Crystal Cleanse Week Four: The final stretch
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,800 Guardian
We now have one week to go in the crystal cleanse event. Where are we now?
Here is our current progress to date:
And this is where we are projected to land, if trends continue:
About 650 million, plus or minus.
After the first week, we seem to have settled on an average rate of about 13-14 million crystals per day, which I'm guessing is our normal crystal opening rate:
If that's the case, then our typical crystal opening rate extrapolates to very roughly 500 million crystals in an average 35 day period, and we're going to end up around 150 million crystals above that baseline. That's actually not entirely surprising. In spite of what many people are saying about Kabam "getting this wrong" somehow, I don't think they did. I think they figured on a ballpark estimate somewhere around there, maybe not exactly, but around, and just doubled it and made that the top milestone.
Did they expect us to hit it? Probably not. This was intended to be a test, and in a test you'd want the event to have a decent chance to be running throughout the entire period. So while I think the top milestone was selected so that it wasn't *impossible* to hit if the players went all out - the crystals are there in theory - Kabam also did not want it to be easy to hit, and in fact would be perfectly happy if we didn't hit.
I also think that the rewards were designed to *not* incentivize opening crystals too much. That sounds bonkers: if this was supposed to be a test, why wouldn't you encourage players to open as many crystals as possible? But if you think about it, they didn't need to incentivize players at all. As mentioned, our baseline opening rate appears to be 13-14 million crystals per day, about 600k per hour, over 150 per second. All day every day. Not only that, we're basically certain to have 100% participation. Who doesn't open at least one crystal in a 35 day period and yet still actively plays the game at all.
Their test was a 100% participation test that would have generated more data if there were no rewards at all than any normal realm event will likely generate. And on day one we had bursts twenty times higher than that, also numbers we are likely to never see again in another realm event. In terms of testing the systems, the crystal cleanse did and is doing everything a systems designer would want done.
Would higher milestone rewards have encouraged players to open more crystals? Possibly. But remember: this was the first ever Realm event. There's a possibility most people aren't considering: it could have failed. Not failed in the sense of the players not reaching the final milestone, but literally failed. It could have malfunctioned and not counted points correctly. It could have failed to count points at all. It could have crashed, or needed to be restarted. It could have crashed the game servers and had to be terminated early. What happens then, if there's progression scaled and progression significant rewards in the event like many suggested it should have? That's right: compensation. People would be demanding reward compensation. They would be demanding their crystals back that they only opened to get those rewards. Etc etc etc. None of this is worth it, when the typical crystal opening data would have been plenty enough. All they needed was a small kick to get things started, and enough incentive to keep enough players interested, which there currently is, without taking the risk that a malfunction would cause game economy problems.
As of right now we've reached milestone 16 and closing on milestone 17. The linear extrapolation gets us to milestone 19 or 20. If there is a significant burst at the end, we might get to milestone 21 and another 25 tier 2 dust, which is a not insignificant reward, so still worth shooting for.
My understanding is Brian is going to be doing a spinathon later today at 3pm Pacific. If he can get his subs to open, say, 300 million crystals, then all these graphs get thrown out the window. Or maybe the egg is secretly worth a hundred million points: I wouldn't put it past Crashed.
The next update will happen at the end of the event and be a wrap up of the data. Plus, I've been working on another crystal cleanse post involving how I approached this event, which crystals I opened and why, which ones I kept and why, that might be interesting to resource management wonks and insomniacs.
In the meantime, keep opening crystals if you can, and if there's anyone on your friends list that hasn't opened at least, say, 700 crystals yet, get them to do at least that much to qualify for the milestones we've already achieved and are likely to achieve. No sense leaving free rewards on the table, and virtually no one is incapable of opening 700 crystals without wasting any meaningful value ones. Make sure they get those units, they get those revives, they get that dust. Also, if every single player currently below 700 crystals opened enough crystals to get them to 700, my back of the envelope rough estimate is that would add as much as 100 million points to our score. It is not an insignificant amount of crystals out there still.
Here is our current progress to date:
And this is where we are projected to land, if trends continue:
About 650 million, plus or minus.
After the first week, we seem to have settled on an average rate of about 13-14 million crystals per day, which I'm guessing is our normal crystal opening rate:
If that's the case, then our typical crystal opening rate extrapolates to very roughly 500 million crystals in an average 35 day period, and we're going to end up around 150 million crystals above that baseline. That's actually not entirely surprising. In spite of what many people are saying about Kabam "getting this wrong" somehow, I don't think they did. I think they figured on a ballpark estimate somewhere around there, maybe not exactly, but around, and just doubled it and made that the top milestone.
Did they expect us to hit it? Probably not. This was intended to be a test, and in a test you'd want the event to have a decent chance to be running throughout the entire period. So while I think the top milestone was selected so that it wasn't *impossible* to hit if the players went all out - the crystals are there in theory - Kabam also did not want it to be easy to hit, and in fact would be perfectly happy if we didn't hit.
I also think that the rewards were designed to *not* incentivize opening crystals too much. That sounds bonkers: if this was supposed to be a test, why wouldn't you encourage players to open as many crystals as possible? But if you think about it, they didn't need to incentivize players at all. As mentioned, our baseline opening rate appears to be 13-14 million crystals per day, about 600k per hour, over 150 per second. All day every day. Not only that, we're basically certain to have 100% participation. Who doesn't open at least one crystal in a 35 day period and yet still actively plays the game at all.
Their test was a 100% participation test that would have generated more data if there were no rewards at all than any normal realm event will likely generate. And on day one we had bursts twenty times higher than that, also numbers we are likely to never see again in another realm event. In terms of testing the systems, the crystal cleanse did and is doing everything a systems designer would want done.
Would higher milestone rewards have encouraged players to open more crystals? Possibly. But remember: this was the first ever Realm event. There's a possibility most people aren't considering: it could have failed. Not failed in the sense of the players not reaching the final milestone, but literally failed. It could have malfunctioned and not counted points correctly. It could have failed to count points at all. It could have crashed, or needed to be restarted. It could have crashed the game servers and had to be terminated early. What happens then, if there's progression scaled and progression significant rewards in the event like many suggested it should have? That's right: compensation. People would be demanding reward compensation. They would be demanding their crystals back that they only opened to get those rewards. Etc etc etc. None of this is worth it, when the typical crystal opening data would have been plenty enough. All they needed was a small kick to get things started, and enough incentive to keep enough players interested, which there currently is, without taking the risk that a malfunction would cause game economy problems.
As of right now we've reached milestone 16 and closing on milestone 17. The linear extrapolation gets us to milestone 19 or 20. If there is a significant burst at the end, we might get to milestone 21 and another 25 tier 2 dust, which is a not insignificant reward, so still worth shooting for.
My understanding is Brian is going to be doing a spinathon later today at 3pm Pacific. If he can get his subs to open, say, 300 million crystals, then all these graphs get thrown out the window. Or maybe the egg is secretly worth a hundred million points: I wouldn't put it past Crashed.
The next update will happen at the end of the event and be a wrap up of the data. Plus, I've been working on another crystal cleanse post involving how I approached this event, which crystals I opened and why, which ones I kept and why, that might be interesting to resource management wonks and insomniacs.
In the meantime, keep opening crystals if you can, and if there's anyone on your friends list that hasn't opened at least, say, 700 crystals yet, get them to do at least that much to qualify for the milestones we've already achieved and are likely to achieve. No sense leaving free rewards on the table, and virtually no one is incapable of opening 700 crystals without wasting any meaningful value ones. Make sure they get those units, they get those revives, they get that dust. Also, if every single player currently below 700 crystals opened enough crystals to get them to 700, my back of the envelope rough estimate is that would add as much as 100 million points to our score. It is not an insignificant amount of crystals out there still.
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Comments
(Brian is doing his crystal opening stream. I can feel the pain behind his glasses).
Out of those, we typically have between 220k and 260k participating in BG at least one match. Hard to say what the average points per player is (for the normal solo event) but the median is probably between 150k and 200k, or thereabouts (meaning, half score more, half score less).
If you ignore the large margins for error for those guesses, and factor in some reasonable guesses about GC behavior, that very very roughly suggests that our normal behavior would score about 500M Realm points if we all played as usual. We might have scored 700M during the highest high boosted milestone seasons.
This is, of course, a marginally educated guess.
We gotta stop right now.
The extra 25 will always end up in overflow unless you plan to invest 175 to keep it in check.
As a non hoarder, I'm up 7k crystals in 2 accounts. That's all I can do. I did opened 1000 small solo crystals. But I'm saving the rest for small boosts for 1 loyalty revive wars.
I'll settle for 693 milestone too.
Im alredy 50 ahead due to that one SQ TL4 strategy thing many moons ago.