Today's offer drop rates

Kabam aren’t selling gold crystals for $40

Bolland

Can you only buy one of the class offers once? It doesn’t state if there is a limit to how many you can buy per class or in total.

They aren't? So the 10 Pools Gold crystals that were included in the 850 unit offer for $29.99 wasn't real? Weird. Sure felt real when I bought it 2 days ago.

Kabam sells gold crystals for 20 units for 1. I can buy 55 gold crystals with $40.

Only one class per offer

And none of that's listed on packaging.

People don’t buy Pools gold to get gold. They buy for gold pool, and the drop rates are there.

Yes we know you can spend units on gold crystals. But it is very rare that people will drop 40 bucks and go for gold crystals and you know that. You know they’re different situations and it’s so obviously not applicable to both.

People will however, go for those t5cc crystals in much much and that’s why drop rates should be shown for them.

I’m not bothering with it even though I’m only 900 frags off from r3ing Ghost. If they show the drop rates of each percentage, I might.
Either way, it seriously irritates when they follow the letter of the law rather than the spirit.

Different situations or not, they are the same in how you are looking at this T5CC. Doesn't matter if i'm buying Pools Gold for Goldpool or not, I'm spending real money on something that has a range of results. That's what this offer is, it also has ISO, Gold and a T2A in it. Who says someone isn't buying that offer for the T2A that they need plus the large amount of ISO to rank up a champ and the T5CC is just extra? See, I can do what you just did.

Deacon

well the very least you can get is 2250 out of each one so for you .. i'd say go for it if you're really ready to take Ghost up.

Deacon

wow well you should put a ticket in because it states 5% is the least you can get.

Wow. Yes, irritating when people follow the law. Maybe in the spirit of Kabams ToS, they shouldn't ban hackers, modders and mercs right? They should put gifting events back to the way they were before 2 years ago. Spirit of the law says Kabam doesn't have to question where the money comes from right?

Rookiie

Couple of hours and you'll get the 5% T5CC from the calendar!

Then it was 5%, I got the 2250. So that makes 2 of us on this thread that got 5% and more than that, got more.

Nope, not the same situation at all. Seems like you’re grasping a bit here.

I think in general all items should have exact drop rates. I think it’s wrong that gold crystals don’t have exact drop rates, but it has a much lower impact in the game than an end game item like t5cc. Especially when it’s a range of 5-25%. That’s a difference in value of buying the offer 20 times for 800 dollars, or buying it 4 for 160.

In my opinion, failure to show the breakdown of odds violates the spirit of the Apple developer guidelines. I believe Kabam should show those.

However, this is not an Apple rule or a TOS. This is an Apple guideline for developers in their developer program. In other words, this is part of an agreement between the developer and Apple. You'd have no standing to sue, because Apple does not give *you* a guarantee that all lootboxes in their Apple Store have published odds. Apple asks their developers to publish those odds, and if they don't the only party with any standing to take action would be Apple. Kabam has no obligation to you to show odds. It has an obligation to Apple to show odds, and Apple has the first, last, and only say on whether they are in compliance with that guideline or not.

Texas_11

Maybe this like 7%

DrZola

Sure. And I’ve got no reason to think anyone is doing anything that doesn’t comply with whatever regulations apply here.

But...I’d list the drop rates for all those other cash-based crystals as well, regardless of whether it was specifically, legally required.

Maybe a step towards further marginalizing said conspiracy believing nut jobs (who are going to exist regardless) would be to actually just list the rates?

It’s perhaps an additional few dozen characters in the description (at most) and I’m confident the team knows them. And then there wouldn’t be any need for anyone to defend hiding cash offer drop rates as a general practice.

Dr. Zola

DrZola

Interesting...perhaps the junk that falls out of crystals could just be viewed as “allowable waste” even under any imaginable regulatory regime. Are you implying that rats are going to rat regardless of what we do?

Dr. Zola

You can only buy the offer once. I can buy as many gold crystals as I have money. I'm not grasping. It's the same scenario. You're only complaining because it's T5CC and not gold.

I don't disagree with your viewpoint at all but I don't think listing the drop rates will satisfy anyone who's already invested more money than what the offer costs in tinfoil.

Oh please, get off it. You know full well that the only reason why they didn’t post the drop rates is because they think that it’ll discourage people from buying it.
How does that even make sense? The Spirit of Kabam’s TOS? It’s pretty clear in both letter and spirit that those things are against it. Same with spirit of the law. I’m guessing you don’t actually understand what spirit of the law means, it means that you take into consideration of what the intention behind the law is as well as the literal words.

We have a saying in engineering: code is written in blood.

If you are a licensed and practicing engineer of some kind, your professional life is governed by professional codes: building codes, safety codes, operational codes. When you say "code" to an engineer, you evoke the mental image of a giant book of rules.

It isn't literally true, but it is true enough that you can probably trace every rule in that big book of rules to a pile of corpses. People die, and then after the fact people demand action, and then someone makes a specific rule to prevent that specific thing from happening again. We have food safety laws in the United States only after too many people died to unscrupulous people lacing candy with arsenic. We have drug safety laws in the United States because too many people were dying to lunatic concoctions we would today describe as rat poison. In the modern era, we add the additional step of tort. First people die, then people sue, *then* we get a new rule partially to prevent more people dying, and partially to indemnify corporations from getting sued again. That's why my lawnmower has specific rules stuck to it to not adjust cutting blades while it is running, and not to refuel indoors.

In the United States, if you can't point to a giant pile of bodies or a check with a large number of zeros, it is unlikely there's a rule governing that thing. Because rules are expensive, and they are always written in blood.

DrZola

Probably right. It’s just a shame a company with a big name game doesn’t decide to lead on this issue.

If there’s any justification beyond concealing how disadvantageous the odds really are, I’m happy to listen with an open-mind.

Dr. Zola

Actually, I've never sat down with a veteran monetization professional and asked this question, but I suspect it is not for something as simple as this, given the answer to a tangentially related question tends to be very complex: why don't most game developers disclose their game mechanics in full?

I’ve studied enough economics and done enough marketing to feel confident in saying that if information is withheld from a product, it is because it either isn’t relevant to the consumer or because it it will diminish the likelihood of purchase. Since the drop rates are very much relevant to the consumer, I’m left to believe that it’s being withheld because they think it’ll have a negative impact on their sales.
Of course, I’m open to other explanations.

I have never asked Kabam, so I don't know what their specific justification is. But I once asked a game developer of a triple-AAA MMO why they didn't disclose certain other numbers in their game, and the simplified version of the answer was that when you give numbers, players focus on the numbers, and they think in terms of math. When you don't give numbers, players cannot focus on numbers and instead have to focus on the experience of the game instead. Giving numbers unavoidably alters players' perceptions of what the game is even about on a deep and perhaps even subconscious level.

It is possible that the issue with giving odds is not specifically to conceal how low they are, especially because people already believe the odds to be disadvantageous already, but rather to take away any ability to measure the value objectively at all, and force players to judge the value of things subjectively. You don't want people to decide whether to buy Doritos on the basis of calorie count, you want them to decide whether to buy Doritos on the basis of cheesy goodness.

It is worth noting that now with the Apple rules, Kabam does disclose odds, and because of the offers covered by the rule it is often the offers that contain the most "disadvantageous" odds that they are disclosing. In other words, even though Kabam is disclosing the odds you'd expect them to want to conceal already if the objective was to hide really tiny odds, they still hide the odds of things they aren't required to disclose where the odds are relatively moderate anyway.

Maybe in an ultimate sense, but not always in an easy to trace direct sense. For example, consider Apple. Apple rarely talks about the numbers surrounding their products. They don't give specific scores or measurements. Is that because they think they will lose sales if they disclose those? I don't think that is true, at least not directly. I think they don't talk about those numbers because they don't want customers to be thinking about those numbers. If you take those numbers away, consumers have to compare Apple to competitors based on other factors. And Apple thinks they have a much higher advantage over competitors if consumers are thinking about subjective criteria.

So it might all be about selling more product in the end, but it might not be a simple case of "if we give out this number it will hurt our sales." It could be a lot more strategic: if we don't give out this number we can't be compared to our competitors on the basis of that number, and in fact it may cause consumers to stop caring about that number at all, since they can't use it to evaluate us. And that lets us shift the playing field to one where we have a much better advantage.

unknown

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Apple doesn’t give out those numbers because it’s not relevant to their customers’ decision to buy their product. It’s unnecessary info, that’s why it’s excluded not because they think customers won’t buy it because of the numbers.