I just did a sample pull of 1000 chests of those 20 pulls, 9 of them contained at least 1 gem.
This is 45%.
My total gems earned was 25.
Since I have a stockpile of gold chests, this experiment cost me nothing, BUT I did the math on this.
Each 50 chest cost 15k gold, for a total investment of 300,000 gold. Again this netted me 25 gems.
If we extend that to the cost of an LT (1 million gold) you can see that, assuming this is an adequate sample size, I have the potential to earn 75 gems with an investment of 900,000 gold, LESS than the cost of an LT and yet more GEMS then were ever available in LTs.
Even though this is not really a viable option for me to do more than 1 50 chest pull, for those of you with top earners I think its VERY easy to see that gold chests are the new/better Gold sink…
Though admittedly you miss out on sharing wealth with other members of the guild…
I did some data gathering myself with this yesterday but my figures are quite a bit lower than yours @efh313.
10k gold chests yielded 128 gems or 0.0128 in decimal form. Whereas yours would be 0.025
Perhaps more could share their data so we could have an even bigger pool.
My estimate was about ~0.015-0.017 gems per gold chest over a sample size of tens of thousands, but these samples were all taken many months ago. LTs are still likely going to be better for your overall purchasing power per gold spent if many people donate. If everyone acts selfishly and starts spending gold chests, you’ll lose out at the end of the day. If only the people donating far above the median without anybody matching them pull their gold donations when they have already surpassed what everyone else would have done in a given time period, probably a net gain for them. I still need more data for the new LTs to get an average payout to determine where the cutoff threshold for gold chests being “better” is, though. Although the two can’t be directly equated in “value” for everyone, gem keys are almost always going to be worth at least about 4.5 raw gems in opportunity cost alone even for VIP players, and twice that for non VIP.
Your estimate is almost perfect. The actual drop rate for gems from gold chests is 1%, and you can get either 1 or 2 gems (so 1.5%). For 1mil gold, the normal expectation is 50 gems.
Totally correct, and I think many are missing just how significant this is. With LT’s the expectation is a mythic every 124 times. In a full guild of 30 members, that translates to 4.13 million gold each. Spent on gold chests, that would open almost 13,778 chests, for an expectation of about 207 gems. Used on VIP chests, which have the best mythic drop rate, it would only open 4 chests giving you a less than 4% likelihood of pulling a mythic.
So if you’re just hunting mythics, LT’s are still far superior (25x better). Note that this is while ignoring all the other things you get from LT’s. The hundreds of glory/gem/event keys (and about 20 legendaries) are all just a bonus. While it’s frustrating that the lack of gems makes VIP chests useless, LT’s are still the way to go in almost all scenarios, if you’re in a guild of equally contributing members.
As an interesting aside, in the above example you’ll actually get about 55 gems from the glory keys you get from the LT’s.
EDIT: This post incorrectly assumes selecting from the first LT table first, so the math/results here are wrong. See further down this thread for discussion and updated/correct numbers.
Maybe we should think about something else to use gold in order to unlock some advantage for the whole guild. I’ve been thinking about some uses, but it is really challenging to create a feature that blends well with GoW and was not used before in other games and still could be used by the devs as soon as it suggested in the sense that there is bureaucracy about using other’s people ideas as we don’t have an EULA to help with such cases…
Gold Chests give other resources as well. Glory can be converted back to gold, gold/glory keys and arcanes with no RNG involved by purchasing Glory Packs. Do we have reliable updated data (3.1) on Gold/Glory Chests troops and resources drops available already? Those benefits are maybe negligible, but they should be considered when evaluating Gold Chests vs. LT.
On top of that, gems obtained from chest can be used to target a Mythic on release, while LT Mythic drops are random, with a pool getting larger and larger over time.
I have the data, but as you said it’s fairly negligible by comparison. I can post the drop rates for those chests later (when I’m back at my PC) if it helps for comparison. But the numbers favour LT’s so heavily, that is not sure the extra granularity will change that, rather it would simply be a bit more detailed. I think the only reason gold chests make sense is purely for the ability to target a specific mythic on release week (as you mentioned), otherwise they aren’t a really viable replacement for the LT’s.
This has been a fun conversation and one that Im glad we have had. For the record, I do not think that Gold Chests are the answer, I just know that for people looking SOLELY for gems it was AN option.
But the points brought up here as to the value of LTs are valid and the exact reason why the devs feel confident in their decision I’m sure.
Now though we, the players, have enumerated the benefits of each course of action and it rests in the hands of the individual as to which path they choose to take.
Thanks to all of you for the civil debate!
PS: This does not mean the debate is over, please keep discussing, just wanted to express my gratitude to an awesome community.
OK, as promised, here’s the extra data for the gold and glory chests. Gold chests have a 3% chance of giving 400-600 gold, 1% chance of 1-2 gems, 3% chance of glory, 3% chance of 20-40 souls, 25% chance for a traitstone, and 65% chance for a troop. Glory chests have a 2.5% chance of giving 600-1200 gold, 2.5% chance of 2-4 gems, 2.5% chance of 40 glory, 2.5% chance of 50-100 souls, 20% chance for a traitstone, and 70% chance for a troop. Hope that helps.
