[WIP] Daily Deals - Discussion and Critique

Thanks! Added to the OP.

Only a couple deals left to find now, mainly ones for newer accounts.

I loved the idea at first. Iā€™ve had similar offers, and most arenā€™t useful for my level. Although I did get a pet offer that helped, which I really appreciate. But whatā€™s starting to get to me (after 2 days!) is that even after I take a look and decide whether or not to purchase, if I donā€™t purchase I still get intermittent flashing symbols on the Offers tab after battles, tribute collection, mail collection, etc. I look, nothing has changed. Continually trying to draw my attention to the offers isnā€™t helping, itā€™s just irritating, and reducing my enjoyment of the new update. I still like the concept, but please, please, reduce the appearance of that stupid flashing exclamation mark on the Offers tab!

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@Saltypatra, anyway to get the flashing to stop? Every time I come out of a battle I have the offer flashing and I have acknowledged it 5x already.

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In my opinion not worth the gems.

Looking through these posts, and considering what Iā€™ve been offered, I canā€™t imagine Iā€™ll ever be spending gems on these daily deals. Not even close to being worth the cost.

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are you sarcastic ? For me is a BIG NO 100 Barbarian XP for 125 gems.
I play the leftmost 50 ranked pvp and iā€™m done

Everything seems about twice as expensive as it should be, maybe they will cut the price in half at some point to make it seem like a bargain. Iā€™d happily buy imperial deeds for 500 gems each tho, as they are unfarmable.

There is a chance this is VIP only, if I am able to get confirmation only I will update accordingly.

EDIT - They confirmed VIP only offer.

Nearly everything offered so far is not only economy-negative, but about 90% of it is a straight trap (not even something Iā€™d consider buying on any account on any stage of development ever with the knowledge I have now). As in, they all have methods to obtain that are cheaper or faster, including direct gems itself. Really makes no sense to have limited offers that are worse than stuff you can get all the time.

Here one I didnā€™t see posted here yet. And one of the worst ones yet.

Iā€™m also seeing the algorithm makes offers for things you donā€™t have ascended, even if you have way more than enough copies to do so, like this on my alt:

image

So, with stuff that has an agreed upon direct valuationā€¦ they seem to have gotten this right. Sort of.

Legion booster is 20 event keys, 20 gem keys, and 20 glory keys for 400 gems. Total direct valuation of these items is 475 gems for the gem bought keys. Average glory key valuation is debatable, but from most reward systems that roughly equate the two, they are likely internally ā€œvaluedā€ at about 2.5 gems each. So, face value, this gives 525 gems ā€œworthā€ of items for approximately 400 gems. However, looking at the MPP (average expectation of mythics pulled per resource spent, my go to for more consistent valuation based on the gameā€™s primary goal) of the resources involved, 400 gems will net a VIP 5+ player approximately 0.08 MPP (spent on VIP keys), whereas the total MPP of all combined items is ~0.44. Event keys are often not used to pull mythics, so if we removed those from the calculation entirely (assume user is pushed to the point of spending gems on event keys in 10 packs at cost), we have 115 gems for 20 gem keys and 20 glory keys, the raw gems would be roughly comparable to the offer (0.023 MPP for the gems, ~0.021 for the keys not counting dropped resources from the keys, which gives the lower rarity keys a slight edge). So outside of specific scenarios and even if I was out of keys right now (and Iā€™m really really not), this offer would at best be roughly resource-even, and this is probably the best offer I could find. Were this offered on the discounted slot (someone had it at 300 gems), this would tempt me, but I probably still wouldnā€™t take it because of how many keys I already have on hand. However, I do recommend this for beginners and non-vip 5+ players, discounted or not. Just an example of why a universal ā€œgem valueā€ calculation just cannot work if you want offers to be universally applicable.

Iā€™m also interested in the cost of ā€œclan offerā€ if anybody else has it. Iā€™m willing to be the valuation is based off intangibles like adding to your guild seals total and not the actual value of what the orb adds in terms of guild key pulls.

So looking at a few of these, it looks like that kind of ā€œvalueā€ calculation they are using for all the offers. Ie., it looks like they are taking the expected ā€œvalueā€ of the items using their internal (extremely lowballed) ā€œgem valueā€ calculation and then reducing the ā€œcostā€ of that by about 25-35%. Ie., the 5 gem keys/4k souls/20k goldā€¦ theyā€™d have to first ā€œvalueā€ 20k gold and 4k souls at over 150 gems. While being one of the worst directly conversions in the game, you can do to get this would be the gem shop, which sees 11k gold and 3k souls for 150 gems. If we scale those up, the resources offered by the shop are ā€œā€ā€œā€œworthā€ā€ā€œā€ about 225 gems, or a total of 275 gems ā€œā€ā€œvalueā€ā€œā€ on the shop offer. Which would make this ā€œExpert Supplyā€ offer, in total, an approximately 27% ā€œdiscountā€ over the combined ā€œvalueā€ of the items. If you really really needed this stuff for leveling and staring your first kingdoms, I could see someone looking at it and thinking it might be ā€œworth itā€ (total beginners trap, but so much stuff is) maybe, but Iā€™m getting this offer on accounts that are far, far, past that stage that have millions of souls, where most of the ā€œvalueā€ of this offer lies.

I canā€™t even apply this kind of lowballed valuation to everything, thoughā€¦ some of it is so absurdly low as I canā€™t even find a line of logic to it and can only assume it was a mistake. For example, the ā€œcrafting resourcesā€ bundle has a direct gem purchase counterpart for every single thing given, and the ā€œvaluesā€ of the resources given by any interpretation are too low by at least an order of magnitude (200 gems netted in the lowest value dungeon gem bounties nets 2000 shards and 400 jewels in addition to 80 diamonds, 16 runics, and 1000 souls - 200 gems in the shop nets 2000 shards and 60 jewels, zero diamonds or anything else and the offer heavily skews toward jewels). Drives me crazy because this is the kind of thing that rarely ever get fixed, and this was the kind of valuation for color jewels that was present on the first draft of epic tasks, and even this overvaluation directly contradicts the valuation in the dungeon offer even if we strip away all other items. The only time this isnā€™t an out-and-out trap is if you need 20 diamonds or up to 50 colored jewels to complete a craft on Sunday you couldnā€™t get otherwise and this was literally the only way you could do it (including vault keys, doing up to literally hundreds of battles for gnomes, or completing an entire guild task color by yourself in a dead guild), and this completely ignores the valuation of the colored jewels. The kicker is getting in on an alt with this:
image

All this just shows that not only is the valuation of the items way off, but the algorithm to make the offers in the first place needs adjustment as well. Give items I might want, and make them slightly cheaper than the next way I can convert gems to get them.

Other stuff, like class xp, I havenā€™t compared directly to the class shop purchase in terms of how far that gets you for that many gems (it is, obviously, resource negative compared to just grinding it out in any mode). But its another option as least. I donā€™t have too much of an issue with this as it is a luxury accelerator that is very clearly a ā€œbad ideaā€ in terms of resource conservation to start with.

The whole concept of a daily gem offers shop doesnā€™t really work if you want to the shop to be used when you are undervaluing gems and highball every single item, including stuff that can be bought directly with gems, at every turn, and they continue to put ā€œdead offersā€ for resources you donā€™t actually need on there regardless. Right now, the system seems to be made entirely to prey upon people ignorant as to the relative ā€œvaluesā€ of stuff rather than what it should be, an impulse buy central either offering limited valuable items with the common items at significantly higher value than you could get by simply direct-converting the gems to it (or a lot more of a time-saver than they currently are).

As for stuff that is worth it?

Iā€™m also curious if anybody that has better pet stats than me knows the average ā€œcostā€ of a single copy of pet from the pet rescue shop, ie., how many gems does it take to get 31 pets on an event? Iā€™d have estimated around 70-80 gems per copy (while getting more incidentals like pet food/jewels on average for that same expenditure) but Iā€™ve done this so rarely I donā€™t have great data. 50 gems for a pet might not be that bad if the right ones get offered at the right time (but it does very little for you overall otherwise, since pet event shops donā€™t have single pet break points and are random in how much they give for any given purchase with a minimum guaranteed). There are, of course, deeds, which everyone seems to be keen on now, putting the cost of a stat point at approximately 4875 gems EDIT: full price for 2 deeds is 300 gems, so full price is actually 6000 gemsā€¦ gut feeling is this is probably going to not pan out long term unless it your primary goal is leveling delves and this lets you skip a heavy buy-in during a delve event, otherwise, you are probably better just buying in slightly higher at that time to still complete it faster and more efficiently (and yes, I still hate that this is the best practice). Since I mostly care about the global stat boosts if anything, Iā€™m likely skipping any colored deeds offers that arenā€™t purple (and including purple once I finish the four kingdoms I care about). Imperial deeds is tempting if it looks like Iā€™m going to get bottlenecked, but for everything I care about now, I probably wonā€™t be. ā€œLegion Boosterā€ if I run into it on key-scare, non-VIP alts is a good deal, and is at least potentially resource-saving-positive on up and coming accounts, so Iā€™d recommend that even at full price (400 gems) unless you are staunchly endgame. A single ascenscion orb for 700 gems would have been tempting a few couple weeks ago when I was closing in on Zuul, and is probably opportunity-cost-positive to at least someone. Class xp maybe as a luxury item, but only if this is more efficient than the class event shop conversion - we already know it is a ā€œbad dealā€, but it might be worth it if is a less bad deal than the other bad deal for people that are very anti-grind.

For personal preferences that I know arenā€™t good deals, if the Medal of Anu offer pops up for 500 gems on my alts Iā€™ll grab one. This is not a recommendation I make to others - these accounts donā€™t farm explore enough that I even have a single one yet, and this would instantly improve multiple setups, only planning this because I have 10s of thouands of gems surplus and full collections to legendary and have a ton of traitstones from other interactions, so I donā€™t need to explore otherwise.

tl;dr: Nearly every shop offer has less tangible value than the gems it costs compared to just using the gems elsewhere to obtain the same or similar benefit (on occasions, demonstrably so by a factor of 10 or more) considered for even early stages of progression, and the algorithm for handing out offers in the first place is largely offering items that are effectively useless to the accounts they are being offered to. Disappointed, but not surprised.

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I just noticed the in-game text in your screenshot: ā€œ3 VIP Keys. These keys unlock GOLD Chests in the Chests Menu,ā€ :upside_down_face:

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Cool. Bug Report Time! :slight_smile:

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Iā€™ll finish reading the rest of your post after this, but as someone who has bought pets to max in the past and bought the one to max todayā€¦

It sucks.

The entry fee to get 1 pet is 175 gems, (Tier 3), as baskets are really unreliable. Occasionally you get it early, but anyone worth their salt knows not to count on it. From then on out, each other tier guarantees one pet 1 pet for 100 gems. (T4: 2 for 200, T5: 3 for 300, T6: 4 for 400, T7: 1 for 100)

So depending on how far you buy into the pet shop, Iā€™d say the cost calculates to be over 100 gems per pet thanks to the useless tier 1/tier 2. However, I consider the value of pets to be 100 gems since thatā€™s what every other tier wants you to think. Its a possible trap.

I mean, the game wants to apply value to ā€œgoldā€ and ā€œpet foodā€, so youā€™ll have to create gem values for that and then take it off shop purchase andā€¦ I just donā€™t care, I still think of it as 100 gems.

How much did I end up paying today? I only got the minimum roll on every pet shop tier purchase except two instances: one T7 gave me 3 and one T7 gave me 2. 2775 gems for 30 copies + 1 from the pet rescue.

RE: how I feel about 50 gems per pet Daily Offer? If you could randomly buy 1/3 pets daily for 50/150 gems per DO (also not counting the throw ins since thatā€™s a trap just to confuse math and make it seem even cheaper in gem cost than it really is which most wonā€™t fall for). Iā€™d be all for it. However if youā€™re getting offered 3 Tanglebush for 150 gems once a week, it just doesnā€™t amount to anything. Its progress, but youā€™re not really making any progress. modern Gems of War in a nutshell.

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Thereā€™s no point in buying purple deeds either as youā€™ll just get a surplus of purple deeds while waiting for imperial deeds for other kingdoms.

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Alright, my off the cuff estimate was somewhere in the realm of about 2400 gems after completing the rescue (my average pets per basket during the couple times I actually did this was higher than yours in this trial, but still not great). That was a roughly 80 gems per pet in the event shop if you go all the way, and the event shop has a very high entry point as pointed out (I almost never interact with the shop unless Iā€™m going all the way, since they effectively get cheaper the more tiers you buy on average by offering more baskets per guaranteed pet per 100 gems). Daily offer therefore makes progress on what would be the cheapest pet purchase - 100 gems for 1 pet and 2 baskets per 100 gems spent. However, the chance of a pet from a basket is almost certainly less than 50% (case in point your latest experience, and whenever Iā€™ve done it), meaning 50 gems per pet still has the opportunity to be resource-cost positive, since 50 gems per pet beats the cheapest you can ever get a single copy of a pet for from a shop on average. But with the offers so scattered you basically need the event shop to mythic a pet either way if you were using gems to accelerate it rather than farming out an appropriate number of rescues, so yeah, effectively, not all that beneficial. If you already planned to gem accelerate a pet next time it appears (and you hadnā€™t already for whatever reason, I might be in this boat at some point i the future), buying a 50 gem pet single can potentially save or cost you 50 gems, and buying the 150 gem 3 bundle can also either save or cost you 50 gems, with a likely slightly higher chance to save than cost.

You are probably assuming full epic task completion weekly (or at least even colors of deeds every week from that source), which my guild doesnā€™t do. Or long term completion for all kingdoms involved, to which we might have a goalpost getting moved if they put in level 20 kingdoms like the idea was floated back when deeds were introduced. Magic kingdoms will be my first upgraded and Iā€™m not actively upgrading any other stats unless I have a surplus of imperial deeds to spend on other stats, and they have a tangible short term benefit in terms of match clear speed for certain content (every couple points of magic has a tangible benefit on some piece of content I regularly do). I currently have Imperials saved for 9 kingdoms I havenā€™t pulled the trigger on, so I can cover every single magic kingdom if I get the deeds and/or writs to do so. Even if they are ā€œdoneā€ while Iā€™m waiting for others to finish. I havenā€™t crafted any deeds from writs yet, either, so I still have that if I get especially antsy (I have enough for a full point magic upgrade right now, but I prefer to do them in pairs).

But also yes, full long term, big picture, no deed offer is worth it without confirmation of level 20 kingdoms added an an analysis of what that would entail, because they all have a very finite value cap that we get closer to every week, and we have no idea the ratio of imperial to color deeds needed for a theoretical level 20, let alone the gold costs involved. And Iā€™m betting all methods for current deed acquisition, including the new shop offers, will be woefully inadequate when compared, leading to complaints of such, leading to a possible system that puts them out on a different scale, making all those offers retroactively a bad deal in the long term. All hypothetical of course, and the minimum time frame for all that to happen is probably at least six to a year months after complaints started, which would be some time after the system is implemented, and we donā€™t even have confirmation on it being a sure thing yet so take that as you will.

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The Vault Offer is VIP Only. No discount shown.

I forgot to account for the ā€œfreeā€ pet from completing the pet rescue, so I edited my post before your post. 100 less gems, still not great

I apologize if these offers have already been shown in the post. I just scanned it briefly.


None of these offers are of interest to me. The shards offer is terrible value plus I have over 16k shards. Bundling anything with souls when I have over 5 million?

I have Peace Pigeon at Mythic and god knows I donā€™t need Moloch. No way would I evee spend this much cash on any bundle. Like WOW!

I keep seeing people getting offers for 3x pets, vip keys, and vault keys and Iā€™m over here like:

My deals last night included a single rocki that I picked up for 50 despite needing 11 because I usually spend 175 gems during the actual rescue for the same and thatā€™s a less frequent pet to show up.

Edit: VIP10 RE: discount %

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Yeap. Ive been playing ~5.5 years and only just finished upgrading all my non doom weapons. Epic ingots is what the issue is though.

For the record as well, I have 294 weapons fully upgraded.

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No discount on this. So, it must be VIP only. :wink: