Opinion: The Revealed Crown Gems for Radiants Amounts Are Fair

Fischblut · March 2021

Why are the Radiant Apex's all different prices but under the same tier? It's the only thing that makes no sense...

With lowest price being just 1200 gems, players can afford at least something rare from this season, so they are not entirely at mercy of some RNG drop

Getting 1200 gems for that Wolf, for example, is much more likely than getting a true Radiant drop withing same amount of crates.

They could have easily made each of these mounts cost 2500 gems instead, for example. And it would be much more fair considering the rarity of these rewards. But they wanted to be kind and give people options - and people still complain even about 1200 gems

As for Senche having the highest cost here, is not because it's senche. It is the most glowy mount of all 3 this time

If they were 800 gems would you actually want to buy & use them, knowing that half the server also had them?

Somebody would be discouraged by such cheap Radiants, somebody would buy all 3 mounts just cause they are cheap, but... most of people would still complain about 800 gems as being too high price.

etchedpixels · March 2021

ThorianB wrote: »

For reference WoW has sold 14 million copies in its lifetime. ESO has sold 15 million copies as of 2020. ESO would require more/better server hardware than WoW.

What matters for that is number of active players - which seems from the limited public data to have doubled in the past few years - impressive for a game that old. A lot of the original players will have moved on but as the game isn't subscription only everybody who ever bought a licence is still in theory at least a subscriber but they don't cost very much.

It also depends on game quality, reliablity and latency what you need. Given ESO is still running on the 2014 servers (according to ZOS) and clearly doesn't prioritize latency I'd draw my own conclusions.

volkeswagon · March 2021

A $1000 mount is not fair. Zos may find themselves being the reason for more bills being passed that prohibit the sale of loot boxes in games. I for one have a very negative view of ZOS because of the crown crates and the gem system.

Araneae6537 · March 2021

volkeswagon wrote: »

A $1000 mount is not fair.

How can it be fair or not fair? The price is the price. You may find it unreasonable (that is certainly more than I would pay), but that does not make it unfair.

I also find it curious that those calculating estimations of price for these mounts leave out everything else one gets from Crown crates. No one is paying $1000 or whatever for one mount or if you are, that’s on you. I assume that anyone buying crates wants a significant portion of the possible rewards.

I do not like items being locked behind crates, unavailable for direct purchase (as in, without having to buy crates at all but with Crowns or even regular currency) and even some of the direct purchase items and services I feel are overpriced or downright scammy (selling items cheaply available in game). But hyperbole serves no one. It is not unfair or predatory or evil. It may be expensive, but whether it is worth it or not is up to each person to decide for themselves.

xAarionx · March 2021

Hmm, I wouldn't call it fair, but unreasonable

The Company is free to Stabilish the price the want
And you are free to buy It or not

akdave0 · March 2021

Seraphayel wrote: »

akdave0 wrote: »

I didn’t find the price to be unfair. Sitting on 69,000 gems made it easy to buy them. Way less stressful and money draining than opening 1200.00 worth of crates.

So you spent well over $10.000 worth on crates? Okay.

I can take a screenshot when I get home. I own a cannabis extraction facility. 10k isn’t much to me. I have almost every radiant Mount ever released. What I do with my money is my business. Don’t hate, work harder.

Seraphayel · March 2021

Araneae6537 wrote: »

volkeswagon wrote: »

A $1000 mount is not fair.

How can it be fair or not fair? The price is the price. You may find it unreasonable (that is certainly more than I would pay), but that does not make it unfair.

I also find it curious that those calculating estimations of price for these mounts leave out everything else one gets from Crown crates. No one is paying $1000 or whatever for one mount or if you are, that’s on you. I assume that anyone buying crates wants a significant portion of the possible rewards.

I do not like items being locked behind crates, unavailable for direct purchase (as in, without having to buy crates at all but with Crowns or even regular currency) and even some of the direct purchase items and services I feel are overpriced or downright scammy (selling items cheaply available in game). But hyperbole serves no one. It is not unfair or predatory or evil. It may be expensive, but whether it is worth it or not is up to each person to decide for themselves.

Nothing in these crates is worth $200-300, let alone over $1000. It‘s just gambling on top of gambling and now they just added a ceiling to it which requires you to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars or just continue gambling (if you want the items or if you lack self control). None of this should be glorified, it’s a very bad business practice.

notyuu · March 2021

I get the distinct feeling that they only added this option to "get along" with certian laws in pictulr countries.

Iccotak · March 2021

Seems to me that the goal is essentially to

A. Buy massive amounts of crown crates at either the shot at a radiant apex or get enough gems to buy a radiant apex

B. save up on gems over the course of a year or two and wait for the radiant apex mount that you want

I think a problem is that there’s people who want to be able to collect everything from a crown crate set in one sitting.

That’s why they’re random and the devs will cycle old crown crates to come back. So then you get another shot...to spend more money.

Is it gambling...well yes but actually no..but actually yes.

idk, I just don’t make it a goal to collect everything in every single type of crown crate.

Araneae6537 · March 2021

Seraphayel wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

volkeswagon wrote: »

A $1000 mount is not fair.

How can it be fair or not fair? The price is the price. You may find it unreasonable (that is certainly more than I would pay), but that does not make it unfair.

I also find it curious that those calculating estimations of price for these mounts leave out everything else one gets from Crown crates. No one is paying $1000 or whatever for one mount or if you are, that’s on you. I assume that anyone buying crates wants a significant portion of the possible rewards.

I do not like items being locked behind crates, unavailable for direct purchase (as in, without having to buy crates at all but with Crowns or even regular currency) and even some of the direct purchase items and services I feel are overpriced or downright scammy (selling items cheaply available in game). But hyperbole serves no one. It is not unfair or predatory or evil. It may be expensive, but whether it is worth it or not is up to each person to decide for themselves.

Nothing in these crates is worth $200-300, let alone over $1000. It‘s just gambling on top of gambling and now they just added a ceiling to it which requires you to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars or just continue gambling (if you want the items or if you lack self control). None of this should be glorified, it’s a very bad business practice.

Not worth that much to me, no, but then a lot of things that other people spend their money on are not worth the price if anything at all to me. And as someone who maintains a collection of tarantulas, I am quite sure that others would say the same of some things I spend money on!

No one is required to spend money on anything here. If I lack self control then I guess I am “required” to do a lot of things, but that’s just nonsensical.

CaptainVenom · March 2021

I'd never spend that much for a mount just because it's pretty lol...

ThorianB · March 2021

volkeswagon wrote: »

A $1000 mount is not fair. Zos may find themselves being the reason for more bills being passed that prohibit the sale of loot boxes in games. I for one have a very negative view of ZOS because of the crown crates and the gem system.

$1000 for a mount is a gross exaggeration. The most expensive mount would cost you somewhere between $350 and $500 depending on luck. For $500 you could get the 1200 and 1600 gems mounts. They are still very much overpriced, like everything else that is sold for crowns/gems.

Blacknight841 · March 2021

Opinion: You are wrong.

Fair is releasing drop rate percentages with each season. Fair is having all items of the same quality dropping at the same rate. There is nothing fair, about saying an experience scroll is the same quality as the other legendary items, if it drops 4x as often. Even if you are playing roulette, you know the odd before playing, crown crates should be no different

Erelah · March 2021

Jeffrey530 wrote: »

Starlock wrote: »

DarcyMardin wrote: »

Fair?? LMAO. You spend money to get crowns, then spend crowns to gamble on crates, get a lot of useless stuff, and turn into yet another form of currency, gems (by now most people have lost track of how much real money is involved, which is of course exactly what ZOS wants). Then you collect these gems to save up (by gambling on more crates) to get the one “my precious” digital item that you weren’t lucky enough to get out of one of those many useless crates you bought.

Why anybody indulges in the silly and wasteful practice of playing the Game of Crates is beyond me. Unless you’re rich, winter is coming for your bank account.

Because addiction, right? It's real thing and it hurts those who suffer from it. I don't have a problem with gambling addiction myself, but I know people who do. For them, it's not a matter of them "indulging" it; they want to quit, but it's not that simple. Addiction never is, regardless of the form it takes. It used to be that gambling addicts could use a hobby like video games as an escape from the casino to help manage their addiction. But certain groups in the video games industry decided to bring the casino to living rooms over the past decade. This has done a lot of harm to customers and these groups have profited immensely. Worse, this gambling is largely unregulated and the groups doing this by and large actively resist much needed regulation.

Charing obscene amounts of money (gems) for radiant apex mounts is not a solution to the problem of unregulated gambling in video games. It's a marginal improvement for some, a dangerous hook for others. Just a few more spins and you'll have enough gems for that mount. Or maybe just a few more spins and you'll be the lucky one. Just a few more spins...

I can point victims of gambling addiction towards some places for help. I wish I could do the same for the video game industry so they knock it off with this crap.

To be honest I don't understand the logic here.

Because some people have gambling addiction, therefore gambling should not be in a video game?

What about people with sugary food addiction then, should sugary food be banned in supermarkets because of that? That's arguably worse than gambling addiction, it literally kills people and put a heavier burden on any healthcare system.

It is really down to the person to have 'self control' or realising they need help with any sort of addiction.

While I disagree with your argument, I'd also prefer a game without crates.

The moment I go the casino and they have ESO loot boxes there I will agree with you.

Raegwyr · March 2021

ThorianB wrote: »

Seraphayel wrote: »

1. No, they're not. There's a reason why even dead MMORPGs are kept alive in maintenance mode: because it's easy and cheap to keep them going, especially when you have a cash shop integrated.

I stopped reading here.

Then you basically lose an argument as @Seraphayel points were pretty valid.
You massively overestimate both current size of eso when comparing to wow (wow is still much bigger game) and the cost of running a mmo infrastructure. The most expensive thing is new content development (This is why mmos are expensive, they require constant flow of content to have a healthy playerbase. Maintenance is a fraction of overall costs). Team of around 200 ppl can cost around 3M $ per month. But problem is, you can clearly see that zos drops a lower quality and quantity content over the years. Chapter with smaller zones, smaller trials, q4 zones without vet content etc.
I expect that they spend less then three milions on servers per month.
Estimated costs of current all wow servers is around 5 milion per month (and we are talking about the biggest mmo on the market. Blizz even released intresting data from which we know they daily cost of running the servers in 2011 was 137k $ but also only from sub they got 5mil per day.

TLDR: MMOs are expensive because they need to constantly drop new content to stay alive. ESO content quality and quantity is ddefinietely lower then what it was couple years ago

ThorianB · March 2021

Raegwyr wrote: »

ThorianB wrote: »

Seraphayel wrote: »

1. No, they're not. There's a reason why even dead MMORPGs are kept alive in maintenance mode: because it's easy and cheap to keep them going, especially when you have a cash shop integrated.

I stopped reading here.

Then you basically lose an argument as @Seraphayel points were pretty valid.
You massively overestimate both current size of eso when comparing to wow (wow is still much bigger game) and the cost of running a mmo infrastructure. The most expensive thing is new content development (This is why mmos are expensive, they require constant flow of content to have a healthy playerbase. Maintenance is a fraction of overall costs). Team of around 200 ppl can cost around 3M $ per month. But problem is, you can clearly see that zos drops a lower quality and quantity content over the years. Chapter with smaller zones, smaller trials, q4 zones without vet content etc.
I expect that they spend less then three milions on servers per month.
Estimated costs of current all wow servers is around 5 milion per month (and we are talking about the biggest mmo on the market. Blizz even released intresting data from which we know they daily cost of running the servers in 2011 was 137k $ but also only from sub they got 5mil per day.

TLDR: MMOs are expensive because they need to constantly drop new content to stay alive. ESO content quality and quantity is ddefinietely lower then what it was couple years ago

Your argument is not any better than Seaphayels and also not worth arguing. I disagree with you on the quality of content. With a few exceptions, the content has been good in my opinion. Markarth was probably my favorite DLC to date. Skyrim was a huge zone.

renne · March 2021

Razorruk wrote: »

Amazed at the naivety of most of the comments. They're marketing these as rare/exclusive items and prices were always going to reflect that. If they were 800 gems would you actually want to buy & use them, knowing that half the server also had them?

Yes, because I like them.

I liked and bought and used the purple Legion Zero horse for 600 crown gems and if these were reasonably priced I'd get them too because I like them. It doesn't bother me with any of my mounts if half the server has them, because with normal mounts they often already do!

But 2500 - because of course the one I liked most was deemed to be excessively expensive, even compared to the other two - crown gems? I thought about it and I just can't justify it.

I bought a bunch of crates in case it actually dropped (I like the other stuff in the crates so that wasn't a hardship to me) but it didn't and I guess it'll just be another radiant apex I liked and couldn't afford, even if this time it wasn't pure RNG against me.

Hotdog_23 · March 2021

Stand by what I already said earlier in the thread but to each his own.

What I think is truly funny

is that for me personally I hardly ever use a mount anymore. With the extra 20% bump in the new CP tree, ring of the wild and hunt and Accelerate skill from Psijic Order I just don’t use a mount anymore.

Stay safe and enjoy the journey 😊

PS. ZOS stop the micromanagement of the green tree 🥺

StamPlar_1976 · March 2021

Yeahhhh..... No. I'm good. I don't even subscribe. I sure as heck ain't buying the clown crates to get suckered into buying more to try to build up gems. Those prices are no where in the ballpark of fair.

ZiRM · March 2021

2500 gems? I'll pass!!!
1500 is doable but still ridiculous to me.