(AEYKAIIPW) ISO Economy Part Three: ISO Chests

This is Part Three in my (Almost) Everything you know about ISO is probably wrong series. This is going to be a short one. No seriously. I've been looking at the ISO economy for a while, and as part of that I took a look at the reward chests in EQ. I was going to make a table of what was in each chest, and discovered that once again, the devs hate me. The chests change contents depending on difficulty tier, and they are also apparently slightly randomized: they have a chance to drop one thing, with a chance to drop something else. I *think* I know what that is now, but the amount of data I've collected cannot account for every possible way these things could have been designed to drive me nuts. So I'm posting this in part to see if anyone wants to contradict any of this, because they have better data or have anecdotally seen other stuff happen. I'm all for someone proving me wrong if it means I don't have to record any more chest openings. Please, prove me wrong. Please?

So here is how I think it works. Every difficulty tier in EQ (and this might work differently in other content) has a chest reward table. For example, the Contender table looks like this:

I'm referring to the ISO bricks by how much ISO they have, not by tier, because who can remember tiers. Anyway, the chests then line up by star rating, so:

A chest will by default drop the reward it is lined up with, but there is a chance it will drop one reward tier higher. So a two star chest in Contender will drop ISO125, and sometimes ISO125x3. A three star chest will sometimes drop ISO125x3, and sometimes ISO525. You might think these chest rewards scale with difficulty tier. Well...

As far as I've been able to tell so far, no? It actually seems like there's only two reward tables: one for the bottom two difficulty tiers and one for the rest. Maybe they do If the probabilities change for when to get which drop? Maybe? But I haven't seen evidence of this yet. It could take months or even years to collect enough data to confirm that though. I'll probably just ask someone. But one thing I find interesting is that *if* my analysis is correct on the chest contents (I'm writing this up because as mentioned, it could take years to *prove* statistically so I'm going with what I have for now) it is also worth noting that under the current difficulty tier system all the maps are basically identical, including chest placement. So if Conqueror has a certain amount of ISO in those chests (plus or minus random variance) then Thronebreaker contains the same amount.

Now, I know that TB contains better class-based ISO in its rewards than lower tiers. But I would think that *all* ISO rewards would scale upward with higher tiers, because of the presumption of higher ISO requirements at higher tiers. But in at least this one case, it doesn't. Does it matter? Well, maybe. The total ISO in Conqueror is (if I have added them up correctly) 173 ISO3000 bricks (this assumes the lower of the two possible drops). That's 519k ISO. That's not a huge amount, but what if it was supposed to scale? Scaling half a million ISO in higher tiers would be meaningful: that's potentially millions of ISO of shortfall.

Is this "wrong." I don't know. But it is unexpected, and it *might* be one of the causes of ISO shortfall in the game. Something that should have scaled upward, but didn't. Also this is for the current EQ system. I don't have data on how it worked in the older one, which is what most of us lived under for the vast majority of the game. This could just be a new design glitch: not responsible for past problems but maybe continuing to exacerbate them.

This is not the end of my deep dive into the ISO economy, but I'm still trying to release this stuff in (relatively) bite sized pieces, and some of this stuff takes forever to collect and analyze (this is a hobby, not a job - arena is my actual job). So this is probably more of a Part three point one. And I might amend this post if I gather more data that refines or corrects those chest rewards. I also already have an idea where Part three point two is going, but I'm not sure how long it is going to take to get there. So like, subscribe, and hit the notification ... oh wait, I'm not that kind of content creator.

Here's a link to Part One: Gold Costs to Use ISO
And another for Part Two: ISO Costs to Level Up (Everything)

Comments

DNA3000

Addendum:

I was saving this for part ~~four~~ 3.2 but since I have the data and since the context is just as good here as where it was originally going to go:

The above analyzes EQ chests. What about ISO awarded within the EQ rewards themselves? Each EQ tier awards a certain amount of ISO for completion and/or exploration of paths:

If we normalize this by assuming that class ISO is always used on the appropriate class to allow for apples to apples comparison, and thus weight class ISO as 1.5x the listed value, we can summarize the total ISO per difficulty tier as a single value:

That looks a lot like an exponential increase:

And if we superimpose an exponential trend line:

Needless to say, the chest ISO doesn't quite match:

The ISO numbers jump a ton from Proven to Conqueror and then level off. Suppose we assume that Uncollected is about the right value for the ISO chest rewards, and it is Conqueror that is a bit high and the higher tiers are a bit low, and we project a similar exponential growth to the ISO chests that the ISO EQ rewards reflect. Then we'd get this:

And the numbers would be this:

In other words, *if* the EQ ISO rewards reflect how the chest ISO rewards ought to scale, and *if* we superimpose similar exponential scaling onto the chest rewards with the normalization point around the Uncollected tier, then that would mean players exploring Cavalier tier difficulty runners are getting about 700k less ISO than they maybe ought to, while Thronebreaker tier runners are getting more than 2.3 million ISO less from chests than they ought to get, if they scaled similarly to the completion rewards.

That's a lot. Moreover, it is noteworthy to consider that "completists" doing all the low difficulties are earning a lot more ISO than players who are only doing, say, one or two tiers. That could have been offset by higher earning rates for the higher tiers, but that doesn't seem to be happening to the degree that it perhaps ought to.

This does suggest that there is an ISO deficit in the design of the monthly EQ. There's less ISO than there probably should be for the higher tiers, this deficit is highlighted by the way completion rewards scale, and for players that only run the top two difficulties that deficit could be as high as three million ISO. That's enough ISO to take a 6* champ from rank 1 level 1 to rank 3 level 45 with enough left over to get halfway through ranking to 4/55.

SpideyFunko

you just divided it up into two to call it short didn’t you

DNA3000

you just divided it up into two to call it short didn’t you

Actually, the next one was getting a bit long, so I shifted this part here.

Pikolu

The thing I love the most about these write ups is you're getting me interesting in things I have never cared about before! Keep up the great work!

DNA3000

The thing I love the most about these write ups is you're getting me interesting in things I have never cared about before! Keep up the great work!

That makes it all worth it.

No, seriously. I suspect everyone with an education or training background will agree with me when I say the most gratifying feedback we will ever get is "I would like to know more."

pseudosane

this is an awesome writeup so far. Tbf this is showing proof that there are manufactured deficits made in game in order to push gamemodes/ players to do certain other things to cover up those deficits.

DNA3000

this is an awesome writeup so far. Tbf this is showing proof that there are manufactured deficits made in game in order to push gamemodes/ players to do certain other things to cover up those deficits.

I suspect this is more likely to be an oversight than a deliberate shortfall, because it would otherwise be weird that the class ISO - which is the "better" ISO - scales strongly exponentially, reflecting player needs growing as they rise in progress, but the generic stuff in the map trophies doesn't just fail to scale properly, it doesn't scale at all. Unless you're Conqueror (or rather doing Conqueror difficulty) in which case you're probably getting more ISO than you can use at that tier.

Either way, it is a problem. Deliberate shortfalls and accidental shortfalls still impact the players in exactly the same way. However, if it is a deliberate shortfall it is harder to argue for it being fixed. If it is an accident or an oversight, there may be more room to ask for it to be adjusted to something more appropriate. So let's hope for accident.

One interesting thing I will mention that I haven't touched on yet, is that part of my motivation for starting this project was the whole "5* and 6* dups should drop more ISO" thing. That didn't seem obvious to me, because the question of how much ISO they should drop was entangled with the questions of what things actually cost and the distribution of ISO everywhere else in the game. I find it interesting that even though I have yet to even go there, I've already discovered some strangeness that points to potential problems with the ISO economy. And if those problems exist, it suggests that the whole question of whether higher rarities should drop more ISO becomes more of an open question. Because if the assumption is that higher rarities drop the same amount of ISO for some specific ISO economy balance reason, these other issues shouldn't exist.

In other words, if duplication ISO was a carefully crafted piece of a perfect ISO puzzle, all the other pieces should fit together perfectly. But they don't seem to. So maybe that piece is also incorrectly shaped. And this is my own (past) economic argument I'm demolishing here.

SummonerNR

Pertaining to above 5* vs 6* ISO issue…

It may be that Kabam had been more interested in throttling how MANY of your 6* (and how fast, how often) you should be able to Rank them up.

Compared to earlier, with 3* and 4* (way back when they were still in use by people for actual quests), there may not have been as much desire to limit them or “throttle” how many and how fast you could take them up.

(*yes, Catalysts come into play for that as well, not just ISO)

But it may be more of “take as many of your 5* you want up now, but leave some semblance of throttling of these 6* champs”.

Hasn’t necessarily worked out that way though, as top players can basically have most of their entire 6* roster up as r3 (as well as probably too many of them up at r4 as well).

DNA3000

Pertaining to above 5* vs 6* ISO issue…

It may be that Kabam had been more interested in throttling how MANY of your 6* (and how fast, how often) you should be able to Rank them up.

That was certainly a consideration, but my point in this thread is that the ISO in chests and the ISO in map rewards points in two different directions for no obviously logical reason. Class ISO points to ISO scaling upward with cost escalation, so that players would be in a position of ranking 6* champs at a similar rate as 5* champs, once they were actually doing content appropriate for that rank up expectation (this is the subject of my next post, so I'm getting ahead of myself). But chest reward ISO does the exact opposite: stalling out rather than scaling, as if the costs were supposed to rise faster than ISO availability and act as a soft cap to rank up speed at the higher rarities.

They can't both be right, because they express two different mutually exclusive design decisions. So whatever Kabam was thinking, one of them is wrong. My money is on the chests, because they are the more obscure reward (you can't obviously tell at a glance what they are delivering to the players, whereas the map rewards are far more obvious in how they scale).

StarSmasher2001

1. Amazing acronym in your thread title. Try saying it 5 times fast.
2. Thank you for doing the math/research that I am too lazy to do myself. I've always been fascinated by game statistics (looks at my 4 spreadsheets for MCOC alone) but I could never do the work that's being done here. Good job.

DNA3000

1. Amazing acronym in your thread title. Try saying it 5 times fast.

I'm going with ai-KAI-pooh.

2. Thank you for doing the math/research that I am too lazy to do myself. I've always been fascinated by game statistics (looks at my 4 spreadsheets for MCOC alone) but I could never do the work that's being done here. Good job.

Hopefully, this doesn't just end with me, but someone else will pick up this stuff and do their own thing with it. Which I full endorse. This is not my data and this is not something I have an exclusive lock on. Its out there for anyone to build upon.