[Suggestion] Epic chests need serious changes!

I've got absolutely no Legendaries this week (at Randimar's), and I wanted some badly, especially from the new expansion That's why devil compelled me to buy an epic AotA chest. Guess what did I get for 150 pizza? A second copy of Blackhammer and Axahot's Shield. I wouldn't buy them even for 50 gold, they are totally useless!
Let's think a bit. 150 pizza = 750 gold. Two epics cost 1000 gold at Randimar's, and you see what you buy (nobody is going to sell you crap for your money). Why should anyone buy the epic chest? Just because he has excess money to dump? Buying two random epics for the price of 1.5 good and playable epics is just stupid. Oh yes, there is a chance of legendary, right. I don't know how good is the chance, but the legendaries aren't always better than the good epics (and sometimes they're even worse than the good commons).
I guess the developers want to earn some money Having a stupidly ineffective option is going to reduce their earning. Personally I will never buy an epic chest until something get changed - and, believe me, I am a true fanatic of the game, and I'm buying all more-or-less decent items at Randimar's. Here are some suggestions for the epic chests:

1. Reduce the price to 70-100 pizza. This isn't going to make the chests uber-popular, but at least there will be a sense in buying them. Most times people will still get the crap, but accidental good items may compensate for that.
2. Immediately exclude the intelligent weapons from the tables. All people with money already have them, and, believe me, they don't want a second copy Plus, the items are scenario rewards, and I guess, they should be exclusive and unique.
3. Make the chests legendary (with increased price, of course). This isn't going to make the game "pay to win": even having all the legendaries increases the chance of winning just slightly. At least people will have a chance to get the items they need.

 

It does feel really weird to have gotten extra copies of two of the intelligent weapons. I don't think I will ever use them in SP or MP, except when they show up in a league, and being intelligent they should really be completely unique... shouldn't they?

 

Yes. Chests are for people who want to buy a collection instead of working for it. Also useful as prizes for things like leagues.

I think it's about a 1/4 chance that one of the Epics will upgrade to Legendary (so 1/8 for each). I opened an epic chest just now (league prize) and got CCEEL from it.

Now that we have a way to earn pizza in the game, I think the prices and contents of the pizza chests are fine as is; each first place ranking will get you nearly enough pizza for an epic chest if you already have all the league figures (besides the 2 chests that are part of the prize).

(36 gold for a single random Common item is pretty lame, though.)

 

I think the real problem is that you can't work towards collecting specific items. Everything is random. Chests are random, and Randimars is random.
Random is fun for a couple months. But after awhile, randomness destroys your motivation to play.

 

I am not talking about prizes. Prizes don't cost you money; if you think they aren't good enough, you just avoid the challenge I am talking about buying the chests for pizza.

I don't know what is CCEEL, but congrats anyway! Did you collect the statistics? How many chests did you open?

Again, I can only applaud your skill if you consider the leagues "a way to earn pizza in game", but, you know, everybody cannot win Most people lack the skill, the cards, or just the time and motivation. And the leagues will cost some pizza soon, so the number of players will tremendously decrease. BTW, we aren't talking about the prizes here at all!

 

Yeah, I believe we should be able to craft the items that we want.

 

Buying chests is a bad deal, and should probably continue to be a bad deal.
I buy the 18 gp chests when my gp balance hits more than I can expect to spend at Randimar's in the next few months. It's the only place to dump gold that gives you a tiny chance of getting something nice. If you're not overloaded with gold, don't do it. The overwhelming majority of what you'll get will be the same commons and uncommons you get from playing, and are probably already overstocked with.
The only advantage I see to buying the Artifact Chest (36 gp) is that if you're pressed for time you can throw away gold twice as fast, and sell off your excess items in half the time.

 

Why should any shop offer a deal that's obviously bad?

 

For people who are bad at math, I suppose. It is possible to get something great from a chest, just as it is possible to buy a lottery ticket and win millions. Possible, but highly unlikely. Some people like gambling even if they know the odds are against them, so I guess it's for them.
For the gold piece chests, it's the only gold dump in the game unless they start selling Randimar resets.

 

Yeah, I use them as gold sinks even though I hate gambling. I've gotten some nice stuff, mostly dross. Blown about 45,000 gold so far.

 

I don't like gambling either, but I do the same. I spent down to about 45k (so I'm guessing I spent about 12k) when AotA came out. I got a few nice items, but paid much more than they would have cost at Randimar's. There really just isn't anything else to do with a big pile of gold in this game.

 

With all due respect, they do need to make money to support the game. So if the chests offer a bad deal, we'll stop buying them. And if we stop buying them, they have a much smaller income stream.

With an estimated Legendary drop rate of .2% for a common chest, I'd have to farm hundreds of stages to get a Legendary. Assuming I've done my math right, I'd have to go through 115 of them for my chance to have any Legendary drop approach 50%. For that same chance through buying chests, I'd spend roughly $2.50.

All that being said, I don't think Ector isn't pricing in the value of being able to choose which of the items he can purchase at Randimar's. For a Legendary out of an epic chest, it could be any one out of the 250 or so in the game. But for the $13 (=~2500 gold), he can be certain to get that one (if he wants it).

Changes I'd recommend:

1. Guarantee a number of Legendaries be available in Randimar's each week, say 5. This will create an incentive for people to at least log in once a week to check Randimar's. And Ector was shafted to get no Legendaries at all, much less the chance to consider whether to buy the one he wanted. Besides, there's always the chance of impulse purchases.
2. Provide additional segmentation to the chest purchases. For example, Magnificent/Epic Chests which will produce items levels 1-8 or 8-16 with the same applicable guarantees. And, Magnificent/Epic Chests that have 0% chance of pulling AoTA items similar to the seller that offers items only from the AoTA set. They added 44 new legendary items with AoTA so now I'm roughly 15% to 20% less likely to get Mullik's Blisterstaff, Chartwell's Ring, Azgul's Orb or Brin's Storm Locket in what were already diminishingly small chances.

 

I have no idea how many pizza chests are sold, so I don't know the impact on their income stream. I suspect the income stream is a trickle because most people will decide it's a bad deal after buying a few, but I'm often wrong about what people will do. I think much of this is due to their desire that CH not be seen as a Pay-to-Win game.
I still like the Restock Randimar's idea. There are so many worthless legendaries in the game that getting one from a chest doesn't always qualify as a good thing.
I also like both your change suggestions.

 

I have heard noobs vent in the lobby chat after spending money on chests. It's a trap, and it has to be to avoid pay2win, and I don't see any way it can be otherwise.

I think pizza chests are a quick way to alienate inexperienced players who might otherwise spend that money on treasure hunts and club membership and enjoy the game for a long time. I don't have any special insight into the game's income streams, however, so who knows how it all pans out in the end. I assume the devs look at this sort of question regularly. *shrug*

 

Maybe if they were slot machines instead of chests it would be more obvious.

 

I posted something similar a few months back.

Prior to the expansion I had maxed out roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of my epic items, meaning I needed no more of them in my collection.

So at that point, buying a base chest gives me roughly a 50% chance of getting an epic item I'll just sell back to randimar's at a loss (when compared to just converting the pizza to gold). So essentially, epic chests become worse as your collection grows, and a larger collection will also correlate to the type of player buying chests. So this system quickly encourages paying players to quit buying chests. I like the way they released the new AotA chests, but I expect that sales of them will quickly taper off as well.

If they can't make money off of selling chests to the smallish group that would buy them, that leaves them with selling expansions as treasure hunts. Players can moan about the evils of pay2win all they want, but these types of games need continuing revenue streams to fund additional development. AotA is clearly a trial at selling future content development, which is probably needed because chests aren't selling as well as they could. I hope they make enough for it to be profitable going forward, but I don't think the existing model for chests is helping as much as it could.

 

Do we have any data on how well chests are selling? Or how many people are playing the game in general?

 

Nothing solid no. MP had been sort of dying down a bit before AotA released. Various high ranked players weren't seen around any more, and general numbers were lower. Forum activity was slowing down too.

Typically if a game is a wild success you'll also see outages for adding in hardware (to deal with higher players loads), and also start to see new faces as the development team expands. Haven't really see that either.

Hopefully AotA, and the new league system can help retain the new players and the people returning to try out the expansion.

 

Chests cost too much and give too little. Two epic chests will cost you roughly 10$ and give you 4 random epics. On the other hand, if you convert pizza to gold, you can get ~1500-2000 gold which is enough to buy ~3-4 epic items of your choice (assuming that they show up at randimar's).

I assume my chances of getting something I want from an epic chest VS waiting for things to drop at the store and buying what I want... are far from equal.

*EDIT* Yada yada. Prepare for me to go a little off topic.

Costumes are neat and all, but 80 pizza feels like too much. I can't imagine spending money to customize my avatar in any other game, at least not when it's the same as TWO treasure hunts. It would be great if some figures went on sale once in a while. Currently I just have no interest, but if you can get people to LOOK at the costumes and WANT a certain one, I think you could get some more pizza out of them.

Speaking of which, treasure hunts are the best value, especially if you double up by getting club membership first. Game content is great, cheap epics are better!

I'm not entirely sure on the details, but it would be very enticing if the Treasure Hunts reset once a month and guaranteed a random epic item. I think you could get a lot of club membership bought that way, even if you have to pay 20-40 pizza each to "reset" them with epic treasure.