Paigan, on 16 September 2017 - 12:39 AM, said:
Of course the vast majority understands it. The vast majority doesn't create cache-whining threads.
Also, you need to understand probability, too.
The ultra rare prices are REALLY valuable. 1000 MC, Mechs, etc. If they set the probability too low, they lose money in the process. A business that loses money is soon a dead business. They are not greey like some wallstreet gamblers who try to squeeze out a few more billions from Africa or whatever. They are a relatively small firm who introduced a gambling element into their game. Just as many other games have, too. Just as casinos do, too. With gambling, the bank ALWAYS wins in the end. Otherwise, it would be bankrupt and the gambling would stop.
Talking about the bank being "greedy" is just ignorant babbling.
This would be true if the rewards actually cost them anything. In a computer game, all digital assets are sunk costs. This means that you invest everything upfront in the creation of the asset and you earn money from sales down the line.
Giving things away in sales ONLY harms their income IF it cannibalizes potential sales. So, if they give away a mech someone would have purchased with MC then it costs them money. If they give someone a mech they would not have bought anyway then it really costs them nothing ... except it makes the player MORE likely to spend MC on keys since they feel that it is possible to win decent rewards. Buying cache keys is already the most cost effective way to convert MC into cbills as far as I know.
In general, with gambling, the margin to the house is very small and they rely on large amounts of money being played to get their share. This document cites about 1% house margin for skilled blackjack players, 5,5% for stud poker and 2.7% on Roulette.
http://www.liquorand...asino_games.pdf
In MWO, the player needs to be enticed to spend real money to win virtual goods ... virtual goods whose only cost to the company is the opportunity cost of the player not purchasing something else. It isn't gambling ... it is a sales technique. Let's say the odds of winning a centurion are 1/1000 (as suggested above). A key costs 25MC. This means that on average every 1000 keys used will net one Centurion ... 25,000MC spent. A Centurion costs 1/10 or less of the MC spent.
On the other hand, maybe the mech is only 1/100 odds. It should be rare but the rewards can not be so rare that it discourages people from spending MC on winning. In fact, I'd suggest that the odds should be set so that the odds of winning would usually require about 50% of the MC required for an upfront purchase. This makes everything purchased by lottery cheaper BUT you don't get so select what you win, it is luck of the draw, however, the odds would be such that it would make purchasing keys a reasonable way to get random digital goods. Careful selection of what is made available would encourage secondary purchases and thus use the lottery system as a sales driver rather than the disincentive system it is right now.
P.S. The odds for MC prizes should be set at 100% or 101% rather than 50% since the MC could be used to purchase more keys and break the system.
Edited by Mawai, 16 September 2017 - 11:19 AM.
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