Allegedly the drop rate from a VIP key is 10x that of Gem Keys. So for your explanation to work then they need to replace what was removed with at least 10x that in gem key value for it to not be a nerf. VIP keys also give double arcane stones too, and no UR cards.
That isn’t how math works. Ignoring that tasks have pretty sharp diminishing returns in value as you put more gold in, a 20% reduction in rewards given would be the same as needing 25% more gold to buy in. Eg., if you get 100 “gem value” for 1 mil gold, and you reduce the rewards by 20%, you have 80 “gem value” per 1 mil gold. If you have 100 “gem value” for 1.25 mil gold, increasing the cost by 25%, you still have 80 “gem value” per 1 mil gold.
While it still probably be a net buff for some people when you consider the ~0.18 “free mythics per month” with daily dungeons, there is still the potential to lose more than ~0.18 mythics per month for VIP players, especially those who were doing legendary tasks. There is also potential for mythics per month to drop from above 1.0 prepatch to below 1.0 afterward, in which case, completing collections even for the shortest amount of time is now impossible without continually paying cash.
A gem key is worth 4.5 to 5 gems for a VIP5 player at this stage of the game, because the only relevant thing is new mythics during the exclusive period. A gem key has an estimated purchasing power of 1/1000 mythics. A VIP key has a purchasing power of 1/100 mythics (stated to be 10 times drop rate of Gem Keys in official posts, with a cost of 45 to 50 gems, depending on if you purchase in bulk or not. Or, put another way, on average, 100 VIP keys, or 4500-5k gems, gets you one mythic on average, and 4500-5k “VIP 5 gem value” worth of gem keys, or still 1000 gem keys, will get you that mythic on average. What we dont know for sure yet is the value the devs have assigned to a gem key, but it is fairly safe to assume that it is not the “VIP 5” value. I’d be surprised if they even gave it a value as low as 9, which is the actual value it is most commonly purchased at, rather than 10.
I doubt that anyone is getting “more Gem Keys than the Gems were worth”. The patch notes said specifically that the Gems were being converted to Gem Keys, not that extra Gem Keys were being given to make up for a loss in Gems.
For me personally, I paid for the ability to open VIP chests, and doing that just got significantly harder unless I pay for overpriced gem packs, which I will not do. Had gems been nerfed this hard six months ago I would never have paid to reach VIP 5, so it’s hard not to feel a little taken advantage of.
Raw Gems are worth more because they have more uses. I can’t open VIP chests with Gem Keys and the drop rates from VIP chests are slightly better than the drop rates from gem chests so that’s where I prefer to spend my resources.
If mythics are all that matters then end gamers have absolutely no leg to stand on. Mythics are no way easier to obtain than before, even if there’s a small nerf (which we still can’t possibly know b/c we haven’t seen the tasks changes).
There’s absolutely no way the small reduction in rewards (to the extent it may exist) can possibly offset the ability to craft a specific mythic for free every few months. Sorry man, but the math just isn’t on your side if we want to boil it all down to the cost of getting a mythic.
The “few months” to craft a Mythic relies on the player spending 50 Gems a day for Diamonds. If the player chooses not to spend Gems, the estimate is 5-6 months per Mythic.
Calculations are, of course, subject to being refined after we see how many Diamonds are rewarded on “Diamond Day”, assuming that those Diamonds are a guaranteed reward the same way other Jewels are on their respective days.
If you’re only missing one Mythic, sure, it might be easier to say “at least I’ll have it in 6 months”. If you’re missing 3, or 5, or 8, or 10 of them? What do you say then? “At least it’s easy to get the 10 you’re missing, it’ll only take you 5 years. But it’s easy!”
Again, what it is going to boil down to is mythics per month post crafting. If that number is not > 1 when including the free crafting materials, then it is impossible to keep pace with new releases, which are guaranteed to be the one we want because we get them during the exclusive period, which we were already doing pre-patch. That means not only is a full collection is not achievable, but we will have an increasing number of empty spots in our collections as time passes. I chose mythics because this is the botlleneck to achieving that goal, and if you can achieve this goal, the others are trivial. This is going to be a huge deciding factor on whether or not people want to continue to play the game, and yes, the numbers are still out. If it was never intended to be that this was possible, as some are also claiming, it should have not taken this long for us to reach that point.
And yes, I’ll be sure to share the full numbers once the full task data is out, to let everyone know exactly where we stand. I’m sure a great number of people will have a net benefit when you count the free crafting resources from dungeons, but a subset, (the ones mostly often requesting this feature in the first place, so they could further their collections by being able to effectively target stuff they have missed with roughly the same ease as when it was new) are more likely to see a net deficit.
Verdict is still out, but the “day of luck” numbers beat our projections. This is very promising if tasks use the day of luck conversion values for replacing “gem value” in tasks - 2 diamonds for 1 gem rather than 1 diamond for 2 gems - four times as many. Eagerly awaiting that last piece of the puzzle.
This is a question for the mobile beta testers. When you were recently beta testing this update, did any of these problems everyone reported (devour, ui glitches etc) appear in testing as I thought that was the point of beta testing so that issues can be ironed out before release.
Excellent post Namour. Everyone is complaining about the nerf to guild tasks even though we don’t know the numbers yet, and I’m sat here wondering how I seem to be playing a completely different game to the one I was playing a week ago.
I guess PC players are already used to the unity AI, but I feel like most of the teams I used no longer work against the streaky RNG and huge mana surge cascades.