With larger collections the odds of receiving duplicate items increases. With no real secondary market (for understandable reasons), the only available option is to sell excessive duplicate items to the store for a relatively small amount of gold. As a player's collection grows, this than becomes a disincentive for them to purchase chests with pizza. For a newer player, an epic chest purchase represents 150 pizza for 2 guaranteed epics (or better). 150 pizza could otherwise be traded for 750 gold, compared to the 100 gold Randimar's requires to purchase 2 specific Epic items. Thus, to a new player epic chests represent a potentially attractive deal to obtain epics. Now instead, consider a player that due to the size of the collection is more likely to receive at least one epic that they will sell. Now 150 pizza is getting them only 1 epic item and 20 gold (from selling the other epic), which makes purchasing chests a worse option than waiting for items in Randimar's, or grinding for random epics. I find this an odd monetization model for a free to play game as it discourages continued or mass purchases from established players. This goes against most of my understanding of successful monetization of a free to play game where most profits tend to come from a small pool of paying players (and an even smaller pool of large spenders). Proposal: Chests purchased with Pizza, and only these chests, would guarantee non-duplicate items. This wold require some logic to define what represents a "non-duplicate" item in terms of Card Hunter. However, players are also asking for similar logic so that they can also more easily sell their duplicate items, so in theory this could be reused for multiple purposes. You could insure that players got unique epic items until they had 1 of each, epic. After that it would insure purchased chests would get a player to 2 of each epic, and then 3 and so on.... Alternatively you could guarantee unique items until a player had 1 of each, and then make it random, though this still seems to impact long term monetization.
How about picking one of two opened chests instead? It would be hard to set rules governing items which are considered as better or worse. So let player decide maybe?
So if you opened the test server and had infinite pizza, you could collect every item in the game in minutes. Excellent!
I definitely see the logic behind your suggestion, however I can see the counter-argument that says your offer will make the game a pay2win game because eliminating much of the random element will mean the amount of chests needed to obtain most epics\legendaries decreases greatly and I'm not sure that's a path BM is willing to take.
