The RNG box to end all RNG boxes

holdenhamlet

So today Blade and Soul introduced "The Treasure Trove" to our version.

http://www.bladeandsoul.com/en/news/spring-treasure-trove-event/

Basically it's an RNG box that you get one free key for every day.  You can buy "Expansion tickets" to give you more options to choose from.  You can convert gold to hongmoon coin and buy up to 10 additional keys a day.  Any more than that have to be bought directly from the shop.

The boxes contain some really nice soulbound items, and a few really profitable items.  You can even get pure experience points out of the boxes with coupons that grant you 100k experience for hongmoon levels.

People are going super nuts over this event.  Everyone's trying to buy keys with gold in chat.  The top stream on BnS right now is just some guy opening like 300 boxes.

I personally hate rng boxes, but this is even worse than most.  Usually there's one or two good items to be had, but this has a sweeping effect on the economy.  Almost every valuable commodity can be found in large numbers in the boxes.  Prices on everything are plummeting.  Add in the fact that you can just get straight gold from these things and it diminishes the feeling of accomplishment of earning gold in the game legit, not to mention untold amounts of gold are being injected into the economy out of thin air.

Personally I've never seen a worse RNG box in my life.  It's par for the course with f2p games, but damn, this is next level.

Only 2 things prevent this from being really disastrous.

1- you don't need exceptional gear to do any of the content and that's unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.

For example, I saw a guy today in my group that clearly spent hundreds if not thousands on his toon.  Meanwhile he's doing the same content with a guy that has just bought premium and a few NCoin to use the mail (me).  i.e. he's not gaining any advantage really (unless he likes tanking everything with his summoner because of all the aggro he drew).  He'll have a HUGE advantage when the 6v6 unequalized battlegrounds come out in 2 weeks- but those aren't taken seriously and I don't think the rewards are very good.

2- Arena PVE is equalized.  Most people consider Arena to be the whole point of the game.  It's not affected much by this event other than people being able to get hongmoon levels a bit faster and a small chance at getting an expensive hongmoon skill.  

Anyway, today was the first time in 3 months that I logged off with a bitter taste in my mouth.  Treasure Trove wasn't a surprise since every other version had it, and some people actually like it, but for me to see it in action was pretty sad.

Tiamat64

Hmm, that didn't take too long.  Sounds like it jumped into RNG boxes after launch at around the same time Atlantica Online did (another game made by Nexon, but published by someone else at first before Nexon got it a few years down the line).  Loved that game so much and people even wrote articles about how it had a cash shop done right, and then the RNG boxes came...

And when you see how many people are buying the things, it becomes somewhat evident why.  Although even the companies know that it lowers the game's lifespan and player retention rate but I sound like a broken record at that point (people are free to ask for the link to R2'Games business presentation if they haven't seen it yet).  It just doesn't matter when a company's primary purpose is money.

Albatroes

k

holdenhamlet

There has since been another rng box since the Trove event, with even bigger rewards.

They also added daily rewards, which is supposed to give you a reward if you complete 4 different tasks.  The problem is there is a huge jackpot reward of 1k gold.  If you don't get that, you feel like you failed, whereas before earning 20g or whatever from the tasks was fine.

Basically all this stuff combines to minimize the feeling of achievement from any normal progress in the game.

This kind of stuff is why I'm not playing and haven't logged in for a week.

Albatroes

holdenhamlet said:

There has since been another rng box since the Trove event, with even bigger rewards.

They also added daily rewards, which is supposed to give you a reward if you complete 4 different tasks.  The problem is there is a huge jackpot reward of 1k gold.  If you don't get that, you feel like you failed, whereas before earning 20g or whatever from the tasks was fine.

Basically all this stuff combines to minimize the feeling of achievement from any normal progress in the game.

This kind of stuff is why I'm not playing and haven't logged in for a week.

I haven't logged in cause its the same junk and they're changing upgrading for weapons next month. Sure I could build up money till then but its meh....