Someone in a forum thread asked if anyone had ever calculated how much it would cost to buy a 5*. Well, that got me to thinking. How can you buy 5*’s? And how much would it cost?
Well here we go. I figured I'd start with you choosing a 5* you want to cover and it being a classic. If you're not picky and you will settle for any 5* fully covered (which we'll cover in another installment), the expected cost decreases meaningfully.
PART 1: Impatient Unlucky Rich Newbie Buy Strategy for Covering a Specific Classic 5* from Scratch
CP is the only way to directly buy covers:
-For 20 CP (a classic token) you can effectively “buy” 3 shards, or 3/500ths of a colorless cover. It would take 500/3 or 166.7 purchases to get enough shards for 1 cover. This equates (at the classics rate) to 166.7 x 20 = 3,332 CP per cover
-For 720 CP, you can buy a cover for any color as long as you already have 1 of that cover.
Obviously 720 is much better than 3,332, so I’ll need one of each color using shards, then I can buy the remaining 10 using direct CP purchase.
1500 shards / 3 shards per classic = 500 classic pulls (none of which are the 5* we want)
500 classic pulls x 20 CP per pull = 10,000 CP for the initial 3 covers, then 720 CP x 10 = 7,200 CP for the remaining 10, totaling 17,200 CP for all 13.
You can buy 7 CP for $100 (you can pick whether that comes with 20K HP or 78K ISO). This is a newbie, so let’s assume for the moment he/she doesn’t know about buy clubs.
17,200 CP / 7 = 2,457.14, rounded up to 2,458 x $100 each = $245,800
Did you know your covered 5*s were worth so much? And some of you are F2P!
PART 2: Impatient Unlucky Rich Newbie Buy Strategy for Covering a Specific Classic 5* from Scratch with Buy Club help
Same as Part 1, but now, thanks to the buy club, the Newbie gets 140 CP for every $100.
17,200 CP / 140 = 122.9, rounded up to 123 x $100 each = $12,300
I could buy a lightly used Ferrari with that savings! Even a mega whale would have to notice that. Now if only you could find 140 buy clubs where all 20 people reliably made the $100 purchase every time.
PART 3 and Beyond
In later parts I'll work to incorporate some of the other ways to get covers.
Some are direct but not guaranteed:
-You could naturally pull a cover for the 5* you want covered. The chances of naturally pulling a latest you want from latests ( 15% / 3 = 5% ) are much greater than the chances of pulling a classic you want from classics ( 15% / 41 = 0.37%), so even though the CP cost per pull is higher (25 vs 20), the specific expected covers per CP are much greater (5% / 25 = 0.20 vs 0.37% / 20 = 0.02)
Some are guaranteed but not always available:
-4* feeders (not every 5* has a feeder)
-For 250 or 500 CP, you can buy a cover IF it is featured in the HfH store (but you can only buy one cover once)
-For increasing HP, you can buy up to 400 shards (80% of a cover) IF it is in your daily shard offers
-You can earn shards in PvP and PvE but the characters rotate and may not be the one you want
Projectus2501 said: Man... I appreciate your math but I don't agree with your reasoning. Building a 5* from scratch can be done much cheaper via shards (insanely expensive still) you just need to wait for the char rotation (2 per day) but you would get there relatively fast.On the same subject, I have a question. Its almost a retorical one. What is the point of buying a 5* in this game? I mean, I understand some of the advantages, but what I don't understand is that if you put 1k or 10k into the game you will still need to keep playing daily hours to keep up with the new chars. For that cash the reward should be much bigger...
bluewolf said: Obviously for most people the return on $5k for a champed 5 or 2 (or 3) isn't very good at all, as you didn't skip the playing. But you would have bigger 5's than almost any non-whale
DAZ0273 said: These amounts of money are simply staggering. Perhaps more worryingly is the nonchalant way it is all being discussed!
MadScientist said: The numbers I indicated are the number of HP bundles that you have to buy. For example, in the Apoc / buy latest / buyclub line it means that you have to buy an average of 31 (thirty-one) bundles which would cost $3100. This number lines up with you bote-calculation, no?Of course, there may be bugs in my code but the qualitative behavior of the results look ok.
MadScientist said: DAZ0273 said: These amounts of money are simply staggering. Perhaps more worryingly is the nonchalant way it is all being discussed! I'm just here for having an excuse to write a monte carlo simulation
pheregas said: So what my take away from this is, with 40 champed 5s, if it were not against TOS to do so, asking $492,000 for my account would actually be at a discount!
jp1 said: Absolutely ridiculous that it is against TOS to sell your account/resources. If there were some real monetary value to the purchases people would spend much more IMO. See some MMOs where the economy is that of a small country.
atomzed said: jp1 said: Absolutely ridiculous that it is against TOS to sell your account/resources. If there were some real monetary value to the purchases people would spend much more IMO. See some MMOs where the economy is that of a small country. Jp1, it’s actually standard practice across most, if not all games to disallow transferring or selling of accounts and resources. Look at all the EULA and it’s practically guaranteed that it’s the case. Simply because second hand sales don’t contribute to the bottom line.