Since there are probably a lot of people sitting at home with a lot more time to grind arena, I thought this would be a timely analysis to do now. I'm just going to toss out some numbers here, and then work my way back to them, because this is going to be a long discussion. Here they are:
5,417,277 gold 7411 units per month
42322 gold and 58 units per hour
1830 gold and 2.5 units per round
There has been a lot of discussion in the past year or two about gold being a key resource shortage in the game. This thread is not about that discussion, at least not directly. Whether there is or is not a gold shortage depends greatly on what your progress level is and how you play the game. But there's an additional wrinkle that is increasingly being suggested: that the gold shortage is different because it is
insurmountable by
any reasonable level of play without spending. In other words, if you play at a high enough level there's no way to earn enough gold to effectively do all the things you need to do that require gold, like rank up champs or fulfilling AQ donations for high maps. That notion seemed worthy of a more quantitative analysis. My gut instinct says that's not true, but I don't believe anyone has done the numbers to figure out exactly how much, or how little, gold you can earn in the arena. I decided to do that, and since the two are significantly linked I decided to figure out exactly how much gold and units an arena grinder can obtain.
I had to start somewhere, so the logical place to start is with me. As we'll see, there will still be a useful way to extrapolate this to other players. I'm almost certainly not a typical arena grinder: the fact that I can consistently place in the top 10% in any, or if I try every arena says that. But still, I decided to actually do all the arenas to see what I came up with. I used to grind way more, now I generally grind way less, so I wanted to see solid numbers when I actually did all the milestones deliberately. And I do mean all of them.
The bottom line: this is how many rounds I did in each arena, during the normal weekday event, points scored, and rank placement.
5* featured: 121 rounds; 16,409,861 points [1-10%]
4* featured: 61 rounds; 4,006,761 points [1-10%]
4* basic: 55 rounds; 1,514,133 points [11-25%]
3* featured: 40 rounds; 656,206 points [11-30%]
Summoner trials: 6 rounds; 25482 points [did not reach all milestones]
Yeah, I got lazy on the last one. We can estimate that one without too much difficulty: at about 6k average per round, it would have taken about 44 rounds to reach the last milestone. Let's pretend I did that. If I did that would have been 321 rounds in three days. I average 23 arena rounds per hour normally, and 25 if I really push it. At 23 rounds/hour that is just under fourteen hours, which agrees with my estimate for time spent on grinding during this period. That's four hours forty minutes per day on average. Way more than the average player, but not an extreme level of grinding for an arena grinder. What do I get for that effort?
First of all, I get all the milestones. Here they are in total (I've dropped the arena boosts as irrelevant here):
5* featured: 135 units, 19500 BC, 38000 gold, 9 PHC, 1500 PHC frag
4* featured: 135 units, 16750 BC 30750 gold, 17400 PHC frag
4* basic: 135 units, 13500 BC, 23000 gold, 14800 PHC frag
3* featured: 65 units, 9000 BC, 17500 gold, 9000 PHC frag
Summoner trials: 65 units, 6600 BC, 10600 gold, 4500 PHC frag
Total: 535 units 65350 BC, 119850 gold, 32.6 PHC (equivalent)
Weekly (two runs): 1070 units, 130700 BC, 239700 gold, 65.2 PHC
On top of that, I also did some Sunday grinding, although much less:
Crystal trove: 47 rounds; 3940404 points [11-30%]
Crystal cornucopia: 29 rounds, 1587568 points [1-5%]
Crystal splash: 22 rounds, 330099 points [1-50%]
The total milestones here come to 59000 gold combined, plus a bunch of crystals I'm going to ignore for now.
That means an entire week of this level of grinding would generate 1070 units, 130700 BC, and 298700 gold.
But wait: this doesn't include gold and BC you earn from the actual grind itself. You get gold and BC in every round. This does vary somewhat depending on what you use in the arena (sometimes) but given the amount you earn per victory, plus the bonus (assuming you win all three), minus the entry costs, this is about what I earn per round in those arenas using my typical teams:
5* featured: 480 BC, 450 gold
4* featured: 420 BC, 350 gold (375 BC 200 gold with 4*)
4* basic: 375 BC, 200 gold
3* featured: 345 BC, 250 gold
Summoner trials: 330 BC, 190 gold
Crystal trove: 420 BC, 150 gold
Crystal cornucopia: 420 BC, 150 gold
Crystal splash: 345 BC, 150 gold
I can tally up all the rounds I grinded and calculate the total BC and gold I earned actually doing all those rounds, separate from the milestone rewards. I get:
5* featured: 58080 BC, 54450 gold
4* featured: 25620 BC, 21350 gold
4* basic: 20625 BC, 11000 gold
3* featured: 13800 BC, 10000 gold
Summoner trials: 14190 BC, 8170 gold
Crystal trove: 19740 BC, 7050 gold
Crystal cornucopia: 12180 BC, 4350 gold
Crystal splash: 7590 BC, 3300 gold
Total for week (normal x 2 + sunday) = 304140 BC, 224640 gold
When I add that to the milestones, I get this:
Full week total: 434840 BC, 523340 gold, 1070 units
Monthly total (four weeks): 1739360 BC, 2093360 gold, 4280 units
One last thing. Based on
my analysis of average return on arena crystals I can convert those battlechips into an average amount of gold and units using the ratio 1,000,000 BC = 1,911,000 gold and 1800 units. I get about 3323917 gold and 3131 units. So the grand total for four weeks (~one month) of grinding at this rate is:
5,417,277 gold 7411 units.
That's
a lot of gold and units. And the total time spent to do this is less than five hours a day. In fact, it is about 32 hours per week, or a little more than four and a half hours per day. This means my average rate of return in grinding all of this is about 42322 gold per hour (and about 58 units per hour). Or if you prefer, it is about 1830 gold
per round (also almost exactly 2.5 units per round).
Now, let's say we ignore milestone rewards entirely and just look at the gold return per round in all the arenas. Since I can estimate the gold return per battlechip as about 1.9 gold per BC, I can refactor all the net earnings per round for all the arena rounds expressed in gold:
5* featured: 1362 gold
4* featured: 1148 gold (913 gold with 4*)
4* basic: 913 gold
3* featured: 906 gold
Summoner trials: 817 gold
Crystal trove: 948 gold
Crystal cornucopia: 948 gold
Crystal splash: 806 gold
1830 gold per round isn't sustainable because a significant fraction comes from milestone rewards, and they eventually run out. So the long term best case earning rate is closer to 1200 gold per round (some blended average of the 4* basic, 4* featured, and 5* featured arenas). So the long term earning rate per hour after all milestones everywhere are exhausted are about 27,600 gold per hour, if you expend more than about five hours per day on average.
I'm sure someone by now is saying that there's no way the "average player" can grind this much arena, and that's of course true. The average player can't. But the average player can't *use* this much gold either. To put this into perspective, the Map 7x5 gold donation level is (I believe) about 440k per AQ week. That's 1.76 million gold in a month, more or less. The gold to rank up a 5* from rank 1 to rank 5 using class-correct ISO is about 2.5 million. To meet that donation level and rank two 5* champs a month from rank 1 to rank 5 would require sustaining about 6.8 million gold per month. The grind above comes pretty close to that, and that's before we count all the other rewards that are hidden amounts of gold, like the PHC crystals or the shard crystals, all of which generate champion dups and thus ISO, which can be sold for gold. Or for that matter gold earned anywhere else in the game. And it doesn't count the 7400 units a month this level of effort generates, which even if you use a fraction of on things like Cavalier crystals will also generate tons of ISO through champion dups. This also assumes anyone believes Kabam releases two rank 5-worthy champs a month, every month, that you would even want to rank up, and that you never rank up 6* champs (which take far less gold to get to rank 2 than 5* champs take to get to rank 5).
Does this mean anything for players who are not top tier players or not high-effort arena grinders? Yes, it does. I want to repeat the average return on arena grinding here:
1830 gold and 2.5 units
per round42322 gold and 58 units
per hourThis, or something like it, is achievable for
everyone, especially for players that do not grind enough arena to gather all the milestones. As long as unclaimed milestones exist, grinding has a higher return than just the base earnings per defeat. The stronger your roster the faster you earn points and the faster you earn milestones, but as long as your champs are reasonably ranked up more than half of that return comes just from defeating things in the arena. You're going to get well over half of that rate even if you never claim a single milestone.
You need a million gold? It'll take about 24 hours in the arena. You need 15,000 units for July 4? 259 hours or so in the next three months (under three hours a day). Depending on specific circumstance, the numbers could be a third higher or lower, but in that general ballpark.
That's how much stuff is in there. It is just disguised in iterations and conversions.
I should emphasize that this is not the final word on whether there is a "gold problem" in the game. That's a much more complex and situational question. But it does provide a quantitative context to one extreme version of the question: is it possible to grind enough gold to satisfy the needs of the highest tier players without spending money. And the answer to that question is apparently yes: it is. Five hours a day gets you mostly there, and not only does it generate a ton of gold, in some sense it costs
negative money as it generates an almost ludicrous amount of units.
This is a lot of calculations, and I did all of this fairly quickly this weekend in between the only acceptable Corona hand holding work going on now (IT people, you know what I'm talking about). So if anyone has questions or corrections, let me know. I *think* I've double checked everything properly, but there's always a possibility a two got accidentally not carried somewhere.
