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Old RNG Boxes Better?


wefhqweig

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Looking at these "RNG Boxes" or trove, is it not just a more money hungry version of trove? Sure, it has aspects of both, but neither of their benefits, no consolation currency you could save up and just buy what you wanted, and no guaranteed crits after around 30 attempts. Of course they depend on luck and are/were worth it for some, but for the average, less fortunate player the traditional RNG boxes were better value in my opinion. This, like trove, just promotes gambling, and before some white knight says "It's your choice to buy those boxes" come on now, we know the point of this RNG design is to manipulate enough people into gambling and spending as much as they can in the hopes of getting the amazing rewards.

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This RNG box is just an out-of-season Trove, with less benefits. At least they don't take away Daily Dash with potential venture tokens when the box is around.

 

Also, the box gives no pity currency where you can exchange for goodies (the coin is only to get another box). It is quite a disappointment to outfit collectors like me, cuz the box introduces no new outfits, and the outfit chests are in the rarest pouches, instead of 2-star like Troves.

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I think I prefer these Trove like boxes over the traditional RNG boxes. No benefits of Trove, but for every 10 you get 1 free box. I tried 100 boxes and felt my RNG was much better with these than previous boxes; however, RNG is RNG so maybe I got lucky this time. 

 

Gambling is promoted in any game that offers loot boxes. It's an unfortunate thing that has become the norm and won't go away for a good while. You can see my results below:

 

 

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1 hour ago, Eckogen said:

I think I prefer these Trove like boxes over the traditional RNG boxes. No benefits of Trove, but for every 10 you get 1 free box. I tried 100 boxes and felt my RNG was much better with these than previous boxes; however, RNG is RNG so maybe I got lucky this time. 

 

Gambling is promoted in any game that offers loot boxes. It's an unfortunate thing that has become the norm and won't go away for a good while. You can see my results below:

 

I've only tried just over 30 boxes, no legendary and no good rare crit, but the few friends I asked all got something good. So., if the odds are better then I won't complain if I just was the unlucky one this time. But, it does feel bad not having the guaranteed crit, or 30 of the regular RNG box currency to at least get something. 

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It's two-sided here, but I think Trove is more rewarding, whereas Starcaller is more convenient.

 

The added benefit for having the Starcaller boxes would be that, like Trove, the player must spend their gold to purchase rewards, but unlike Trove, there's no time limit for when the player purchases them. The Trove system had it where once you rolled the die using a Treasure Trove Key and got the list of items, those were part of the separate Trove system integrated into the game. They weren't boxes added to your inventory, and they had a time limit before they would expire. What makes Starcaller boxes beneficial here is that players have more freedom to purchase what they want, whenever they want, as they please.

 

However, the greatest problem I see with Starcaller boxes is that without the crit. and bonus rewards from Trove, there's no real incentive to purchase these boxes other than to gamble and try your hand at receiving legendary and hard-to-farm materials, gear, and outfits. For the most part, Starcaller is a P2W gambling system; that can't be dismissed nor denied. It's like Trove, but less rewarding in that if a player bought and used 500 Starcaller boxes, they wouldn't get anything extra aside from what they got in those boxes.

 

Bottom-line: Starcaller is very-heavy RNG like Trove, but for less reward. As someone who's tried their hand at this, I wouldn't recommend spending on this system because while the player has more freedom here, there are less rewards, so it isn't worth it. Better to spend NCoin on cosmetics or stockpiling gold for the Marketplace.

Edited by Snowyamur
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My own experience -- no where near as rewarding as last trove.  Last trove was most rewarding of any I've been in, which had the bad effect of encouraging me to spend more.  :shy:

And some rare items seemed to be higher priced in this 'trove' compared to previous ones.  However, 'mats', were still often around 1/3 or lower the price of the same on market, so it could be used as a source of mats for less money, though .. mats might still have been cheaper before.

 

On additional benefit in this trove.  The mid-range boxes are alot more common (obvious bell curve in distribution) -- and the advantage of that is that if you find a material you need, you might be able to hit max on the buy window and get  multiples of the same item for the same price.  It helps to do a sort on your window before you start going through them that puts more expensive items closer to top & left.  A few of those I just threw out, too much for too little, and so far, 0 good accessories.  This trove was alot easier to walk away from.

 

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On 4/19/2019 at 2:05 PM, Snowyamur said:

It's two-sided here, but I think Trove is more rewarding, whereas Starcaller is more convenient.

Bottom-line: Starcaller is very-heavy RNG like Trove, but for less reward. As someone who's tried their hand at this, I wouldn't recommend spending on this system because while the player has more freedom here, there are less rewards, so it isn't worth it. Better to spend NCoin on cosmetics or stockpiling gold for the Marketplace.

I'll take rewards over convenience any day. I think NCSoft is the 1st company to successfully manipulate this many people into lowering their expectations so much. Being charged to open "slots" for trove is a joke, that's a pathetic milking tactic and players now look at it as a benefit not having it for these boxes when that should be a neutral standard. But, I'll admit, not being restricted to the 1 day time period to pay for your reward is nice, that makes it feel like I'm actually buying RNG boxes, and not just participating in another limited time trove event. I feel you can only argue these boxes are better IF you were lucky, which simply comes down to RNG. I see it the same as any trove event, the people who got lucky last trove say that was worth it, and the people who got lucky with these Starcaller boxes say this was worth it.

On 4/21/2019 at 9:49 PM, Astarae said:

My own experience -- no where near as rewarding as last trove.  Last trove was most rewarding of any I've been in, which had the bad effect of encouraging me to spend more.  :shy:

And some rare items seemed to be higher priced in this 'trove' compared to previous ones.  However, 'mats', were still often around 1/3 or lower the price of the same on market, so it could be used as a source of mats for less money, though .. mats might still have been cheaper before.

 

On additional benefit in this trove.  The mid-range boxes are alot more common (obvious bell curve in distribution) ...This trove was alot easier to walk away from.

 

I never understood why people call the mats cheap. If you pay 49 HM coin per key, let's be generous and say that's 25 gold each. That means 30 gold for a single Legendary Element/Jewel or if you get somewhat lucky, 7.5 gold for 3 Legendary Elements/Jewels, congrats, you finally saved just under 10 gold. Very few 1 star rewards are actually worth it, the only concern should be how many good crits you can get and at what cost in HM Coin + Gold. Without crits, you're better off selling NCoin, not buying HM Coin and/or saving your HM Coin to buy good F10 specials and selling those, then just buying mats directly.

Edited by wefhqweig
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1 hour ago, wefhqweig said:

Being charged to open "slots" for trove is a joke, 

The older troves are where you pay 1 coin to unlock 6-7 slots at a time that you need to process before moving on.  This one, your coins pay for the slots  (0.45 Ncoins or 42.99/100 -- prices approximate), but opening them is free.  Once you open them, you are charged money to pick one of them.  If you don't want any of them, you can go on, but you aren't charged for boxes where you take no items -- at least I never was.

1 hour ago, wefhqweig said:

I never understood why people call the mats cheap. If you pay 49 HM coin per key, let's be generous and say that's 25 gold each.

I don't recall anyone saying they were 'cheap', just that they might be cheaper than other higher alternatives.  Are HM coins really worth 1/100 of NC coins?  Since keys are 0.49 NC coins each.

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41 minutes ago, Astarae said:

The older troves are where you pay 1 coin to unlock 6-7 slots at a time that you need to process before moving on.  This one, your coins pay for the slots  (0.45 Ncoins or 42.99/100 -- prices approximate), but opening them is free.  Once you open them, you are charged money to pick one of them.  If you don't want any of them, you can go on, but you aren't charged for boxes where you take no items -- at least I never was.

I don't recall anyone saying they were 'cheap', just that they might be cheaper than other higher alternatives.  Are HM coins really worth 1/100 of NC coins?  Since keys are 0.49 NC coins each.

I commonly hear people say mats are cheap from trove, but it seems I took what you said wrong, my bad.
Where did you get 0.49 NC coin for 1 key, or 1/100 NC Coin for HM coin? It's 49 HM Coin or 49 NC Coin for 1 key, same price with either currency. Currently in F9, 49 HM Coins would cost you 32 gold, but back during trove it was 28 gold.

NC Coin is more valuable than HM Coin especially during trove because there NC Coin doesn't have the 20 key daily limit like HM Coin. In my opinion, it's only worth 20-30% more than the rate in F9, but sadly the ones in control don't feel the way and force the rate to nearly 1 gold = 1 NC Coin. At that rate, you're better off buying the 20 keys a day with HM Coin.

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13 minutes ago, wefhqweig said:

Where did you get 0.49 NC coin for 1 key, or 1/100 NC Coin for HM coin? It's 49 HM Coin or 49 NC Coin for 1 key, same price with either currency. Currently in F9, 49 HM Coins would cost you 32 gold, but back during trove it was 28 gold.

I maybe mentally inserting a decimal point to use to get back to $$, adding a 1.25 or 2.5x factor for NC or gold prices.

 

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11 hours ago, wefhqweig said:

I'll take rewards over convenience any day. I think NCSoft is the 1st company to successfully manipulate this many people into lowering their expectations so much. Being charged to open "slots" for trove is a joke, that's a pathetic milking tactic and players now look at it as a benefit not having it for these boxes when that should be a neutral standard. But, I'll admit, not being restricted to the 1 day time period to pay for your reward is nice, that makes it feel like I'm actually buying RNG boxes, and not just participating in another limited time trove event. I feel you can only argue these boxes are better IF you were lucky, which simply comes down to RNG. I see it the same as any trove event, the people who got lucky last trove say that was worth it, and the people who got lucky with these Starcaller boxes say this was worth it.

I wouldn't say NC is the first. There are many game industries today continuing to manipulate their player base and consumer market in ways as bad as NC manipulating its audience with its RNG loot boxes; i.e. Activision, Electronic Arts, Trion, EnMasse Entertainment, including a few Indie game developers and publishers. What makes NC different is that they're doing it almost openly without fear of judgement or consequence; triple A companies like NC today would perform these greedy business practices in secret until uncovered by the community. NC knows that there are more people buying than complaining, thus they won't bother to change anything.

 

As long as what they're doing is sending them into profit heaven, they won't change; their South Korean player base is already absorbed into this strategy, and they're thinking the U.S. will be the same. So far, it's working because there are NA players that spend thousands to "win" in Blade & Soul, which is satisfying their marketing predictions for the western market.

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