First week of Crystal Cleanse Realm Event
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,301 Guardian
As I write this, we're now about one week into the Crystal Cleanse realm event. So how well are we doing, are we going to make the one billion crystal maximum milestone, and are there any other interesting bits of information hiding in the crystal data? Well let's start with this: here's our crystal opening efforts, in chart form:
Our crystal openings are in blue, and for comparison the orange line is the average rate necessary to get to one billion, if we averaged the same rate throughout the event. [Note: the x-axis for all charts in this post represent hours since the event started] As you can see, we are currently well above the pace necessary. However, we are also losing ground relative to the pace line. If we focus on just the last five days (the first two days were extraordinary, which you'll see in a moment) out to the end of the event, it looks like this:
And if we extrapolate to the end of the event, we get something like this:
Assuming we hold our current rates (and we could slow down more over time) we're currently projected to land somewhere around 800 million crystals, plus or minus. Now, two different factors can change this. First, in general I would expect our average crystal opening rate to decline even further, as players run out of stashes of crystals. But as we saw with Road to the Crypt, I would also expect there are batches of players waiting to closer to the end of the event to pop open a lot of crystals. Are there enough such players to make up a 200 million gap? I would suspect not, but it is possible.
Another way to look at our crystal opening activity is to look at the rate of crystal openings rather than the cumulative total number of crystals. I'm limited by the number of data points I have collected (I'm just trying to remember to capture data points occasionally throughout the day, and I'm only collecting data points in the middle of the night if I happen to be awake for some work purpose) but I think I have enough data to give a reasonable picture of this:
The blue is our average crystal opening rate per hour in between data points collected. So if I collected one data point at 9am and another at 10am, I assume the average opening rate is the difference in crystals between those two times divided by an hour. We started off at over 13.4 million crystals per hour. That is over 3700 crystals per second. Different crystals take differing amounts of time per crystal to open, but it is extremely difficult for a single player to sustain an opening rate of over 3-4 crystals per second popping ten at a time. So we're looking at over a thousand players at a time popping open crystals at our peak opening moments right out of the gate.
Making some reasonable guesses about crystal opening activity, I would guess that the first day of crystal openings represented the efforts of about fifty to a hundred thousand unique players/accounts.
Now the orange line represents the average opening rate we would have to sustain from that point to reach one billion. It looks like a straight line, but that's because it is zoomed out a lot due to the very high opening rates on day one. If we look at that same graph but eliminate the first two days, we get this:
Again, the blue line is our average opening rate, and the orange line is what our required rate would be at that point. It isn't a straight line, because whenever our rate is above the line the required rate in the future drops (because we are getting ahead of the requirement), and when our rate is below the line the required line in the future rises (because we are falling behind).
One of the things I was wondering was would we get a weekend bounce, like we did with RttC. In RttC we saw increases in death counts because presumably there were many people saving Necro runs to the weekend where they had more time. And we kind of see a bit of a Saturday morning/day bounce, but not really much of a Sunday bounce. Overall, I would say the data currently shows that while players might save hard content for the weekend, they are less likely to save something like crystal openings for the weekend, and there aren't all that many players that only play on the weekends, at least not many that are sitting on large crystal stashes they wish to part with.
There is a very consistent activity cycle where crystal openings are much higher during the period from about 11am Pacific to a few hours later. It is lowest in the evenings Pacific time. That would make sense on the first day, since that was when the event started, but that pattern persists throughout the week. Interestingly, mid-day Pacific time seems to be when crystal opening activity is the highest. That doesn't mean that is when players are most active. It could be the opposite: that is when many players are not doing content, so that's when they are opening crystals (when crystal opening rates are highest, players have to be logged in but they can't be actually playing content for obvious reasons).
It will be interesting to see how the second week shakes out, and how the entire event unfolds. Does the crystal opening rates continue to slowly decline? Do bursts of new players show up in the data, or alternatively new stockpiles of crystals? Will we see more players decide to part with crystals if they see us fall behind the pace (at the moment if you're only looking at milestone data, it can seem like we have all the time in the world to reach a billion since we've reached quite a few milestones in just a few days)? Will there be a collective desire to push in the last week? We'll see.
Our crystal openings are in blue, and for comparison the orange line is the average rate necessary to get to one billion, if we averaged the same rate throughout the event. [Note: the x-axis for all charts in this post represent hours since the event started] As you can see, we are currently well above the pace necessary. However, we are also losing ground relative to the pace line. If we focus on just the last five days (the first two days were extraordinary, which you'll see in a moment) out to the end of the event, it looks like this:
And if we extrapolate to the end of the event, we get something like this:
Assuming we hold our current rates (and we could slow down more over time) we're currently projected to land somewhere around 800 million crystals, plus or minus. Now, two different factors can change this. First, in general I would expect our average crystal opening rate to decline even further, as players run out of stashes of crystals. But as we saw with Road to the Crypt, I would also expect there are batches of players waiting to closer to the end of the event to pop open a lot of crystals. Are there enough such players to make up a 200 million gap? I would suspect not, but it is possible.
Another way to look at our crystal opening activity is to look at the rate of crystal openings rather than the cumulative total number of crystals. I'm limited by the number of data points I have collected (I'm just trying to remember to capture data points occasionally throughout the day, and I'm only collecting data points in the middle of the night if I happen to be awake for some work purpose) but I think I have enough data to give a reasonable picture of this:
The blue is our average crystal opening rate per hour in between data points collected. So if I collected one data point at 9am and another at 10am, I assume the average opening rate is the difference in crystals between those two times divided by an hour. We started off at over 13.4 million crystals per hour. That is over 3700 crystals per second. Different crystals take differing amounts of time per crystal to open, but it is extremely difficult for a single player to sustain an opening rate of over 3-4 crystals per second popping ten at a time. So we're looking at over a thousand players at a time popping open crystals at our peak opening moments right out of the gate.
Making some reasonable guesses about crystal opening activity, I would guess that the first day of crystal openings represented the efforts of about fifty to a hundred thousand unique players/accounts.
Now the orange line represents the average opening rate we would have to sustain from that point to reach one billion. It looks like a straight line, but that's because it is zoomed out a lot due to the very high opening rates on day one. If we look at that same graph but eliminate the first two days, we get this:
Again, the blue line is our average opening rate, and the orange line is what our required rate would be at that point. It isn't a straight line, because whenever our rate is above the line the required rate in the future drops (because we are getting ahead of the requirement), and when our rate is below the line the required line in the future rises (because we are falling behind).
One of the things I was wondering was would we get a weekend bounce, like we did with RttC. In RttC we saw increases in death counts because presumably there were many people saving Necro runs to the weekend where they had more time. And we kind of see a bit of a Saturday morning/day bounce, but not really much of a Sunday bounce. Overall, I would say the data currently shows that while players might save hard content for the weekend, they are less likely to save something like crystal openings for the weekend, and there aren't all that many players that only play on the weekends, at least not many that are sitting on large crystal stashes they wish to part with.
There is a very consistent activity cycle where crystal openings are much higher during the period from about 11am Pacific to a few hours later. It is lowest in the evenings Pacific time. That would make sense on the first day, since that was when the event started, but that pattern persists throughout the week. Interestingly, mid-day Pacific time seems to be when crystal opening activity is the highest. That doesn't mean that is when players are most active. It could be the opposite: that is when many players are not doing content, so that's when they are opening crystals (when crystal opening rates are highest, players have to be logged in but they can't be actually playing content for obvious reasons).
It will be interesting to see how the second week shakes out, and how the entire event unfolds. Does the crystal opening rates continue to slowly decline? Do bursts of new players show up in the data, or alternatively new stockpiles of crystals? Will we see more players decide to part with crystals if they see us fall behind the pace (at the moment if you're only looking at milestone data, it can seem like we have all the time in the world to reach a billion since we've reached quite a few milestones in just a few days)? Will there be a collective desire to push in the last week? We'll see.
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Comments
1. It's annoying to open thousands of crystals 10 at a time.
2. Then I have to allow items to expire or tap on thousand of items in overflow to get the gold from selling.
And for everyone waiting to say "that's a you problem". I don't disagree with you. I honestly just won't put in as much effort as I would have if they had thought about this. But if Kabam wanted more particapation so we would clear out our stashes they should have thought about how to make those 2 issues more convenient.
Not enough incentive for hoarders to open em.
And there are not enough crystals for non hoarders.
We have a simple structural problem with this event, which is, the players with the highest ability to impact the score (long-time summoners with tens of thousands of crystals sitting around) also have the lowest incentive to participate. Because the rewards aren’t worth the trouble.
absolutely agree the rewards were in no way scaled to swing the deep-pocketed to empty their stash (and waste time doing it) to swing things, but I hope that some people will start to contribute the farther we go along.
and possibly be swayed if @DNA3000 does an updated analysts later? please? (and awesome detailed breakdown, thank you for that!)
A crystal opening realm event is the perfect choice here. Clearly, they have already been able to stress the system to the tune of hundreds of millions of crystal openings. They have been able to validate that the realm wide point counters work (apparently - they may be verifying these in the data to make sure, because how would any of us actually know if the counters were not perfectly accurate).
Could they have made all sorts of changes to the way crystals worked and the way inventory worked to make this easier on the players? Potentially yes. But then we would be testing all of those new features on top of the realm event. What if those changes themselves failed? Then they could have completely messed up the actual realm event test, and then we would have to have had another one before any major realm event could happen.
The idea was to come up with something that could be set of with relatively little time and resources outside of the realm test itself, so all the attention could be focused on ensuring that that technology was working properly, and if it didn't work properly no player was unduly negatively impacted. This seems to be working as intended.
But I believe that the average player could easily put up between 1000 and 2000 crystals within the 35 day event window without possessing any significant crystal hoards. If we call that 1500, then it would only take about 670,000 players to reach the one billion mark. We have that many players. If the players who show up on the BG solo event leaderboards opened 1500 crystals that would already be 375 million crystals just from them. If half of all players participate in BG, then that means you can account for 750 million crystals from the masses. And I suspect less than half the playerbase participates in BG, which means the masses could in theory put up even more.
The mega hoarders could be opening tens of thousands of crystals, but there are probably only tens of thousands of them maybe. If they all emptied their stashes, then they alone could account for hundreds of millions of points. But the masses with little effort can probably do even better than them collectively.
At least I hope everyone encourages their friends to put up 495 points to get the free units. Opening 495 crystals in 35 days is the easiest way to get 300 units outside of the calendar (150 at 66, 150 more at 495). Never turn down free units when Kabam is in the mood to give them out. 300 units is not game changing, but free is free.
I ended up leaving several thousand gold to expire in the stash because the Items page has no "Select 100" > Sell option, you have to click one at a time and ain't nobody got time for that.
Possibly the more serious problem is there are items that a player *shouldn’t* sell but are sellable. If a player uses a “sell 100” feature and the 99th item is something they really don’t want to sell, they won’t see it flagged for sale and just lose it. This could end up generating a lot of support tickets, and any feature that generates lots of support tickets is probably a feature the devs would find counter-productive to add to the game.
There are people who say that the players who would misuse such a feature shouldn’t hold back the players who want it. But it doesn’t work that way. Even if you were of a mind to say any player that uses “sell 100” and sells a valuable item is just out of luck, that’s their problem not ours, the problem is not a question of blame, it is a question of how much trouble and expense such players would create for the game. Even if support told them to get lost every single time they opened a ticket, that would still cost money to process.
We have bulk sell for ISO and embers because in both cases the stuff in those sections is fairly homogenous, and no one item in there is sufficiently important to cause players heartache if they accidentally sold more than intended. But stash sections with heterogenous mixes of items are more problematic. I’m not saying the devs couldn’t add such a feature for those stash sections, just that it becomes complex enough to become a low priority high risk feature.
I could either read all that or assume it says "open more" and go do that instead.
I have 4400 crystals atm and my score is 811.
I just keep opening the pointless ones. I didn't watch the stream so I didn't hoard the extra 3 days I could have.
The 25 dust is going to be sore on the eyes lol
But separate from that, if they were to implement such a button, here’s what that would sell in my current inventory: 30% champion boosts, energy refills, 6* generic sig stones, L2 revives. Some people would be fine with a bulk sell option selling those. But I would bet a lot of money that a lot of players would complain that oh, they had no idea the sell button would sell those things, and why would Kabam automatically sell those things, and how stupid are those Kabam devs that they would think that anyone would want to sell those things and why couldn’t they have exempted those things from the sell button because everyone knows what the sell button should sell, because of course all players think exactly like me.
Before you can make such a button, you would have to have a meeting with the dev team responsible to decide what the button would sell, how much it would sell, what the messaging would be to describe how it would work, what the response from customer support would be when someone claims the button sold the wrong thing, and what the policy and what the remedy would be for players complaining they want a sale reversed.
You’re a developer working on MCOC with a million wish list items on your TODO list, a list of bugs to investigate and work on, and your own ideas for game improvements. Would you decide to set them all aside to tackle this?
I personally opened all my gold, regular arena boost, everything that won't put any iso or catalyst into overflow.
Then you got people who post in here about "not being worthy" "blahblahblah" each character they typed could have been a tap to open 10 crystals 🤣
This is a very common misconception among many players. When they made the Road to the Crypt, how many times do you think they *wanted* you to die? Do you think they were encouraging players to deliberately die? Of course not. They were incentivizing participation in the Necropolis, knowing that people would die regardless.
They don’t really care if you open crystals or not. Kabam gets nothing either way. Your fellow players do: it is they who want you to open crystals. But Kabam is just providing a fun opportunity for the players, because they have to test the Realm systems, and why not test them with an actual event rather than some engineered volunteer beta test?
If you decide to open crystals, or decide to not open crystals, the only people directly affected will be the rest of the players. You can help reach additional milestone rewards, whether you think they are large enough to be worth your time or not, and more importantly whether you think the rest of us players are important enough to be worth your time or not.
But the people out there thinking that Kabam is trying to trick us into mass opening crystals because they need us to open crystals are operating under a false idea: that the crystals we own in some way “hurts” the game. They don’t. The game will not run any faster or better if we all open those crystals. This false perceptions is a mutated telephone tag idea that comes from the fact that crystal schemas collectively slow the game down. In other words, crystal definitions. If there is a crystal that is five years old and no one can earn ever again and only twelve crystal hoarders still own, the game must keep database space for it. It must keep the crystal definitions and resources around. Every time the game is updated, those resources have to be compiled into the game client and pushed to player phones. Every time the developers make an update to the game, those resources have to be recompiled and pushed to the game servers, over and over and over and over and over again. It contributes to database bloat in the backends. At some point, it makes sense for Kabam to just delete the crystal. But to do that, they have to open all the remaining crystals in players inventories and dump the contents into their stash, so that they can then wipe those resources out of the game.
But whether a player has one PHC or 10,000, that’s just a number. The game runs no faster and no slower if it has to track a one or a ten thousand in that blank. So the devs do not care if you open crystals or not. And if you are holding one of those obsolete crystals that are slowing the game down for no good reason, they’ll just force that crystal open and delete it after the Realm event ends, because that is something they have already announced they are going to do.
Open, don’t open. Kabam gains and loses nothing either way. If they want you to open a crystal, they’ll open it for you. The only difference between opening them now and opening them later or never opening them is the impact this has on your fellow players. If that’s not enough for you, that’s not Kabam’s fault. That’s just your choice.
I also find the argument of Kabam is tricking us to open crystals to take a load off the servers . Most people are complaining about the lag on the servers and game, if that statement was true why would they want to add to the problem? 🤣
99.99% sure that a meeting at Kabam saying "Hey this event is a flop, lets run again with better rewards" will NEVER happen.
So... Get something or get nothing 🤷
Is like that meme of the dad saving something for 40 years in the garage waiting for the opportunity to use it...