First of all, this is not a complete pricing breakdown comparing everything to everything else in the Essentia store. For reasons that will become clear, that's not a thing anyone can easily do. For another things, this is not a defense of the Essentia system or the Essentia roll out. For the record, I like the Essentia system. I think the roll out was botched. And there are still issues with certain aspects of it. This is just looking at one specific aspect of it that I think hasn't been discussed enough, and adds a layer of complexity to the question "are we better off?" And in particular, this was prompted by me seeing a lot of discussion in various places comparing Essentia prices to what Glory store prices used to be, and claiming the Essentia store is a rip-off of the players. Most of these comparisons seemed to all be suffering from a fundamental flaw. And that flaw has to do with Glory store pricing.
A little historical detour about the Glory store. The Glory store had escalating pricing. In other words, the more of something you bought, the more expensive each successive item became. This seems backwards to people, but the original idea wasn't completely bonkers. The Glory store was itself a replacement for the old AQ crystals which were somewhat random, and also had the problem of not necessarily giving players what they wanted. Lower maps generated lower tier rewards, higher maps generated higher tier rewards, but what if you actually needed a lower tier reward? The only option was to have the entire alliance do lower tier AQ maps, which was ridiculous. Raise you hand if you were in an alliance doing Map 2 specifically to top up on T1 Alpha catalysts back in the day.
Glory was intended to give player agency. Instead of crystals, we got a store where we could buy whatever we wanted. We could do Map 6 and still buy T1A if we needed them. But a single store created an economy problem: if players were no longer getting rewards spread out among lots of different crystals and reward channels, they could focus all their rewards (Glory) on targeted resources and earn them much faster than the economy was balanced for. With engineered rewards the devs can decide how much of each thing players got. Devs can also overestimate some rewards to make sure less active players still got what they needed, because more active players couldn't abuse the fact they got way more of those things. But now, if they balance for low active players then high activity players get too much high tier stuff, and if they balance for high activity players then low activity players would starve for resources.
Escalating prices mitigated that. AQ could give out way more glory than necessary for the average player, and thus lower activity players would still get enough. But when high activity players tried to use all that glory to arm wrestle the glory store into submission, escalating costs meant their glory hoards generated diminishing returns. That's basically why those escalating prices are there. It is so glory can be plentiful for most players without being game breaking for higher ones.
In the modern MCOC, those escalating prices are no longer seen as palatable though, and so most stores don't have them. The BG store didn't, the Incursions store didn't, and the Essentia store doesn't. But that makes comparing Glory to Essentia much more complicated because you can't just compare a screenshot of the Glory store to the Essentia store. You need to factor in that prices increase in the Glory store, but not in the Essentia store.
I picked a few items that are present in both the (now absent) Glory store and the Essentia store to show how the prices we pay for stuff depends on how much we buy. I looked at two difference between the Glory store and the Essentia store: how much do things cost, and how available they are (i.e. how much can we actually buy). I looked at both using Valiant numbers. Let's start with T4 Alpha Catalysts.
T4 Alpha Catalysts currently cost 480 Essentia for 10% of a T4A (5700 fragments). That cost is constant regardless of how much you buy, and you can buy up to 20 bundles of fragments - equivalent to 2 full T4A. In the Glory store, 8200 fragments (8200? Really Kabam?) cost 500 Glory. Very obviously the initial Glory store price was much better: you got more fragments for less currency.
Note: the current conversion option for Glory is 100 Glory for 100 Essentia, implying a 1:1 valuation between them. It also implies we're going to earn about the same amounts of Essentia doing AQ as we did earning Glory once the cutover takes place. This has not yet been publicly confirmed: I am using this assumption for the rest of the analysis. If our actual earning power is different, the true value of the Essentia store will be different. Keep this big caveat in mind.
So at a glance, it looks like the Essentia store is a complete bust. But the Glory store prices rise rapidly: for each additional 8200 fragments the price in Glory went up by 150. So the next one was 650, then 800, and so on. How does the Glory prices compare to Essentia as the amounts we buy increase? Here's a chart visualizing the difference:
I've normalized the amounts to percentages of a whole T4A. Essentia sells T4A in bundles of 10% which the Glory store does so in bundles of 14.3859649% because of course it does. The break even point is at 0.5 T4A, or 50% of one T4A. If you buy less than that, the Glory store was cheaper. If you buy more than that, the Essentia store is cheaper. Or alternatively in currency terms if you were spending less than 2k Glory on T4A fragments the Glory store was cheaper, if you were spending more than that the Essentia store will be cheaper.
We can also look at overall availability. The Glory store topped out at about 0.72 of a T4A, or 72% of one T4A. The Essentia store allows up to 2 full T4A to be purchased:
Now, it would take almost ten thousand Essentia to buy that much T4A, but that's not out of the reach of very active AQ players. And even mid tier players were still collecting 4-5k Glory per week; that would translate to more than a full T4A if you wanted to commit the resources. T4A is an upper-mid tier rank up resource for end game players, and most of them would probably benefit from Essentia store pricing: they are far more likely to want more than half of one T4A a week.
Let's take a look at T6 Basic Catalysts next. They are more of a lower tier end game rank up resource. Here's the same pricing comparison between Glory and Essentia for T6B:
For T6B, the Essentia store starts off only slightly more expensive than the Glory store in relative terms, but then quickly gets much better than Glory as Glory's price curve rapidly rises above Essentia. The break even point is at about 2 full catalysts, but even below the break even point the Essentia store isn't terribly more expensive. It is slightly more, then rapidly becomes much better. And in terms of availability:
T6B is vastly more available. Let's try a lower tier resource and see if this pattern holds at the low end. Here's T4CC selectors:
Here we see that the Glory store pricing is actually significantly better until you reach the break even point of about 14 total catalysts, where Essentia pricing then gets significantly better than Glory pricing. 14 sounds like a lot, but given how T4CC is used in rank ups, anyone needing T4CC probably needs them in bunches: 14 is not a lot spread out across six classes of catalysts. Here I would say if you were only buying a couple here and there to top off your collection the Glory store was better, but if you're cranking these out to make significant lower rarity rank ups then the Essentia store is going to be better. And of course if you need a lot of them:
The Essentia store has way more availability at (in my opinion) very reasonable prices.
I was going to show T7B as an example of the highest tier resources that were available in both stores, but the Glory store had 1260 fragments for 1675 Glory to start while the Essentia store has 3375 fragments for 1300 Essentia, so that's an automatic win: the Essentia store is just always better in terms of pricing for T7B (by a wide amount).
For the most part, then, the question of "are prices better or worse in the Essentia store" is, if we are comparing Essentia to the Glory store, a question that has no clean yes or no answer. The answer is, in all the resources I've looked at, the prices are better if you need a lot, and worse if you need very few. In other words, for the consumers of the stores that were buying lots of stuff to use, the Essentia prices seem to be better for them. For people only buying tiny amounts of stuff it's not better.
I personally think that's a net win overall. If you're buying very little of something, you're getting worse prices but also not really losing much anyway, specifically because you aren't spending much on that thing. But if you're buying a lot, you'll save a lot. For most players, I think they will come out ahead on this trade. They will sometimes face worse prices and other times face better prices, but the times they face better prices will have far larger benefits than the times they face worse prices which will be tiny in absolute terms.
I haven't looked at comparing Essentia to the old BG store yet, in part because I think that's a much easier comparison for everyone to do personally. There's no complicated price changes. And I haven't looked at the stuff that was moved to the Mysterium store yet, in part because while Glory is being changed to Essentia in terms of in-game rewards so comparing prices is an apples to apples comparison between two currencies, moving things into the Mysterium store causes them to stop costing any of the original resources and starts costing a completely different resource that different people have completely different constraints on. For some players, the effective cost of the stuff moving there might be zero, because they were not using their Mysterium effectively prior to the change. So that one will take more thought beyond just calculations. There are also availability issues that require more discussion than here. The Glory comparison landed in the sweet spot for me of being complicated enough to make sense to do, without being so complex that any discussion of it would be premature and full of guesswork. We have all the Glory numbers necessary except the actual in-game rewards, which will take some time to roll out, but which I think we can at least reasonably guess from the transfer options will be similar in numbers. 1000 Glory earned in-game will probably end up earning something similar to 1000 Essentia. But we will have to see to be sure.
