test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
So why the apparent disparity in lock box reward rates?
guyhumual
Posts: 2,412 Arc User
So with the key sale and the Zen sale I decided to open twenty crates, my bad, I should have known better by now. However I have noticed that the prices in the auction house for the chaser items has a ton of variance. I was able to get the skeleton costume set for 1500, but the clockwork was selling for 2000, and this latest set seems to be selling for more then that. If everyone were opening lockboxes at the same rate it would seem to suggest that the rarity of some of these items seems higher. Why is that? I'm not just bitter that I wasted $20 and got nothing to show for it, I mean I am, very bitter, but the it's the prices in the AH that drove me to wasting my cash in the first place. Why would they make rare items even rarer in some lockbox sets?
Post edited by guyhumual on
0
Comments
Not all lockboxes are opened at the same rate...many, many factors are involved. Also, the Krampus set was going for about 1500g yesterday (based on many sales that I saw and the AH prices).
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
this is all a symptom of a bigger problem
the trade gurus have plenty of g from either good trading or exploits depending on the person.
it takes longer to earn money in game in a legit way than it used to
you used to be able to vend farmed gear at a higher price
the average person playing the game has very little.
when a new costume set is introduced people want to get as much as they can.
over time as more boxes are opened over 3 months the price goes down
this also happens because less people need the set because they get the set.
eventually the price goes down to the lowest usually about 1k
after that people buy more and the price starts to go up.
the rate does have a bad drop rate but its prob the same as the last 3 boxes
If I ever see it around the 1000G mark I'd happily buy it.
depending on what it looks like, how much people want it.
disparity;
simple- the premium items have the lowest drop rate, so that people will open more boxes to try and get them.
same with any normal random prize game. IF you have a Local Fair, go have a look at a spin the wheel game. The ones with segments with prizes listed on them.
There will be 1 major prize ,several secondaries and the rest will be the junk prizes.
saw krampus for 900g on AH yesterday, also bought one from someone.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
If I'd gotten something good, anything really, I might have spent another $20 on the next lockbox set, but I'm left feeling that they're a waste of money when they first showed up and they're a waste of money now.
I don't mind the idea of major prizes but it's the junk prizes that piss me off. If a key costs me $1 or 100g the boxes should have at a minimum something worth 100g otherwise I'm wasting my money and I have no incentive to open any more boxes. The best thing I got from some 100 boxes thus far is some rank 7 mods, 5 presence, 5 growth. Mercenary armour, aka the stuff that's equivalent to free armour, is counted as a major prize, and even if you got a random piece that everyone wants you're not likely to break even.
The problem with the wheel is that they're mostly offering me prizes that I could easily get just by playing the game. What they're selling is time saving items mostly. Items that don't really enhance the game, rather they're items that you might grind for, and so opening lockboxes means you have to play the game less.
Anyways, I knew lockboxes were horrible before I wasted my money on them, but the drop rates affect the AH costs, so getting the lockboxes drop rates to a reasonable level is something that affects more then just the suckers that actually waste money opening them (and yes I consider myself a sucker at the moment).
If the minimum guaranteed value of the contents of a box is 100G, there will be no reason to sell keys for 100G. If keys cost 100G, a potential key seller might as well just open boxes and sell the contents instead of selling keys. That way they'll be guaranteed at least 100G themselves and they have the chance to open something more valuable, instead of letting someone else get the potential profit.
Simply put, if the minimum value of stuff in a box is 100G, either the box or the key will have increased value. Or the common stuff in the box will decrease in value over time as more boxes are opened (by people wanting the top prize).
I've never had such terrible luck with boxes.
[SIGPIC]http://co-forum.perfectworld.com/image.php?type=sigpic&userid=93012404000&dateline=1344025336[/SIGPIC]
The difference would be folks like me wouldn't feel ripped off with getting a bunch of rank 3 mods for your level 40 toon with vigilante gear. If I got something I liked I might buy more keys. As of right now I'd guess that the key market is being supported by the resource cap on silvers more then the lockbox market. Certainly the lockbox market is helped by the time warp lockboxes, where your chances of getting something good was greater, but if these current items and drop rates were used to regulate the key market I doubt keys would sell for more then 40g as what the lockboxes offer in exchange is paltry at best.
Think about it again then. You wouldn't sell a key for 100g if all available rewards from it were greater than 100g - that would be ripping yourself off. Hence, your suggestion that keys have items worth minimum 100g because that's what people currently sell them for it not a good one, because this would simply drive key price up.
That's the problem with assuming you'll get something you want from a random chance item. You'll probably be disappointed. As a result, people buy more to ensure that opening them gets their coveted item, and PWE scores a greater cash influx for the same item release as if they had simply sold the item outright in the Zen store. It's the driving concept behind all of these type of random chance boxes (seriously, play just about any other game out there, you'll find this concept present) and it works.
If you don't want to be disappointed:
Buy enough keys to simply sell them and buy the item you want
or buy enough keys to assure you get the item you want (ill-advised)
or alter your idea of how these items work so that you don't go in with a winning expectation
Well as I pointed out, what would happen is the items in the lockbox would devalue for those buying and selling those items, so you wouldn't really be getting 100g worth of stuff anymore if you were valuing the items based on AH values. You would still be getting items that you were somewhat remotely pleased to be getting though. The thing I don't quite understand here is how you figure the key price would be raised if you raised the value of the junk prizes in lockboxes, people still need them as a currency, except now some folks might not see it as a loss to use their keys on lockboxes rather then hold onto them as currency.
I do play other games, which is why the items in the CO lockboxes is especially disappointing. I often feel disappointed when I don't get the item I wanted but at least I don't feel ripped off. I opened 20 lockboxes and barely have enough items to trade back for a single key never mind an item I would have wanted.
Or just don't buy keys at all and grind resources to buy what I want from the AH, which is what I've been doing. But I suspect that not enough money has been generated by the lockboxes in the last series so they jacked up the rarity of the chaser items this series.
Percentage chance to get any particular item from a lockbox is NOT cumulative.
you have exactly the same chance on each box.
with the costumes, that's about 1%
it used to be about 1.75% but that dropped on the last 5 boxes,
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Not really. That's not how the "law of averages" works. As noted above it's about a 1% of each and every box. You could potentially get five in a row and then none again ever. Extrapolating it over "how many boxes you need to open" is misunderstanding how it works.
There is no particular number of opened lockboxes that guarantees the item, rather the probability that it will already have occurred approaches, but never quite reaches, unity.
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
You could open 100 in a row and get the item every time, it's not even remotely going to happen, but the law of averages concerns itself with what is the average person going to need to do to hit the percentage. 1% means 1 in 100, so, by the law of averages, you'd expect the average person to need to open 100 boxes to get the rare item. That's what's meant by the law of averages.
By the binomial distribution, P(X >= 1) = 0.6339...
The probability that you'll get one or more of the item, with a 1% drop chance, in 100 boxes is about 63%.
And that's your 15 seconds of statistics for today.
(I teach high school stats.)
By the way, the "law of averages" is the statistics myth--it represents that mistaken idea that past results influence future ones for otherwise fair events. Our universe just doesn't work that way.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
If you've ever played Blood Bowl, you should know that while a 2+ roll on a normal 6-sided dice is fairly likely to go the way you expect, 1 will also come up frequently enough that a newbie will blame the dice on their losses. "But I only rolled the dice once, I should be safe from rolling a 1".
No. The dice do not care whether you rolled them before or not.
to quote a wargame conversation between someone at the Gamers Guild with notoriously bad dice rolls., and another player.
"I can only fail on a 1 in 10", I'll do it "
a roll of 1 later
Southern Cross,
"What do I have to roll on d100 to blow up a torpedo if I hit it?"
"1" I was sitting next to the person and watched the roll.
1 dice roll and a very large explosion later. we were now enemies of every group, which didn't matter since we had blown up the party, the factory, storage area containing all the other weaponry, factory, town and surrounding areas.
scratchies in Australia, 1in 6 chance of winning anything.
chance of winning the big prize is something like 1 in a million. I'll check when I go shopping. They actually have some of the stats on the back of the cards, by law.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!