Trickster and Chopper Event and Events in General

[drrchmnd]

Greetings and Salutations Everyone,

Today I am going to address my frustration with events and related issues. Yes, this is also a rant.


Events are fun and cool and such yes??? Absolutely not when they are effectively only being used to nickle and dime us. And the just ended event involving a red trickster and a yellow chopper, is a grade AAA prime example. Let us start with the details involving this event. Yes I have the trickster but I don't have the chopper. There wasn't any way in heck I was going to spend that much time playing or spend that much ironite. To those that do have both great. I am going to wager you are in a very real minority of people in this game. And yes I would like to know how many choppers got collected via this event.

7 days to collect shards in the arena for 2 characters.
Sands of War regenerate at 1 per hour with a max of 10. Bonus sands and such stack on top but that is it.
Trickster costs 350 red fragments.
Chopper costs 500 yellow fragments.
The average drop is 5 fragments per win in the arena. With occasional drops of 10.
Both types of fragments drop but only one or the other with the majority being Tricksters. The ratio looked something like 4:1 but I am not sure.

Let's start with how many wins are needed to collect enough fragments. So (350+500)/5=170 (Yes I am going to average this out a bit and I am going to use worst case ie 5 fragments at a time and such.)
So this gives us an absolute minimum of 170 rounds to collect 850 fragments. Now no one wins 100% of the time so lets add in a 80% win 20% loss ratio to this. That will add ~42 more rounds for a new total of 212 rounds in the arena.

Ok so if we play it 212 times we should get both characters, right? Nope. I am guessing the drop ratio for the chopper character was around 1:4. Meaning for every 4 fights 1 should be yellow and 3 red. Basically its yellow 25% of the time. So 25% of 212 is 53 which would give us ~265 yellow and ~795 red. Based on all of this (and not taking into account fragments also dropped in 10s) to get 500 yellow fragments requires ~420 wins.

So ~420 wins in 7 days is 60 fights a day. With perfect timing you can get 27 sands of war max in 24 hours. 24 from the 1 per hour regen and 3 from daily challenges. And you could one time buy 30 sands of war for 45 ironite. But if you buy it sands of war won't regenerate until they are used so you have to burn it as soon as you buy it for maximum benefit. So let's ignore details like sleep and so on and figure out the ironite cost.
sands of war from regen : 168
one time: 30
total of 198 sands of war for 45 ironite. Round to 200 for simplicity and that means we need 220 more sands. 10 sands means we need to buy 22 refills which are 30 ironite so 660 ironite.

Putting it all together means to feasible get both characters in the past event you have to fight 60 times a day in the arena. This is going to cost 705 ironite for additional sands of war. And the one thing not taken into account in this is time. 10 rounds of the arena takes what about 20 minutes or so. 6 batches of 10 at 20 minutes it let's see 2 hours or so. Plus the daily stuff and so we are looking at about 3 hours.


So what does it all mean...... The last event was a bit on the ridiculous side as far as time and ironite costs. 14 hours or so over the course of 7 days spent just in the arena to possibly get enough fragments for both characters. And the amount of ironite is on the redonkulous side as well. Can't get that back in one week unless you have BNW or Lord o Light dungeons to complete for the first time.

About the only thing decent about it was most of the casual players should have gotten the trickster without much difficulty.

Past that good freaking job to set up an event to nickle and dime you. So far this is the absolute best one of those. Most people aren't going to break it down to figure out what it would really take to complete it. The one completely impressive item is you weren't selling the fragments from the beginning. So you couldn't start off with 100+ Chopper fragments for 500 ironite.


And now for part two.

So how many new bugs or previously fixed bugs came back because of the last event? When are those bugs actually going to be fixed? Are the devs and coders and such ever going to get adequate time to vet a patch/update/event to see what breaks? And then get the time to fix it before it goes live?

And now we have the Halloween patch that starts today. Should probably look at it.

Well now a brand new character that can be purchased if you have enough gold and you don't even have to work for it. Oh but wait your going to do the skull dungeons anyway. So what's the drop rate going to be. 8 dungeons that can be done once a day more or less. 7 days to do it so can run through the skull dungeons for 56 chances to get fragments. Yeah I am willing to wager you are probably only going to get about 1/2 of the needed fragments for the yellow undead thingy from skull dungeons. Which makes sense since you can buy 250 for 750 ironite.

And this is coming off of an event where a lot of players were probably buying a lot of sands of war, so they probably don't have enough ironite even with the 2 one time purchases for gold. Yup nickle and dime.

Yes, this is really becoming a bit inane. And here we are, just wanting the game to play like it should and bugs getting fixed and staying fixed.

Top that off with who is starting to get bored and burned out on all the events? Because I know I am starting to. Where a continuation of the story with events tied to it would just be awesome. But this schedule of virtually weekly events where they all require significant amounts of time and resources including sands of war/time, ironite, or $ to buy them is really getting old.

It also sounds like they need a story writer since it isn't going anywhere.

And enough is enough. Good Day.

[mikus666]

Calculations seem pretty spot on to how the week went for me. Good post.

[JJJ428]

I would like to disagree with some of the calculations and the last event. I thought the arena event was one of the best ever probably 2nd favorite after the immortal event which probably nothing will ever top that one. But this one was great in not only could you get trickster and chopper fragments but rare, G/A, and legendary frags as well. Also the free SOW you get is 189 with what you accumulate and daily achievements. If you look at most of the threads for the gunner chopper it seemed it took somewhere in the realm of 225-250 wins for most people to get him. Were some more unlucky sure might have taken them quite a bit more. But if you look at the 189+30 from the one time deal that gets you to 229 which is pretty darn close, add in a few refills or low level sacrifice and I think most people would get him. These things should not be easy that's what makes them special. If you could just get any character without any work what would be the point. The issues with the event were that they put an update a few days before that really glitched a lot of the battles and made battling difficult so that could have been planned out a lot better but the event it self was great.

I like the ideas of these events and the devs have done a great job of balancing things as much as they can. There are new players and there are end game players. The issue is people look at the reward or work involved for some of these things and think its a joke but you seem to forget about the other type of player from you. Case in point with this current event there is a lot of reasonable priced deals, I think the ironite ones and the daily frag purchases aren't bad. Maybe they are too steep for some of the newer players but then those aren't for them. Then there is the class specific legendaries that are very steep. Those deals are for the end game players who are maybe missing one or two specific toons and have 400 million gold. That way they can blow through some of their resources. Just like some of the end game players are begging for some sort of Iron coin sink from the devs right now. I am sure they will come up with some deal just for them and it will be some item that costs 100K of iron coins. The casual player will look at it and think that its crazy while the end game player might think "phew only 100K" that's probably gmac who might be a millionaire by now.

In closing I just like to say this is a F2P game where peoples jobs are tied to it making money. If it doesn't make money they won't have jobs to work on this and if they don't have jobs then nothing gets updated. The events are not for all players, if an event or deal doesn't suit you or your play style its easy just don't participate. I think there are some complaints people can make about this game but events are not one of them.

[Majice]

I worked very hard to get the Chopper character. Over 300 matches played almost 300 wins and yes I got fragments of other souls and 2 skill shards. The problem is the amount of time and matches won and still only got 435 fragments for the Chopper. I waited and waited for the 50 to come and it never did. 3 Tricksters-3! Very frustrated for the amount of time and iron given up with nothing to show for it. 3 3 star characters and repeat characters in the other souls. I think of the amount of time that some people spent on the contest and come up short is terrible. I think if you played over 300 matches you should have been rewarded for the effort.

[LandCrusher70]

I must’ve been on the low end of drop quantities.

I hit exactly 500 Chopper Fragments at 271 wins. Coincidentally I had 1050 Trickster Fragments (3x Tricksters).

I did however have one 50x yellow fragment drop.

In any case, it sucked grinding those Fragments out and I can understand how many players would not have been able to collect all 500 Fragments needed for Old Man Chopper.

[The Educated fool]

I worked very hard to get the Chopper character. Over 300 matches played almost 300 wins and yes I got fragments of other souls and 2 skill shards. The problem is the amount of time and matches won and still only got 435 fragments for the Chopper. I waited and waited for the 50 to come and it never did. 3 Tricksters-3! Very frustrated for the amount of time and iron given up with nothing to show for it. 3 3 star characters and repeat characters in the other souls. I think of the amount of time that some people spent on the contest and come up short is terrible. I think if you played over 300 matches you should have been rewarded for the effort.

Yep, that was my experience with this event too... I had fun grinding for the chance for skill shards (of which I got 4) and souls (of which I got my share, though they didn't yield anything significant), but it was very frustrating not to get Chopper in the end. I never saw a single 50 pack... of anything... in 297 wins. 460/500 for Chopper at the end, and a ridiculous 1175/350 for Trickster.

My bad luck for these events is somewhat legendary, but nevertheless, the drops here seem off to me. I think it would be a nice gesture to make the red fragments convertible into yellow ones (rather than *cough* Precious), albeit at a reduced rate... hell, even 5:1--5 reds for every one yellow would be better than nothing. I posted this idea in another thread, but it seems to have disappeared.

Thoughts, anyone?

[GotN]

it was very frustrating not to get Chopper in the end. I never saw a single 50 pack... of anything... in 297 wins. 460/500 for Chopper at the end, and a ridiculous 1175/350 for Trickster.

Omg this is just ridiculous! Good, that i didn’t hunt for it any more the last hours (drinking some beers with couple of friend was far better!). Could have made another 100 wins and maybe wouldn’t have got him.

Making the red fragments convertible into yellows would be great. Would be a recognition to much devotedly players who didn’t have the luck to pull the chopper! To Sparton and Kaz: could you make that possible? Would be fantastic!
\m/

[Wyphy]

I am a newer player (~2 months), so take that into account.

I did quick napkin math and also figured I'd need about 250-300 wins to get the Chopper.
I did have a lot of SOW as I only ever did the 1/day for the reward.

Problem I ran into was that being a newer player, I cannot compete in the arena; not any good characters.
The best characters I've got are 4 x 4*-80, but on day two, almost all I could find was teams of 2 x 5* x 50+ and 2 x 4* 80, or better. I've no chance to beat them.
Would only get 5 or so attacks per day, so didn't move down the ranks.
On about 3rd day I knew I had no chance for either.
On Thursday I realized that if I changed my defense to my lowest (2* L23 Eddie only) I should get more attacks, moving me down, so I could at least get more wins for frags to convert, but even that didn't net me very many attacks. I see some others here had that same idea.
I'm going to just leave my defense that way just so I can work on the Eternity souls.

This new event hasn't started out much better.
Run the best XP grinding mission I can see (Soulless March, Hard) and after about 55-60 runs I've gotten 2 x 5 fragment drops.
With that math, it's going to take about 500 runs to get enough for a soul.
Even if I had that much time, that's a lot of work for a 1* idol or heart. True, I did get a 3* idol the other day, but the other 6-8 were all 1*.
Maybe there's some secret I'm missing, some special mission that awards frags more than others.
I guess it's really just supposed to be a small bonus for new players, as I can't see any incentive for vets to run the story missions.

The Undead part isn't so bad, yet anyway; got 30 frags out of 8 Skull runs from my 6 available. This is pretty much not possible for me either, especially as I spent a shedload on expanding character and talisman slots just before the event started.
Oh well, more frags to convert.

So, okay, I'm still a newer player, and the PVP event wasn't really designed for me.
I have gotten a couple decent characters, and now a Pharaoh, so I suppose I can't really complain too much.
Still, not sure how I can ever get the last 5 frags for a Legendary soul, since they only come from mission challenges, yet no more of the mission challenges award legendary frags. Not sure I'm really worried about it anyway, since I did buy the one lifetime Legendary and got a dupe.
How shit is that? I had about 5 out of the 60-ish characters available and I got a dupe!

I'm a fairly casual player, and always will be.
I don't have the time or money to be a top tier competitor.
I dropped $45-$50 the first week in the game for the two newbie bundles. Coming from a MMO background, that's about 3 month's worth of spending.
I got a lot more game for my money with the MMOs.

Now that I think about it, it's definitely making me think twice about spending any more money here.
This came a long way from where I thought I was going to go.

[Askora]

I am a newer player (~2 months), so take that into account.

I did quick napkin math and also figured I'd need about 250-300 wins to get the Chopper.
I did have a lot of SOW as I only ever did the 1/day for the reward.

Problem I ran into was that being a newer player, I cannot compete in the arena; not any good characters.
The best characters I've got are 4 x 4*-80, but on day two, almost all I could find was teams of 2 x 5* x 50+ and 2 x 4* 80, or better. I've no chance to beat them.
Would only get 5 or so attacks per day, so didn't move down the ranks.
On about 3rd day I knew I had no chance for either.
On Thursday I realized that if I changed my defense to my lowest (2* L23 Eddie only) I should get more attacks, moving me down, so I could at least get more wins for frags to convert, but even that didn't net me very many attacks. I see some others here had that same idea.
I'm going to just leave my defense that way just so I can work on the Eternity souls.

This new event hasn't started out much better.
Run the best XP grinding mission I can see (Soulless March, Hard) and after about 55-60 runs I've gotten 2 x 5 fragment drops.
With that math, it's going to take about 500 runs to get enough for a soul.
Even if I had that much time, that's a lot of work for a 1* idol or heart. True, I did get a 3* idol the other day, but the other 6-8 were all 1*.
Maybe there's some secret I'm missing, some special mission that awards frags more than others.
I guess it's really just supposed to be a small bonus for new players, as I can't see any incentive for vets to run the story missions.

The Undead part isn't so bad, yet anyway; got 30 frags out of 8 Skull runs from my 6 available. This is pretty much not possible for me either, especially as I spent a shedload on expanding character and talisman slots just before the event started.
Oh well, more frags to convert.

So, okay, I'm still a newer player, and the PVP event wasn't really designed for me.

This is exactly why I made the suggestion that, if they do a similar event in the future, they should award the 3* character frags based solely on battles played (win or lose). That way, new players would have a chance at getting art least one of the exclusive characters.

[Bobby2613-8511]

I'm a new player too. Gave all I could, only got 260 fragments for the chopper. I won't lose any time for that BS next PvP event. Will play my 50 troopers and PvP casually as usual. Not worth the time sink.