mega-packs aka waste your ironites

[alekos]

I don't know how many x900 ironites you need to waste in order to get a character that is worth. The last 2 weeks I've wasted not only my ironites (more than 6000) but my heroic soul fragments that I kept only to get beast eddie (of course I didn't get him, not after more than 40!! tries)
the irony in this "featuring an INCREASED chance for whatever character" is just frustrating. What would be the chances if it wasn't increased? one in a million?
how would someone buy the packs if they're not giving the characters? ... it doesn't make sense.

[Blade]

It is because this game has a strong gambling tendency. You see it as most skills have a "chance" to apply effects, only seldom a guarantee. And the souls...well...this is to create the money! Last pack I bought was when the Liliths were introduced, a big fault!
Increased means increased, but still almost zero. In this case it is 0.0168 * 0.41 = 0.0068 = 0.7%
The "increase" comes from the 41% IF you get a 5*. As there are many 5*, your chance would be even smaller than 0.7%
This is chasing the dragon

[alekos]

now it makes sense. I was thinking I can't be that unlucky. but with a 0.7% I might as well be haha

[Yup]

...if you aren't saving characters for months, or spending a lot of money for ironite and then event souls.... things are designed for you to miss out on new characters. That's how they want it. To drive the "must have" and FOMO factors to get you to spend, spend, spend, spend.

But think about it.. what's the new character going to do for you??? It won't make playing the Cosmos, BNW, or LOL any easier unless you started playing recently and don't already have any level 100 5 star, skill sharded, characters. It MIGHT improve your PvP standing.. but what's there? Just iron Coins, which have no real purpose other than to get other characters or relics. But again, it's not like there's ANYTHING new to do with new characters.

So really new character, new character, new character... blah.. they don't matter. There's NOTHING new to do with the characters. Collet them all.. get 5 of each.. so what? How is that, in any way, a "game"?

(And don't go harping the Gauntlet is new... it's just automated PvP, with higher costs to evaporate resources faster and drive the FOMO for duplicates.... which in turn is designed to again get you to spend, spend, spend... that's all.)

[Cefiar]

The luck of the draw can be quite annoying.

I did a LOT of sacrifices, 3 Ultimates (VII), many many Exalted (VI), and lots and lots of little stuff. I've racked up over 20 vortexes (counting by the number of alchemist shards I collected, at 15 per vortex) and with all the HUbris souls I got through that, I got nothing useful.

Sure, from some of the other souls I got Benjamin Breeg, but otherwise nothing I didn't have before (and all went into the Sacrifice pit).

So since I had a bit of ironite over my usual "minimum I try not to use" amount (some thanks to the 666 ironite for the bugs), I bought a megapack of Hubris souls.

Out of that, I got Daedalus.

*sigh*

[Blade]

I've racked up over 20 vortexes

Wow, amazing!
May I ask where you got all the sacrifice material from, as the last big sacrifice event was only 2 weeks ago?

[alekos]

20 vortexes...!!! i'd expect you got killers eddie before he's even out with such thing!
i did my first vortex 2 days ago, i got 15 rare gun/assasin souls and 5? legendary souls. I was so excited i'd get something cool. i got s@#$. after reading this I won't hurry so much for my next one... (and it takes time to find characters that actually have enough value to sacrifice)

[Muzzleloader]

The longer you play the easier the sacrifices become once you get all the toons you want. I dont buy any event souls, save all my ironite for the events. The LoL event is the best in payoffs, you earn evo shards and sacrifice toons. Going for the liliths give some good lilith sacrifices.

Without spending real money it's easy to earn enough sacrifices for at least one vortex per month. The hard decision now is what troops to keep as dupes for gauntlet or sacrifice for the new OP toon.

[blade685]

it's always the same players that have new toons, for me it is because they spend money in the game, i don't see another answer for all that shit loot for same players always and always

[HuckFinn150]

Yup said it best. It made me think about my quest for characters. I find I farm almost exclusively with FOTD, Regina and Wickerman. I seldom use any of my other Eddie's or toons. In PVP I am the same side from substituting FOTD for Beast Eddie or DDE. I guess I'm a true collector lol

[Ancient Mariner]

...if you aren't saving characters for months, or spending a lot of money for ironite and then event souls.... things are designed for you to miss out on new characters. That's how they want it. To drive the "must have" and FOMO factors to get you to spend, spend, spend, spend.

But think about it.. what's the new character going to do for you??? It won't make playing the Cosmos, BNW, or LOL any easier unless you started playing recently and don't already have any level 100 5 star, skill sharded, characters. It MIGHT improve your PvP standing.. but what's there? Just iron Coins, which have no real purpose other than to get other characters or relics. But again, it's not like there's ANYTHING new to do with new characters.

So really new character, new character, new character... blah.. they don't matter. There's NOTHING new to do with the characters. Collet them all.. get 5 of each.. so what? How is that, in any way, a "game"?

(And don't go harping the Gauntlet is new... it's just automated PvP, with higher costs to evaporate resources faster and drive the FOMO for duplicates.... which in turn is designed to again get you to spend, spend, spend... that's all.)
Wow now even Gauntlet is shit? Your negativity is amazing...each and every post you make is the same, i wonder why you keep playing then.

I gotta "defend" the game this time: I got several times the new event character, even if not most of the times of course...and note that i've never spent a cent for this game.

[Amarthir]

I only ever really spend money on the ironite sub and sometimes those special offers that they occasionally throw in. Especially the ones that will grant you like 150 ironite a day to 2 weeks because your ironite will just blow up and you'll still have most of your money.

As for these Icarus and Daedalus type characters, they'd be great to have, but spending straight ironite on these event souls will always be a waste of ironite unless you have an excessive hoard and happen to get lucky. I'd save it only for arena, Lord of light, brave New world type events.

As for the growing negativity from some of my fellow troopers, I already stated my opinions on THAT matter with other people here and don't feel the need to jump back into the drama. Even though sometimes I reeeeeeaally want to.

[Muzzleloader]

I just get tired of all the whining about RNG and the odds of pulling characters. We all know what the odds are and they dont change, we just get the same complaining each event.

The same complaints about frag drops in LoL events, and BNW drops. Any short term run may give good or bad drop rates. Play over several days and they even out. It took me 14 lilith souls to finally pull a gunner, it's just a game and get used to the drops, play on and have fun.

[Cefiar]

Basically last sac event I got the special char from that and completed the event rewards, then stopped. This meant I didn't use all my souls then.

From then I kept every soul I could, used only a common soul for each days. I only redeemed one of the judgement souls and one of the magus soulless demon souls, and kept the rest on hand. Also, I got a trooper eddie through fragments which I kept. I also used gold to buy a legendary soul each month.

I also sacrificed some dupes (sentinel lillith, assassin lillith, warrior lillith, osiris, a bunch of 4 & 5* eddies, etc). FWIW I still have 2x osiris's (I got 3 - the RNG liked me that day).

I have a fair bit of gold, and had an absolute crap-ton of fragments, so where possible I power up 4 & 5* chars to either lvl 80 (4*) or lvl 100 (5*) before sacrificing them. This meant I got a LOT of Tier VI sacrifices, which really helps getting those vortexes.

I poured all the souls I got from Tier VI & Tier VII sacrifices and Vortexes back into the sac pit, usually after powering the 4 & 5* ones up. I got quite a few 5* Gunner eddies (hallowed, cyber, aces high) who give a quite good amount of essence.

FWIW: I still don't have Crusader Eddie or Icarus.

PS: I was not having a whinge about the game earlier. I was simply pointing out that you can throw a lot at it and get nothing out, and sometimes you can drop a single soul into the book and get high powered characters. It's all down to just what randomness comes your way at the time.

[Amarthir]

I just get tired of all the whining about RNG and the odds of pulling characters. We all know what the odds are and they dont change, we just get the same complaining each event.

The same complaints about frag drops in LoL events, and BNW drops. Any short term run may give good or bad drop rates. Play over several days and they even out. It took me 14 lilith souls to finally pull a gunner, it's just a game and get used to the drops, play on and have fun.

Exactly, RNG is and will always be, just random. I've gotten a Lillith soul every month since they came out and I still do not have the warrior yet. I play alot of games involving rng and this game is literally no different than the others in that the odds are extremely low for the ones you want.

[Liebhild]

Exactly, RNG is and will always be, just random.

And here you are very wrong. Random in LotB is NOT random. Do some math and you will maybe also recognize.

[Amarthir]

And here you are very wrong. Random in LotB is NOT random. Do some math and you will maybe also recognize.

I would be inclined to believe you if, in fact, you were believable. 'member the crimson and gold event that gave some players hundreds of rare, GA and legendary souls? Yeah I threw out thousands of them and recorded the draws and everybody showed up in equal amounts and the numbers did in fact, balance out according to the drop rate.

So yeah.... I DID do the math... And I'm right.

[Fudjo]

So yeah.... I DID do the math... And I'm right.

I can confirm this. I was also one of the "lottery winners" in the Crimson and Gold event. The drop rates I saw were in line with what was advertised.

[Yup]

Last 2 sac events.. over 100 souls each event... 2 5 star characters (CG and wCotD).. just 2..... sac events here have turned to total shit.

Why the hell am I still playing the "game"???

[Zugzwang]

I would want the new characters more if the animation and graphics for them were better. I am not complaining about the game—I really think it’s great. I just notice as I’m sure others have that characters are recycled. Osiris, Set & Horus—Benjamin Breeg & Clansman—and now Aset & Icarus to name just a few. If there are “new new” characters I try to get them. If they look and move the same not so much. That’s just as important to me as the skills they have or I may as well be playing a text based game.

[rags-6094]

I have to fess up my horns came out today, after sacrificing everything I'd saved in the three weeks since the last sac event I must have turned in I don't know for sure but I had 2 x vortex fills and 2 x 6 tier fills and several 5 tier fills. Whatever that gets you in hubris souls....
Out of that I got nothing, I'm kinda doing ok in PVP but have seen soooo many teams with one or both of the new characters I got caught in the trap.
After so much luck recently with souls dropping I.e Crusader, Osiris, etc... I could not except that in all the soul drops I did not pull at least one of them!
So I purchased an Aussie dollars $80.00 bundle which had 1800 ironite over the 1200 I already had, I purchased the hubris mega pack x2 that is 1800 ironite, it produced a dupe Hallowed Eddie the rest were mainly 3* characters, still no new characters so I went a way for a little while then returned purchased an ironite top up of 675, and purchased another mega pack, dropped another 10 hubris souls in still nothing only 1 x 4* G Hellraiser.

I am annoyed but not complaining, rather I write this as a warning to all, I know better than what I did today and still I fell in the trap!
I will stick to my past strategy of only purchasing worthwhile ironite bundles maybe once a month twice if truly worth it.
It's only money I will get more but I will be very cautious in future idiot that I am....

[Ip4]

this game is one big betting...

[Deathbat6120]

As much as I've been tempted to, this is why I'll never spend money on this game. The rates are just too low for it to be worth it. Ironite is somewhat easy to get hold of by completing Skull Quests (And hoping for the best), grinding Powerslave, through completing the Daily Challenges and from the Arena every week. As for souls, I'd rather only have a few than spend money, have loads and turn out for them all to be 3* dupes. If it takes me a few months to get characters, fair enough. IMO, getting a character I've been waiting to get for ages feels a bit more rewarding.

[desprezo]

And after all this, we keep on playing :D

[Deathbat6120]

And after all this, we keep on playing :D

Yep, and until they stop releasing new stuff, we'll all keep continuing because of that need of have everything lol

[Liebhild]

I would be inclined to believe you if, in fact, you were believable. 'member the crimson and gold event that gave some players hundreds of rare, GA and legendary souls? Yeah I threw out thousands of them and recorded the draws and everybody showed up in equal amounts and the numbers did in fact, balance out according to the drop rate.

So yeah.... I DID do the math... And I'm right.

Then tell me how likely it is to get 6 IE and 3 BE almost in row???

[Yup]

200+ event souls souls and only 2 5 stars... that's 0.01%... which is what the game states.. but is horrific nonetheless. Which is why I question why I'm even bothering....... seriously.. starting to really see the futility in it all.

[Cefiar]

Random Number Generation is HARD. It's also non-intuitive to understand sometimes, especially when you get multiple requests on a single source from different clients. It's also usually done at the OS level, not at the program level. Sure you can do it at the program level, but that is significantly slower usually as you're naturally treating your "pseudo random" input (which most likely comes from the OS's RNG, lets face it) as suspect and then performing permutations on it to produce even more seemingly random data, at the expense of CPU time.

The only thing I am wondering about here is if the server produces the randomness for character selection, or the client. It could even be both.

If it's the client then most likely your device (iOS or Android) is to blame, with maybe a really small amount of blame for the software framework (ie: Unity).

If it's the server, then the only advice is to make sure that any hardware randomness tools are enabled to add entropy to the random number generation pool, or add devices to do just that if it's not enough by itself.

Without appropriate amounts of hardware generated random entropy, software random number generators can produce weird or non-random output (ie: small loops of repeating or similar data is possible). Many random number generators will block (stall giving output) when the entropy is low, but in many situations you can bypass this for lower quality output (FWIW: Bad idea if it's for encryption/cryptography).

Also, Hardware RNG's usually have fixed output speeds (not super fast), so it's not like you can continually pull on them for a true random number in a tight loop. Also, they're not necessarily infallible (hardware can have issues or bugs just like software). This is why places that need insane amounts of randomness, for things like encryption/cryptography, usually add external sources to their systems to add more entropy (eg: Cloudflare - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUUfMeOijg ).

Almost all Intel/AMD PC CPU's have built in Hardware RNG's, but depending on your OS, this may or may not be being used by default.

Virtual machines (such as many hosting services) in some cases don't expose the underlying Hardware RNG's, or have multiple servers accessing the one Hardware RNG, so less randomness to share around.

I have no idea what Hardware RNG is like for iOS or Android devices (I've only really looked at this for servers), but I wouldn't be surprised if they have them, but also not surprised if they don't or have not very good ones.

Now in a server, you get multiple requests on an RNG. This causes splitting of those numbers in weird ways. A few to client 1, a few to client 2, a few to client 3, a few to client 1 again, more to client 4, some to client 3, some to client 5, etc. That can cause one client to get repeats or numbers that they wouldn't see as often if they were the only user. And the same happens further inside, when you get multiple programs or threads pulling random numbers for their respective processes (eg: not just the game server, but for encryption/cryptography, databases, etc).

Oh and before anyone says that there are plenty of examples of good pseudo random number generator code on the net: Most of them rely on random entropy, usually from another RNG or supposed "random" input. There's also a lot of crap out there masquerading as good, and even some of the seemingly good stuff has bugs.

As I said, Random Number Generation is HARD. Oh and humans are really BAD at spotting randomness as we see patterns in everything, whether they're there or not.

[Yup]

So....Cefiar is a NF "plant" here :) You just blew your cover, buddy :) Spartan is that you???

[Muzzleloader]

2 out of 200+ is close to 1% not 0.01%. As you stated that is the given odds for pulling a 5* toon, not the odds of pulling the main character.

During the God events I didn't pull any gods until the last 6 souls and then I pulled 2 Osiris. Too many think the odds seem to be too low and unfair. If everyone pulled the new OP toon each event would it not be defeating the purpose of benefiting active players with the new toon or just the lucky ones.

Some could say it is unfair to have real money only purchases, the ones who wont or cant make the purchases could be considered to be at an unfair disadvantage. I find this just a game and if others spend real money or play more often than I, then they deserve to have the better teams and the new toons.

I haven't pulled one of the last 5 Eddie's as of yet, that's the way it goes. I pulled 6 SSE, while others haven't received one. That is sometimes how RNG plays out.

[Cefiar]

Yup: Hah! No plant. I is a meat popsicle!

I just deal with lots of computer stuff for work, and digging into RNG stuff (mainly in Linux) was something that occupied my time in the past, so I actually have some idea of how it works. I have basic understandings of the maths involved in checking if a sample is somewhat random too, but I'm not a mathematician.

Mind you, I've been "working" with computers since 1986 (and exposure to them since like 1981), and I'm still in the field. I've had a lot of exposure to a lot of different tech and ideas and systems over the years, and learnt a lot over that time. I've jumped from project to project and subsystem to subsystem, and some of it comes in handy in seemingly unrelated projects/fields. Currently, I'm more interested in the Mesa project (OpenGL graphics drivers), since I got bit by a few bugs and helped get them fixed. ;)

The way a lot of programmers are exposed to an RNG is the typical iceberg analogy. There's a hell of a lot more under the surface and if you're not careful, you'll run into problems caused by not knowing about the hidden part. Sometimes however, finding that interaction is really hard.

PS: I miss seeing Spartan around here. :/