Hey all,
I figured since we are about to begin Season 1.2, it was worth looking back at Season 1.1 and asking important questions about the format to determine how to approach Season 1.2. I’m going to give my thoughts on the issue that I feel is most important. Please feel free to share your feedback in this thread as well about this or any other items, like Story, etc.
Should I be paying money for this?
The most important question in my mind. Given that this is a F2P live service game, anyone can pick the game up and give the format a try and decide if they like it or don’t. Their is no cost other than your free time. But when you are thinking about whether you should spend actual money on something, then the question becomes more involved.
Unlike a lot of F2P games, the value of the purchasing a “pass” or “season upgrade” is pretty clear. There is a list of rewards and you decide if you want to pay money for said rewards, many of which are available at a slower pace F2P. However, that is not the case with Seasons in Puzzle Quest 3. Instead, what we have to a certain degree is an enhanced prize station and lottery, similar to playing games at Dave & Busters or the carnival and getting a bunch of tickets and then having to decide on which overpriced items to spend our tickets. In this scenario, it’s equivalent to everyone getting a free card with a limited number of plays but you can pay money and get more plays for even more prizes (or so you hope)!
In very simplistic terms, the two main benefits of purchasing either the Gold or Platinum Pass is increased Gems and increased Seasonal Currency. In terms of Gems, F2P can earn up to 500 gems, Gold Pass owners can earn up to 2,000 gems, and up to 5,000 gems are earnable by Platinum Pass holders via the token bank.
In terms of Seasonal Currency, I summarized in a previous thread and provided a template for determining generally how much Seasonal Currency you can earn from each approach:
The calculator is now updated for all variables including the amounts earned for each Story Mode. We can see that the average F2P player will earn between 3,000-4,000 Seasonal Currency, while a Gold Pass Holder will average ~6,500 Seasonal Currency (the assumption being that a Gold or Platinum Pass holder will play daily to maximize their additional purchased plays so there is less volatility in the range). A Platinum Pass holder will earn ~10,500 Anthrite.
Additional assumptions:
- the Difficulty of the Battles played averages around Difficulty V. This is easier to maintain than before since Loot Tickets now count both towards Battle Completion and towards Seasonal Bank increases; and
- no additional Seasonal Currency purchases are made with either Gems or Crowns, which will make sense shortly.
Now the question is: What can we do with all this Seasonal Currency? And here is where it gets more complicated. Each Seasons Shop will have certain purchasable Spells, Minions, and Cosmetics. In Season 1.1, the combined cost of the game play items was 800 Seasonal Currency and the combined cost of the Cosmetics was 2,000, meaning that even F2P players can acquire enough Seasonal Currency to acquire the Shop-sold items. After that though, you enter the wonder world of R N G. So some of the currency you can use to buy guaranteed relics for upgrades. But the question is: will you get the items that you want to upgrade? You can potentially get them from Dungeon Battle Chests but as was amply demonstrated in other threads, the drop rates are spotty and the rarities almost all Rare and below, and more likely than not you will end up with piles of Food that you can’t use. You can potentially get them from the Caches but here comes the even bigger lottery part of the system where you really need the RNG gods to be in your favor. And even then, once you have the items, were they really even worth it? The gear sets so far are not very exciting, the spells are not replacing anything currently in use, and the legendary items are interesting but not required meta-type items.
I polled the members of Throne of Odin and Odin’s Wolves and this is the results that were reported back on the following questions:
From this I think we can see that purchasing the Pass definitely increases your overall goals completed, but most of the most “rewarding” Goals were unattainable even by Platinum Pass holders and the Goals simply give you more lottery currency. I believe the highest Goal Percentage Completion we had was 84%.
So is it worth it to buy the Gold or Diamond Pass? I would say in its current state the answer is NO, BUT …. Mainly because there is too much RNG involved. Maybe you will get the items you want, maybe they will be the mastery color you want, maybe you will luck upon enough relics to make the upgrades you want, and maybe those upgrades are attainable because somehow you found enough glyphs to keep pace. Perhaps if we had an understanding of what Seasons Archive holds for Pass holders that would help to determine some additional value. The BUT part is that for the cost the gems are a decent value especially for the Platinum Pass. However, you still have to get around the money/Crown arbitrage game being played by the developer. Crowns are sold in increments of 535 and 1120, but the Gold Pass is sold for 600 Crowns and the Platinum Pass is sold for 1200 Crowns. So you can’t just buy the right amount of Crowns to pick up the Pass only. Very devious and unworthy way of doing game currency pricing.
Personally I would like to see more guaranteed items purchasable in the Shop. Second, the caches have absurd amounts of Shards and low level rarities and not enough upgrade materials for the gear in question. Lastly, there needs to be ways in Seasons mode or at least somewhere else other than Events to attain Glyphs. Glyphs continue to be the biggest bottleneck and all Glyph sources are random which makes trying to complete things like Seasons Goals even worse.
Looking forward to hearing what others think.
