Hypothetical high roller question

Unknown

Let's just pretend I'm a billionaire and I wanted to assemble a maxed out roster of all the currently available character covers how much would that cost? I think I saw on the wikia that it would cost about 7,000,000 iso which would come out to about $9,000 but what about hero points for roster slots and covers?

PuceMoose

That would interesting to see a figure on this. Imagine a new player, day one, no ISO, no HP, no covers. It's been so long since I've played the tutorial that I think you end it with at least a few covers and a handful of ISO and HP. Assuming the point that you're "released" into the game proper to proceed at your own pace, and have bottomless funds, what would be the expected expenditure (and standard, non-sale) rates to buy token packs to guarantee at least one cover of each character (and then using HP to level those heroes to max skill level, once one of each cover was obtained). Following that, the cost to level each and every character to max level, including roster slot prices would be included. If the estimate was less than $30,000 USD I'd be surprised. Sounds like a fun challenge for our more statistically-inclined forum-goers!

FaustianDeal

That's an interesting question that I have tried to noodle out. The first obstacle is actually easy, buying enough roster spots for everyone. That is easy, and the only fixed cost that you can easily put a value on in the whole pile.

The first, biggest problem is getting 1 of each cover for every active character. So right out of the gate you are buying 40-packs of heroics until you get *at least* one of each color for everyone. Once you get one of each color, you stop buying packs. Next step is to train the numerous duplicates you drew as you tried to get one of each. Next sell all the extra moonstone's and other dreck you wound up with for ISO.

Next is probably buying standard tokens with the ISO you just got, because you still don't have all your 1* camharacters. Maybe this process netted you something trainable for your 3*s or 4*s.. Train that sell the rest.

Now buy all the covers you didn't manage to draw. Just buy them outright, I'll be cheaper.

Then you can use your ISO from sales to train. When it runs out you are buying ISO to fill in the rest.

I don't know what the ISO cost is for the 'active/available' characters, but I think it's closer to 10.5M if you count all the characters period.

The number of cover packs is the part that's funky because it's difficult to project how many packs are required to get 1 of everything, or how much coverage you get as a side-effect of that buy.

Absolute best case 57 characters with 3 powers each is 3 40 packs. I think you have 0% chance of getting that lucky. In that case you might buy another few 40s because it's cost efficient to get covers for 2*, but Eventually there's a cliff and you definitely need to switch to individual covers.

Unknown

Add into this that currently you can not actually get all of the characters in game from opening packs, and it becomes slightly more complicated. This means for some of the characters you are stuck waiting until they get added back into heroic packs, which can take months (I believe the current gripe is that Daken hasn't been awarded in 4+ months and is currently required in order to win another one of his covers).

notamutant

In my sandboxed hacked account, I easily spent 3 million HP on cover packs to get all the covers. A majority of that came at the end when I was just missing one or two covers for a specific character and had to keep opening new 40 packs to get one cover.

Unknown

notamutant wrote:

In my sandboxed hacked account, I easily spent 3 million HP on cover packs to get all the covers. A majority of that came at the end when I was just missing one or two covers for a specific character and had to keep opening new 40 packs to get one cover.

Why the hell did you not just buy specific covers?

Even if you take out of the equation getting the first cover, there are 35 3* characters currently, and at 10 covers each thats 350 x 1250 = 437,500 to 13 cover all 35 3*s. At 20k for $100 that's about $2,200 JUST for 3* covers. You apparently might cut that down a little by going 42 pack for your first handfull, but the second you 13 cover a guy, or even 5 cover an ability I would stop.

I don't even want to contemplate ISO costs. I just don't want to know.

mischiefmaker

An opportunity to do math, hooray! I'll take a crack at it.

Let's begin by assuming you start a brand-new account. You open the game and immediately decide, man, tinykitty this tutorial nonsense, I'm maxing everything right here and now, and I'm not doing even a teensy bit of gameplay to do it!

First, roster slots. There are currently 64 characters in the game, so according to the wikia page, that costs 27,000 hero points. Easy peasy!

Next, you need to cover max every character. Here we're going to run into a problem -- vaulting. You can't actually get a bunch of the 3*s, or Bag Man, just by opening tokens. And you can't get Devil Dinosaur at all. OK, as a lower bound, let's figure out how much it would take you to max all the available ones, shall we?

According to yogi's post, there are 15 3*s missing from rotation. That leaves 20 still in rotation. What's the cheapest way to get one cover of each? Well, thanks to the Token Spading spreadsheet, the chance of getting a 3* out of a standard token is 2.29%, and the chance of getting a 3* out of a heroic token is 16.6%. So the expected cost of getting a single 3* cover is either 21,834 ISO or 1800 hero points; converting that to dollars we get either $28 in ISO or $9 in hero points.

We may be rich, but we're not stupid -- clearly we're going to buy heroic tokens. How many tokens do we need to buy? We need 60 covers, but it's not just 60 * 1800, because we're not just going to get exactly one of each cover. It turns out there's a well-known math problem that describes this situation perfectly: the coupon collector problem, which tells us that to collect 60 unique coupons, we expect to require 281 total coupons. A "coupon" in this case is a 3* cover, and we get one of those every six heroics, so we need 1686 total heroic tokens.

Ah, but there's a catch -- we also need 4* covers. Specifically, we need 21 of them (let's assume we wait for Professor X to get added, and nobody gets removed). According to the in-game stats, there's a 0.5% chance of getting a particular 4* cover, which would be a 3% chance of getting any cover. According to the token spading sheet, that's high -- in aggregate we're averaging about 2.2% 4* pulls. Let's assume the in-game stats are correct, just rounded -- that would mean a 0.45% chance of getting a particular cover, or 2.7% chance of getting any cover, or 37 tokens to get a single 4* cover. Again by the coupon collector problem, we need 77 coupons to collect 21 tokens, or 2849 total heroic tokens. Since this is greater than the 1686 we'll need for 3* covers, it should also be sufficient to get us one of every 3* cover, and since we're getting 281 3* and 77 4*, the remaining 2491 tokens will all be 2*, which should be more than enough to cover all our 2*s.

We also need to cover our 1* characters. Same math, using a 83.8% chance to pull a 1* cover from a standard, 16 total covers, means 66 standards should be enough to get us one of each.

Now that we have one of each cover, is it better to buy more tokens or level them directly? For 4*s, it's 37 tokens to get a single cover, so obviously much better to just pay for the covers. Same for 3* -- it's 6 tokens per 3*, or 1680 hp at 40-pack prices, so we're better off just buying them directly (which is good, cause it's a huge math nightmare otherwise). For 2*, we've got 2491 of them, I'm pretty sure they're already going to be fully covered. For 1*, it's 125 hp to level up a cover (about 63 cents) or we can buy another standard token at 500 ISO, which is...about 64 cents. So wow, it's actually cheaper to level up 1*s with hp as it is to buy standard tokens, so let's just do that.

Finally, there's ISO. 8 4*s is 3.43 million ISO, and 35 3*s is a bit over 6 million ISO (I know, we're missing 15 3* and Devil Dinosaur, but presumably we'll max them when they're available). 13 3-power 2*s and Bullseye runs us another 950k, and finally the 1*s give us another 150k.

What's our grand total?

Roster slots: 27,000 hp
2849 heroic tokens: 797,720 hp
66 standard tokens: 33,000 ISO
Cover-maxing 8 4* (assume we can use all 77 of our covers, so 14 remaining plus 10 devil dino): 60,000 hp
Cover-maxing 20 3* (260 total required covers and we have 281; assume we cover-maxed them all, which is probably not right, but hey, lower bound): free!
Cover-maxing 7 1*: (76 total covers and we have 55; assume we can use them all so 21 remaining): 2625 hp
ISO to max everyone: 10.53million ISO

(Knowing that your roster STILL isn't as good as Colognoisseur's? Priceless.)

= 887,345 hp + ~10 million ISO (remember that we're going to sell off a bunch of 2* covers from heroic tokens)

...or about $17,256. Remember that this is a lower bound -- it's actually going to be quite a bit higher because we still don't have any covers for any of the missing 15 3*s and since we decided we're not going to play this game at all to get them, we'll need a whole lot more heroic tokens. That being said, the hp in that calculation was relatively cheap compared to the ISO, and we already bought enough ISO to max everyone, so it's around another $3k or so, depending on how long we wait and how exactly the vaulted characters rotate back in, etc.

Editorial note: there will be many people who see this number and are outraged. Twenty grand to play a match-3 phone game, that's crazy! To which I respond: take a look at any F2P game that is in the top 10 and run a similar calculation (cost to unlock every single item assuming you invest zero game time). I'll bet you there are games that are AT LEAST an order of magnitude higher.

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

An opportunity to do math, hooray! I'll take a crack at it.

Let's begin by assuming you start a brand-new account. You open the game and immediately decide, man, tinykitty this tutorial nonsense, I'm maxing everything right here and now, and I'm not doing even a teensy bit of gameplay to do it!

First, roster slots. There are currently 64 characters in the game, so according to the wikia page, that costs 27,000 hero points. Easy peasy!

Next, you need to cover max every character. Here we're going to run into a problem -- vaulting. You can't actually get a bunch of the 3*s, or Bag Man, just by opening tokens. And you can't get Devil Dinosaur at all. OK, as a lower bound, let's figure out how much it would take you to max all the available ones, shall we?

According to yogi's post, there are 15 3*s missing from rotation. That leaves 20 still in rotation. What's the cheapest way to get one cover of each? Well, thanks to the Token Spading spreadsheet, the chance of getting a 3* out of a standard token is 2.29%, and the chance of getting a 3* out of a heroic token is 16.6%. So the expected cost of getting a single 3* cover is either 21,834 ISO or 1800 hero points; converting that to dollars we get either $28 in ISO or $9 in hero points.

We may be rich, but we're not stupid -- clearly we're going to buy heroic tokens. How many tokens do we need to buy? We need 60 covers, but it's not just 60 * 1800, because we're not just going to get exactly one of each cover. It turns out there's a well-known math problem that describes this situation perfectly: the coupon collector problem, which tells us that to collect 60 unique coupons, we expect to require 281 total coupons. A "coupon" in this case is a 3* cover, and we get one of those every six heroics, so we need 1686 total heroic tokens.

Ah, but there's a catch -- we also need 4* covers. Specifically, we need 21 of them (let's assume we wait for Professor X to get added, and nobody gets removed). According to the in-game stats, there's a 0.5% chance of getting a particular 4* cover, which would be a 3% chance of getting any cover. According to the token spading sheet, that's high -- in aggregate we're averaging about 2.2% 4* pulls. Let's assume the in-game stats are correct, just rounded -- that would mean a 0.45% chance of getting a particular cover, or 2.7% chance of getting any cover, or 37 tokens to get a single 4* cover. Again by the coupon collector problem, we need 77 coupons to collect 21 tokens, or 2849 total heroic tokens. Since this is greater than the 1686 we'll need for 3* covers, it should also be sufficient to get us one of every 3* cover, and since we're getting 281 3* and 77 4*, the remaining 2491 tokens will all be 2*, which should be more than enough to cover all our 2*s.

We also need to cover our 1* characters. Same math, using a 83.8% chance to pull a 1* cover from a standard, 16 total covers, means 66 standards should be enough to get us one of each.

Now that we have one of each cover, is it better to buy more tokens or level them directly? For 4*s, it's 37 tokens to get a single cover, so obviously much better to just pay for the covers. Same for 3* -- it's 6 tokens per 3*, or 1680 hp at 40-pack prices, so we're better off just buying them directly (which is good, cause it's a huge math nightmare otherwise). For 2*, we've got 2491 of them, I'm pretty sure they're already going to be fully covered. For 1*, it's 125 hp to level up a cover (about 63 cents) or we can buy another standard token at 500 ISO, which is...about 64 cents. So wow, it's actually cheaper to level up 1*s with hp as it is to buy standard tokens, so let's just do that.

Finally, there's ISO. 8 4*s is 3.43 million ISO, and 35 3*s is a bit over 6 million ISO (I know, we're missing 15 3* and Devil Dinosaur, but presumably we'll max them when they're available). 13 3-power 2*s and Bullseye runs us another 950k, and finally the 1*s give us another 150k.

What's our grand total?

Roster slots: 27,000 hp
2849 heroic tokens: 797,720 hp
66 standard tokens: 33,000 ISO
Cover-maxing 8 4* (assume we can use all 77 of our covers, so 14 remaining plus 10 devil dino): 60,000 hp
Cover-maxing 20 3* (260 total required covers and we have 281; assume we cover-maxed them all, which is probably not right, but hey, lower bound): free!
Cover-maxing 7 1*: (76 total covers and we have 55; assume we can use them all so 21 remaining): 2625 hp
ISO to max everyone: 10.53million ISO

(Knowing that your roster STILL isn't as good as Colognoisseur's? Priceless.)

= 887,345 hp + ~10 million ISO (remember that we're going to sell off a bunch of 2* covers from heroic tokens)

...or about $17,256. Remember that this is a lower bound -- it's actually going to be quite a bit higher because we still don't have any covers for any of the missing 15 3*s and since we decided we're not going to play this game at all to get them, we'll need a whole lot more heroic tokens. That being said, the hp in that calculation was relatively cheap compared to the ISO, and we already bought enough ISO to max everyone, so it's around another $3k or so, depending on how long we wait and how exactly the vaulted characters rotate back in, etc.

Editorial note: there will be many people who see this number and are outraged. Twenty grand to play a match-3 phone game, that's crazy! To which I respond: take a look at any F2P game that is in the top 10 and run a similar calculation (cost to unlock every single item assuming you invest zero game time). I'll bet you there are games that are AT LEAST an order of magnitude higher.

Good grief this post is a thing of beauty. Thank you!