This is one of the core problems, I suspect. Going off of absolute conversion values instead of “relative usefulness” values.
A raw gem is the most valuable currency in the game specifically because of its spending power. It doesn’t matter if you take away 20 raw gems and give the players 2 gem keys because the gem keys are already locked to a specific purpose and because of that are inherently less valuable.
I don’t have a good answer for how many gem keys I would consider acceptable per 10 gems lost. I use gems to buy VIP keys so gem keys are already significantly less valuable (unless they add a mechanism to exchange gem keys for VIP keys at a 5:1 ratio).
For me, determining the degree of “gem nerf” is going to come down to tracking how long it takes me to build up enough gems to buy 50 VIP chests compared to before the nerf, since that’s all I used them for originally. I suspect it’s going to come out to a lot more than a 16-20% nerf.
Nevermind the added drain of buying Diamonds if you don’t want to wait 5-6 months to create a single mythic troop.
I’m not the best at keeping up with this sort of lingo but to me nothing equals gem value more than a gem itself.
Out of 35 confirmed completed tasks 4 guilds have exactly 0 gems to show for 35 million gold.
Just curious how many Gold or Glory Keys can one buy for one million gold? I’m loathe to go thru my current stockpile to gain a few Gems but I can see the temptation now.
If there are, I don’t have them. I just did quick math for the number of keys. (1,000,000 divided by 15,000 per 50-pack, and multiply the result by 50, and round down to the nearest multiple of 50.)
And the irony is, a gem’s spending power is still negligible. At an all time low every week, in fact, both for the individual and the game as a whole. I was hoping crafting would curb this, but currently, converting gems to crafting resources to troops is on average much more expensive in the long run than just converting gems to VIP or event keys when said troop is released.
As an aside, I was once able to move toward a full collection (unlocked, but not fully ascended) and could have done so to the point of obtaining every troop in the game and every troop released while earning about 100 gems per week, combined, from all sources. It would have taken years to collect at this pace, but there was little risk of backsliding while earning even this amount. The relevant purchasing power of a gem was one legendary for about 42 event keys worth on average. All new legendaries aside from new kingdoms entered through glory packs, which was covered just through the activity hooks. New kingdoms just required a surplus of 625 gems every few months - more was better to fight against RNG, but on average, one 50 pack or a few 10 packs of event keys was what you needed. Everything else was a step closer to finishing your collection, which you would keep full with 625 gems every few months. Gem spending power still reduced every week based on age of game and account, but it is nowhere near what it is now.
I would never pretend to equate the two if the devs had not put it forth first. Quite simply gems are not comparable to getting things even gems buy directly and they have fluid values dependent on the needs of the individual. The best I can do is work up multiple “gem value” calculations, which is something I’m going to try to do in prep for Monday’s task data, to try and see where exactly these 16% and 20% numbers come from.
You can’t buy glory keys with gold, only glory, and at 20 a pop. Gold keys cost 300 each, so 3,333. Opening said gold keys would get you on average about ~56k gold, ~54 gems, ~2k glory, a bunch of minor stones, commons/rares, etc. 2k glory gets you 100 glory keys, or 11.1 event keys. Again “but divided by thirty” on the guild tasks because your guild is shouldering some of the cost, but again “probably not divided by thirty but somewhere in between” because task contributions are not going to be equal and resources are not transferable.
About 0.016 gems per gold key on average based on my stats and @shimrra’s chest stats, so about 16 gems per 1000 keys.
Yesterday I spent 120k gold on these chests just to do a bit of data gathering. I will say this : In my honest and humble opinion gold chests have better value than LT’s at this time. I know that my opinion will differ from others, but from what I’m needing- they definitely have better value.
@Mithran, if there’s anything we can do to help you gather the data in one single Excel sheet, just let us know… I’ll keep updating with the LTs we do at Últimos Guardianes, we generally get a few done every Monday but after this latest update a few long-time members have decided to call it quits, so we’ll see how it goes.
Just to point out, that makes the opportunity cost “gem value” of 1,000,000 gold a 220 “gem value” if we consider direct conversions and 232 inflated 5.7% to account for putting the gold obtained from gold keys back in recursively. I still don’t have the average numbers on the new tables, but some of the best “gem value” thing I’ve seen using even direct conversions is 8 gem keys, 1 event keys, and 100 glory, for 80 gems, 15 gems, and 8.3 gems (highballed for buying event keys with at full price), respectively, for a “gem value” of 103.3. Economically speaking, if you are within the three highest weekly donators for a given guild (and therefore ~333k/task), gold keys have a better value than the best case scenario for legendary task drops. Using VIP5 calculations, purchasing power estimates, and average table rather than best case scenario, the economically sound “selfish” decision will probably be for even lower ranked donators to not donate further.
However, I doubt it will ever be enough to overpower the opportunity cost of the lowest donator, or even top 15 or top 10, though. If your target is mythics, you are still best off farming gold and putting it to LTs, so long at least a few other people are still doing the same. Hitting up gold keys instead after you have reached the top x weekly donator only makes sense long term if you know your guild will be unable to reciprocate. I’d also contend that there is such little functional difference between the two “gem values” relative to man-hours spent farming at that point, to do so in the first place beyond what you would normally enjoy doing in the game will just burn you out for no good reason, and you will never see the fruits of your labors anyway if that happens. Same with treasure hunt, but if you really want to go that route it is up to you.
This is consistent with what I see in the data files. No Legendary Tasks currently provide Gems. This can change server-side, though, so it’s subject to change without notice.
@Mithran Would the $ values of various things help with comparisons between gems and gem keys? (Apologies I’ve only really skimmed through the posts, so I might have missed the details somewhere) If so there is a breakdown I put together last year that should be mostly up to date (in so far as things haven’t changed too much price wise in the shop):
I suppose I could add another column for comparative cash purchases, for the stuff that is directly purchasable. Right now, the gem value table I am working up has several different values that can be used to work up their relative value, including comparing their rewards given per task costs (using 3.05 guild tasks, still need to work up comparisons with 3.1 legendary tasks) direct costs low and high (if they can be bought with gems directly), and their comparative purchasing power for relevant bottleneck items (legendaries, mythics).
That happened to me against the easiest paragon I have ever seen! I beat all the psion and justice hard teams and got an easy paragon but then the crazy AI took over and skulled the crap out of my troops! I have gone 4/1 twice this week because of this crap and to top it off went 4/0 another time but it gave a a loss for a match I never did so that was my 3rd 4/1 in a roll! The console AI is brutal and seems to be getting worse!
in about an hour doing treasure maps on X4 speed. Right now it seems to be the best use of my time!