Simple enough request: replace elite level “chance to upgrade” with a cumulative percentage. No going over 100%, when you hit 100%, you get that elite level. Same exact costs and rates apply. The current “chance” a medal has to upgrade just becomes what percentage of the level they will grant, which will stick on the troop until it “levels up”.
The basic reasoning is that the rarity of I want to upgrade are not the rarity of medals I’m seeing with any degree of frequency, not even tokens, which is very disheartening when you play an entire hour long session at top speed and can’t measure your progress in any meaningful way unless you are willing to gamble. I’m then faced with two unpleasant choices: gamble my time investment or press on with no sub goals. With “gambling” changed to “make a tiny amount of guaranteed progress toward my goal” while keeping the costs in line, I feel better about interacting with both the explore system and the elite leveling systems, even though technically, long term, I’m making progress at the exact same rate with the exact same costs.
You can also just consider this “ratio of bar filled”
Medal Rarity +0(same rarity as troop)= 1/1 before elite 1, 1/2 before elite 2, 1/3 before elite 3
Medal Rarity +1(medal rarity is above troop)= x3
Medal Rarity -1 = 1/3x
Continuous for every rarity, can’t go above 100%.
As a test case:
As of now, when attempting elite 1 on a mythic, each cedric (medal rarity-3) adds 1/27 of a chance, putting 3 on an attempt gets you a 1/9 chance. Spending 27 cedrics on mythics int his manner has an average expectation of 1 bronze elite mythic for 90k souls.
Yes, distributed 3 at a time for 9 attempts at 11.1111% each, its only 65 some percent to get “1 or more”, but you can get “more” with that distribution (~39% to get exactly 1, ~19.5% chance to get exactly 2, and so forth). Your average expectation is still 1, you just don’t have that rather large (35%) chance to get zero for your efforts in the short term.
With progress bars - spending 27 cedrics on a mythic gets you exactly 1 elite level bronze every time, spending 90k souls (more souls if applied in batches of less than 3).
Considering 27 cedrics is like… 20 hours? or so of farming, imagine your relative levels of excitement and disappointment if you got above or below the “expected amount”. I think mine would be “sigh of relief” versus “I’m never playing this mode again”.
As a grind based system, this doesn’t need to work the same as the gacha style collectible distribution where the chance for 0 is to get people to spend (usually time gated) resources beyond their means and guide them into seeing cash options as more attractive. It also works for those systems because you are getting a new collectible “thing”, and the attachment is much stronger there. Elite levels are structured to be impossible to complete already, its been stated as much and I’m fine with that, elite levels only give stats, and elite levels are only possible as direct effort in the form of farming medals, they don’t need this extra barrier.
