Interesting twist to the "gold problem"
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,841 Guardian
I personally don't subscribe to the notion that there is a "gold problem" in the game in a global sense. As I discussed in my arena grind analysis there's plenty of gold in the arena, if you're willing to spend the time. If you can't or don't want to, that simply places you in the same position as people you can't or don't want to do dungeons (ne: incursions) or high tier AQ or competitive AW, or who can't find the time or energy to become Uncollected or Cavalier. That's a choice, and your rewards in the game will depend on those choices.
But that shouldn't be the end of the story, because it is still worth asking the question if there's something about gold that makes it, if not special, then different in a way that can generate this perception. Is there *any* way in which you could argue there is something odd about gold. And in between putting out remote access fires, I've had some time at home to analyze the game in more detail, and I think there is something worth discussing. This isn't a conclusion, but it is something I find interesting. If you *aren't* an arena grinder the game changes in a numerically noticeable way, it turns out. But it takes some analysis to get there, so if you're one of those people that don't like lengthy posts, this would be another one of mine you're not going to like.
If you aren't an arena grinder, where does your gold come from? Well, gold is in a lot of places, but after looking it over, I think the majority of gold that a player gets if they don't grind arena is basically going to come from duplicating champs and selling excess ISO. There are other places to get gold, but they don't seem to be as large, most of the time, as this one. If someone wants to itemize the rest, I'd love to see it. Or I might do it if I get stir crazy enough.
So how much gold can you get from opening champion crystals? Well, the gold comes from the immediate reward for duplicating a champ, plus the potential gold you get from selling the ISO you get for duplicating a champ. Here's a chart of what you get for duping a champ:
Except, that's not all. You also get shards when you dup a champ, and sometimes a max sig crystal. And shards are, in a sense, more champion crystals. So really, you have to account for what happens when you eventually convert those shards, and the amount can be (almost) double if you get max crystals. Factoring in that, you get:
Some crystals contain a single tier of champ, some contain ratios of different tiers. We can account for that:
That's the average gold value of those composite crystals, for the case of every dup just being a dup and every dup being a max dup. Reality will, of course, be somewhere between the two numbers. This allows us to compute the average value of all those common champion crystals:
There is a punch line coming very soon. Here's the costs to rank up every tier of champ:
We can now do something interesting. We can ask what the ratio is between the cost to max rank a champ and the gold you get from duplicating that same tier champ:
At any moment in time you're going to be getting crystals of different kinds of champs. When you first start getting, say, 3* champs most of them are new - because you don't have any. But over time a higher percentage become dups, which generate ISO and gold. For 2* champs it takes about 42 dups to get enough gold to rank a 2* to max rank. But for 3* champs that ratio is only 29. And then by the time you are at the part of the game where 4* champs are the main point of progress it only takes about 11 dups to get enough gold to rank a 4* to max rank. I recognize this is a very simplistic comparison, but I think it does validly illustrate something real. It gets easier to rank up champs from 2* to 3* to 4*. There's bound to be a sense in which the game "speeds up" when it comes to ranking champs.
5* champs reverse that trend dramatically. We don't even know what the costs will be for 6* champs because the last two ranks don't exist yet, but we can see that it will be higher for 6* champs. So if your "fuel" for ranking champs comes predominantly from duplication - to get ISO and gold - you will see a progression where fuel gets easier and easier to get up to 4* champs, and then becomes dramatically harder to get again.
There are a lot of reasons why this probably happens, which I've discussed in the past and are beyond the scope of this thread. But it does pose an interesting question regarding arena grinding's place in the game. In a sense the game makes arena grinding less and less important up to 4* rosters - say, up to about players doing Act 4 - and then becomes suddenly much more important.
It doesn't take a lot of arena to fill this gap - now. But the trend seems to be unsustainable. Perhaps we should be asking what tools we're going to need to address this upward curve over time, and start playing with them now. As I said when I started this thread, I don't subscribe to the notion that there's a "gold problem" with the game as a whole. But of course every individual player situationally has some bottleneck problem. For the specific case of gold for the players short of gold there is this extra component of the problem I think is worth Kabam's time to think about. Either the arena is going to become an increasingly mandatory game mode, or there has to be alternate sources of gold to break this curve. If not now, then eventually, because this going to scale in bad ways over time.
As I said, this is a bit of a simplified analysis that doesn't specifically account for every single detail. It is meant to illustrate one element of a more complex problem. For example, of course the gold you get from earlier tiers is going to still be coming in, and a more sophisticated analysis would try to determine the ratios of each champion you get and how that affects "carry upward" resources. But that analysis will have to wait for either myself to get more time, or someone else to dive in and continue the thought process. I felt this was sufficient to be worth discussion, not that it was the final word on the subject.
But that shouldn't be the end of the story, because it is still worth asking the question if there's something about gold that makes it, if not special, then different in a way that can generate this perception. Is there *any* way in which you could argue there is something odd about gold. And in between putting out remote access fires, I've had some time at home to analyze the game in more detail, and I think there is something worth discussing. This isn't a conclusion, but it is something I find interesting. If you *aren't* an arena grinder the game changes in a numerically noticeable way, it turns out. But it takes some analysis to get there, so if you're one of those people that don't like lengthy posts, this would be another one of mine you're not going to like.
If you aren't an arena grinder, where does your gold come from? Well, gold is in a lot of places, but after looking it over, I think the majority of gold that a player gets if they don't grind arena is basically going to come from duplicating champs and selling excess ISO. There are other places to get gold, but they don't seem to be as large, most of the time, as this one. If someone wants to itemize the rest, I'd love to see it. Or I might do it if I get stir crazy enough.
So how much gold can you get from opening champion crystals? Well, the gold comes from the immediate reward for duplicating a champ, plus the potential gold you get from selling the ISO you get for duplicating a champ. Here's a chart of what you get for duping a champ:
Except, that's not all. You also get shards when you dup a champ, and sometimes a max sig crystal. And shards are, in a sense, more champion crystals. So really, you have to account for what happens when you eventually convert those shards, and the amount can be (almost) double if you get max crystals. Factoring in that, you get:
Some crystals contain a single tier of champ, some contain ratios of different tiers. We can account for that:
That's the average gold value of those composite crystals, for the case of every dup just being a dup and every dup being a max dup. Reality will, of course, be somewhere between the two numbers. This allows us to compute the average value of all those common champion crystals:
There is a punch line coming very soon. Here's the costs to rank up every tier of champ:
We can now do something interesting. We can ask what the ratio is between the cost to max rank a champ and the gold you get from duplicating that same tier champ:
At any moment in time you're going to be getting crystals of different kinds of champs. When you first start getting, say, 3* champs most of them are new - because you don't have any. But over time a higher percentage become dups, which generate ISO and gold. For 2* champs it takes about 42 dups to get enough gold to rank a 2* to max rank. But for 3* champs that ratio is only 29. And then by the time you are at the part of the game where 4* champs are the main point of progress it only takes about 11 dups to get enough gold to rank a 4* to max rank. I recognize this is a very simplistic comparison, but I think it does validly illustrate something real. It gets easier to rank up champs from 2* to 3* to 4*. There's bound to be a sense in which the game "speeds up" when it comes to ranking champs.
5* champs reverse that trend dramatically. We don't even know what the costs will be for 6* champs because the last two ranks don't exist yet, but we can see that it will be higher for 6* champs. So if your "fuel" for ranking champs comes predominantly from duplication - to get ISO and gold - you will see a progression where fuel gets easier and easier to get up to 4* champs, and then becomes dramatically harder to get again.
There are a lot of reasons why this probably happens, which I've discussed in the past and are beyond the scope of this thread. But it does pose an interesting question regarding arena grinding's place in the game. In a sense the game makes arena grinding less and less important up to 4* rosters - say, up to about players doing Act 4 - and then becomes suddenly much more important.
It doesn't take a lot of arena to fill this gap - now. But the trend seems to be unsustainable. Perhaps we should be asking what tools we're going to need to address this upward curve over time, and start playing with them now. As I said when I started this thread, I don't subscribe to the notion that there's a "gold problem" with the game as a whole. But of course every individual player situationally has some bottleneck problem. For the specific case of gold for the players short of gold there is this extra component of the problem I think is worth Kabam's time to think about. Either the arena is going to become an increasingly mandatory game mode, or there has to be alternate sources of gold to break this curve. If not now, then eventually, because this going to scale in bad ways over time.
As I said, this is a bit of a simplified analysis that doesn't specifically account for every single detail. It is meant to illustrate one element of a more complex problem. For example, of course the gold you get from earlier tiers is going to still be coming in, and a more sophisticated analysis would try to determine the ratios of each champion you get and how that affects "carry upward" resources. But that analysis will have to wait for either myself to get more time, or someone else to dive in and continue the thought process. I felt this was sufficient to be worth discussion, not that it was the final word on the subject.
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Comments
Decent analysis. I don't believe that arena is necessary, just save gold crystals and don't rank up everyone. Save for a week, then rank up champions. Summoner Advancement usually nets me around 30k gold per week and that contributes a lot to my gold reserves.
As you noted above: It's a choice to be a solo player. Choices matter in life and in this game
But at the same time, this game did not have alliances and co-op play at the start. It was not part of the foundation
So while I am not saying anything ridiculous about "fairness" or whatever, it would he interesting to know at what point being a solo player becomes consequential with regard to overall game reward/opportunity
Kabam logic!
But I think this becomes problematic over time, because as 5* champs become closer to the center of mass for the playerbase it becomes harder to justify them being far harder to rank up than 4*, and even accounting for combining 3*, 4*, and 5* resources I think 5* champs are still harder to rank up than I think would be appropriate. Even if it is appropriate now, it won't be at some future point in time, but there currently isn't a scaling mechanism to solve that problem.
Important to note: just handing people more 5* crystals doesn't solve the scaling problem because that just speeds up the curve, so to speak. Players get more resources from dups, but they also get more champs to rank up at the same increase in pace. It is the ratio that is the issue, and the ratio is unaffected by the volume of crystals you get.
The core part of this game are quests. However, nobody considers that as a source of gold. Reason: it cannot be grinded. Once you explore a quest, the gold doesn't offset the energy cost. Especially for monthly quests, which barely give any gold.
The gold problem would be solved if you would get gold from playing this game e.g. defeating champions in quests.
So logically, when you players start playing mcoc, they try to apply rules they know from before, namely "Gold is a resource everyone has plenty of". But this isn't the case for mcoc.
However, even mcoc isn't spared of this "junk resource". It just isn't gold, but ISO. ISO is easy to get, players don't even notice getting the thousands of small chunks. The problem with ISO is tho, that the inventory for it is almost funnily small, so it is usual to have thousands of units of ISO slowly ticking away.
Another issue with ISO is, that it often is sold for gold (also because players don't get ro spend it in time). But if you compare it to other games, it isn't usually very good idea to trade your main resource for others, because it simply transfers the problem and doesn't solve anything
I personally use google slides because it is easy and simple. Also, I don't really need slides for anything.
As Steve Jobs said "People who know what they are talking about don’t need PowerPoint.“
Just know what your doing and any slideshow will work.
The bullet list, for example, is probably the most abused thing in Powerpoint, and it is literally the first thing everyone learns to do (and often, the last thing as well).
Once, as a challenge, I decided to take a prepared presentation and deliver it with completely random slides. As in, every slide had a random image from Google. It turned out to be a better version of the presentation than I originally wrote, and also the most popular presentation of that day. Because visual aids should punctuate the speaker, not the other way around.
I later came to realize that the benefit wasn't just my god-tier improvisation skills. It was that none of my slides contained text.
Everyone thinks they are "normal," and their problems are the "real" problems. But everyone is different, and everyone has their own problems. Which is why looking at these situations with more precision can help everyone, regardless of what side you're on, discuss the problem more accurately.