Honest, ernest question poll about 7* cost thought process
Sbkrueb
Member Posts: 556 ★★★
Do you think Kabam announced 7* cost at 15,000 shards just so they can "compromise" at 12,500 with less outrage?
Honest, ernest question poll about 7* cost thought process 267 votes
Of coarse
14%
40 votes
I doubt it
85%
227 votes
4
Comments
That was the one hope I had for it not being a complete cash grab.
There are some very poignant takes on the 15k cost and the titan crystal and none of them are great.
There is a lot going on in a negetive way with the game right now and this felt like a dropped opportunity for some neutral or even good will.
Dr. Zola
On the bright side, our first 2 7*s are only 10k, so imo, that's pretty fair.
That’s the answer.
People are buying cheap 6* shards for months now accumulating 7* shards from 6* duped.
They saw their data on how much 7* shards on average players have, and they thought 10k would allow players to open more 7* stars than was intended.
I’m not playing BGs that much and I’ve already have 30k 7* shards plus 400k unopened 6* shards, that will be 90% dupes and 7* shards.
I imagine hardcore BGs players will be already around the 100k 7* shards mark, let alone where whales will be.
The transition from the 6*s to 7*s for people that don’t play BGs will be rough, because outside BGs 6* shards availability is heavily outdated.
Watch 8.2 f.e. you can get more 6* shards for two weeks in BGs, than exploring the latest story content.
Altering the 7* shard economy by increasing the crystal cost and then boosting every source for shards except 6* duplication attenuates the *primary* way to theoretically buy 7* champs with cash: via champion duplication. Whales open tons more champion crystals than anyone else, and thus they get disproportionately more shards from champion duplication than anyone else. Anything that increases the relative shard sources of everything except champion duplication, or to put it another way anything that reduces the ability for spenders to buy 7* crystals, reduces the gap between spenders and non-spenders.
Calling this a cash grab is completely ludicrous.
The 7* crystal appears to have a much more curated set of champions. It doesn't appear to be intended to rapidly include everything as quickly as say the 5* and 6* crystals did. Therefore, the net value of that crystal is much higher.
The way I look at it, as a thought experiment there was an imaginary 7* basic crystal for 10k, a 7* curated crystal for 15k, and the 7* Featured crystal for more. The 7* featured crystal evolved into the Titan crystal with its own shard currency, and the 10k basic crystal was simply eliminated altogether to eliminate the option to buy a crystal with subpar champions in a full basic pool.
The way I look at it, the 7* crystal has higher value, the shard cost is higher, but those higher shard costs will be disproportionately paid by the players who open the most 6* crystals, because on a relative basis they are the ones who will have their relative buying power reduced the most. Most players opening 7* crystals are likely to benefit overall from this structure.
There is no "fair" and "unfair" shard cost. What matters is how many crystals players ultimately get. Until recently, 6* dups generated no shards at all. Is that fair? It isn't fair or unfair, that's just how the duplication worked for lower rarities. The relative shard costs and drops for 7* champs do not need to be numerically identical to prior rarities, because those rarities are no more fair or unfair. They are just numbers in a system, and it is how the system works overall that matters. You can't just cogs outside of the gears.
The Paragon crystal odds have not been announced (as far as I'm aware) but we can speculate that the odds of pulling a 7* are going to be very low, but the odds of pulling a 6* are going to be much higher than for Cav crystals: probably not too dissimilar from the odds of pulling a 5* from Cavs. Those Paragon crystals were not *only* going to land the occasional jackpot 7*, they were also going to flood those whales with even more 6* shards generating even more 6* dups.
Whales always get the chance to buy into the top rarity. With Cavs/Paragon crystals, with special offers, with special crystals. None of that is likely going away. The specific change being discussed here is the change to shard costs, and the net impact on 6* duplication generated shards. Those are now relatively less valuable. And however you look at it, the whales are always going to get a lot more of those than anyone else. An order of magnitude more in many cases. Every time an F2P player gets one 6* champ from 5* dups, the whales are getting ten. Well now every time an F2P player gets a 7* champ from 6* dups, the whales will be getting seven. In relative terms, F2P players come out ahead.
Furthermore if the goal from the design team was to truly slow the acquisition of 7* champions then the Paragon crystal would not be coming out for a long time. There was a long period (years I believe) between the release of 6*'s and the release of the cav crystal. After the cav crystal released it is obvious that whales spammed the opening of them to acquire "all" the champions.
Lets be clear: the paragon crystal will be no different and Kabam are betting on it.
Whales will buy as many paragon crystals as necessary to have all the available 7* champions at max sig and then more again to get the titan shards+crystals for the other champion set.
While I appreciate Kabam Miike's post earlier explaining the design decision, much of the reasoning is completely nullified by the financial decision of the paragon crystal.
All this is before you get into the sheer disastrous PR approach. Kabam knew the cost of the crystal would not be received well. So much so that Jax said it on stream as gently as possible and immediately had the "first two for 10k" cookie ready to go to help make the medicine go down better.
I'll leave it there for now and see what others have to say.
It would have been nice if it was 10k but i expected 12.5 -15k. They were always going to (1) monetize the next star level to a certain extent and (2) cater more to the players that spend more. Paragon crystals will be part of that.
The game needs to be profitable.
That's what this game does. It grabs cash from thousands of spenders, so hundreds of thousands of people can play the game completely for free. I'm not a big spender, but I do spend, and I approve of this. And I'm also fine getting less for my money so that those of us that do spend have a lower advantage over the rest of the F2P community.
Normally that's not what people mean when they call something in this game a "cash grab." They mean something derisive. But in the sense you're implying, this is a good thing and something we can only hope the game does more of in the future.
Be thankful that you can play the game for free and still enjoy it.
Is it ideal that 7* are priced at 15k?? No.
Is it really that game breaking?? No.
Will it force people to leave or spend?? Personal choice.
I have no doubt more 7*s will be opened by the average player than 6*s when they were introduced.
Not sure how I feel about the Titan shard acquisition through dupes, but I’m willing to concede that the ideas around that probably aren’t very mature yet and Kabam is trying hard to be transparent with us about this new idea
Essentially, none of them. I stopped opening 5* crystals a while back, once my ISO situation stabilized. For me 5* crystals are a way to save ISO for a rainy day, and it hasn't rained in a while. I have over 440k 5* shards at the moment, plus 30 5* dual class crystals unopened. Of course, I've received 5* champs here and there - from arena rewards, say. But overall, in the last 66 days it is safe to say that the total number of 6* shards I received from 5* duplication would amount to less than one crystal.
But what if I liquidated *all* of my 5* champion crystals all at once? I could open about 80 crystals between shards, dual class, and nexus crystals. Let's assume all of them generate max sig crystals and all of those drop 6* shards. That would amount to 80x275x2 = 44000 shards. That's four basic 6* crystals and change. Let's round that up to five, for no reason at all, and let's also compare those five basic crystals to the 30 featured crystals I've already opened, all of which cost more shards.
In that case, my 6* champions in the last 66 days would come about 17% from 5* duplication and 83% from direct 6* shard rewards.
For my 6* champs to come at least 50% from 5* duplication would require magically opening an additional 465 5* crystals or otherwise max sig dup 465 champions. In 66 days that would require opening seven 5* crystals a day. Really, that is not going to happen. But I could be opening Cav crystals. Basic Cav crystals have a 16% chance to drop a 5* champ then I could be opening about 42 Cav crystals a day to end up with enough 6* shards from 5* duplication to equal the amount of 6* champs I'm currently getting from non-duplication sources. So for regular players buying about 1300 Cav crystals a month, 6* champs could be coming as much from 5* duplication as from direct rewards.
Except that's wrong: Cav crystals don't actually help at all. They have a 16% chance to drop a 5* but also a 3% chance to drop a 6*. That means for every 100 Cav crystals you buy you get (on average) three 6* champs directly, and sixteen 5* champs that generate about 8800 6* shards on average (assuming every drop generates a max sig crystal that itself drops shards). That's less than one. So no amount of buying Cav crystals will *ever* create a situation where a player is getting more 6* champs from 5* dups as they get from just receiving 6* champs directly.
A whale that is completely bonkers could buy an unlimited number of GMCs which have a chance to drop 5* champs and no chance to drop 6* champs and eventually have more 6* champs from 5* duplication than from direct 6* rewards. But that's ridiculous.
*Initially* at release it is possible that champion duplication could be a substantial percentage of the 7* shards available to players. However, history shows that changes fast: it did for 5* and 6* rarity. There's no way that once things get moving the average player is going to be opening 6* crystals at twenty to forty times the rate of 7* crystals, which is what it would take for duplication to compete with direct rewards. That would eventually require Kabam to start handing Paragon players hundreds of 6* crystals. That's extremely unlikely.