Crystal Purchasers not getting their money's worth?
June 11, 2016 4:32PM
edited June 2016
I translated everything in game into approximate dollar value in this spreadsheet. I translated the dollar value of a single crystal and then did the maths to see how much shards, droids, and credits are actually worth.
Say you purchase a Vault.
When you buy the Chromium Mega-Pack, each shard costs $0.19.
When you buy the Training Droid Mega-Pack, each droid costs $0.06.
When you buy the Credit Mega-Pack, each 10,000 credits costs $0.07.
Looking at the breakdowns, these seem entirely intentional.
The real problem is when you go to purchase packs like Military Might or Aurodium, these is a huge discrepancy in what you are paying.
Using those values and knowing how many shards, credits, and/or training droids you are getting tells us how much each of those packs is worth. The Aurodium Data pack is worth $4.77 of that $99.99 you spent on that vault, so almost 5%.
But, the individual components only total out to $3.09. That amounts to a 56% markup!. Even looking at the Military Might Data pack, the cheaper, not-so-good deal, was only a 24% markup and the mega pack was a 19% markup.
Even considering the novelty of the shards - this doesn't seem worth it. I know people (like me) are still going to buy a few.
What I find interesting is comparing the markups to those who would purchase a Pouch of Crystals. They actually experience less of a markup price!
It just seems a little shady on EA's part.
What are your thoughts?
Also, I plan on adding a calculator to the spreadsheet to determine how much your account is worth. If you have any ideas or improvements, please leave a comment in the spreadsheet.
Spreadsheet link (since links don't show well on this forum): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HLmHgOHZ_KvplJHbM5bfScbiMADcO7XMP_qKsY0FrDA/edit?usp=sharing
Post edited by Hanak on
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Replies
Thank you for your thoughts.
Which reminds me - is it always 15 shards if you already have that character?
In general in the game you pay for specificity and for immediacy.
The only time this isn't true is purple shipment gear which is a bargain.
Or you could compare it to hard nodes at 100 Crystal energy refresh and 50 Crystal shard refresh and you get 83, 90 and 100 crystals per shard.
I thought about this and I may mess around with this next. The hard part if computing the probability on only my data sample. If someone has that handy, I'd be much obliged.
As @HanSlowMo has pointed out the aurodium packs have premium characters whose shards would technically cost more due to the exclusivity of them.
When you compare the chromium 8packs with the military might packs again there would be differences. Military might or rancor raid packs would cost more because they offer specific toons from around 20 whereas the 8pack offers you any toons out of the 80+. This is confirmed when you buy the droid pack or jedi bundle for example as these are more expensive packs but contain more specific toons.
Also the 8packs do not have a fixed per shard value. This will vary depending on how many full characters you get which I've seen being 1-3 and they can also be 2,3 or 4 star which makes it incredibly variable.
At the end of the day, any addiction is expensive.
First, thank you for taking the time to do the cost comparison.
Second, I'd tend to agree with several other posters on here that you are paying a premium for a character recently released or not obtainable by the FTP crowd.
Latest and greatest phone, car, digital movie will be marked up for a few months after release.
I'm Ok with this. People always have a choice whether they spend or not.
-Ashishin
I first thought the same thing about the 8packs. We are kinda right, but also kinda wrong. The variance on that as you stated would be 3-9 extra shards with it leaning heavy to the 3 mark - even so the computation puts it at $0.17 per shard. And it falls in line with their model of a $0.01 decrease in price/shard as purchase the larger pack. (please correct me if I'm wrong, but it is 15 shards if you already have the character, correct?)
I don't have it spelled out as clearly as I could, but the premium shard value of the Aurodium pack is exactly double the anticipated value of a shard from the 8 packs.
My purpose here was not to say EA is bad or things are ridiculous - moreso just wanting to figure out their pricing strategy. I've been playing FTP, PTW, and subscription games for years (and as a mathematician, I can't help it). I'm very used to it, I feed it, but I like to know how much I feed it.
To answer your question I think its
2* 25 shards worth for unowned and 7 shards for owned
3* 50 shards worth for unowned and 14 shard for owned
4* 80 shards worth for unowned and 32 shards for owned
(it's something like that. Can't remember exactly)
The difference may be small but there is the potential for some variance depending on what is drawn)
Im the same, I do spend but I like to go for what's the best value but I haven't purchased aurodiums yet based on the pricing model but have purchased raid, assault, 8 packs, 4 packs - droid and jedi bundles - some of these weren't particularly good value and I tend to do the maths first to dissuade myself from buying them but tend to do it anyway so I like your approach