Conclusions
-
Crowns - Personally I detest premium currencies that are only available through purchase, with no in-game acquisition options. There already exists a more suitable premium currency: It’s called dollars! (or whatever your local currency is). The main reason for premium, purchase-only (hard) currencies is to create arbitrage: Selling the premium currency in bundles and then articulating things to buy in amounts that leave the player with “change”, residual premium currency that they can’t use unless they buy additional amounts of the hard currency. That is somewhat ameliorated here because Shard Daily Deals exist in extremely small amounts that at least allow the player to use up the premium currency. I would prefer to just simply see Crowns go away and Gems be the premium currency (a “medium” currency if you will), both attainable in-game through gameplay and purchasable in the Shop. However, given that gems are so frontloaded in the game and easily attainable by a starting player, I doubt that is a realistic possibility. As @Tacet has suggested, Crowns should be offered even in small quantities to players through promotions or perhaps as he suggested, tied to VIP to create more longevity of value and entice continued renewals.
-
Gems This appears to be the currency that will resemble Gems in Gems of War. I suspect that we will see this currency show up as event rewards and that players will have various ways to earn Gems to utilize on shop deals/refreshes/bounties/whatever else is thought of as we move forward. Should you be using gems currently or hoarding for future use? As I mentioned earlier, the total Gems to be earned from a playthrough is 5,625; 5 playthroughs is 28,125 gems. That’s pretty generous as a starting currency to make choices in the game. However, without knowing how prevalent gems will be in the future, it’s hard to recommend going on a spending binge and buying every gem offer that shows up in the Shop (further thoughts?)
-
Gold Farmable currency that currently has insufficient options for use. @Tacet summed up the issues with Gold later in this post. @Salty further on indicated that revisions Gold offers are being discussed.
-
VIP Pass Rather than rehash excellent points already made by @Tacet and others, I provide reference to his insightful post:
VIP Pass rewards fall off after a few months of playing -
Daily Deals - What to make of the changes since 0.35? I think @Tacet makes a good point on the incentive issue and I share his view. Although it is cheaper in gems to refresh the shop then before, there are less “interesting” things to pop up, such as high value gold buys. Also, nearly 1/4 of deals are now defined in Crown currency, making it less likely that people will spend gems (using up a potential premium currency) because they are currently not wanting to spend cash on the Crown currency. I don’t know what the actual data says, but if I had not purposely done refreshes to get this daily shop data, I have a feeling I would have done less shop refreshes. I do view the shard packages favorably; creating a tiered package structure (20 for gold, 50 for gems/crowns) is actually a reasonable approach. But I wonder if things were defined entirely in gems rather than gems/crowns, perhaps people would become accustomed to spending the gems and then, much like Gems of War, will look for opportunities to buy more Gems to fill our there needs as they arise (again, I am not a fan of Crowns). Lastly, I do think VIP spots in the Daily Deals should be Gold purchases only; of course making things of higher value available once again in gold makes it more likely that these deals will be even more attractive to players and would enhance the desirability of VIP.
-
Battle Pass
The Battle Pass (premium side) currently costs USD$10 (ignoring crown purchases discounts) and runs for 60 days. In order to achieve all rewards in the Battle Pass, you need to earn 900 horns over the course of the 60 day pass. But are the full rewards even possible? @Tacet did some math on this in an earlier post so I’m repeating his conclusions but your potential Horns earned are: 1) 18/week by participating and collecting Tier1-6 rewards from all 3 PVP tournaments and 2) approximately 7/day from completing Bounties using the 4 daily free Bounty tokens and using the one-at-a-time, best-available Bounty selection. So, the total estimated Horns that can be earned during a Battle Pass season are ~564, assuming free Bounties are done daily and a minimum of 7 weeks of PVP including (all 3 tourneys). That leaves us 336 Horns short of the required total; in other words we need to make up 5.6 Horns a day to max out the Battle Pass. Thus we would need to spend 150 gems/day for 60 days (estimated 3 additional Bounties a day at 25, 50, 75 gems respectively) to get enough Horns to finish out the Pass. That’s a total of 9,000 gems! Let’s just go ahead and say plainly, even with the inclusion of a Relic and a Glyph in the premium Battle Pass rewards, the premium Battle Pass is the worst real currency investment you can possibly make in the game.
I will continue to update with additional thoughts as the discussion on the Shop continues!