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An analysis of gear coming from lockboxes.
spinnytop
Posts: 16,314 Arc User
In MMOs there are two ways to acquire gear that follow two very basic mechanics. You have either the "straight buy" or the "random drop".
In many traditional MMOs, the random drop is the chosen method. That one particular big MMO uses this method; every time you complete a certain bit of content, there is a random chance that a piece of gear will drop at the conclusion of that content that you will want, i.e. you kill a raid boss, it drops loot, that loot may or may not be useful to your class.
The other method, the straight buy, is also used in many MMOs, including that particular big one. There is a particular type of currency, sometimes the same as the game's base currency sometimes not, that the player accumulates until they have enough to pay the price of the item in question.
So then there are some questions we can ask. The first is, what does Champions Online use?
Well let's go back in time. Initially, Champions Online strictly used the random drop method, like most traditional MMOs. You would go and kill things until one of them randomly dropped the piece you wanted. There was a straight buy method in pvp gear; of course, pvp gear at that point was inferior to pve gear.
At one point, the game's loot distribution went a drastically different route, and they went almost completely to the straight buy method, at level cap at least. On the way to level cap nothing much changed, but once you were at the level cap the best gear was bought straight with Acclaim.
Then came On Alert and to the games current loot distribution method, which uses both random drop and straight buy. Heroic gear is straight buy, and the next "tier" up, Legion, is random drop. What's interesting is that this formula follows closely what you can expect in other MMOs. In TERA for example, once you hit level cap your first set of "good gear" is a straight buy; the better sets of gear after that come through random drop.
Another question that can be asked is, are lockboxes essentially different from boss drops? Or at least, are they different enough to warrant the negativity? In the case of boss drops, you run content over and over until the item you want drops. In the case of lockboxes, you run content over and over to open lockboxes until the item you want drops. In both cases the majority of the process is the same: You are running content over and over until the thing you want randomly ends up in your inventory. The only real difference here is that you can choose to spend money to bypass the act of running the content, something you cannot do with boss drops.
Yet another question, an extension of the last, is are random drops and straight buy themselves even that different? Again we come to the realization that in both cases you are running content over and over, the only difference being that with one it is uncertain how many times you will have to do that and you could end up getting what you want after the first time.
In my humble opinion, cosmic keys and lockboxes are a good system, primarily because it involves choice; there are plenty of other games that simply bar your ability to get any stronger if you're not willing to spend dollars, Champions doesn't do that and it's one of the things I really like here. However, I'm also a big fan of the straight buy method; when that other mmo introduced it, I was pretty overjoyed. I believe that it would be a good move to provide a straight buy option for both the current legion gear, and the upcoming justice gear and any gear sets beyond. At the same time, keep the gear in the lockboxes as well; give players the option. There will always be someone who's willing to roll the dice to see if they can get the item for a lower cost. The cost for this gear in the questionite store should of course be fairly high, if anything to give players some sort of long term goal to chase.
In many traditional MMOs, the random drop is the chosen method. That one particular big MMO uses this method; every time you complete a certain bit of content, there is a random chance that a piece of gear will drop at the conclusion of that content that you will want, i.e. you kill a raid boss, it drops loot, that loot may or may not be useful to your class.
The other method, the straight buy, is also used in many MMOs, including that particular big one. There is a particular type of currency, sometimes the same as the game's base currency sometimes not, that the player accumulates until they have enough to pay the price of the item in question.
So then there are some questions we can ask. The first is, what does Champions Online use?
Well let's go back in time. Initially, Champions Online strictly used the random drop method, like most traditional MMOs. You would go and kill things until one of them randomly dropped the piece you wanted. There was a straight buy method in pvp gear; of course, pvp gear at that point was inferior to pve gear.
At one point, the game's loot distribution went a drastically different route, and they went almost completely to the straight buy method, at level cap at least. On the way to level cap nothing much changed, but once you were at the level cap the best gear was bought straight with Acclaim.
Then came On Alert and to the games current loot distribution method, which uses both random drop and straight buy. Heroic gear is straight buy, and the next "tier" up, Legion, is random drop. What's interesting is that this formula follows closely what you can expect in other MMOs. In TERA for example, once you hit level cap your first set of "good gear" is a straight buy; the better sets of gear after that come through random drop.
Another question that can be asked is, are lockboxes essentially different from boss drops? Or at least, are they different enough to warrant the negativity? In the case of boss drops, you run content over and over until the item you want drops. In the case of lockboxes, you run content over and over to open lockboxes until the item you want drops. In both cases the majority of the process is the same: You are running content over and over until the thing you want randomly ends up in your inventory. The only real difference here is that you can choose to spend money to bypass the act of running the content, something you cannot do with boss drops.
Yet another question, an extension of the last, is are random drops and straight buy themselves even that different? Again we come to the realization that in both cases you are running content over and over, the only difference being that with one it is uncertain how many times you will have to do that and you could end up getting what you want after the first time.
In my humble opinion, cosmic keys and lockboxes are a good system, primarily because it involves choice; there are plenty of other games that simply bar your ability to get any stronger if you're not willing to spend dollars, Champions doesn't do that and it's one of the things I really like here. However, I'm also a big fan of the straight buy method; when that other mmo introduced it, I was pretty overjoyed. I believe that it would be a good move to provide a straight buy option for both the current legion gear, and the upcoming justice gear and any gear sets beyond. At the same time, keep the gear in the lockboxes as well; give players the option. There will always be someone who's willing to roll the dice to see if they can get the item for a lower cost. The cost for this gear in the questionite store should of course be fairly high, if anything to give players some sort of long term goal to chase.
Post edited by spinnytop on
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So in the end, its not as simple as "farming to get gear". Its farming little by little (crippled by a refining limit) to haggle and exchange for cash tokens that will get you the gear. Much more convoluted and unethical.
How can it be so simple for me, but so "convoluted" for you? What extra steps are you finding that you have to take to get from the beginning of the process to the end?
Which part of forcing you to play a video game to get rewards (which are not required to progress in any part of that game) in that video game is unethical? It's not like gambling. If you go to the casino and dump money into a machine, there's a good chance you'll get nothing. Lockboxes aren't slot machines... they're whatever you call these things:
^ if you think this is unethical, you have a lot of grocery stores to write letters to.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
On Champions is you tank and spank, you open boxes of questionite (that are random), you refine it (with a daily limit to slow you down), you exchange it (the prices fluctuate and you may get a lot or not), you get zen and you open the Zen-Store and buy Keys and open the boxes (which are random drops) that have another random drop chance of getting you a Gear Box that has a random drop chance of giving the piece you need, with the stats you need. Geez! And it takes real money. Paying to get stronger, even if indirectly, is classified as "pay 2 win" and therefore its considered unethical. At least for me.
You can also farm G and buy keys from players, or farm G and buy the legion gear directly from the AH. Which is kind of simpler. But they were still acquired through the method above, which is undoubtedly more complicated than other games. Also, in other games, there is no real money in the equation - you either farm and drop it or you dont. However... Its not as bad as people say - its not really a gamebreaking thing. Heroic Gear is pretty good and the game requires no gear at all so its not that much unethical. The day i soloed Vikorin with my Disciple, wearing only Heroics, was the day i learned that Legion gear isnt a real goal unless its a personal thing (like, i want to push my character to the limit).
But i much prefer the old Acclaim system, or farming SL bunkers to drop the gear. Dont you?
You need to play some more MMOs. Also, what is a "normal MMO"? Which one specific MMO is, objectively, the normal one? Fast answer: None of them, there are no actual standards in this industry.
Daily limits: There are MMOs out there that only allow you to run dungeons once a day. If you pay a subscription, you get to run those same dungeons a grand total of two times per day! As for the daily Q limit here in CO... honestly, that doesn't even resonate with me because I don't even have the gumption to use all the limit I have available to me on my various characters, and I don't have a lot of characters...also there's that whole "you don't need any of the stuff you can get anyway" thing, but I'll leave that for later in the post since you brought it up as well.
The entire process you listed up there that starts with tank and spank and ends with getting a random drop... even though you tried to make it sound complicated, it still isn't when I do it in game. There are also other MMOs out there with processes that take just as many button clicks, and have just as much randomization. The ultimate end result however is the same; you run content, then you have a random chance to get something useful... and this is quite common in MMOs, with varying levels of steps to get from point A to point B. Like I said earlier, the steps in between here take like 30 seconds, and that's if you're drunk or took too many Tylenol PM.
Seriously... you need to play more MMOs. When you say "there is no real money in the equation" ...I just think back to all the games I played that are actual examples of Pay2Win... the type of Pay2Win that will send you running back to CO with open arms.
This is why it's not unethical at all. You don't even need this stuff, so how could anyone make the argument that they're being manipulated into spending money to acquire it? Hell, a lot of players have probably completed all the content in the game, sometimes several times over, before they even know about the existence of Legion Gear. If I was a greedy money hungry executive I would be losing my mind over how hard this money-making scheme is being held back.
There are games out there that make content numerically impossible to progress through unless you have gear equipped that requires you to pay real money to acquire... and even those technically aren't unethical, because they are under no obligation to provide access to any part of their game for free. There are games out there based around PvP where you can gamblebuy your way to being so much more powerful than free2play players that they might as well just sit there and let you kill them.
You want unethical? There are games out there that will have you spend real money on some random chance to get something.... and you actually get nothing. You can spend 20 dollars, and literally get nothing for it. You always get something out of Lockboxes in CO, and you're told what you can get. Some of those games that give you nothing... they don't even tell you that you might get nothing.
I do like the Acclaim system.. good news, it's still in the game! They just need to add some stuff to it, but not so much/so good that we go back to everybody PvPing even though they don't like it.
As for farming SL over and over... no, absoloutely not. This is why I like vendor based systems over boss drops. Boss drops are random, so much like lockboxes, you have to keep going at them until randomly the thing you want drops. With vendor based systems, you can run whatever you want and collect the currency needed to get the thing you want. This is the good thing about lockboxes, which are essentially a vendor based system, that makes it better than the "SL over and over" thing... you can run a number of different things, instead of just one thing over and over. At the end it's still a chance at a random thing, but at least you had several options for how to get there.
Like I stated in the last paragraph of my thread, I'm in favor of both. I want the option to either farm my way to an expensive price for the exact thing I want, or to decide that I want to open a few random boxes for a chance at getting it quickly. That to me seems much better than what other games offer.. which is "Fight this same boss over and over and over and over until he randomly drops the one thing you need"; which, don't get me wrong, I realize CO has as well.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Here's my CO experience. I'm what I guess you could call an advanced casual gamer. I have a job and a family, so I don't spend 16 hours a day playing - more like 2 or 3 tops on most evening/nights. Maybe 3 or 4 hours on Sat and Sun.
I've been playing since F2P first came out, and have managed to get 19 level 40's with another 17 on their way to 40 :biggrin:. I try to keep every toon loaded with each of the 4 Alert missions, I try to keep it efficient as possible.
Whenever I am leveling up my lowbies, I run the alerts until I can return for my Q reward. Once I hit the daily cap of 8000, I usually have leveled at least once or twice, and then do the same for another lowbie. It's not difficult to get 16,000 Q in a couple hours if there's a nice mix of Alert types.
What's really nice is the daily missions (like the current Drifter mission) for 2000Q. My 40's make short work of these missions, so I can make 20K or more Q per hour pretty easily, using each level 40 once per day (even faster with the bug that causes two groups to spawn at one, clipping each other. Double the dead, double the speed!). You can do the same thing on lower leveled toons, although it can take longer if they get killed a lot.
I stopped converting my Q to Zen when the price went over 250, so now I have just under 500,000 Q. Not a lot, but more than I ever planned. I'm waiting for the market to drop a bit before I do any more converting.
Before I stopped converting, I'd save up 100 Zen and get a Cosmic Key, then open whatever lockbox I had laying around (got hundreds of most types). Sometimes I get 25 of a rank 3 mod that I know won't fetch the 100 G the key would have likely brought, but occasionally I score a big prize, like a choice Legion 4 slot or even a vehicle (which I sell - I don't need vehicles!).
I've been able to keep about 2000G in my Hideout bank most of the time, even while buying the full Gravitar getup, heroic or legion gear and rank 5, 6, 7 and even the occasional rank 8 mods for multiple level 40 characters.
It took a while to get used to the way things are done now. But I like this system better than the way it was, it's easier, I spend more time playing and less time crafting. I hated Champion's crafting system before. But I was comparing it to CO's which I understood fully. Now it's easy and quick, and dare I say - logical!
Lockboxes are to me, EXACTLY as spinnytop put it: gumball machines. You choose the machine, but not the item that falls from it. If you didn't get the one you want, buy another, buy it from the Auction house, or just re-adjust how badly you want it. Would it really be better playing the same mission for 6 hours to get that piece? Save your (in-game)money and you can buy it in the Auction House. Or open a lockbox and take your chances. No real money required.
If you are determined to find problems with something, you will. But since I seldom encounter a game breaking issue, my time is better served playing, learning from others, and teaching others who're like myself, and want to know more.
if anything, it should be in the questionite store. SCR can't be monetized. questionite gives you more options for things to do to acquire it... maybe you wanna run those unity missions over and over, but most people I know hate them
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Q grinding - best place to do it - the Ren Centre. Reasons to go to any other places errm well not a lot really. We have servers that are virtually empty along with their unused lairs and a nasty thought keeps popping up... Use em or lose em! Is PWE gonna keep running servers with less than 10 people on em I wonder darkly?
I'm glad you like the current system but it is encouraging more alerts and the chance of any real new content like a decent AP or CS is all but gone AFAICT.
I would like there to be a reason to run lairs, maybe we could like get whole teams of people doing it once again, if the new gear could only be had by lair running. Maybe it would encourage players to go to places other than Mil Cit.
There is currently no justifiable development reason to do any more zones or AP/CS's precisely because of the Alert Q grind lockbox key fest. Why have a new zone or whatever if nobody is going to the other zones we do have?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
The one who can't shut up formerly known as 4rksakes
About the @handle - it's a long story.
Profound quote.. "I'm not a complete idiot - several parts are missing."
I'll do you one better. Name a serious mmo (I know a few of em don't work this way) that lets you flat out spend a buck for a chance at that uber rare drop that drops in the end dungeon. No, wait, let's go farther. Name an mmo that doesn't even HAVE an uber rare drop at the end of the dungeon! Therakiel's just has a silly rare sword, and nemcon doesn't even get finished most of the time because all you get is a bit of silver rec.
Point, and I mean this respectfully: Telling someone repeatedly that they need to play more mmos doesn't make their point any less valid. This system is jacked up, and I play the game in spite of it. I find myself doing so more and more infrequently, though, because I can always just take my paycheck and buy 50 keys if I really wanna get some new gear for one of my higher level 40s. And I'll take him out, putz around, mod him up, then get bored and wander away. Why? Because we have no endgame. Why? Because the focus is on the alerts and lock boxes. And, name me one other mmo that lets you play the ENTIRE RUN OF A CHARACTER in one zone.
I still love the game, don't get me wrong, but I'm pretty close to quitting in spite of myself. I practically did last week, and I'm fighting to keep playing because all of my online friends are here. I just can't quite seem to find a reason why, even in the *middle* of an event I've been anticipating for like 2 years.
My issue with lock boxes themselves is pretty limited. Gamblebag, whatever, I get the rare drops just about every time a new one comes out. I got 2 hawks and a vtol on about 15 keys combined. My issue is more *and then what*? You can't call it endgame when I can do it on my level 6. And there's literally *nothing* to do at endgame aside from piggyback lowbies in alerts, run nemcon or grav for the nth time, and occasionally get a party for therakiel's. My main has beaten about every quest in the game (barring those accursed dollies) about 2 years ago. And as long as we have the "lock boxes are fine" "you don't need raids because I wanna solo" etc... It's only going to get worse.
Just my 2 cents.
RIP Caine
Putting the gear as rewards for running lairs... also not good. As hard as it may be to believe, there will be people who resent the fact that they will be forced to run lairs. Also, there's no monetization potential if the gear is a drop in lairs.
On the other hand, if the gear comes from the questionite store, and you make bosses in lairs drop questionite (and make sure it's enough that lairs are as efficient a source of questionite as Nemcon is), then not only do you have potential monetization (that, importantly, is not forced) but you also keep to that wonderful idea that players should be allowed to choose how they go about reaching that gear goal.
After all, you put that gear into lairs, grats now everyone is only running lairs and everything else is abandoned... you've just shifted the problem in a new direction, not solved it. The real solution is that everything needs to be as efficient a source of questionite as Nemcon is; then you'll see people running all sorts of content. This includes adventure packs/comic series as well.
I don't think anyone here is arguing that we don't lack traditional endgame content, so I'm not sure who you're disagreeing with on that point.
You also seem to misunderstand the point that I'm making regarding the ore->open lockbox process. Maybe there is another MMO out there with the exact same process, maybe there isn't; there are definitely MMOs out there with much more tedious and convoluted reward gaining systems though... I played them... playing those games opened my eyes to just how good we actually have it here in CO. However, the point I was making is that randomly getting gear from a lockbox is ultimately no different from randomly getting gear as a boss drop, other than the extremely brief series of 5 mouse clicks involved, and the fact that you have a choice in how you arrive at that random drop and don't have to repeatedly run the one same bit of content over and over for it.
And yes, CO does allow you to spend money to bypass the content and go right to the random drop... and yes, there are other MMOs that do that as well. My question is... are you trying to say that this is a bad thing? And if not... then what are you saying about it?
My super cool CC build and how to use it.