I've asked this question before and no one has ever answered it...
If literally nobody opens the R&D packs (or uses keys to open lockboxes), how would you be able to buy ships off the exchange? Unless Cryptic seeds the exchange, my guess would be you couldn't.
That question has been answered dozens of times.. just read azrael's reply.
It just doesn't fit. it doesn't have mass appeal or massive fire power or even a trait or console that wows you enough. The ship is bad in comparison, the timing is bad, and even the wording for the introduction of the ship is bad.
I'm going to come in for a sec and challenge "timing is bad." We haven't had a new promo ship in a while and this is following a c-store double pack and a brand new ship event, releasing something that could just as well been an infinity box update (it's Elachi.) The timing is pretty darn customary, either it was going to be the Franklin or the Jellyfish in a promo pack. The spark to this thread is simply the continuing antipathy to the promo format. It still exists in spite of negative feedback. For change to happen, though, there needs to be a structural rebalance of the game's economy and its gameplay (pushing players towards a fixation on specialty starships, of all possible things.) So, until we see such changes we should probably look to these announcement thread as a confirmation that a problem still exists rather than an unexpected transgression, worthy of fresh outrage (just speaking to some of the emotion in this thread.)
Please cite that official Cryptic 1% statement if any, otherwise not fact & at best an educated guess. "On average through massive testing on the Tribble server ...". Since we, as players, have no way of knowing if the odds are different on Tribble compared to Holodeck, again, an educated guess at best no matter how many times tested. Holodeck is apples & Tribble is oranges or vice versa.
Actually, we do. With respect to lock boxes I was able to run explicit hypothesis testing and there's no statistical evidence for variation in odds between tribble and holodeck (P value was much much smaller than 0.05, though for the exact figures I'd need to dive into my posting history either here or on Reddit, can't recall where I posted the number crunching.) While you can maintain that "Well, we don't really know" such is simply the power of suggestion and will to believe (see. conspiracy theories, we don't really know that the pyramids weren't built by aliens do we?) To advance it as a matter for consideration you need to do better. Ie. substantiate the claim that the odds do in fact vary, which will involve large sample sizes (not personal anecdotes) and good methodology. Else, we're going with the results we've found so far. Ie. the two are directly comparable.
(Plus, why the hell would you bother trying to obscure drop rates on a testing server when folks could just as well aggregate data on holodeck? It's less convenient but, unlike the inconvenience of updating the test server with a unique RNG table ad infinitum, it achieves the desired result.)
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People open boxes for a whole variety of reasons not at all related to winning a ship.
Lobi-crystals and RND-packs, aside from a chance to the grand-prize is considerably less than you *might* get from a lockbox. Still not bad tho. You easily get stuff to sell on exchange plus lobi-gear.
But tbh, I agree with the Franklin being more suited for the Lobi-store. I find that ship cute, but not "open gamble-packs for it"-cute.
The promo-ship should be the ST:Beyond Enterprise-A with MW-specs, while also giving us the Into-Darkness-refit and Beyond-refit-parts for the normal Kelvin-Connie
(an unrelated nice Addition as for promo-ships, Phase-II-parts for the temporal light Cruiser would be nice too).
Weird as it may sound, some people actually buy R&D packs for the mats even now. There are some people who pretty much play the admiralty, the doffing, and crafting as their main thing and only do the rest of the game on a very casual basis. I don't think there are a lot of them, but they do exist and they do open boxes.
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> Weird as it may sound, some people actually buy R&D packs for the mats even now. There are some people who pretty much play the admiralty, the doffing, and crafting as their main thing and only do the rest of the game on a very casual basis. I don't think there are a lot of them, but they do exist and they do open boxes.
ROFL, not Promo packs at 15 Million EC each they don't. Those people buy the regular R&D packs for a few thousand EC, they are not going to sink 15 milliin or more EC into a small amount of mats. Cone on man use your head. A player like that doesn't even have 15 million EC.
They both open the packs to use the mats and have the EC and not just 1 or 2 but stacks of them. There is a group of players that mostly only do admiralty, doffing and crafting. For those types of players 15million is pocket change, they wont even think twice about dropping 100+million on promo packs.
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> Weird as it may sound, some people actually buy R&D packs for the mats even now. There are some people who pretty much play the admiralty, the doffing, and crafting as their main thing and only do the rest of the game on a very casual basis. I don't think there are a lot of them, but they do exist and they do open boxes.
ROFL, not Promo packs at 15 Million EC each they don't. Those people buy the regular R&D packs for a few thousand EC, they are not going to sink 15 milliin or more EC into a small amount of mats. Cone on man use your head. A player like that doesn't even have 15 million EC.
I am not awake yet, so I probably phrased that wrong.
I wasn't talking about them buying ship boxes with EC, I was talking about them buying the R&D packs with cash in the z-store (they are still a bit over-priced I think, but some people have bigger budgets than others so it might seem less to them). Crafters like that tend to sell the ship boxes (if they get one) for extra profit unless there was some ship they were particularly interested in for space Barbie and did not have yet, which is a part of the reason the supply of ship boxes is unlikely to completely dry up as someone speculated on earlier.
They are also more likely to pick a ship with yawnworthy stats since they tend to not do much combat and just buy it for aesthetics and maybe RP value, though that is still not a good reason to put the Franklin in an R&D pack where it is so outclassed by everything else.
> @pottsey5g said:
> (Quote)
> They both open the packs to use the mats and have the EC and not just 1 or 2 but stacks of them. There is a group of players that mostly only do admiralty, doffing and crafting. For those types of players 15million is pocket change, they wont even think twice about dropping 100+million on promo packs.
Assuming these unicorns exist, and they open the promo packs for mats or lobi, when they get a ship they'll sell it because it wasn't what they were after and then they'll buy more packs with the EC so regardless of why they open them any ships produced get sold.
That's wrong many of us buy the packs because we are after the ships, mats and lobi. Those of us like that wouldn't sell the ships on regardless.
> @pottsey5g said:
> (Quote)
> That's wrong many of us buy the packs because we are after the ships, mats and lobi. Those of us like that wouldn't sell the ships on regardless.
Moving goalposts noted.
How am I moving goalpost? I was just pointing out both your statements are wrong. Everyone doesn't play the game in the way you say. We don't all buy packs just to get ships to sell on for EC. Some of us do buy packs to get more mats and/or lobi despite you pretending we don't exist. If we do get a unexpected bonus ship we don't automatically sell it on.
well i understand the possibility of people opening these for mats... but the probability is not there. I mean... Why? Why would anyone do that? Willingly?
You get mats for almost everything including tfo's above normal, salvaging, and admiralty. If players are spemding that kind of money for mats then.. that's pretty inefficient. It's such a bad idea that it becomes negligence... bordering on dereliction, just a pure failure of the player that's doing it.
It's possible. I just don't see whom would be that desperate... for random mats... to spend or lose 14M+ for something as lackluster as crafting? That's kinda tough.
FYI, you can get any lock box or R&D pack ship with a 100% chance for success by buying it from the Exchange using energy credits, but that is going to be expensive too. Buy R&D promo packs (not regular ones!) for Zen, sell the packs on the exchange, get the ship. The cost will be as high as $200, but less if you get Zen on sale and buy promo R&D packs on sale.
I've asked this question before and no one has ever answered it...
If literally nobody opens the R&D packs (or uses keys to open lockboxes), how would you be able to buy ships off the exchange? Unless Cryptic seeds the exchange, my guess would be you couldn't.
I agree with your method of obtaining the ships, and if I were to go for such ships it would be the way I'd go. I just find this advice somewhat (potentially?) self-defeating as without people opening packs, there are no ships to sell.
Now, I know that the chances of absolutely not one single player opening packs/lockboxes is essentially zero, but if it were to happen, then you would not be able to buy ships off the exchange. So for every ship on the exchange, there was at least one player who actually opened a pack/lockbox. And likely not just a single player who only opens one single pack, either.
I suppose my question is more curiosity than real world application since there will almost always be someone opening packs/lockboxes. Am I wrong in my line of thinking?
Good point, if no one tried & gambled on the various lock boxes & R&D promo boxes then no "special" ships would be able to enter the main STO market (Exchange). Gotta thank the wallet-risk-takers for that!
Also, I understand a couple of the players here thaat want to derail the conversation to focus on the credibility or morality of gamble boxes and what not but I don't think this is the venue for that.
This ship specifically will not make players gamble in its current rendition so there wouldn't be any gambling for it specifically.
There are more pressing and interesting things to discuss then if a company can or can not make money based on our morality. I don't really care. since i do not gamble for it. i purchase things out right with out probability.
If this is how they make their money let them get them bags, but i know for a fact this specific ship is a hard pass for me and i own all the other promotional r and d ships so meh. lets see what else comes around the bend.
Also, I understand a couple of the players here thaat want to derail the conversation to focus on the credibility or morality of gamble boxes and what not but I don't think this is the venue for that.
This ship specifically will not make players gamble in its current rendition so there wouldn't be any gambling for it specifically.
There are more pressing and interesting things to discuss then if a company can or can not make money based on our morality. I don't really care. since i do not gamble for it. i purchase things out right with out probability.
If this is how they make their money let them get them bags, but i know for a fact this specific ship is a hard pass for me and i own all the other promotional r and d ships so meh. lets see what else comes around the bend.
Yeah, I'm just not seeing this ship on par with the other Promo-ships, a tier or two lower imo, but we all have our favorites. I think it would've made it worth it to buy the rights to the song "Sabotage" & have it play like on the Franklin's bridge or something, then I think it could've been a best seller lol.
The Franklin feels more like a lobi ship than a promo ship to be honest. Hell the Amarie was an extremely unpopular promo ship and even it felt more like a lock box ship than this thing, the Franklin should've just been slapped in the Lobi store with either the Kelvin Ent A in a promo, the Jellyfish in a promo, or the Altamids in a promo. As it stands this feels like they ran out of ideas and needed to slap something in a promo.
> @pottsey5g said:
> (Quote)
> How am I moving goalpost? I was just pointing out both your statements are wrong. Everyone doesn't play the game in the way you say. We don't all buy packs just to get ships to sell on for EC. Some of us do buy packs to get more mats and/or lobi despite you pretending we don't exist. If we do get a unexpected bonus ship we don't automatically sell it on.
I did not pretend anything. I made a specific statement about only people who buy boxes to open for mats or lobi. I did not mention anyone who buys boxes with zen to open to try for the ship. I am not pretending such people exist, I question their intelligence, but I pretended nothing. You then added those people in your statement and that had nkthing at all tk do with what I said. That is the definition of mkving the goalposts.
Here is your first statement I responded to.
"They both open the packs to use the mats and have the EC and not just 1 or 2 but stacks of them. There is a group of players that mostly only do admiralty, doffing and crafting. For those types of players 15million is pocket change, they wont even think twice about dropping 100+million on promo packs."
There is nothing in there about ships, just mats and lobi. I responded to that and stated that many of those players opening boxes only for the 2 items mentioned, mats and lobi, would sell the ship they didn't want to get more mats and lobi. Which is accurate. I said nothing about an entirely seperate group of players opening for mats, lobi, or ships.
I know I posted late at night but looking back I don't see where I made a mistake and mentioned ZEN so I did not move goalposts. When I said buy packs I wasn’t talking about ZEN. I was saying how wrong your statement is that those that buy packs with EC sell any ships they can get for EC. We don’t automatically sell any ship we don’t want, we pick the ship we do want and keep it as a bonus.
There will be exceptions, I am not saying none of them sell ships on but as a member of that group of players I can tell you the EC we make form full time crafting means we don’t need to sell those ships on for EC to buy more mats and lobi. So it makes more sense to pick the ship/console/trait we want and take that and keep it.
Buying the packs for crafting/lobi via EC is not a stupid thing to do. So why question their intelligence, LoL at them and call them none existent unicorns. I would never buy the normal packs but I am in need of consent supplies for crafting and lobi so I buy the promo packs for those until my stock levels hit the required amount. My goal isn't to get a ship if that happens its just a nice bonus and I don't sell it on.
Good luck to all gullible gamblers who try to beat the (absurdly long) odds!
One thing though to all those who extoll the buy box>sell>buy ship model - You are forgetting two things
1. The higher the zen costs, the more dil is needed, in turn requiring more time investment (and character outlay) to maintain the same level of earning, reaching a point where the time investment (and character creation costs) outweighs the return
2. The market fluctuates - Hypothetically, imagine 1000 people follow the model, flooding the market with boxes - what do you think would happen? The price would plummet - Ships however would barely move in price (due to lockbox odds) resulting in a state where buying boxes to convert becomes untenable
No matter how you cut it, this model that is used to justify the 'these ships are available to all' claim is frankly a huge steaming pile of targ excrement
Add to that rnd packs are hilariously worthless (I can gain the same amount of resources (minus boosters) by running 5k dils worth of academy tasks) unless they are a hit (lobi is better gained from regular lockboxes for more return of investment)...and justification of the model, heck let alone the concept of the boxes themselves is on extraordinarily shakey grounds
Just rewatched Star Trek Beyond just for fun & since relevant with STO's current U.S.S. Franklin. I'm still not thinking this ship is at the Promo level, & I still think adding the "Sabatoge" song would've been great, but I understand the licensing fee might've been prohibitive so I think it should've had it's unique bridge with the motorcycle :-) I know a functioning motorcycle would've been too much effort but having it just be there on a unique bridge would've been an awesome selling point maybe have it feature DOFF assignments, similar to some other ships, or something to give the ship something unique & extra.
“No matter how you cut it, this model that is used to justify the 'these ships are available to all' claim is frankly a huge steaming pile of targ excrement”
Not really anyone can access any of these ships without spending a single penny of real money. They are available to all so I don't see what is wrong with the claim.
“No matter how you cut it, this model that is used to justify the 'these ships are available to all' claim is frankly a huge steaming pile of targ excrement”
Not really anyone can access any of these ships without spending a single penny of real money. They are available to all so I don't see what is wrong with the claim.
Only if you are space rich, and can make a lot of millions each day. >_>;
“No matter how you cut it, this model that is used to justify the 'these ships are available to all' claim is frankly a huge steaming pile of targ excrement”
Not really anyone can access any of these ships without spending a single penny of real money. They are available to all so I don't see what is wrong with the claim.
Only if you are space rich, and can make a lot of millions each day. >_>;
“No matter how you cut it, this model that is used to justify the 'these ships are available to all' claim is frankly a huge steaming pile of targ excrement”
Not really anyone can access any of these ships without spending a single penny of real money. They are available to all so I don't see what is wrong with the claim.
Only if you are space rich, and can make a lot of millions each day. >_>;
Its perfectly in most peoples reach to earn a few million every day, it’s not exactly hard. Between crafting for 1 hour a day and selling all decent loot you pick up the EC soon stacks up. You have to put a bit of time in but given how rarely these ships come up for sale there is more than enough time to grind up EC to buy them without real cash. If someone is after one of these ships its perfectly obtainable so its fair to say they are available to all.
Comments
That question has been answered dozens of times.. just read azrael's reply.
I'm going to come in for a sec and challenge "timing is bad." We haven't had a new promo ship in a while and this is following a c-store double pack and a brand new ship event, releasing something that could just as well been an infinity box update (it's Elachi.) The timing is pretty darn customary, either it was going to be the Franklin or the Jellyfish in a promo pack. The spark to this thread is simply the continuing antipathy to the promo format. It still exists in spite of negative feedback. For change to happen, though, there needs to be a structural rebalance of the game's economy and its gameplay (pushing players towards a fixation on specialty starships, of all possible things.) So, until we see such changes we should probably look to these announcement thread as a confirmation that a problem still exists rather than an unexpected transgression, worthy of fresh outrage (just speaking to some of the emotion in this thread.)
Actually, we do. With respect to lock boxes I was able to run explicit hypothesis testing and there's no statistical evidence for variation in odds between tribble and holodeck (P value was much much smaller than 0.05, though for the exact figures I'd need to dive into my posting history either here or on Reddit, can't recall where I posted the number crunching.) While you can maintain that "Well, we don't really know" such is simply the power of suggestion and will to believe (see. conspiracy theories, we don't really know that the pyramids weren't built by aliens do we?) To advance it as a matter for consideration you need to do better. Ie. substantiate the claim that the odds do in fact vary, which will involve large sample sizes (not personal anecdotes) and good methodology. Else, we're going with the results we've found so far. Ie. the two are directly comparable.
(Plus, why the hell would you bother trying to obscure drop rates on a testing server when folks could just as well aggregate data on holodeck? It's less convenient but, unlike the inconvenience of updating the test server with a unique RNG table ad infinitum, it achieves the desired result.)
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Lobi-crystals and RND-packs, aside from a chance to the grand-prize is considerably less than you *might* get from a lockbox. Still not bad tho. You easily get stuff to sell on exchange plus lobi-gear.
But tbh, I agree with the Franklin being more suited for the Lobi-store. I find that ship cute, but not "open gamble-packs for it"-cute.
The promo-ship should be the ST:Beyond Enterprise-A with MW-specs, while also giving us the Into-Darkness-refit and Beyond-refit-parts for the normal Kelvin-Connie
(an unrelated nice Addition as for promo-ships, Phase-II-parts for the temporal light Cruiser would be nice too).
I am not awake yet, so I probably phrased that wrong.
I wasn't talking about them buying ship boxes with EC, I was talking about them buying the R&D packs with cash in the z-store (they are still a bit over-priced I think, but some people have bigger budgets than others so it might seem less to them). Crafters like that tend to sell the ship boxes (if they get one) for extra profit unless there was some ship they were particularly interested in for space Barbie and did not have yet, which is a part of the reason the supply of ship boxes is unlikely to completely dry up as someone speculated on earlier.
They are also more likely to pick a ship with yawnworthy stats since they tend to not do much combat and just buy it for aesthetics and maybe RP value, though that is still not a good reason to put the Franklin in an R&D pack where it is so outclassed by everything else.
You get mats for almost everything including tfo's above normal, salvaging, and admiralty. If players are spemding that kind of money for mats then.. that's pretty inefficient. It's such a bad idea that it becomes negligence... bordering on dereliction, just a pure failure of the player that's doing it.
It's possible. I just don't see whom would be that desperate... for random mats... to spend or lose 14M+ for something as lackluster as crafting? That's kinda tough.
Good point, if no one tried & gambled on the various lock boxes & R&D promo boxes then no "special" ships would be able to enter the main STO market (Exchange). Gotta thank the wallet-risk-takers for that!
This ship specifically will not make players gamble in its current rendition so there wouldn't be any gambling for it specifically.
There are more pressing and interesting things to discuss then if a company can or can not make money based on our morality. I don't really care. since i do not gamble for it. i purchase things out right with out probability.
If this is how they make their money let them get them bags, but i know for a fact this specific ship is a hard pass for me and i own all the other promotional r and d ships so meh. lets see what else comes around the bend.
Yeah, I'm just not seeing this ship on par with the other Promo-ships, a tier or two lower imo, but we all have our favorites. I think it would've made it worth it to buy the rights to the song "Sabotage" & have it play like on the Franklin's bridge or something, then I think it could've been a best seller lol.
There will be exceptions, I am not saying none of them sell ships on but as a member of that group of players I can tell you the EC we make form full time crafting means we don’t need to sell those ships on for EC to buy more mats and lobi. So it makes more sense to pick the ship/console/trait we want and take that and keep it.
Buying the packs for crafting/lobi via EC is not a stupid thing to do. So why question their intelligence, LoL at them and call them none existent unicorns. I would never buy the normal packs but I am in need of consent supplies for crafting and lobi so I buy the promo packs for those until my stock levels hit the required amount. My goal isn't to get a ship if that happens its just a nice bonus and I don't sell it on.
EDIT: changed text so it reads better.
One thing though to all those who extoll the buy box>sell>buy ship model - You are forgetting two things
1. The higher the zen costs, the more dil is needed, in turn requiring more time investment (and character outlay) to maintain the same level of earning, reaching a point where the time investment (and character creation costs) outweighs the return
2. The market fluctuates - Hypothetically, imagine 1000 people follow the model, flooding the market with boxes - what do you think would happen? The price would plummet - Ships however would barely move in price (due to lockbox odds) resulting in a state where buying boxes to convert becomes untenable
No matter how you cut it, this model that is used to justify the 'these ships are available to all' claim is frankly a huge steaming pile of targ excrement
Add to that rnd packs are hilariously worthless (I can gain the same amount of resources (minus boosters) by running 5k dils worth of academy tasks) unless they are a hit (lobi is better gained from regular lockboxes for more return of investment)...and justification of the model, heck let alone the concept of the boxes themselves is on extraordinarily shakey grounds
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Only if you are space rich, and can make a lot of millions each day. >_>;
I haven't seen one either.