== Odds of getting a mythic item ==
From reading a bunch of replies/tests, I get the impression that 1% mythic drop is - on average over time - about the expected drop rate of a mythic item for 100-level chests. Lower chests also (apparently - I’ve not seen any drop yet, after all) drop mythic, presumably at less than 1%.
So let us assume that, on average, 1 item per 100 chests is the best-case expected return, farming 100-level chests.
If you’re a new player and anything mythic is cool, then that’s not bad. Because you’re still figuring things out and you’re pleased with whatever the RNG tosses you.
.
== CASE STUDY: A mid-level player ==
Now let’s take the case of a mid-game player. You’ve figured out your desired gear setups, and there are 2 pieces from a particular set that you want to get.
So you farm that dungeon. Since you can’t autofarm at a high level, you have to play actively, and it takes you, on average, 7 minutes to successfully farm that dungeon. (That’s about what it takes me, including failed attempts or restarts. I can survive 1-3 hits from an enemy… so I have to spend most of my time making sure I keep the enemy stunned until I’m buffed up enough to survive more hits.)
So, you have a 1/100 chance of getting a mythic. That’s, on average, 700 minutes of play for one mythic.
Ah, but there’s only 2 particular items you’re looking for. Meaning only 1/3 of the time will that mythic be what you want. So it’s not 700 minutes, it’s 2100 minutes on average.
(Of course, the probabilities are a bit more complicated – e.g. after 1400 minutes, i.e. 2 mythics, there’s a 55% chance you’ll have gotten one of the pieces you want. There’s also a chance that you could get 10 mythic drops - 7000 minutes – and still not get anything you were hunting. But we can use the simpler calculation to represent the expected results over all the different possibilities.)
2100 minutes to get one of those two pieces. But now you want the other … and that’s only 1 of 6 possible mythic drops. You’re looking for both pieces after all.
So now you grind for the next one – 700 minutes per mythic (on average) and 1/6 chance it’s what you want, so 4200 minutes to get it on averge. (Could be quicker, could be longer, depending on your luck.)
That’s a total of 2100+4200 = 6300 minutes to get the 2 desired items from the set. That’s ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE HOURS. … If you play this casual game as a full time job (40 hours a week), that’s over THIRTEEN DAYS OF FULL TIME GRINDING, just to get the two items you want from that set/dungeon.
And most customers aren’t full-time-PQ3 players. So it’s going to take them longer than 2 work weeks! If we define a “casual” player as someone playing 10 hours a week, that’s TWO-AND-A-HALF-MONTHS of grinding game play to get just 2 desired items from one dungeon.
How about if you want 3 particular items from the dungeon? … 1400+2100+4200 = 7700 minutes = expect nearly 130 hours on average.
And that’s just one gear set out of the (at present) 27.
And that’s only grinding for gear items. Doesn’t count time doing anything else in the game if you want to.
.
Yes, I could grind a lower level dungeon faster … but with a corresponding reduction in good-drop chance.
Say I could do a level 50 dungeon in 2 minutes, but with a three -fold reduction in drop chance. Then the two changes cancel out. I dont have a sense of what chance lower-level chests have of dropping mythic, but that’s probably a fair ballpark.
IE a reasonable working hypothesis is that the faster time to do a worse chest is offset by a corresponding reduction in mythic chance. So the calculations should be about right for that case too.
.
== THE IMPLICATIONS FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ==
This is why the advance-only-by-random-drops has sabotaged the ability of players – particularly the non-end-gamers – to get the loadouts they’ve figured out they want.
This is why I maintain that it now takes LONGER to upgrade a particular item, despite the fact that you can get a mythic “instantaneously” rather than having to slowly improve an item over time.
Because the probability of getting a particular item is SO LOW that, odds are, you’d have gotten it quicker under the old system. Even needing all those glyphs and relics.
And, meanwhile, it’s just constant discouragement as you fail, over and over, to get the desired items from the random drop. No sense of making slow, reliable, measurable improvement.
.
Which means frustrated customers giving up or even quitting … much less likely to spend $ than those making progress who feel good about the game and want to speed up their advancement.
Certainly, they won’t get as “involved” or “invested” in their gear advancement as they did back when they had the sense of “agency” and “consistent progress” that the old upgrading mechanism allowed.
.
== WHAT ABOUT LOOT TICKETS? … Let’s do those calculations ==
Indeed, they’ll probably do what I have, which is to basically give up on advancing their gear, and only do auto-play and loot tickets. Autoplay will be at a low enough level that the chances of a mythic drop are negligible. And they’ll have a very limited number of dungeon loot tickets to use.
So, yes, with loot tickets, sure, I can “win” a level-100 chest faster than that 7 minutes. But if my crafter produces, say, only 2 dungeon loot tickets a day (she’s at level 45, and I think that’s about what I get as a ‘casual’ player who will log in 4-6x a day to check my tavern) then that’s only “saving” me about 15 minutes of grinding a day, or less than 2 hours a week.
So, yeah, I could try (in the example above) to get those 2 items from dungeons only using loot tickets. Then my expected time-to-completion for just ONE of the 27 dungeons – if I spend all my loot tickets on it – is SIXTY WEEKS (900 attempts, on average, with 15 dungeon loot tickets per week.)
That’s over a year to get 2 desired items out of a single dungeon using the loot tickets I’m generating.
That is not going to inspire me to spend lots of money trying to speed things up.
That’s going to make me GIVE UP and NOT CARE ANY MORE … and, in fact, greet the arrival of a mythic, when it does show up as a random drop out of the blue, not with exitement but with an apathetic, “yeah, that’s nice, but so what … I’ll still never get a significant amount of my gear upgraded. Ho hum.”
A very different response than I had when getting to a mythic was the reward I’d been consistently working towards, and devoting resources and game-play time to, and it felt like something I’d earned through time-and-money spent working towards that goal… not something just finally tossed my way by the capricious RNG gods.
.
== CONCLUSIONS ==
So, again, for both customer-retention, customer-happiness, and financial-income reasons, the devs would be well advised to return the ability to upgrade chosen gear to mythic.
That’ll increase the likelihood that new customers become long-term customers, since they find the game more psychologically rewarding, and it’ll increase the frequency at which long-term customers spend $ on the game, because they’re more invested in gear development and see spending money on that as a reasonable/reliable expense.
There’s enough gear to get, and enough different challenges, that restoring that ability isn’t going to suddenly make those customers “max out” and stop spending.