Sacrafice Reward Transparency and Balancing

[bort]

After my previous adventure into crowdsourcing the reward breakpoints (multiple the minimum tier to multiply the rewards, some tiers can only ever have 1 or 2 rewards), I wanted to do the same thing for the reward contents - however, I think that is basically an impossibility at this point.

So, my suggestion would be for NF to make the reward badges a little more transparent.

In the sacrifice rewards popup (top left of the sacrifice screen), for each badge that appears, show the minimum and maximum values for that badge. This will help people choose if they want to hold out for the next tier or if the current rewards are "good enough". Without hitting each tier individually, its difficult to see the difference between a grand and an exalted sacrifice.

This will help us, the userbase, give feedback to NF regarding the balancing of the reward tiers, which, in return, keeps us coming back and prevents us from being embittered by a bad sacrifice.

...

Speaking of bad sacrifice, I recently did a VI sacrifice and got one legendary soul. It was a four star dupe. Even if it was new, or a new five star, I had to sacrifice two five's and a few four's to get that reward.

Its a bad reward and should not have been an option. I get that you want a bit of rng involved, and thats fine, but the rewards for VI are clearly discrepant in value. 15 g/a souls feels like a bit of a distant second place after 50 reg souls. 1 legendary or 2 skillshards is a smack in the face.

I'm fine with one of those rewards being objectively better, but the remaining three should be about on par. Look at the potential reward breakdown:

50 reg souls = ~5 four star, 0.5 five star, plus the rewards from five 1500 dust sacrifices from all the three star characters. This is clearly the best reward
15 g/a souls = 1.5 four star, plus the rewards of ~two 1500 dust sacrifices from the three star characters. This is the second best, but very far behind
legendary soul (I don't know the max, but 1 is def the min) = 0.1 five star (per soul).
skill shard = skill shards are nice, but i've received two from this sacrifice, and thats way too few.

*fractions are given by percentage chance of obtaining that level

So my suggestion to balance this would be to make the bottom three (g/a. legendary, skill shard) feel approximately even so its not as much of a letdown. I'd also want to increase the rewards for them so they dont feel so far behind the top prize.

I think that 20-25 g/a souls would feel a bit better - you'll get an average of 2.5 level 4 out of it, with a slightly better chance of a five star. On top of that you'll have a bunch more dust to throw back into the machine - not as much as the top prize, but still doesn't feel like a letdown.

For legendary souls I think that 5 would be a good start. ~5% chance of a 5 star, and four more 4 star's for the pit. I could see have a variance of this, but I feel 10 would be far too many and would eclipse the top spot.

For skill shards I think a massive increase is necessary, especially at the rate that a dedicated player can obtain them. I can manage several a week, but a level VI sacrifice takes me months of obtaining souls to pull off. I think 15-20 skill shards here would feel like a decent reward.
--

Basically, for balancing, ask yourself (or, NF, ask your players) which gift they would like for free:

50 reg souls
15 g/a souls
1 legendary soul
2 skill shards

Then go back and check your numbers -they're not going to be balanced at all with those rewards. If you keep repeating the question while adjusting the rewards, you'll eventually find some sort of balance where the lesser values are more or less "even".

Rant over.

#MakeSacrificesGreatAgain

[slauki]

well i support every word you say here. i fight for months for equal sacrifice values but this topic doesn't seem too popular as it seems.
so yeah you farm 3 days for 2 skillshards and half a year for 50 rare souls. and both are the same reward for sacrifice VI, where is the logic there?

not even talking about the legendary souls. they are overvalued by the devs for some reason. in the end they will give you a random 4* >90% of the time. so really
no reason to be so scrooge with them especially when you take into account what you have to invest for a level 6/7 sacrifice...

hope this will be adjusted soon. shouldn't be too hard to do.

[T-Man]

Well said. Why is NF so damn tight with skill shards anyway? It will take 10 years to shard all these toons at this rate.

I think it would help team variety in the arena as well. It seems every other battle is the same team. Don't want to see nerfing either, but that is the path NF has chosen.

Tiers 6-7 should always drop numerous skill shards (I like you numbers) plus what ever souls imo. As you pointed out, it takes a very long time to build up toons for this level sacrifice.

[JJJ428]

As hard as it is to do level 6 and above sacrifice I think you might be to high with your numbers for the devs to ever agree. I think 4 legendary souls possibly 3 would be plenty and maybe 5-6 skill shards. Hoping for 15 skill shards for level 6 is crazy. I think asking for reasonable numbers so the rewards are a little balance is better not something where we want 20 some skill shards then it becomes very clear the other way what the best reward is. I think once you get to 5-6 skill shards some people would switch what is better depending on needs. I know I would take 6 skill shards over 50 souls almost everytime.

[Nicko]

As hard as it is to do level 6 and above sacrifice I think you might be to high with your numbers for the devs to ever agree. I think 4 legendary souls possibly 3 would be plenty and maybe 5-6 skill shards. Hoping for 15 skill shards for level 6 is crazy. I think asking for reasonable numbers so the rewards are a little balance is better not something where we want 20 some skill shards then it becomes very clear the other way what the best reward is. I think once you get to 5-6 skill shards some people would switch what is better depending on needs. I know I would take 6 skill shards over 50 souls almost everytime.

I agree. Those numbers would never happen - though 4 might.

But just did a Tier 6 - almost all 4 star toons including an AoS I leveled up to make tier 6.

The result?

One Legendary soul. An AoS.

Absolute BS...

[osiris0000]

I agree with everyone here. And i know there are many players keeping their dupes because of this current sacrifice meta.
1 legendary is slap in the face. Chance of screwing up with legendary soul and skillshards is %50, which is a high number for that level of sacrifice.

It is interesting to see not getting any response about this. We may send a mail to support for some reaction.

[Sparton_LOTB]

Well, Kaz wanted me to look into this for the next major release anyways, so we figure I should post a bit of our preliminary thoughts in here...

It's important to keep in mind three factors when looking at the sacrifice rewards:

• If you want to increase the relative quantities of something, higher essence will [almost] always give you more of that thing on average (with reaching higher sacrifice tiers an additional jump in average quantity)
• The different kinds of rewards within a tier are never intended to be equal to each other (ie some rewards are expected to be a "better" result than others within their tier)
• Certain rewards are far more valuable for some players than others

That first point is why I wouldn't be interested in showing the quantities... they're incredibly deceptive as to how much of a given reward you should expect to get. For example, you can get 5-10 Rare Souls from a Tier IV, and 10-15 Rare Souls from a Tier V. Someone could look at that and think that they're going to get 2x as many Rare Souls from doing Tier V sacrifices... but in reality, because Rare Souls are more likely to be a reward in Tier V than Tier IV, you're actually getting about 3x as many Rare Souls on average. This is true for nearly every* average reward quantity comparison you make from one tier to the next, and showing possible quantities would send the wrong message (and no, we're not going to tell you the odds of items, just like how we don't for other kinds of random reward distribution).

*No one I have seen has successfully surmised the cases where this isn't true, interestingly. Maybe someone has figured it out, but it hasn't been posted on the forums.

The funny thing is that Tier VI was originally not going to even have Rare Souls... and the only reason we figured it would be a good reward is if there was a crazy high quantity of them. But now that's what (some people) in the community want more than anything else! As such, while I can appreciate people wanting that reward (I too like opening many souls at once and seeing what I get), it's unrealistic to make a comparison of, for example, the average amount of essence you're going to get from that reward, because that reward possibility was specifically inflated.

Similarly, it's important to keep in mind that you're never going to get characters like Navigator Eddie, or Cyborg Eddie, or Vampire Hunter Eddie from Rare Souls... and long term players are typically going to be missing those rarer Gunners and Assassins due to the relative rarity of Rare Gun/Assassin Souls. Heck, many of them have every other Warrior, Magus and Sentinel you could get from Rare Souls (except possibly right now for the new Valkyries... but that's only because they're weeks old). As such, if you're looking to finally score Rainmaker Eddie, all the Rare Souls in the world are meaningless... except for the possible conversion to getting Rare Gun/Assassin Souls (or Legendary Souls). And if you look at the average rewards a sacrifice could get (insomuch as what sacrifice it would get you), of course it's going to be less value than what you put in; any other possibility makes it so you can just infinitely sacrifice and get everything, which would obviously defeat the purpose of having long term goals of collecting and equipping characters.

Ultimate, as Nicko surmised, we're not interested in a crazy arms race of just inflating the rewards of the other categories. When slauki brought up the discrepency with Rare Gun/Assassin Souls, we agreed, because we also felt that many people were just waiting out for Event Souls anyways, so increasing the quantities of Rare Gun/Assassin Souls to the amount we consider relative to the value of regular Rare Souls made sense. But 20 skill shards is crazy making, and 5 Legendary Souls for sacrificing a bunch of 4 stars is so much higher value than stuff like PVP rewards (both weekly and limited time events) that I don't even know where to start. These sacrifice rewards are additional rewards you can earn; assuming every new avenue of earning a resource will 2x the quantity of that resource you're getting over time before that is setting yourself up for disappointment.

---

That said, what we are looking at is making it so certain sacrifice tiers would give you more than one loot roll. We would keep the average quantities of most items roughly the same, but it'll make it possible to get multiple Legendary Souls (albeit even more rarely than getting Legendary Souls now), and you could get stuff like Rare Souls in high quantities, it's just more likely you'd get a mix of the rewards of a tier instead of a single sacrifice giving a high quantity of that one thing. So maybe a Tier VI reward could have 20 Rare Souls + 5 Rare Gun/Assassin Souls + a Legendary Soul, or 2 Skill Shards + 5 Rare Gun/Assassin Souls [exact quantities still TBD].

[Bradata]

I think that a long time player like me would say: "I don't need any more toons, I need more Skill Shards!"
I would really like to see some more shards from higher tiers but then this is just me.

[slauki]

What sparton said....

wow, thank you very much for the detailed insight sparton, it's much appreciated. sure the perspective of devs and players are different, but nice to hear, that you are looking into this further.

okay that's a fair argument that the really rare chars drop from g/a and legendaries, so they are somewhat more valuable. but if you take the essence value into account i would take 50 rares and 25 g/a over 1 legendary every single time, even if i miss the 5% chance for a 5* jackpot. even if it's not your goal to make the rewards equal, it would be cool if you could make it somewhat more equal...1 legendary and two skillshards are really poor. as said 2-3 days of farming compared to months of farming.

really like the idea of mixed rewards, that would prevent lot of frustration. looking forward to the adjustments, and i hope you will find a good solution that satisfies the most players and the most devs ;-)

cheers \m/

[bort]

Hi Sparton,

Thanks so much for jumping in on this.

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

Now, depending on how the player spends their trooper points, they could go for G/A souls instead of skill shards, but it doesn't really matter.

I can understand that some rewards are absolutely going to be "better", but there has to be some line where the "bad" rewards feel less like a kick in the pants. 1 legendary as a tier VI reward for, as you put it, a handful of 4* characters (handful being 10, of course, with some of them leveled or sharded, to hit the 20k minimum threshold for a VI sacrifice), is absolutely a kick in the pants given that the legendary soul has an 85% chance of being a 4*. The only way i'd be happy with a tier VI reward being one soul is if it were guaranteed to be a 5*, because you're either sacrificing 10 4*'s, or a combination of 5*'s and 4*'s to hit that minimum amount required.

As for skill shards, the current reward is 2, I think? I'm not sure if its a variable amount, but I've been given 2 shards multiple times from a VI reward. That is approximately 5 days worth of playing for me, and it just isn't worth it. Most toons take 8 shards to max, and some take 14 or 15 to max out. Each eddie takes over 20. 2 shards just is not worth it at all for a reward of that level. For giving up 10 4*'s, i'd really want to have the chance to max out a toon I could possibly use, or maybe even two toons.

So, as a final point, the rewards don't all have to be great, or equal, but they should at least feel *rewarding*.