Crystal Odds Question

Kabam is pretty good in general at listing crystal Odds and acknowledging when things go awry. But have a question why this doesn't extend to where the same type of reward is in a crystal multiple times.

When you have fabulous crystals for sale, is it not a key piece of information to have the breakdown in odds of any unit rewards in them? Similar for arena crystals, should they not break down the percentages by denomination of the units/gold/other rewards. Ie. 75 units Vs 225 units. Just saying units is x% doesn't help make informed decisions.

Similarly I can't remember if the odds for the banquet crystals where there are say 3 different amounts of 6* shards, should these breakdown the percent of each quantity, I can't remember in this example if they usually do.

Comments

ahmynuts

I play my trap card @DNA3000

DNA3000

That's a good question, and I believe the answer is: the odds displayed are a concession to the requirements placed upon them by the app stores. Before those requirements existed, Kabam did not post odds at all. So it simply represents the level of effort they felt was necessary to satisfy the requirements.

Personally, I would prefer if they listed the odds of all the different drops, but I could see how that could get very lengthy for some crystals. However, the compromise there is they could post them on their knowledgebase website and refer to it. However, that would require extra work to keep in sync. In effect posting the odds anywhere else opens the door to someone forgetting to update something and then have the company accused of advertising fraudulent odds. So while I would prefer all the odds to be posted, I acknowledge this is not as trivial a thing to do as it might seem.

_Pez_

It does just feel that saying 100% units doesn't meet or maybe shouldn't be considered to meet any requirements. It doesn't really tell you much of value, when a crystal can be purchased.

I get the argument of it being messy it there were lots of options, but I'd also argue that crystals with THAT many outcomes that it would be an issue shouldn't really be made (I know they are)

Pikolu

Got it, remove the basic crystals because they have too many outcomes

DNA3000

Technically, the requirement isn't for lootboxes to list the odds of every discrete possibility. The intent was to inform players of the relative chances of high value or rare drops, not to turn every game into an Excel plugin.

The argument is whether, say, if a crystal has a chance to drop 15 or 45 units, if 45 units is considered either an exceptionally rare drop or an exceptionally high value drop that can't be combined with unit drops in general. There's arguments on both sides there, but if you ask me if the drop listings obey the letter of the law, I would say in most cases it generally does.

Where it doesn't is in weird places, like subfeatured drops. In my opinion, the fact that those are not specified, or even directly stated that they exist at all (the subfeatured drop is cultural knowledge, not documented in-game) would technically fail the requirements as written.

Incidentally, arena crystals aren't covered by the app store disclosure requirements in the general case, because the disclosure requirements only apply to crystals that can be purchased with cash. In-game rewards that can only be acquired by gameplay are not required to have their odds disclosed.

_Pez_

Kind of a pointless comment, they don't list options out anyway and the odds are the same for every champion so there would be no point. Don't think you can say that the odds of 75 units or 225 units are the same or that in banquet crystals the odds of 1000 shards, 5000 shards are going to be the same or whatever the denominations are.

Not sure why you are trying to derail a genuine point/question about transparency. This isn't me saying anything is rigged or saying any odds are wrong.

_Pez_

I agree, just feels that for the fabulous crystals as an example the majority may have 20 but there are much higher denominations in there and these can be basically purchased sometimes. Again maybe the law is being followed but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for more transparency

DNA3000

I think the point being made here is that if the letter of the law is to list the odds of every option and any crystal with too many options shouldn't exist, these crystals would fall in that category. You seem to be saying that this is a case where listing the odds doesn't matter because the odds of each champion are the same. Except they are not. There are some champions for which the odds of them dropping are zero, because they aren't in the base pool. If the requirement is to inform players of every possibility that has different odds, then zero certainly is one such possibility.

Furthermore, even if the odds are all the same as each other, they aren't the same from crystal to crystal. When the base pool gets additions, the odds for every champion that was in the crystal to drop falls, because there are now more possibilities. If there used to be 100 champions, then the odds of a particular champ in the crystal appearing is one percent. But if they add six more champs, the odds drop to 0.94%, and eventually those odds will drop to 0.75%, and then to 0.5%. If you're targeting a specific champ, the odds of pulling that champ used to be zero, then at some point they could have been one in a hundred, and now are less than one in two hundred. From an informed decision perspective, are these important differences that need to be documented? You could argue both ways.

_Pez_

Except the list of champions in the pools are documented elsewhere/there is sufficient transparency and announcements about champs entering the pool and the assumption that all champions present in them have equal chance of coming up.

Nowhere for the crystal types that I was referring to, does it list all the possible unit outcomes and there is no assumption that all the different outcomes are equal chance.

Anyway doesn't matter, we agree more transparency would be nice, but in all likelihood the absolute minimum to satisfy is probably what is most likely.

DNA3000

The list of champions in the basic pools is officially documented nowhere. This is something I've been asking for off and on since 2016.

Yes, it is theoretically possible to construct such information outside the game with crowd sourced documents, but the same is true for most crystals. For example, I can tell you that the odds for the two different unit drops in arena crystals is 10% for the smaller value and 5% for the larger value in all three crystals. I've posted about that many times, so the information is out there.

Longshot_33

@DNA3000 is it true they stiffed the community when 6* Punisher was released and then rushed a fix out to patch it after everyone blew their stash of chips?

ahmynuts

Ah the good ol days

DNA3000

I don't specifically recall if there was any compensation for that, but I don't think there was.