7 Star Shards Acquisition vs 6 Star Shard Acquisition

Hey! So I was curious about something after the recent livestream. This tailors into said livestream and content surrounding both it and the content in game.

"The only place that that's going to affect the acquisition differently than 6 stars is duping your 6 stars. Everywhere else is scaling percentage based."
Source: "Act 8.2 & 7-Stars // !giveaway for the FIRST EVER 7-Star Champ // Marvel Contest of Champions", Kabam Jax, 1:13:59

Being this, I was curious so I went back and looked at past content.

Source: MCOCTrucos

Before 6 stars were able to be opened, we were able to obtain the shards through means outside of duplication, such as the Story and Event quests. This right here is the completion and exploration rewards of Act 5 (as well as Chapter 4 but that's not important for this). As you can see, for completion and exploration, you can get 5k 6 star shards.
Now, continuing on...

Source: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/35965/announcing-event-quest-hotel-m-o-d-o-k
This was when Uncollected difficulty for event quests were first introduced, with more ways to obtain 6 star shards, 2.5k to be exact. In total, that's about 7.5k or 75% of a 6 star crystal.
Moving on...

Source: "Act 8.2 & 7-Stars // !giveaway for the FIRST EVER 7-Star Champ // Marvel Contest of Champions", 0:33:13
The total 7 star shards for completion is 1k.

Source: "Act 8.2 & 7-Stars // !giveaway for the FIRST EVER 7-Star Champ // Marvel Contest of Champions", 0:34:50
The total 7 star shards for exploration is 3k.

Doing the math, as of right now, we can obtain 4k 7 star shards or ~26.67% of a 7 star crystal. Keep in mind, I'm using the current 15k value and am not factoring in the discounted 7 star crystals.

However, also mentioned in the following:

Source: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/2284045#Comment_2284045

I highlighted the bit I wanted to ask about but this post delved into something else that I wanted to briefly touch upon.
The bit talking about duping 6 stars to gain 7 star shards, and the current 6 star shard acquisition rate.
I was under the impression, given the quote at the top, the one talking about the scaling of the acquisition, it left me to believe that the 7 star shard acquisition isn't factored with the 6 star duping in mind.
The comment by Kabam Miike sort of sings a different tune, also briefly mentions something we had never heard before until then, 'Paragon event quest.' Is this where we will see the true scaling of 7 star shard acquisition to 6 star shard acquisition to be on par to when 6 stars were first released in late 2017/early 2018?
Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Comments

Demonzfyre

I think you're forgetting an important part of all this, we've been able to collect 7* shards since Nov/Dec. When 6*'s came around, we couldn't collect them that early from 5* dupes. Most of us couldn't open a 6* until 6.1 or after.

We've got a good start so we're not scrambling all to open the first one. But I think they'll continue to give 6* shards out even more than they are now leading to more dupes. Plus all that iso. We get 3k from 8.2 and I'm sure we'll start seeing them in content soon.

DNA3000

I think it is very important to correctly define what Kabam means by "shard scaling." A lot of people are looking to 6* shard rewards and assuming that 7* shard rewards should scale relative to 6* shards. But I do not believe that is the case.

When the designers of content are designing rewards, I do not believe in general they are thinking about shards. Shards and fragments are just a way to award fractional amounts of singular things: champion crystals and catalysts. I believe that most of the time, when the devs design a reward they are thinking in terms of the fully formed item, not the shards directly. When the Paragon daily crystal drops 22,500 T5B fragments, I believe that was designed to be "50% of a T5B." That's then converted to fragments. This isn't true 100% of the time, but I believe it is true most of the time.

When Kabam says that 7* shards will "scale" according to the basic crystal cost, I believe this is what they mean. The content designers design the rewards in terms of fractions of a crystal, regardless of how many shards the crystal costs. That does not mean that if one piece of content contains 2000 6* shards then a related higher tier piece of content will contain 3000 7* shards, because the 2000 was "upscaled" to 3000. Rather, the original content was designed to contain 20% of a 6* basic, and *if* the higher tier content is also analogously designed to contain 20% of a 7* basic then it will contain 3000 7* shards for that reason. But keep in mind it doesn't have to be designed with that same percentage ratio.

The 7* rarity system designer could have made the basic crystal cost 12k or 20k or 100k. All downstream rewards that included 7* shards would have scaled to that cost. So when they say except for 6* duplication we would have gotten the same rewards regardless of crystal cost, that's what they mean. They design rewards to give us some multiple of 7* crystals, like one crystal or 2.5 crystals or whatever, and the shards are calculated to match.

Again, the scaling is from 7* crystal cost to 7* shard rewards, not from 6* shards to 7* shards.

Pikolu

Not sure what your actual question is, but if I do think you're asking where the scaling is happening? The true scaling of 7* shards are going to be in any content kabam pushes out that gives 7* shards as a reward. This could be EQ, SQ, story or some new EoP.

Something else to keep in mind is act 5 was endgame content at the time, not many people were capable of exploring it when it came out. UC difficulty was also very difficult too when it came out. So for the average player, they wouldn't see a 6* for like 2 or 3+ months.

With 7*s we have easy access to shards from dupes. Anyone who is able to push GC the last many seasons has been getting 30k 6* shards per week from just that gamemode alone. If 90% of those pulls are dupes (might be more or less depending on roster) then, not counting max sig crystals, this player would have over 18k 7* shards from just 25 weeks of buying the 6* shards from BGs store alone. This doesn't even include gifting, those who saved 6* shards for when we can dupe them for 7* shards, or any other variables.

Right now the 7* shards acquisition rate is much higher than 6*s were when they were released.