Another weird way to get gold (and a literally broken way to get T4B)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,844 Guardian
A while back I posted about a weird way for Valiants to get gold: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/366400/the-weirdest-way-to-buy-gold-for-valiants
Essentially, you could buy T5 Basics in the glory store and sell them for gold. This turns out to be far better than using glory to buy Uncollected Gold crystals. See the linked article above for the details. Well, it seems there’s now another weird way to get gold: buy T4B with units.
Now, the rank up store sells T4B for ten units a pop, and you can sell those for 20k gold each (and 1k T5B fragments) and that’s actually a decent return: much better than buying UC Gold crystals with units. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Turns out that at the moment, Valiants can buy ten T4B for just 25 units. Say what? How?
What are we looking at here? This is the pop up offer you get when you run the Daily Expert Proving grounds map. The Proving Grounds maps are the ones where you can earn basic catalysts. The first three allow you to earn T1, T2, and T3 Basic catalysts. The expert map allows you to earn T4B fragments. But every time you complete any of those maps, you get a pop up offer to buy more of the corresponding catalyst. Now, this offer used to be not all that great: in fact it used to be horrible. Then a few years back they adjusted it to make them a bit better, and also start scaling with progression (higher progression paid less for the same offer). And very recently, they seem to have upgraded the offers again. Now, every pop up offer offers *ten* catalysts for some price. Here are the Valiant versions:
Not bad, if you are short and need these to rank up lower rarity champs. But the T4B one is special, because it is actually broken. Literally broken: it was not intended to be 10 T4B for 25 units, it was intended to be five T4B for 25 units (more on that later).
As mentioned above, you can sell T4B for 20k gold each. You’re getting ten for 25 units, which means if you don’t even need T4B and you just sell them, you can get 200k gold for 25 units (and also 10k T5B fragments, but I’m going to ignore that for the rest of the post). UC gold crystals drop about 23,500 gold on average per crystal (they are random) and they cost 40 units a piece. You’re getting almost ten times the gold for almost half the price.
You can only buy this once per day after initial completion of the expert map, but you can theoretically buy this every day. Which means in theory, you could spend 750 units in a month and get six million gold. As far as I am aware, this is the most efficient way to buy gold outright in the game.
Now, the price for this offer scales with progression. For example, I tested this with a Thronebreaker account and it cost 40 units rather than 25. But that is still a steal. This is way, way better than the rank up store for T4B and way, way better than buying UC Gold crystals with units. Yes, the best way to get gold is still to grind arena, and there is a lot more gold in the game than there used to be, but for players who a) need a lot of gold and b) don’t want to grind for it, this is currently the best way to do it.
Now, as I said, this is completely broken. The devs originally intended for this offer to be five T4B, not ten. I’ve confirmed this with the devs. Since all of the completion offers are for ten catalysts, my guess is this is a copy/paste error. However, the devs are going to be busy for a while. They have the Cyber sales coming up and I’ve been told that while this is on their list to fix, and it will be fixed eventually it will likely not be fixed in the immediate future to avoid making any last minute changes to stores right before a big sale. So for a limited time, players can take advantage of that pricing error. It is NOT NOT NOT an exploit to purchase it in its current state.
So: if you need a ton of T4B, or you need a ton of gold, and you can spare the units, here’s a way to get a lot of both. And for a limited time only, this offer, which will actually still be pretty good when it is fixed (it will still be a much better source for T4B than the rank up store and a much better source for gold than the UC Gold crystals) is offering twice the catalysts as it is supposed to.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what the prices are for other progression tiers besides TB and Valiant (I need to roll new alts to fill the progression tables), so someone else will have to figure those out. And I have no idea when this will be fixed. So if the offer makes sense to you, get it now while you’re getting twice the value. Run the Expert Proving Grounds map once for completion, and you should get that offer as a pop up flash offer (I believe it lasts for two hours).
- D…arn Nifty Arbitrage
Essentially, you could buy T5 Basics in the glory store and sell them for gold. This turns out to be far better than using glory to buy Uncollected Gold crystals. See the linked article above for the details. Well, it seems there’s now another weird way to get gold: buy T4B with units.
Now, the rank up store sells T4B for ten units a pop, and you can sell those for 20k gold each (and 1k T5B fragments) and that’s actually a decent return: much better than buying UC Gold crystals with units. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Turns out that at the moment, Valiants can buy ten T4B for just 25 units. Say what? How?
What are we looking at here? This is the pop up offer you get when you run the Daily Expert Proving grounds map. The Proving Grounds maps are the ones where you can earn basic catalysts. The first three allow you to earn T1, T2, and T3 Basic catalysts. The expert map allows you to earn T4B fragments. But every time you complete any of those maps, you get a pop up offer to buy more of the corresponding catalyst. Now, this offer used to be not all that great: in fact it used to be horrible. Then a few years back they adjusted it to make them a bit better, and also start scaling with progression (higher progression paid less for the same offer). And very recently, they seem to have upgraded the offers again. Now, every pop up offer offers *ten* catalysts for some price. Here are the Valiant versions:
Not bad, if you are short and need these to rank up lower rarity champs. But the T4B one is special, because it is actually broken. Literally broken: it was not intended to be 10 T4B for 25 units, it was intended to be five T4B for 25 units (more on that later).
As mentioned above, you can sell T4B for 20k gold each. You’re getting ten for 25 units, which means if you don’t even need T4B and you just sell them, you can get 200k gold for 25 units (and also 10k T5B fragments, but I’m going to ignore that for the rest of the post). UC gold crystals drop about 23,500 gold on average per crystal (they are random) and they cost 40 units a piece. You’re getting almost ten times the gold for almost half the price.
You can only buy this once per day after initial completion of the expert map, but you can theoretically buy this every day. Which means in theory, you could spend 750 units in a month and get six million gold. As far as I am aware, this is the most efficient way to buy gold outright in the game.
Now, the price for this offer scales with progression. For example, I tested this with a Thronebreaker account and it cost 40 units rather than 25. But that is still a steal. This is way, way better than the rank up store for T4B and way, way better than buying UC Gold crystals with units. Yes, the best way to get gold is still to grind arena, and there is a lot more gold in the game than there used to be, but for players who a) need a lot of gold and b) don’t want to grind for it, this is currently the best way to do it.
Now, as I said, this is completely broken. The devs originally intended for this offer to be five T4B, not ten. I’ve confirmed this with the devs. Since all of the completion offers are for ten catalysts, my guess is this is a copy/paste error. However, the devs are going to be busy for a while. They have the Cyber sales coming up and I’ve been told that while this is on their list to fix, and it will be fixed eventually it will likely not be fixed in the immediate future to avoid making any last minute changes to stores right before a big sale. So for a limited time, players can take advantage of that pricing error. It is NOT NOT NOT an exploit to purchase it in its current state.
So: if you need a ton of T4B, or you need a ton of gold, and you can spare the units, here’s a way to get a lot of both. And for a limited time only, this offer, which will actually still be pretty good when it is fixed (it will still be a much better source for T4B than the rank up store and a much better source for gold than the UC Gold crystals) is offering twice the catalysts as it is supposed to.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what the prices are for other progression tiers besides TB and Valiant (I need to roll new alts to fill the progression tables), so someone else will have to figure those out. And I have no idea when this will be fixed. So if the offer makes sense to you, get it now while you’re getting twice the value. Run the Expert Proving Grounds map once for completion, and you should get that offer as a pop up flash offer (I believe it lasts for two hours).
- D…arn Nifty Arbitrage
25
Comments
This is all explained in the original post.