loading into the spinner doesn't determine a crystal's contents is because it is possible to load a crystal into the spinner while the game is actually disconnected from the game servers or the network connection is down. Since crystal contents are calculated on the server side, not the client side, the game can't actually be doing anything at that moment, or the game would immediately hang in a network connection error. Instead, that network error happens when you try to spin the crystal, because it is at that moment that the game client tries to ask the server for the crystal pull and discovers it cannot fetch one.
Thanks for the clarification. Knew it was as one or the other, essentially flipped a coin on which I was going with
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The reason we know that buying the crystal doesn't determine its contents at purchase time is because players in the past have bought and then sat on crystals, and then opened them much later and champions that did not exist in that pool when the crystal were bought subsequently dropped. So we know the contents weren't frozen at purchase time (if the pool that the crystal is tied to never changes, the crystal can seem like it is frozen, so this test has to be performed on a crystal tied to a pool that gets updated periodically, like the basic 5* pool).
The reason we know that loading into the spinner doesn't determine a crystal's contents is because it is possible to load a crystal into the spinner while the game is actually disconnected from the game servers or the network connection is down. Since crystal contents are calculated on the server side, not the client side, the game can't actually be doing anything at that moment, or the game would immediately hang in a network connection error. Instead, that network error happens when you try to spin the crystal, because it is at that moment that the game client tries to ask the server for the crystal pull and discovers it cannot fetch one.