A hidden cost of war (that Kabam overlooked)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,690 Guardian
So for a while now I've been buying war potions and revives, to try to slowly stock up on them You want to buy these over time if possible, because the costs escalate. I know a lot of people are hoping the entire system is either scrapped or radically overhauled, but I'm not going to wait around for that Christmas miracle.
However, it occurred to me today that this process of stocking up contains a somewhat hidden, but gigantic cost of war that Kabam has introduced. This might seem obvious to some, but I don't believe it has been actively discussed. So let's look (again) at some numbers.
The loyalty store has three levels of revives for sale: L1, L2, and L3. Their costs are 7k, 25k, and 45k. For now, it isn't important what they do. The inventory limits on those are 10 each, 13 if you have the Sigil. I'm going to assume no Sigil for now. In theory, that means you actually fully stock your inventory, even if you spread out the purchases enough to only buy one at a time at the base cost, it will cost you 770k loyalty to fill your inventory with those revives. Similarly, single potions cost 1500, 7500, 15k, and 20k. Their inventory limit is 20, which means it would cost 880k loyalty to fill that inventory. And finally team potions cost 4k, 25k, 50k, and 75k with a 10 inventory limit. This costs 1.54 million loyalty to fill. This means it will take a total of 3.19 million loyalty to stock up to full. We are, however, getting a flood of certain items, including L2 revives. Let's assume no one has to spend anything to fill up on that one item (we are also getting a flood of L5 health potions, but we can't buy those anyway from the loyalty store). So let's deduct the 250k it would take to fill up L2 revives. That leaves 2,940,000 loyalty to stock up on the potions for sale in the loyalty store.
That loyalty is just *gone*. What do I mean? Well, let's consider the case of anyone who's actually doing war, actually using potions, and actually wants to avoid ever running out of potions. You know potion costs escalate, so there's a huge advantage to spreading out your purchases if you can. You never want to be in a position to have to buy more than one per day if you can avoid it. Your inventory is your buffer to prevent that from happening. Even if you don't expect to burn ten potions in the next war, you still have an enormous incentive to keep buying potions as long as you are not maxed out in your inventory, if you can. If you're not full, and you have loyalty, and you're doing war, you're going to buy potions. Maybe not the little ones, but the little ones also don't matter in terms of cost in the grand scheme of things. Something closes to three million loyalty is going to go towards keeping inventory up that unless the player decides to quit spending potions, they will never actually get back.
The cost to fill war potion inventory is like a security deposit. You pay it with first month's rent, and in theory you get it back eventually, but as a practical matter that money is just gone. You get it back when you move, just like a player can theoretically get that loyalty back by just deciding to stop doing war (or playing it at a level where they know they will never need potions ever again). But so long as a player is reasonably active, so long as they know they will need potions, and so long as potion costs escalate and there's a significant discount to spreading out purchases, that loyalty has essentially been permanently removed from circulation. It is a little more dynamic than that, but that's the bottom line.
Kabam has said that the new potion costs go in now, but the increased loyalty isn't going to be added to the game until the issues with gameplay are fixed and compensation goes away, because in their opinion players shouldn't need those expensive potions until compensation goes away. When players start needing to use them, they will also have the higher loyalty amounts from war. Fair enough. But this line of thinking doesn't account for this somewhat hidden invisible cost of war. Players are, in a sense, being charged three million loyalty to participate in war. Whether you pay it up front or put it on layaway, if you play war at all competitively and make any attempt to play it efficiently, you're eventually going to be paying this three million loyalty. And I don't think this "security deposit" for war has been accounted for anywhere.
Maybe the time to start giving players the enhanced loyalty numbers is now, when they are still getting compensation packages and can use that loyalty to start stocking up for the time when compensation will go away.
TL;DR: to use portions effectively and efficiently, you really need to stock up. And you're going to spend about three million loyalty to do that over some period of time. That's a lot of loyalty the players have to eventually put up to "prime the potion pump", and for all practical purposes will never get back. Where is it supposed to come from, when we aren't getting increased loyalty yet?
However, it occurred to me today that this process of stocking up contains a somewhat hidden, but gigantic cost of war that Kabam has introduced. This might seem obvious to some, but I don't believe it has been actively discussed. So let's look (again) at some numbers.
The loyalty store has three levels of revives for sale: L1, L2, and L3. Their costs are 7k, 25k, and 45k. For now, it isn't important what they do. The inventory limits on those are 10 each, 13 if you have the Sigil. I'm going to assume no Sigil for now. In theory, that means you actually fully stock your inventory, even if you spread out the purchases enough to only buy one at a time at the base cost, it will cost you 770k loyalty to fill your inventory with those revives. Similarly, single potions cost 1500, 7500, 15k, and 20k. Their inventory limit is 20, which means it would cost 880k loyalty to fill that inventory. And finally team potions cost 4k, 25k, 50k, and 75k with a 10 inventory limit. This costs 1.54 million loyalty to fill. This means it will take a total of 3.19 million loyalty to stock up to full. We are, however, getting a flood of certain items, including L2 revives. Let's assume no one has to spend anything to fill up on that one item (we are also getting a flood of L5 health potions, but we can't buy those anyway from the loyalty store). So let's deduct the 250k it would take to fill up L2 revives. That leaves 2,940,000 loyalty to stock up on the potions for sale in the loyalty store.
That loyalty is just *gone*. What do I mean? Well, let's consider the case of anyone who's actually doing war, actually using potions, and actually wants to avoid ever running out of potions. You know potion costs escalate, so there's a huge advantage to spreading out your purchases if you can. You never want to be in a position to have to buy more than one per day if you can avoid it. Your inventory is your buffer to prevent that from happening. Even if you don't expect to burn ten potions in the next war, you still have an enormous incentive to keep buying potions as long as you are not maxed out in your inventory, if you can. If you're not full, and you have loyalty, and you're doing war, you're going to buy potions. Maybe not the little ones, but the little ones also don't matter in terms of cost in the grand scheme of things. Something closes to three million loyalty is going to go towards keeping inventory up that unless the player decides to quit spending potions, they will never actually get back.
The cost to fill war potion inventory is like a security deposit. You pay it with first month's rent, and in theory you get it back eventually, but as a practical matter that money is just gone. You get it back when you move, just like a player can theoretically get that loyalty back by just deciding to stop doing war (or playing it at a level where they know they will never need potions ever again). But so long as a player is reasonably active, so long as they know they will need potions, and so long as potion costs escalate and there's a significant discount to spreading out purchases, that loyalty has essentially been permanently removed from circulation. It is a little more dynamic than that, but that's the bottom line.
Kabam has said that the new potion costs go in now, but the increased loyalty isn't going to be added to the game until the issues with gameplay are fixed and compensation goes away, because in their opinion players shouldn't need those expensive potions until compensation goes away. When players start needing to use them, they will also have the higher loyalty amounts from war. Fair enough. But this line of thinking doesn't account for this somewhat hidden invisible cost of war. Players are, in a sense, being charged three million loyalty to participate in war. Whether you pay it up front or put it on layaway, if you play war at all competitively and make any attempt to play it efficiently, you're eventually going to be paying this three million loyalty. And I don't think this "security deposit" for war has been accounted for anywhere.
Maybe the time to start giving players the enhanced loyalty numbers is now, when they are still getting compensation packages and can use that loyalty to start stocking up for the time when compensation will go away.
TL;DR: to use portions effectively and efficiently, you really need to stock up. And you're going to spend about three million loyalty to do that over some period of time. That's a lot of loyalty the players have to eventually put up to "prime the potion pump", and for all practical purposes will never get back. Where is it supposed to come from, when we aren't getting increased loyalty yet?
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Comments
If you choose not to do this, then you become fully exposed to the escalating potion costs when you die, even if that is infrequent. Over a long enough period of time, those escalated potion costs will exceed even the three million stock up costs, because recurring potion costs are unbounded.
It's a competition. There are people who have more means to compete than others. That's not a design flaw.
Another example I haven't seen mentioned yet is by looking at the 28Day alliance wars solo event. Reward 2 gives a level 5 AW potion and regen boost which is worth at least 10k (boost) + 20k(theres no price for lvl 5 aw potions) loyalty while reward 7 on the solo event provides a mere 20k loyalty which is only enough to cover the first purchase of a lvl 4 pot. There's clearly huge misjudgement when they did the calculations for the loyalty potions cost.
Prior to these changes players had 6000 heals and 350 hp revives giving making an equal security deposit ceiling of 370,000.
Additionally if you need 10 l3 revives on hand and 10 l4 team heals on hand you’ve got bigger issues to tackle.
It doesn’t actually matter what the potion situation was before. What matters is how the devs intend players to use the current system now. If they intend players to average out their potion use with inventory as the averaging buffer (as their statements seem to imply) they have to presume that inventory is filled. Otherwise it can’t be used in that manner. Conversely if they presume filling inventory is completely optional and therefore the cost to do so is irrelevant to potion balance, then they cannot state that the system is balanced for all players to average out their burst potion use over time, and must balance for the reasonable worst case burst usage.
What they cannot say is that players don’t need enhanced loyalty while compensation is being given out because there’s no need to buy extra potions, and when compensation is removed then they will give out boosted loyalty that is balanced to the average consumption metrics they are looking at, because that makes it mathematically impossible to fill inventory with the potions that are necessary for that average balancing to take place. That’s simply a system implementation error, that is completely separate from any complaint players might have about potion costs. Whether you think potion costs are too high or too low or just right is a matter of judgment: how expensive do you want war to be, and how few or many players you want to be playing the game mode you’re spending time and resources to develop. But the inventory priming costs have nothing to do with whether potions are too expensive or not: it is simply a logical inconsistency in the developers’ expressed intent.
“but to ensure that we are accounting for the number of Potions and Revives that Summoners were using prior to the weekly compensation packages going live.”
What would be a fair cost for a summoner to have every item available available to them at will? Why Should that be an option for an average player?
There is no way to cover the costs even with compo. The good thing is the compo will be here for a while as every month there are new bugs.
The big youtubers have done videos on this, but, it's clear that war is not a $ economy to restrict who can buy what. The sad thing is even if they double loyalty it won't be enough , increase cost of multiple items and the very high cost to start with.
They know this and closed that thread, nothing else matters until they look at both their macro economic policy