Sacrafice Reward Transparency and Balancing

[T-Man]

Sparton, thanks for taking a look into this.

Something to consider.

The list of toons I would like to shard continues to grow at a rapid pace. No way to even think about keeping up. I dwindled it down to 18 toons I'm considering. Only 4 Eddies on the list btw.

To shard these 18 would take 225 skill shards. Accumulating 20 (a reasonable estimate) a month, this would take nearly 1 year. It's an excercise in frustration.

Thanks for listening.

[Sparton_LOTB]

While I understand your logic and your response, I'd like to point out the current droprates for daily players, even those who are somewhat new.

Legendary Souls: 1 per month from PVP, with the possibility of more from the daily quests.
Skill Shards: 3 per week. 1 from PVP, 2 from troopers, with the possibility of more from the daily quests.
Rare souls: 0, with the possibility of more from daily quests. I get maybe 1-4 a week.
G/A Souls: 1 from logins

There's a lot that you're missing out from those projections, though:

• Common souls are effectively a fraction of Rare Souls, because sacrificing batches of 1 star and 2 star characters can get you Rare Souls even at the lowest sacrifice tier. This is significant because you will earn many common Souls each day (a pile from Skull Quests, and many more from grinding in the Cosmos worlds, which is the most efficient place to use troopers)
• We've added Rare Soul Fragments, Rare G/A Soul Fragments, and Legendary Soul Fragments to all Skull Quests, which means you'll be earning more than you think per month from those on average per month
• Getting Tier IV and higher sacrifices is now easier than ever with character fragment events, which will almost always be 4 star characters (rare instances of 5 star characters, but not yet 3 star characters). When it's in the Lord of Light (which we plan on keeping most of them in), players of most skill levels can easily get at least one soul per event, and more if they're willing to invest some time and Ironite
• Speaking of Iornite, you've discounted free Ironite you can earn from Skull Quests, Daily Challenges, etc. For many players, Ironite is primarily sunk into souls of some kind (and for some players, the vast majority of their Ironite is sunk into souls), usually because of limited time event souls like the Brave New World Soul. Other Ironite spending usually indirectly rewards souls, too (such as spending on Sands of War to place high in PVP, or spending on Sands of Time for certain kinds of events)
• You can get a Tier VI sacrifice with some 3 stars in the mix. Some of the natural 4 star characters being Gunners or Assassins, and/or Eddies, will give you a boost, as will evolving one or two of the 4 stars to 5 stars. This lets you turn spare Shards into essence as well.
• All of the sacrificing we expect you to do (rarer occurrences of Tier IV and above plus many lower tier sacrifices from common Soul fodder) works towards a Vortex Bonus, which of course can reward Skill Shards directly, but also rewards Rare Gun/Assassin Souls and Legendary Souls (which feed back into making more higher tier sacrifices)

As such, we account for all of these avenues to get a sense of what the "average" essence an engaged player will make per day. If you're like many players who stays on top of using all your troopers, does the daily challenges, and makes an effort to the various events we run each month, you should try to keep track and see how long it actually does take to get to a Tier VI; you won't get one every day, but you'll get to that far more often than you think.

Something to consider.

The list of toons I would like to shard continues to grow at a rapid pace. No way to even think about keeping up. I dwindled it down to 18 toons I'm considering. Only 4 Eddies on the list btw.

To shard these 18 would take 225 skill shards. Accumulating 20 (a reasonable estimate) a month, this would take nearly 1 year. It's an excercise in frustration.

We will always be adding more avenues to getting skill shards with new features and events. Consider the evolution of that throughout the existence of the game (mostly from memory, so sorry if there's some mistakes):

• Initially Skill Shards were weekly locked for trooper points (1/week), and they were rarely earned from Secret Locations (the previous incarnation of Skull Quests)
• The gating for buying with trooper points was later removed
• Achievements were added, providing one-time bonuses players could get that we would periodically add to every few major updates
• PVP was released, giving a new avenue to get at least 1 more per week (more for people who competed for ranking)
• Events started to become more common, some of which would give out Skill Shards for high participation (this technically started earlier with things like the Fear of the Dark event, but they were extremely rare)
• Sacrifice is released, making all souls earned from Skull Quests, PVE, PVP, and events effectively progress towards even more Skill Shards
• Character fragments is released, meaning there's more avenues to getting characters, and in some cases characters of specific, higher rarities (making higher tier sacrifices easier, thus increasing the rate of earning Skill Shards)

We of course have more missions and achievements coming, which will indirectly work towards Skill Shards (and other rewards), and (without getting into too many details) the Silent Planet will be another source of many resources in a way that will scale with how strong and deep your roster is. And that's without getting into other features we've not yet announced, and most of those will indeed let you get more and more Skill Shards over time.

So yes, while you won't be able to shard all of your favourites right now, we've been increasing the velocity of Skill Shards you can earn over time, and plan to continue doing so. We're in this for the long haul, and need to find the right balance between too much (people max everything they have and don't have more to work towards) and too little (people can't max more than a handful of characters), and in this balance we err on the side of caution and prefer to use things like events and limited time promotions as stopgaps as we get more features online.

[R1ck]

@Sparton, getting FRAGMENTS of rare or g/a souls is not a price, if we get enough fragments for a complete souls we end up summoning a 3* character, that's sad. We should have access to more souls not fragments.
You talk about the possibilities to get skillshards in your events, so far there were only 2 events which gave us skillshards, that's in more than half a year, come on. You should make skillshards more accessible considering that every 2 months you nerf our fully sharded toons, of course you make that on purpose so people spend more money.
Wonder Iron Maiden holdings doesn't have a quality control department to check their products and consumer concerns.

[bort]

Hi Spartan,

Thanks for addressing us again, and I agree with what you've posted - I haven't had the time or data to do the type of evaluations you've done; I can only spitball from my own experience.

However, the chief complaint was not that "the tier VI rewards were not balanced", it was "two of the rewards are a direct slap in the face and make me not want to do tier VI sacrifices anymore". The side-note to that was that "maybe the three non-top awards could be increased and balanced against each other".

To that point, I've hightlighted an important portion of your text below

There's a lot that you're missing out from those projections, though:
...
<snip>
...
So yes, while you won't be able to shard all of your favourites right now, we've been increasing the velocity of Skill Shards you can earn over time, and plan to continue doing so. We're in this for the long haul, and need to find the right balance between too much (people max everything they have and don't have more to work towards) and too little (people can't max more than a handful of characters), and in this balance we err on the side of caution and prefer to use things like events and limited time promotions as stopgaps as we get more features online.

So you've increased the amount of skill shards and the intervals in which players get them in all ways except tier VI rewards, which gives two. This is not balanced - a tier VI reward should feel like a reward, not a colossal disappointment. Maybe the players should rather the 50 rare souls or the 15 G/A souls, but they shouldn't hate the fact that they got skill shards. You mentioned recording how long it would take an average player to get a tier VI reward - its been weeks since my last, and I'm waiting on a 5* to drop randomly in order for me to get another. I expect it would be several weeks or even into next month (legendary from PVP). In the time it will take between the two level VI sacrifices, I will have earned 3 skill shards per week, plus any that drop from the daily quests. Currently that will have been 11 skill shards. Another week or two will bring it up to 12 or 15, which is about the time I expect to be ready for another tier VI sacrifice. My last one gave me two skill shards. If my next one does as well, then playing passively between the sacrifices will have given me four times the reward of the sacrifices itself.

That needs to be fixed.

[Sparton_LOTB]

However, the chief complaint was not that "the tier VI rewards were not balanced", it was "two of the rewards are a direct slap in the face and make me not want to do tier VI sacrifices anymore". The side-note to that was that "maybe the three non-top awards could be increased and balanced against each other".

[...]

So you've increased the amount of skill shards and the intervals in which players get them in all ways except tier VI rewards, which gives two. This is not balanced - a tier VI reward should feel like a reward, not a colossal disappointment. [...] My last one gave me two skill shards. If my next one does as well, then playing passively between the sacrifices will have given me four times the reward of the sacrifices itself.

We can't just add more and more features that double or triple your Skill Shard intake per week; we'd very quickly reach a point where Skill Shard rewards are meaningless. Like, if you got 12 Skill Shards a month base, and we added 3 features that increased you Skill Shard intake by even 50%, the first feature would make it so you gain 18 per month, the next would make you gain 27 per month, and the third would make it so you gain 40 per month. The numbers become silly if you consider percent increases based on previous yields instead of absolute value improvements, especially when most (non-Eddie) characters take 6-10 Skill Shards to max.

Even setting aside the raw amount of Skill Shards earned, if you got 50 Rare Souls, what do you expect you'll get out of them? What is the best you'd expect to get out of them?

For a lot of long term players, more characters is purely a matter of raw essence, since certain kinds of souls literally cannot give them new characters (again, situational exceptions like the new addition of Valkyries can occur). If the goal is more Skill Shards, getting 2 Skill Shards directly is more Skill Shards than the average expectation of any other result when considering how close other results will get you to another high-tier sacrifice and how much progress you'll make towards a Vortex.

Legendary Souls are a different consideration, but they're the best chance to get natural 5 star characters, and they can get 5 stars of any class, so they're still the ultimate prize for finishing a collection and getting the rarest new characters we add.

[bort]

Thanks again for replying Sparton - it really does mean a lot when you engage with us on the forums.

We can't just add more and more features that double or triple your Skill Shard intake per week; we'd very quickly reach a point where Skill Shard rewards are meaningless.

But thats exactly what you bragged about doing! You increased the skill shard drop and included them into the PVP store. They're not meaningless, far from it, they're still the gatekeeper to effective PVP.

We will always be adding more avenues to getting skill shards with new features and events. Consider the evolution of that throughout the existence of the game (mostly from memory, so sorry if there's some mistakes):

• Initially Skill Shards were weekly locked for trooper points (1/week), and they were rarely earned from Secret Locations (the previous incarnation of Skull Quests)
• The gating for buying with trooper points was later removed
• Achievements were added, providing one-time bonuses players could get that we would periodically add to every few major updates
• PVP was released, giving a new avenue to get at least 1 more per week (more for people who competed for ranking)
• Events started to become more common, some of which would give out Skill Shards for high participation (this technically started earlier with things like the Fear of the Dark event, but they were extremely rare)
• Sacrifice is released, making all souls earned from Skull Quests, PVE, PVP, and events effectively progress towards even more Skill Shards
• Character fragments is released, meaning there's more avenues to getting characters, and in some cases characters of specific, higher rarities (making higher tier sacrifices easier, thus increasing the rate of earning Skill Shards)

How can you argue that "2 skill shards" is a just reward for a task that takes a month to complete when you get 3 per week, not including any drops you get during the week. You've acknowledged that you've increased access to skill shards in many, many different areas - why has the reward from the second best sacrifice in game not kept up with that scaling?

Like, if you got 12 Skill Shards a month base, and we added 3 features that increased you Skill Shard intake by even 50%, the first feature would make it so you gain 18 per month, the next would make you gain 27 per month, and the third would make it so you gain 40 per month. The numbers become silly if you consider percent increases based on previous yields instead of absolute value improvements, especially when most (non-Eddie) characters take 6-10 Skill Shards to max.

Thats not what we're asking here. If skill shard access is a serious problem, remove it as a reward from the tier VI sacrifice. My complaint is that its a slap in the face in terms of a reward. If you can't reasonably increase it, just remove it so it doesn't feel like so much of a letdown when thats what comes up.

Even setting aside the raw amount of Skill Shards earned, if you got 50 Rare Souls, what do you expect you'll get out of them? What is the best you'd expect to get out of them?

Everyone is obviously different, but the reason I go for the tier VI is for the 50 rare souls to get a chance at the natural 5*'s that I don't yet have. The 15 GA souls are a lesser reward because of the 5* drop chance is very low and probably won't hit in only 15.

If I had every non-GA character, I'd be going for tier VII sacrifices to try for the 50 GA souls.

Even if I had every characterin the game I wouldn't be sacrificing trying to get skill shard rewards. I'd save everything until there was an event, because I can get those skill shards by waiting like 3 days. Its a complete waste of a reward and I can't imagine a circumstance in which I would be pleased with that outcome.

For a lot of long term players, more characters is purely a matter of raw essence, since certain kinds of souls literally cannot give them new characters (again, situational exceptions like the new addition of Valkyries can occur). If the goal is more Skill Shards, getting 2 Skill Shards directly is more Skill Shards than the average expectation of any other result when considering how close other results will get you to another high-tier sacrifice and how much progress you'll make towards a Vortex.

I'm a fairly long-time player. I started back in beta when it first hit iOS and have most of the characters. There are a few notables i'm missing (Nomad, VHE, etc), and I am always falling behind on my skillshards - I have more characters I want to shard than I have individual skillshards. EVEN THEN I would hate to get (2) skill shards as a reward for a tier VI sacrifice. I know because I have, and it felt like someone punched me in the stomach.

Legendary Souls are a different consideration, but they're the best chance to get natural 5 star characters, and they can get 5 stars of any class, so they're still the ultimate prize for finishing a collection and getting the rarest new characters we add.

Speaking of legendary souls, I don't really get excited for those either - they're nicer than a rare soul, in that they will probably give me a 4* dupe for the pit, but they're way overvalued based on the droprate.

[Sparton_LOTB]

Thats not what we're asking here. If skill shard access is a serious problem, remove it as a reward from the tier VI sacrifice. My complaint is that its a slap in the face in terms of a reward. If you can't reasonably increase it, just remove it so it doesn't feel like so much of a letdown when thats what comes up.

The exact argument will be somewhat moot when the change I proposed earlier in the thread goes through, but the fact of the matter is that we look at the rewards we want to give out per sacrifice tier and tailor the quantities and chance of earning them to ensure that the average amount earned is of an appropriate value.

For example, if we think that earning an average of 10 Rare Souls for a Tier VI sacrifice is appropriate, we could make it so there's a 20% chance of 50 Rare Souls (50 * 0.2 = 10 on average). As such, to ensure that something as valuable as Skill Shards isn't a comically rare reward, the quantity you get them in is lower, but the chance of them isn't something like 1% at that tier.

If Skill Shards were a 30% chance at that tier and we wanted to remove them because people think lower quantities of them as a reward are bad, we wouldn't just have no reward come up 30% of the time, so other stuff would be more common. To meet the internal targets for average rewards earned, that means the quantities of all of those things would go down.

I'm a fairly long-time player. I started back in beta when it first hit iOS and have most of the characters. There are a few notables i'm missing (Nomad, VHE, etc), and I am always falling behind on my skillshards - I have more characters I want to shard than I have individual skillshards. EVEN THEN I would hate to get (2) skill shards as a reward for a tier VI sacrifice. I know because I have, and it felt like someone punched me in the stomach.

Well... I'm not sure what to say. You say you desperately want more, but you don't want more. Like, I'll grant you that more could be given out (and my current numbers do bump skill shard average rewards for higher tiers), but there seems to be such a disconnect between the expectations that we both have that I don't know if any kind of middleground would satisfy you. If presumably low quantities from these tiers is such a problem to have once a month, I'd imagine removing them as rewards and making it so the averages from Vortexes are slightly better (the reward you'd only get once every 2-4 months if I'm correctly projecting how much essence you generate over time?..) would be considered a worse result by most people, not better.

[bort]

Well... I'm not sure what to say. You say you desperately want more, but you don't want more. Like, I'll grant you that more could be given out (and my current numbers do bump skill shard average rewards for higher tiers), but there seems to be such a disconnect between the expectations that we both have that I don't know if any kind of middleground would satisfy you.

Sparton,

Any effort will satisfy me. When I say "I dont want (2) skillshards", it doesn't mean I don't want skillshards, its that I don't want the event (ie, sacrifice) I have spent weeks->month+ saving up for giving me the amount I make in less than a week by playing normally. Its just not balanced.

If presumably low quantities from these tiers is such a problem to have once a month, I'd imagine removing them as rewards and making it so the averages from Vortexes are slightly better (the reward you'd only get once every 2-4 months if I'm correctly projecting how much essence you generate over time?..) would be considered a worse result by most people, not better

Well, here is the advantage of having a close relationship with your customers. You can crowdsource the reaction to your changes well in advance. Maybe we're all greedy and will never be satisfied, like you mentioned. Maybe there is a middle ground where we'd be happy with the split. You'll never know unless you try to ask your playerbase how they feel about it.

We've complained in numerous places throughout the forums about the lackluster VI/VII rewards (sometimes). You've acknowledged that its an issue. Perhaps you could be transparent with potential changes in the future so that we, the playerbase, gets a look at it so you can gauge our reaction.

[slauki]

So you've increased the amount of skill shards and the intervals in which players get them in all ways except tier VI rewards, which gives two. This is not balanced - a tier VI reward should feel like a reward, not a colossal disappointment. Maybe the players should rather the 50 rare souls or the 15 G/A souls, but they shouldn't hate the fact that they got skill shards. You mentioned recording how long it would take an average player to get a tier VI reward - its been weeks since my last, and I'm waiting on a 5* to drop randomly in order for me to get another. I expect it would be several weeks or even into next month (legendary from PVP). In the time it will take between the two level VI sacrifices, I will have earned 3 skill shards per week, plus any that drop from the daily quests. Currently that will have been 11 skill shards. Another week or two will bring it up to 12 or 15, which is about the time I expect to be ready for another tier VI sacrifice. My last one gave me two skill shards. If my next one does as well, then playing passively between the sacrifices will have given me four times the reward of the sacrifices itself.

That needs to be fixed.

first i have to say bort for president . we don't talk about an exponential growth of skillshards if you increase the skillshards for level 6 to 4-5 and the legendaries to 3. a tier 6 can happend approx. once in a month so i cannot see how this would affect our skillshardearning/and the legendaries that much.

right now i'm 100% with bort, 2 skillshards and 1 legendary are making me wanna throw my phone against the wall. and many feel this way, we have read this for months now. it's such a rare opportunity to make a tier 6 or a tier 7 sacrifice, we are exited every time and no reward should feel like a pain in the ass. i play since over a year religiously and i was able to make ONE level 7 so far. that says a lot.
it's completly okay if one reward is better than the other but the current differences in value are insane and are not grounded by logic. again: we can grind two skillshards in 3 days. but it will take us months for 50 rares or 20 g/a souls. you are right sparton, 50 rares doesn't help us that much if we have a deep roster, but most likely we will drop some 4* and 5* which will help us make new sacrifices and fill the vortex. right now the vortex is the best reward we can get. so the essence at all will help us a lot.

i'm really happy that you jumped in the discussion. you are famous to solve these problems very well. if we look into the history of the game we will find several similar problems (the 3* evo shards drops from LOL, or the xp runes from the normal level or the BNW drops). it took a while but you guys decided to fix it, and man i never heard a complain again regarding these topics. i bet if you adjust sacrifice in a sane way you will also never hear complains again. history teaches us that finding a compromise worked out fine so far, cannot see a reason why this shouldn't apply this time too :-)

keep on rocking

[Sparton_LOTB]

Any effort will satisfy me. When I say "I dont want (2) skillshards", it doesn't mean I don't want skillshards, its that I don't want the event (ie, sacrifice) I have spent weeks->month+ saving up for giving me the amount I make in less than a week by playing normally. Its just not balanced.

Well, the minimum you get at higher tiers means you'll have gotten other rewards, and the maximum Skill Shards if you only get Skill Shards will be higher than before, so I think we'll be happy with the result.

Well, here is the advantage of having a close relationship with your customers. You can crowdsource the reaction to your changes well in advance. Maybe we're all greedy and will never be satisfied, like you mentioned. Maybe there is a middle ground where we'd be happy with the split. You'll never know unless you try to ask your playerbase how they feel about it.

We've complained in numerous places throughout the forums about the lackluster VI/VII rewards (sometimes). You've acknowledged that its an issue. Perhaps you could be transparent with potential changes in the future so that we, the playerbase, gets a look at it so you can gauge our reaction.

A lot of people's initial responses to things can be wildly out of whack with the long term perception. To take a recent (if contentious) example, many people absolutely hated the idea of an extra-difficult character fragment event in Brave New World, but by the end of it even a lot of critics felt that this was actually what they were looking for in the game. Obviously we still have stability issues we're working through with BNW, and some people still didn't live the feature regardless, but it served it's purpose of establishing a different tier of events which rewards having really capable teams that can tackle new, challenging content, with an exclusive reward appropriate to the new demands.

That said, we're no stranger for having preliminary patch notes for certain things, and we can consider expanding that beyond just character and talisman tuning when the situation warrants.

i'm really happy that you jumped in the discussion. you are famous to solve these problems very well. if we look into the history of the game we will find several similar problems (the 3* evo shards drops from LOL, or the xp runes from the normal level or the BNW drops). it took a while but you guys decided to fix it, and man i never heard a complain again regarding these topics. i bet if you adjust sacrifice in a sane way you will also never hear complains again. history teaches us that finding a compromise worked out fine so far, cannot see a reason why this shouldn't apply this time too :-)

Yeah, the community perception is always important to us. It's just with some subjects it can take is time to digest everyone's reactions and compare it with our own perceptions (as developers and also as players), and/or to review the math in light of the fresh perspectives our players have.