123500-credd-system

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I've never felt like the devs designed content to persuade me to buy CREDD, so I also haven't really felt pressured. But I did think early on that the number of goldsinks, and the high cost of many of them, was a play to get us buying CREDD. The most obvious ones to me were dye costs (not just purchasing, but applying them to gear) and some of the housing-related costs. I would say it's virtually impossible to build the plot many of us want to build without buying CREDD or being incredibly market-savvy, as well as willing to exploit max profit from people/situations. It could be done, and I'm sure many people build cool houses without resorting to CREDD. But I felt overall it was too much, and gold income based on gameplay was too low. Nowadays it's not so bad. It seems, overall, that they're trending to mitigate some of these costs.


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No, the core argument here is that someone else already had it. According to your argument that anything you get from the AH that improves your position is buying a game advantage, the entire AH is a scheme to give game advantages. I just don't buy that. I might buy the argument about epic riding, since that comes from a vendor, has a set price, and isn't coming from another player who already proved it's not that big of a deal. Seriously, I haven't even been trying to get them, and I've got like ten partial primal patterns in my inventory from shiphands. They're not hard to come by.

It's actually not too bad. You don't even need all that information. All you'd need to know (and just running off the numbers you have here) is 10 minutes per clear (thus 6 per hour, thus 30 PPPs in 5 hours, thus one bag per 5 hours), versus the 4-ish bags per CREDD. So 20 dollars is, if economics is to be trusted, considered by the player base to be equivalent to roughly 20-ish hours of playtime (let's call it a day). This assumes a vacuum, though. If more CREDD users want to buy the PPPs rather than grind, the price rises as the demand rises, thus meaning you can buy less bags, thus meaning you'll be getting less than a day of playtime for your CREDD. If less CREDD users want to buy the PPPs, the price falls as supply outruns demand, making a CREDD worth more than a day of playtime. Therefore, if you are of the opinion that 20$ is too little to replace one day of Shiphand grinding, then CREDD is presently worth less than you think it is.

Except for two things: -If you buy it from the AH, your CREDD has to be worth enough to outweigh the work involved. Right now, a CREDD is worth (according to Ildur) less than 15 plat. That may buy you a PVP set. At the same time, how fast can you grind up 15 plat? Do you consider yourself at a distinct disadvantage if you can or can't? That's why the source is important. Without regulation, essentially, we're setting our own prices. A PVP set on the AH might cost 10 gold, it might cost 100 plat, but it was put together by a player who found it relatively easy and worth his time. The gameplay distinction in the match may change, but then again, that distinction doesn't care if you bought a PVP set with CREDD, plat, or had it given to you by a guildmate. You can't buy a game advantage that isn't already easily available to other people who didn't need real money to get it. -PVP gear, at least the first tier, is actually purchasable from a vendor.


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So it's OK with you if, as long as it's possible for us to get the same thing through gameplay, they started to sell Legendaries in a cash shop? :P


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This has made a VERY drastic assumption, that Player Y decided to walk into a BG with no gear exclusively because he had no CREDD and thus no other way to get gear. That's what I'm saying. At the very least, from zero, the scenario would be: Player X buys a full suit of PVP gear with plat bought with real money. Player Y buys a full suit of PVP gear with plat earned from playing the game. Why would we assume that someone is walking into PVP without PVP gear because he didn't buy CREDD? That's exactly the distinction I'm making here, that you absolutely don't need CREDD to get that gear. How much time do you think was saved by doing that, if we're assuming Player Y then dedicates himself to just grinding up plat to buy his gear? And we're forgetting that Player Y can literally join a guild that suits him up in top PVP gear for nothing but being a guildie. That is also possible.


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I was getting pretty badly smeared in my unruned PvP blues. Heck my runed pre-Dungeon PvE gear was better. Adding runes to my PvP gear makes a world of difference.

My alt hit 50 about a month ago and while she had earned more plat than my previous two 50's it was "only" 6p. That's not enough buy PvP blues and get them runed out appropriately. Of course being at 50 she had quite a few more options for generating IG cash. But since I don't play her a lot she's still hovering around that 6p mark :lol:


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The bit in red there made me LOLOL. Let's not call it a day because only the hardcoriest of the hardcore are going to spend 20 hours straight farming the same content at a rate of 10 minutes per run. That's bot-level farming, not idly having fun piddling around. You don't have time to piddle if you plan to have that gear before Drop 20. OR, you can circumvent that 20 hours of farming for 20 dollars. So the conversion is that for a buck, you can circumvent an hour of farming. Do you value your free time more highly than $1/hr? If the answer is yes, then by your own argument you'd be better off paying cash instead of farming for PPPs. And by the way, let's not skip the last step of actually calculating the average to obtain a piece of legendary gear because it lets you know very clearly who is actually going to be getting this gear in practice. If the odds of getting a legendary gear drop from one of these boxes is 5%--which, by the way, is almost certainly an overestimate because Jabbithole hasn't picked one up in >60 trials--then the average number of boxes you need is 20. If each 20 dollars of cash or 20 hours of farming gets you ~4 boxes, then on average you're going to need to repeat that process 5 times. So the actual on average cost of what you're after is $100 per piece of gear, or 100 hours of farming vet shiphands. But wait, we're not done! That gear is randomized with respect to armor category and/or class, and soulbound. Of the Titian legendaries in Jabbithole, 10% are weapons (odds of being the right class, 1/6); 60% are armor (odds of being the right class, 1/3); and 30% are gear. So the odds of you being able to actually use it is about 50%, leaving aside whether the stats make sense or match your preferred role, which would only happen with still lower odds. So the average cost of a legendary item that you can actually use is about $200 per piece of gear, or 200 hours of farming vet shiphands. And that is the problem with this perspective here:

Is it technically possible to earn enough PPPs by just running veteran shiphands so that you can obtain that gear? Sure, it's possible. All it will take is 200 hours of farming on average, so I hope you don't think your free time is at all valuable. If you spend an hour every day farming for it, on average you should have a piece of that gear 7 months from now. Better get started, see you in October when you can start going after your next piece. Or you can do the exact same thing without any farming at all, just add cash. Heck, at the cap-limited rate of one CREDD per day, if you can afford to drop the $600 maximum on CREDD you can pick up ~3 pieces of usable legendary gear per month, on average. Cash can buy you a faster route through the endgame by a factor of 20. Sorry, when a rich player can get an edge in 3 months that will take a poor player 5 years to equalize, that's P2W whether it's possible for both to eventually get to the same place or not. Edited for clarity.


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Ok so you found a hair to split. Selling statted gear in a cash shop is uncool, especially end-game gear. Is it P2W? Arguable. It's definitely swinging into what I'd call "unfair". I'm not happy with Legendaries dropping from the PPP gamble boxes. If making them accessible to casuals was the intent then having them be super rare content drops would have been more appropriate. Hopefully when Contracts land, they'll be removed from the gamble box loot table.


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