0.7528

Raffoon

Or rounded, 3/4.

This is the chance if you buy a 10 pack of ISO-8 tokens that you will NOT get any Nick Fury covers from the bunch.

0.3034, or rounded, 1/3. That's the chance if you buy a 42 pack of ISO-8 tokens that you will not get a Nick Fury cover from the bunch.

Posting this for two reasons. First, just in case people are curious about their odds before buying.

Second because I think that's pretty silly. I know D3 has some fancy shmancy metrics that say token sales are higher when they don't include a guaranteed character, but I can tell you anecdotally and personally that they've lost a sale from me. I'm certainly not going to pay either 20 or 80 bucks (which is generous, and assuming that you buy HP $100 at a time for the best rate) for a slim CHANCE at a cover. And I've paid plenty of money into this game already.

I know Fury is supposed to be rare, but if you're going to drop 80 bucks on a handheld puzzle game, I think that should at least entitle you to ONE guaranteed cover? Come on.

GuntherBlobel

Yeah, I think the PSA is needed. As long as Demiurge offers purchases that are very bad deals, even when compared to other CCGs, there should be posts warning other players about them. Perhaps someone should sticky the Featured Character probabilities for 10 and 42 packs like you show here.

Since they've lowered the Feature Character probabilities, these "special" deals are hardly special at all. Why do they even exist? Look closely at the advertised "Great deal" in the Combined Arms pack and you will see that the probabilities are identical to the Heroic pack, but single covers actually cost more! Crazy.

This issue really bothers me. I've posted my theory on who buys these things here: http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13462#p197516

Unknown

I agree. When I started playing I would drop $20 here and there on HP for character slots and the goal of buying a pack of a featured character that I wanted. Now that the packs do not have guaranteed covers, I will never buy a token pack and I have also stopped buying HP since I can win enough for character slots and the occasional shield. In my case, it is a lose-lose scenario for demiurge.

Unknown

I can't help but wonder if there's not some fundamental misunderstanding on the business end here about how F2P game sales are often successful. 80 bucks? Really? Try giving us something attractive that costs a few bucks, and you'll sell quite a lot of that...

GuntherBlobel

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

I can't help but wonder if there's not some fundamental misunderstanding on the business end here about how F2P game sales are often successful. 80 bucks? Really? Try giving us something attractive that costs a few bucks, and you'll sell quite a lot of that...

You should check out Demiurge Al's short-lived Game Blog for a quick second. In it he lists how HeartStone's business model differs from MPQ (and the typical F2P). He seems genuinely surprised that for only $60 he has unlocked enough of the base game to be satisfied with his spending. He also thought that HearthStone would not be a "ARPDAU monster." (It seems to be grossing well to me.)

http://almnop.tumblr.com/

To a long-time gamer like myself, it's might be obvious that HeartStone pricing is sensible and will succeed if coupled to a good game. To an F2P insider, it's kind of amusing.

Unknown

Budget Player Cadet wrote:

I can't help but wonder if there's not some fundamental misunderstanding on the business end here about how F2P game sales are often successful. 80 bucks? Really? Try giving us something attractive that costs a few bucks, and you'll sell quite a lot of that...

In theory, if you sell one e-widget for $100 or 100 e-widgets for $1, it doesn't really matter. There's overhead involved, but it's not exactly like manufacturing where there's much more consideration for how much production costs. They can pretty much put their price point where ever they want. But you're right in that they seem to be completely ignoring the true micro-transaction, impulse-buy model that a lot of F2P games do very well with. I have friends who will buy almost any stupid **** you can think of because "oh, it's only $.99." They don't really cater to that market here.

That said, their price points for this game in general seem really wacky for me, and tokens now are about the worst offenders. They're really relying on people's desperation to get featured characters and hoping they keeping pulling the handle on the slot machine. I don't have their numbers so I couldn't tell you how well it's working, but since they haven't really tinkered too much with the numbers lately I'd guess it's working out for them just fine, at least in the short term. I can tell you they're not getting any of my money, because they haven't offered me anything I want to buy in a really long time, and I spend plenty of money on gaming in other places.

Unknown

All I see is people who think they're part of the P2W crowd complaining money doesn't get as much as they thought they could, and that's because you're not Colognisseur even if you think you are entitled to the same stuff he has.

Nick Fury isn't even so powerful to warrant investing that much so you've only yourself to blame if you tried to buy your way to him. For the Iso 8 brotherhood event the only reason to have Nick Fury is to get Nick Fury, and if you don't already have Nick Fury you were nowhere close to top 2 of this event so just save your money. Yes PvP and PvE aren't quite the same thing but it's almost impossible for someone who can compete for top 2 in PvE somehow was never in an alliance that can be top 100 at one of the 3 seasons unless you just started playing last month.

Comparison to Hearthstone is pointless because Blizzard has a very strong IP not to mention completely garbage CCGs have done very well too so it'd be really weird if Hearthstone, which is at least average with a huge existing fanbase, didn't do well. MTG is so dominant in the CCG theme that apparently nobody ever realized that MTG actually sucks when played online due to an utter lack of support for MTG for people don't spend hundreds of dollars.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

All I see is people who think they're part of the P2W crowd complaining money doesn't get as much as they thought they could, and that's because you're not Colognisseur even if you think you are entitled to the same stuff he has.

I don't see anyone here complaining or acting entitled. All I see going on here is people pointing out that these token packs don't provide what they consider a good value, considering their relatively poor odds and high price, which seems to be a very reasonable opinion.

Phantron wrote:

Comparison to Hearthstone is pointless because Blizzard has a very strong IP not to mention completely garbage CCGs have done very well too so it'd be really weird if Hearthstone, which is at least average with a huge existing fanbase, didn't do well. MTG is so dominant in the CCG theme that apparently nobody ever realized that MTG actually sucks when played online due to an utter lack of support for MTG for people don't spend hundreds of dollars.

"Pointless" is a pretty strong word to use for what appears to be a perfectly reasonable comparison. Yes, Blizzard's World of Warcraft has become a very strong brand. But so is Marvel. Take random people off the street and show them pictures. I'll take Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Wolverine, and you can have any ten characters from World of Warcraft. I bet I'll get more positive hits off my guys than yours. Even if you limit the polling to gamers I still bet I'll win. And yes, Collectible Card Games are popular. So are Match-3 games. So you've got two games with popular brands using popular game formats that are both using a F2P model with micro-transactions as their main source of income. Is the comparison still pointless? Because it looks okay from where I'm standing.

Unknown

Raffoon wrote:

Or rounded, 3/4.

This is the chance if you buy a 10 pack of ISO-8 tokens that you will NOT get any Nick Fury covers from the bunch.

0.3034, or rounded, 1/3. That's the chance if you buy a 42 pack of ISO-8 tokens that you will not get a Nick Fury cover from the bunch.

Posting this for two reasons. First, just in case people are curious about their odds before buying.

Second because I think that's pretty silly. I know D3 has some fancy shmancy metrics that say token sales are higher when they don't include a guaranteed character, but I can tell you anecdotally and personally that they've lost a sale from me. I'm certainly not going to pay either 20 or 80 bucks (which is generous, and assuming that you buy HP $100 at a time for the best rate) for a slim CHANCE at a cover. And I've paid plenty of money into this game already.

I know Fury is supposed to be rare, but if you're going to drop 80 bucks on a handheld puzzle game, I think that should at least entitle you to ONE guaranteed cover? Come on.

The main hardcore purchasers of tokens seem to be individuals who have gambling tendencies. Despite these overwhelming odds against the user, people still love to buy tokens to gamble it up (e.g., roulette, blackjack-i swear i have a system that works, ****, etc.). I hope that these people don't step into a real casino, or else they'll lose their paychecks pretty quickly.

Unknown

I used to gamble a fair bit, and you still wouldn't catch me spending money trying my luck at pulling a featured character from these packs... Especially when you are part of the community that remembers when you could buy these feature packs and be GUARANTEED said featured hero's cover...

All in all, whatever they (D3) are doing must be working for them at the moment, since as newer members join, they have no idea what things were like say 3 months ago, and i'm sure they are the ones that are keeping D3 alive with their spending...

Since lets face it, unless there are A LOT of whales in this game forking over big bucks every month, i'm guessing a lot of the revenue comes from newer account holders looking for open slots etc... which is probably why they make you spend 500 HP at the beginning now to open 3 slots, unlike when i first started and it cost i think 50HP or 100HP to open your first slot...