Using Windows Calculator, it appears the odds of getting no mythics from 500 keys is about 60%. It looks like to get a 50% chance of getting a mythic from event keys, you’d need to use 630.
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I spent 228 guild keys and 1000 gem keys and pulled 5 Aquaticus. You, my friend, are simply unlucky.
Loot boxes are basically simulated gambling - as far as i’m concerned, this game needs to add a simulated gambling descriptor to the rating. You basically are spending in or out of game resources for an intangible in-game item (that gets them around the pesky gambling argument). The fact is that the items received in-game have no real-world value, are non-transferable, and are locked within the game itself. VIP keys are a little bit more of a gray area (pay to play) - I assume the only reason Mythics existed in the first place was to sell VIP keys.
The developers (or at least their mouthpieces here) have stated on numerous occasions that people are bad at stats. Yet, they aggressively exploit that weakness for their own material gain. i’m not sure about that from an ethical standpoint.
Do I trust the developers stated odds? Of course not - I see no incentive for them to tell the truth and a definite financial incentive for them to lie/mislead. Yes, slot machines and gambling are fairly heavily regulated. Loot box regulation wouldn’t be easy to implement and time consuming.
I too hate the kingdom power level downgrade that required Mythic troops (and useless pets and weapons) to advance.
Should you try for mythics by spending massive amounts of resources? As Joshua from War Games might say… “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play”.
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The odds are 1 in 1000 for gem keys, and 1 in 100 for vip keys.
I know, because every month ever since Mythics were introduced I spend my keys and get my mythic.
The only thing we have is that a long time ago, somebody tracked the TDS respawn rate (which was stated as 50%) and proved it did have a bias towards streaking. For some reason, despite it having been nearly a year with the wrong third trait, that was the month the devs happily announced TDS would be getting its third trait replaced with a new one.
As for gambling being regulated…when a machine says it has a 99% payout, it actually pays out 0%.
That’s a decision up the regulatory boards of each country to decide. So far, most have not equated loot boxes to gambling. Belgium has. Recently, UK regulators have recommended that such a connection be made (no action by Parliament as of yet). Everywhere else still greenlights the gacha/lootbox system.
There’s a valid argument to be made regarding the ethicality of such a system. That said, the markets have clearly stated that there is a demand for this system in games currently.
There’s a little concept at play here, known as “fraud”. It’s one thing to have nebulously murky draw rates that can be altered behind the scenes. It’s a completely different legal animal once a gacha/lootbox vendor declares draw rates publicly. There are HUGE legal repercusions for posting false draw rates. As such, there is no logical reason why the devs would want to post false draw rates and incur substantial legal liabilities.
I would disagree. The winning move, assuming that a player wants to advance in the game, would be to accumulate gems. Instead of chasing Mythics with them, covert the gems to diamonds slowly over time and buy the Mythic from the Soulforge directly. Sure, the player won’t have access to the Mythic in question immediately, at it may be some time until that Mythic rotates into the Soulforge. But, this method guarantees a desired Mythic, given enough elapsed time.
Being smart about one’s decisions towards the game, goes a long, LONG way in reducing some of the frustrations with a gacha/lootbox system. To that extent, GoW is still among the most generous gacha/lootbox games out there, if a player can keep their composure and make sound investing decisions. Otherwise, RNGesus is both kind and merciless, and a player never knows if it’s their lucky day or their worst nightmare when opening chests chasing Mythics.
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@Lyrian is a huge boon to this community for the summaries of streams alone—it’s not cool for you to insinuate there’s some underhanded bribery going on @PeperandSalt
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The cynicism here amazes me!
Why on earth would you continue to play a game you have that much skepticism about the devs/publishers morals & ethics?? @Lyrian hit the nail on the head:
First off, you don’t have to spend a dime if you don’t want to and people have shown time & again they can achieve a anything in the game that those who spend money can (with the exception of a few weapons & deathknight armor). Second, you have no one to blame but yourself for the amount of money you spend on GoW (but thanks for keeping them in business for the rest of us to play!). Third, I’m sure you can quit any time you want to…speak with your wallet by closing it.
Good luck proving that. I’ve been playing for more than 3 years now and I’ve gotten mythics with only 50 glory keys (got 2 in 200 glory keys once!) and I’ve spent thousands of gem keys, gems, seals at max level and tens of thousands of glory/glory keys at 1 sitting & came up empty.
Search the forum for “new mythic” and browse through the various threads that come up with dozens of posts in each one about how many resources people spent on each mythic. They’ll range all over the place and you’ll see that while there are people with worse luck than you there are plenty with better luck.
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- The loot boxes gambling yes/no thing definitely needs to be definitively decided/dealt with. The ESRB (and others) adding a loot box descriptor would be a nice first step.
The problem with the current definition of gambling is that is deals exclusively with tangibility. Loot boxes are inherently intangible. They way they are done in Gems of War is that they have an impact of gameplay and your potential successes. If they were purely cosmetic, I wouldn’t care.
Got You games (why gacha, I could get gotcha?) are predatory / exploitative in nature. Loot boxes also rely on the same psychological forces as gambling.
- The original post said there should be some kind of oversight into this exact type of thing. As of now there really isn’t and we’re supposed to take the developer/publisher’s word for it. If enough developers used the same tools for RNG there should be a way to do a little oversight - increasing costs marginally with a certification.
Is it impossible to believe in a scenario where a developer would overstate odds (in my view rounding up counts) to spur more real money purchases? Especially in a RNG orgy game like Gems of War. People don’t seem to understand stats and disproving it would take a ridiculous amount of in-game resources. Even then the defenders would cite “luck”. Why do they always do point estimates? i’d rather see a 95% confidence interval.
Does Infinity Plus Two do this? i don’t think they material do, but i can’t prove it either way (some of their other in-game odds, maybe). Now, if they want to give me 10+ million gem keys to get an idea of the odds - i’d be ok with that (i know never gonna happen - it wouldn’t really impact the in-game economy, as i hate PVP).
- The situation i was talking about was the massive resources attempt to get a mythic. We’ll call it a time zero event. Yes, i know there is one other agonizingly slow way to do this.
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The original poster actually has some valid concerns (and thing that need to be addressed in the industry)
- Loot Boxes: if loot boxes are gambling, then they should be regulated/certified (odd checks and the like). No, we shouldn’t take the developers word for it.
- Fraud: I fail to see how incorrectly stating loot box odds would be really fraud. Who would sue a company over something that has absolutely no monetary value (good luck proving it too)? These games should have Term of Services that should mitigate legal exposure also.
“Everyone knows”.
You’re playing a game heavily based on random events. Sometimes they don’t go your way; that doesn’t mean they’re broken. Sometimes you notice a lot of bad luck; that just means you’re noticing it.
“Getting sued into oblivion” is an awfully good incentive for them to tell the truth. Also, if you fundamentally believe that the devs are bad people, are lying to you, and are trying to rip you off…then why are you playing?
I don’t think you understand how gambling works. Or laws work. Or numbers work.
If you’re trying to reform all gaming that has randomized elements, then go into politics. Whining about bad luck and conspiracy theories on internet message boards gets you nothing but…well…whining and conspiracy theories.
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My big question? Most players want see RNG change
You lot who are being less supportive and negative about it, How is it going to effect you if the changes get applied?
Beta testers are given precisely d**k for testing the game. We are not reimbursed in any way, shape, or form for spending time supporting the internal QA team and trying to give the devs feedback about what the playerbase is likely to enjoy/despise.
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Here’s the deal about the gambling discussion: there is law and there are feelings, and one more word: ethics. Morality and ethics have a lot in common. The law has nothing to do with either.
Ethics are an academic concept. It is an attempt to make a science of right and wrong. If we say something is ethically wrong, we are asserting we think that all people will universally agree it is wrong. It turns out few things are widely accepted as ethically wrong without a heck of a lot of context. It also turns out that even with context, nobody tends to agree about ethics. They were meant to solve problems created by moral arguments, but they only succeeded in creating different problems.
Morality is a less scientific concept. Ethics makes you base your arguments on logic. Morality doesn’t ask where your argument comes from. If you say, “I feel like…” it’s probably a morality argument, not ethics. I can make a morality argument based on values I derived from the text of a cereal box. One bad quality of morality arguments is there is no invalid morality argument if it starts with “I feel like…”. The first chapter of any beginner ethics text is usually a description of why you don’t want to get into arguments based on morals. When Captain Crunch is a valid source, you’ll never make any progress.
The law is generally an indicator of what the people who made it see as “good”. But it is not universally based on ethics or morality. Being legal doesn’t make one right. Slavery, and afterwards, institutional racism, was legal in the United States. So was Prohibition. I don’t think they are equal things in the ethical or moral arena but they were both Constitutional amendments which are a big deal in the US.
Gambling is a complex thing and most people have strong feelings about it, so nobody in this thread is going to change anyone else’s mind about whether it “should be” illegal. At the same time, it’s weak to argue that since it “is legal” then it is “good”.
There are a lot of questions, such as what ethical or moral obligations the operator of a casino has regarding people vulnerable to addiction. It’s OK to have an extreme opinion, but keep in mind the more extreme your opinion the more people will disagree.
So like, I think some of the arguments made so far are morally corrupt, and I think there are arguments that they are ethically invalid. But if I apply a Utilitarian approach to this thread, I realize I’m going to get a heck of a lot more enjoyment out of having stated my piece and moving on than diving in and trying to convince someone to believe my ethical stance. The argument thus far is much more based on morality than ethics.
I will fight you in the trenches about game mechanics. I’ve had enough arguments about gambling. I’ll rephrase what I said earlier:
If you think how GoW operates is unethical or immoral, stop playing. By playing, you support it, and supporting bad things tends to make you bad. If you want to do something, talking to the ethically or morally corrupt who profit rarely changes anything. Make your case to the legislators of your jurisdiction. Make them care. If you don’t care enough to go to that effort, then it is likely you don’t care as much as you think about this issue. It’s much easier to avoid the games you think are unethical than to make them illegal.
Also, hey @PeperandSalt, did you know
There’s a way to edit a post
Again, the problem is that you cannot prove this. If we are told ‘x’ are the odds how do we know this to be the case.
There is money and gambling involved. There needs to be a method to know that everything is being done on the up and up. Even if it is an honest mistake with coding there needs to be some sort of guarantee.
What gambling? all the gambling I have heard of you lose your money if you lose but with this game whatever you spend you get something out of it.
Why on earth would you do that? Once you get one copy, why would you spend keys trying to get more???
Pull one copy of the new mythic, then save the rest of your chests for next time…