Tuesday, September 4, 2012

"Gacha!" The Truth Behind Legend Packs

Legend Packs Exposed

It would seems cygames is desperate to keep its players spending since their is still no definitive date on when trades will resume (which I will touch on later). Between their latest 3 Million User Campaign and now the ruse of the 5x SR tickets Legend Pack Promo, cygames is desperately trying to keep its player's spending. Although the new Legend Pack promo is making them appear more like a clan of pickpockets. The type where one premeditates a distraction while his partner comes up behind you to steal your wallet.

First, let's discuss the game mechanics behind the Legend Pack Card Lottery. Its derived from a Japanese gaming style called, Gacha.

The best definition I found thus far is in the article:
Kompu Gacha, "Mystery Box Games", the legality of blind virtual item sales from Reed Smith Writer, Andrew Boortz:

Kompu gacha, or "complete gacha," is a virtual item sales strategy whereby users purchase a virtual item that is part of the set of multiple virtual items. Once the entire set is collected, the user receives a significant prize. The catch, though, is that the virtual item that the user gets for his/her purchase is selected at random from among all of the items in the set, and some of the items in the set are far more rare than others.


The article goes on to explain how the Japanese Government is now regulating the over spending of young gamers due to them dumping loads of money into games similar to Rage of Bahamut.

If you do and a google search on the subject matter, you'll find how companies like DeNA (the company the runs the Mobage platform) become more and more loaded from gacha addicts who catch a wiff of the "Gotta Catch 'em All" syndrome. The worst part is the individuals who spend exorbitant amounts without ever really knowing the probability of obtaining the more elusive prizes such as SR and up cards. Well here's some news that may or not surprise you...

Legend Pack Probability

Since starting this blog in May 2012, I have been on a mission to figure out the probability of pulling each different card rarity type from Legend Packs. Although these findings are not conclusive since they do not come from Mobage or Cygames, I have indeed done my homework by:

★ Conducting Polls on various forums and Blogs

★ Recorded Stats given from admins of other Rage of Bahamut Blogs

★ Interviewed over 25 ROB Players who have cloned hundreds accounts and recorded their results for Claim Tickets.


Based on the methods listed above, The average probability for drawing each type of card rarity is:

★ SS Rare↝ .5%
[approximately only 1 in 200ppl!]
★ S Rare↝ 1%
★ High Rare: 15%
★ Rare: 60%
★ High Normal: 38.5%

Latest Legend Pack Promo

Now let's talk about 5x SR Promo

First off 5x the SR would only be 5% chance (or there abouts). What bothers me if many are buying this thinking they also have a higher chance of getting an SSR Bc of the link underneath allowing you to browse the SR & SS gallery. Plus most claim tickets we get of higher rarity will say: "HR and up", "SR and up" and so on. So Mobage is using that to their advantage, baiting people into buying the new card packs in hope that there is a higher chance the new God SSR will be there.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they further baited us into actually buying more HP & CW, by rolling out the next event before trades are up. In which case, a lot of good that increased chance of one Elder Homunculus will be to us then ;)

Remember, the only incentive Mobage has to get trades up sooner is their bottom line. Don't let them the catch you off guard with these feeble attempts to buy your affection with their special "campaigns" until they give us what we really want back:

The Ability to Trade.

18 comments:

bertoq said...

I for one think this system of buying cards is total rip off for the player and I'll put this in perspective using Magic the Gathering. With Magic you can buy a booster pack for $4 bucks and get 15 cards (.26 cent per card) and guaranteed a rare card with every pack. If you don't get a super good card you're at least rewarded with a good quantity of cards you can trade and in the event you happen to hate every card you get you still only spent $4 bucks. Keep in mind these are physical cards you can touch and trade with real people...

Now ROB booster pack. $20 bucks for 6 cards ($3.33 bucks per card). Personally I've bought 3 mobacoin packs $20 bucks each on 3 separate occasions. The best card that I've gotten was a HR Nymph and only one HR out of 3 packs or 18 cards. Lets take this math a step further. If 1 hp = $1 (1 hp = 100 mobacoin = $1) then you can break down the value of each card pack and see that you're actually losing money by buying card packs. Lets say you happen to get 6 rares from a card pack. That's 6 - 12 hp depending on how much you spent on the rares so you actually lost between 8 - 14 hp by buying the card pack versus buying the HP direct with your mobacoins and trading from there. In hind sight I should have bought 60 hp direct and then purchased the cards I wanted directly at the best price. And this is assuming you received all rares if you get high normals then you're extra ripped off.

Tell me why a virtual game has such high mark up on their virtual items? Don't get me wrong I don't mind spending the money on a game if I feel I'm getting a good ROI IE SR or SSR and up on a consistent basis but buying $3+ a for card you card farm for free is a rip off. Cygames does this because they would be selling themselves short by putting a value on a claim ticket IE SSR claim ticket = 2000 mobacoins or less, etc. If they set the values to low then they potentially sell themselves short on losing money and what company these days wants to lose money?

Here's the really upsetting part. This system will never change. You can stop buying cards to boycott but other players will not. Cygames is in business for one thing and one thing only and that's money. Asking them to change their format doesn't make financial sense to them when they can give players a dumb referral card to bring on 19 new players to replace the 1 jaded player who stopped buying card packs.

So I've decided not to spend any more money on any virtual item on any game. It's simply a system put in place to get you to spend more money on their games and only give you a fractional advantage over another player if that.

Ok rant over
Bertoq3

Unknown said...

The last two card Legend Card packs (6 cards) I got were 3 hn and 3 rares. I was furious!!! Threw my phone across the room!!! To actually spend money just to get hn's is insulting!!! I get hn all the time from friendship cards. I'm glad you actually posted the approximate chance of each card. If RoB said legend packs were rare and up, that would be a good start. Plus take that 38.5% and give the HR/S/SS some extra percentage chance, that would be nice.

After the 3 hn & 3 rare packs I got, I've done exactly what bertoq above suggests: I've spend $20 and bought 20hp. Then used the 20hp to trade for what I need....

AZNWHIP said...

The Magic price comparison isn't a good one... I've heard it before, but there's one thing that hasn't been mentioned that does factor into RoB prices...overhead. With Magic, what they really needed was simply a printer press and once the product was made, no further upkeep was required, just ship to store and done. In the grand scheme of things, overhead wasn't that high. With an online TCG, you have to consider servers, security, staff of high priced developers, DBAs, TQA, support, etc. All that adds up to overhead. An argument could be made that they just sell packs at lower prices and generate revenue through increased sales volume, but then market would be flooded with cards and really kill a lot of the rarity and value. I'm not sure how fun the trading market would be if I was buying HRs for 1hp, SRs for 5hp, etc.

Cheri said...

they don't need to increase the hrs or the srs that much, but charging $3 for a hn? I know so many ppl that are so pissed they won't buy cards again (me included). Put it this way, if magic gave you 80 of the same card for free, then told you there is a 1 in 3 chance that the card pack you are buying is filled with the same card, wouldn't you think twice about spending $ on a pack?

Zuks said...

That is ridiculous for an HN. I wouldnt be surprised if they increased the probability of pulling one. At least the lottery shows you the odds. This game can change the draw probability at anytime without fear of being regulated.

darkheart41 said...

I hate to tell you, but Magic has an online version as well. The packs still cost the same.

Unknown said...

Today I noticed that when you login to the game it gives new warnings about using strong passwords and not to share your passwords. Wow, a week+ of no trades just to get a warning message!!! Seems like things are are moving slow! Or they are doing lots of changes to the game, not just hacking fixes.

AZNWHIP said...

darkheart41 - I'm comparing Magic during the days it first came out prior to them being bought out by big corporation. Magic isn't WotC sole brand like RoB is for Cygame. WotC, a subsidiary of Hasbro has much much larger resources and revenue stream than Cygame. As such, they can take the low return/high volume sales approach and taking a loss on an expansion pack (Fallen Empire and The Dark comes to mind for you old school guys).

Arbiter said...

I just wish that a better games developer would take control,hell if microsoft were to take control, not only would we have customer support that is up to par but we'd actually have a better chance at getting good cards
And i say why not make it so that hrs and srs are 1 and 5 hp. the fact that this game has its won economy makes it so stupid. Hp has become gold and it sets the standard for every card,its a trading card game and i just find it really stupid that out of the supposed 3 million players, only the top .5% has ssrs. This game as fun as it is, needs to be brought to a realistic point in the economy,not something where the most expensive card in the game (batraz) would cost you $2000 real life cash....
overhead should be considered but i mean come on, yugiohs rarest and most valued cards went for a couple hundred, not thousand....

Arbiter said...

*own

Zuks said...

Yeah just started playing legend of the cryptids and prices are the same there too (it's the exact same game by the way but most cards are only 2-3 Evo's) only prob is what they use for hp and CW doesn't seem to be tradable unless you pay for it. So all u can do is cross your fingers and hope u get a good draw out of their LPs.

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Ben said...

I just had to add that the percentages at the bottom don't add to 100. They don't differ from what I have seen in all my legend CP but I would drop HN chance to about 23.5%, with rage 60% and HR at 15% that leaves you a few percent for Srare and SSRare, and it adds to 100%.

Unknown said...

Mtg has a lot more to do than printing cards man, do you not think the art on the card cost money. How about packaging cost shipping cost. Marketing, promos, events, I'd have to say that a magic card would most deff cost way more than a single digital product

Unknown said...

The magic price comparrison is perfect actually. They pay for materials ink employees such as artists designers and there base staff. They pay to ship and host large events. There is alot magic does that costs them money. RoB needs only artists and a couple programmers. The game is simple. Larger number wins. I can buy a pack of magic cards for 3 bucks and get 15 or so cards or a whole box of boosters for under 80. I dont have to invest in hp to keep playing among other things. Rage is rediculously overpriced for the very little they give you.

DennisOfDoom said...

I Think Its Fair That The Sr & Ssr Cards Are Hard To Get Because If They Werent Hard To Get They Wont Be Worth Shit Then

ephemeral said...

I know another online game comparison whose marketing strategy is much better and it's Shadow Era. Granted, different game with different rules, but I could get a decent deck for the same money I'd spend on shitty cards in Rage.

Or an even better example is League of Legends. Has a much better market idea also for being free to play. Cygames could simply increase rarity of cards by releasing exclusive versions of them with same stats but different name and artwork and people would pay for that. They could also make cards scale slightly better to even out the value. Last but not least is to bring trading back into the game and release a specific item that can be used for currency but is very hard to obtain but can be obtained by playing the game normally. That's what made the Diablo 2 economy work so well and made it possible even for new and poor players to get decent items over time.

Investing time into the game should be rewarded regardless of how one invests.

They should also remove the phone verification and instead of showering new players in items make it so new players get bonuses for playing and not just logging in. By slightly up scaling weaker cards and improving things such as questing and introducing new rare and hard to get items but can be farmed the economy will stabilize. By adding new versions of old cards that are even rarer the exclusivity will remain for vanity reasons. By reducing card pack prices and increasing the chance of pulling good cards from the exclusive packs more people will pay for them. Rarity of rare cards will go down but that's why it's important to create synergy between cards, builds and spells such as sets that when finished will provide additional bonuses. It should also be so that weak cards should be able to come with specific rare but useful modifiers to increase the price and demand of low cards. Consider the idea of sockets in Diablo 2 for example.

It might also be a good idea to randomize the base stats of all cards somewhat in order to increase rarity even within the same card type
To for example then find a perfectly stat rolled ssr with special art if this can not be outright bought from the store that is one option too, would increase that card's value way beyond what we currently see on the market. Also increasing this stat variation beyond evolution perfection and enhancement would increase the price on old cards as they are all seen as perfect rolls.

Cygames could take control over the economy but I frankly think they are lazy. They don't seem to really know or have any ideas of how to improve the game even though their business model is actually failing apparently, since they make so many players quit.

Unknown said...

Don't buy hp individually. . Buy hp in the hp set you will get more for your buck