Well let’s be clear on one thing first.
The purchasing and reselling of a sale item is an exploit only when the result creates an unexpected and unintended advantage within the game environment. The Mist Lynx as an example, you could sell back for HIGHER than its listed sale price. Exploit. Why? You can do the buy sell over and over to inflate your CB wallet without a loss.
The purchasing of a mech for its equipment on the other hand is not exploitable because it is done at an overall loss. The Enforcer was 3.x million. It comes equipped with a 4.x mil XL and 800k worth of UAC5. The chassis stripped only sold for 700- 800k? All unwanted equipment sells for, at best, half value as well. So even if everything else was sold except the XL, 800K for chassis 500k (generously rounding up) for weapons and equipment, that is only 1.3 million out of the 3.x million spent. The player still suffers a financial loss and therefore no unfair change in game environment. All you did was get a discount on a single engine at the expense on giving up a mech and equipment.
Unfortunately I feel this is going to be the unavoidable nature of the 50% CB sales . Even if PGI takes old crap stock variants of mechs, the discounted mech price will (I dare say) always end up less than buying that mech engine by itself. Look at the Locust V1 (?) that was on sale. That mech was a meager 700k, but the STD160 that comes stock with it is 981,200cb. It’s a manufactured flaw in the system, the math doesn’t change. It’s nothing PGI specifically did wrong to cause it’s just an incompatibility with the flat 50% off sale model. Mech prices are tied directly to the equipment included ON the chassis.
Personally I’m not bothered by my second example of buying a mech for a discounted engine, because the player IS STILL incurring a C-Bill loss. Big deal, I bought a XL 250 (4,083,333 CB) at discount, I still spent the 3,371,160CBs for it. It is wrong though to make C-Bills off the deal, so that’s just someone making sure due diligence is done properly.
I will stand by and fully support future XX% off sales, but it wouldn’t surprise me they won’t be as generous 50%. If you play with the math, you will find that sweet spot where the discount percentage will be greater than or equal to the cost of the sale mech’s engine.
Let’s look at the Locust again;
Locust-1V ---------- 1,388,242 CB
50% discount ------- 694,121 CB
30% discount ------- 971,770 CB
25% discount ------- 1,041,182 CB
STD160 ------------- 981,200 CB
So with a few minutes of simple math, that sweet spot is between 25 – 30%. Since it’s not likely to see a 26.5% sale on mechs…. A 25% off sale would eliminate the buying mechs of just for an engine discount….. IF that’s is determined to be a problem at all.
I’m hoping these c-bill sales continue though. Exploits and nit-picking aside, it is a great boon to our F2P population and really should be done more often. Sales affecting C-Bills is long, long overdue.
Edited by Darrious Quinn, 29 September 2017 - 07:18 AM.