Make unusable tokens usable

digitaljoel

In many games you can take a scarce resource that you have no need for and exchange them for another scarce resource, or combine for an even scarcer resource. For instance, taking something, disenchanting it into xyz-dust, then combining that dust into something more valuable that you can actually use.

In this case, I propose that we are allowed to disenchant covers for some amount of marvelonium (yeah, whatever you want to call it). Perhaps limit to 2* and above. Say a 2* cover gives one marvelonium. 3* gives two, and 4* give four. Then the player can spend marvelonium to "craft" covers they can actually use. I would gladly save up twenty 2* covers to trade for a single 3* that I'm interested in.

This would not replace the ability to sell for iso-8, but would be a separate option.

Unknown

Even if you assume it's a cover you already have, the value of a 3* cover is priced at 1250 HP. For this exchange to make any sense you'd probably need several hundred 2* covers and at that rate it's no longer very useful.

Let's say you get 3000 iso + 100 HP for a high placement finish and those two resources are equally valuable, then 1250 HP = 37500 iso. Currently 2* covers sell for 250, so you'd need 150 covers. And I bet a lot of people will be willing to buy 100 HP at a cost of 3000 iso. While that's not a 'buy as much as you possibly can' price, I'll certainly buy a couple thousand HP to stash before this deal is no longer available.

OnesOwnGrief

I'm all for an ISO-8 to HP conversion or HP to ISO-8 conversion that aligns with the numbers Phantron posted. It's something that should exist already because I find it questionable that a F2P game has more than one premium currency.

atomzed

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

I'm all for an ISO-8 to HP conversion or HP to ISO-8 conversion that aligns with the numbers Phantron posted. It's something that should exist already because I find it questionable that a F2P game has more than one premium currency.

Where is this proposal phantron posted?

I personally find a conversion system problematic bec it would affect the 'economy' of MPQ.

Unknown

I didn't propose, but I'm saying if you want to be able to make useless covers convert to something else (better tokens/tokens, for example) that's essentially like converting iso to HP so we'd need a rate, and using PvP finishes as a baseline you'd end up needing a prohibitive amount of useless covers to get anything since 3* covers are valued at 1250 HP from the store. I did some sanity check for the 3000 iso -> 100 HP. It isn't a better rate than what you'd get for spending money (you get about 4X the iso compared to HP for spending). It's definitely something I'd consider buying, but it's not a 'buy as much as you can' price either (D3 would never want to offer you a conversion rate so good that everyone rushes out to convert all their iso to HP).

I don't know if we should be able to convert iso to HP in the first place, but anything similar to the original topic is essentially converting iso to HP.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Even if you assume it's a cover you already have, the value of a 3* cover is priced at 1250 HP. For this exchange to make any sense you'd probably need several hundred 2* covers and at that rate it's no longer very useful.

Yes and a 2* cover is valued at 500 HP still. They could really stand to update prices to reflect rarity better. As things are priced now buying or selling a 2* has a "value" equal to about half a 3* which is simply not the case at all.

digitaljoel

I'm saying if you want to be able to make useless covers convert to something else (better tokens/tokens, for example) that's essentially like converting iso to HP so we'd need a rate, and using PvP finishes as a baseline you'd end up needing a prohibitive amount of useless covers to get anything

But your baseline is way off, making the calculations even further from reality. PvP rewards make no claim that the amounts of each resource are equal, it's just an arbitrary award amount of each. A better baseline would be the cost of each.

At the worst case, $2 buys me either 200 HP or 1200 iso-8. That's 6-1, not the 30-1 you suggest. In which case, instead of the 150 covers you propose, it would be 1/5 of that, or 30 covers, which is much more inline with my off-the-cuff proposal. In the best case, $100 buys me 20k HP or 78k iso-8, which is an even better 4-1 (approximately) taking it down to 20 2* covers.

Not something that you could do overnight, but not so absurdly prohibitive to make it useless. Then the player can decide when they get a useless 2* cover if they need the iso to level someone, or if they want to "disenchant" and save it up to get a cover that they can actually use.

Unknown

If they offered the ability to buy HP at the rate of 4 or 6 iso per HP, that's a good way to ensure the game will go out of business in one month.

digitaljoel

I was using the values for things as they are currently for sale in USD. Also I'm not talking about buying HP for iso. If USD is the master currency it can be converted to either iso or HP at the rates I mention, but once converted there is no way to go from one to the other.

Your argument, as I understand it, is that my proposition would basically equate to being able to convert iso to HP because currently the only thing you can get from a cover is iso and the only way to buy a cover (other than standard) is with HP. I'm talking about the player having to make a decision whether they want to sell their unusable tokens for iso or a new material that would allow them to combine lower grade tokens into higher grade tokens. There's no mechanism for converting iso to HP, or back, and the same for the marvelonium or whatever I called it.

I was just thinking aloud on a way to make more heroic tokens more usable, and to me, 20-30 2* tokens for a 3* (and maybe they make it turn into a guaranteed 3* token so you can't just craft the abilities you want) seems very reasonable.

Unknown

Okay, I see what you're saying here, but the conversion rate you offered does not make any sense in the current game. If there was a type of 2* token that has only one character in 3* (which used to exist but was phased out probably because they're too much in favor of players), and that there's a 1 in 6 chance of getting the 3*, it'd take on average of 18 such tokens to get the specific 3* cover you want. Of course we don't even have these type of tokens anymore. Despite their considerable cost, heroic tokens are actually quite useless for anyone who is looking for a specific cover, especially if it's a cover you don't have so that you don't even have the option of upgrading. So there's no incentive for D3 to suddenly cut you a way better deal compared to the current system.

Now whether the heroic tokens are overpriced is another issue. I think they are, but last time we had data from D3 they said people are still buying them up, so as long as people are still buying them there's no financial motivation to change this.

digitaljoel

I think we are on the same page now. Perhaps I was too abstract in the original post. For a real world example, I would see it working as in the following (not-so) hypothetical scenario.

All my 2 star heroes are maxed in training. I earn 2-3 heroic tokens each week in pvp rewards and 84% (feels like 99%) of the time they give me a 2* hero that I already have. In PvP I also earn about 10 2-star covers per week. Despite being on my day 178 daily reward I still have no maxed 3* characters. Frankly, I'm getting frustrated and have resorted to saving all the HP rewards from PvP and just buying powers. I've spent as much as I'm ever going to on this game, so more money isn't an option. I end up selling all my useless covers all the time and stockpiling iso-8. Finally I have enough HP and I buy one power for one character (takes 3-4 weeks at least to get enough).

Reality:
I burn out grinding for just another Ares or Moonstone and finally just stop playing. The end.

Alternate Universe:
I get another Moonstone cover. Instead of selling it for 250 iso-8 I see a button that says "disenchant." I hit it and get 100 marvelonium. I then see that I can buy an "epic cover" which is guaranteed to pull from the 3 and 4 star pool only. Each epic cover costs 3000 marvelonium. I now sell all my 1* rewards and disenchant my 2*s saving marvelonium and being excited about the game again. After 2 - 4 weeks of saving my marvelonium I have enough to buy an epic cover. Still random character/power, but at least I know it's 3 star or better. Now I run into a problem... I can't get Hulk from 130 to 142 because I don't have enough iso-8 because I disenchanted all my 2*s instead of getting the iso-8. That's a problem for me, but not D3 because now I either play more to earn it or I buy it with real money. I then decide on each 2* cover in the future whether I need the iso-8 or want the marvelonium. If I'm super optimistic, it could even drive sales of iso-8 for the D3.

I know I'm probably not the kind of player they are looking for having spent only $26 on the game, so it makes no sense for them to make the game better for folks like me, but thought I would throw it out there and see if it would stick.

Unknown

You'd need a secondary and likely persistent way of getting heroic tokens. If it took 20 heroic tokens to disenchant into any given 3*, that really doesn't help much because the primary way of getting heroic tokens is by spending HP. You get about 1 heroic token per 3 days in PvP (if you could get two you'd have a score of at least 900 and probably aren't hurting for 3* covers) plus whatever PvE happens to give you. That'd take too long to get but of course it makes no sense to buy 20 tokens which cost 5800-7800 HP to get any specific cover.

I'd propose a system like this:

10 heroic tokens = a random cover of any fixed 3* character.
20 heroic tokens = a select cover for any fixed 3* character.

Offer events that have a 150 HP buyoff that rewards at least 1 heroic token similar to the elite events. In the worst case you spent 1500 HP for 10 tokens which is slightly overpaying for a cover you already have (1250 HP) but you've a chance at getting a cover you don't have. It's also 2500 HP for a cover you don't have at all. It'd cost less if you actually placed well in whatever these new events are supposed to be.

Though the problem with this system is that you're still needing HP to get tokens in the first place. I assume this idea came from Hearthstone, and gold is somewhere in between HP and iso in this game for the arena equivalent. Charge HP and it's a bit too much, but iso would be too little. Maybe you can charge a combination of HP + iso to get more heroic tokens, though I'm also not sure what the new events will have to be. It seems like it'd be too slow if it's the equivalent of an elite event, but this game currently doesn't have anything that can be run persistently like Arena in Hearthstone.