-!!WARNING: LONG POST WITH MATH!! TL:DR: Red agent gear is so rare it isn’t realistically achieveable and the “Curious of our time” achievement is pretty much impossible in the lifetime of the game no matter how optimistic if you don’t plunder your retirement fund.
So…after recently putting some thought into it and crunching the numbers it came over me hoiw ridiculous the red agent gear is. As someone that is willing to put his face to the grindstone when it comes to agents and ran quite a few missions/e1 dungeons I am quite used to putting time into things but the red agent gear surpasses the possible and needs me to spend time with the system for years on a daily basis to even see one and boosters are not better either.
I understand that Funcom wants and needs to make money but I fail to see how the geargrind to red is motivating in the least to put money into it when they chances are worst than on any other rng ingame by a longshot.
Lets go into the number department. Some assumptions but we should be in the right direction numberwise:
To buy one red gadget you need 500 hexcoins. Lets say you have put your mind to it and wanna buy it with boosters…lots and lots of boosters. In average you get 2 hexcoins per booster which makes 250 boosters (or if we wanna be optimistic lets say 3 which makes it 167). With an aurum cost of 125 aurum per that means you spend 31250 aurum (optimistic: 20875) which is 265 Bucks (optimistic 180) or assuming an exchange rate of 280 marks per aurum 8.750 million marks (5.845 mil).
All to get ONE red agent gear bag (assuming rng doesn’t hate you) that doesn’t need to be the wanted 1 stat/unique item.
Ok, so you don’T have that amount of cash. So you wanna farm it. Not better on that front:
There are between 46 and 47 tier 5 missions (depending on your faction. Templar have one more.)
Of those 46 (lets equalize templar to the other faction for ease of calculation) 6 are bagmissions with one extra having it for critical success which is negligible. How rare they are is hard to figure out but lets go for 3 days until you spot one realistically, 1 day the optimist/ 24/7 player and 7 days the pessimist/ casual that still looks into the game daily as that seems to work as a good rule of thumb. I would like to use hard numbers but a lot of that like the chance to appear compared to other missions is only known to funcom.
For the success chance we could assume someone has mythic gear and the best agents but for a realistic look Quartermaster+Amir+Giovanni and epic gear is probably the most realistic that the average player can afford since outside of endgame players it rapidly gets tighter in the mof purse.
The best case is 48.5% with mythic and stuff like Boone which kinda shows how far fetched it is and the more realistic level is 39%.
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So you get optimistic a bag every 2.5 day, realistic 7.5 for a regular player that is hooked on the game and every 18 days for the casual which still feels a little rose colored glasses but approximating is the thing we gotta do.
Now you got a bag based on Secretfox aka the dropresearch site we guess how many bags we need and you guys assume how much it varies, deal?
91.25 Epic/7.58 Mythic/0.58 Legendary
So an epic every 1.09 bags, a mythic every 13.2 and a legendary every (drumroll) 172.4 bags…-.-
That means for our days until bag:
Optimistic gets a mythic every 33 days (a month of glued agaisnt the monitor) and a legendary every 431 days. 4…3…1
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That is the unrealistic optimist 24/7 player that needs over a year for ONE legendary.
Now for the realistic regular daily player. A mythic every 99 days or roughly 3 months and a legendary every 1293 days. Who is in for playing the game a few more years until their first legendary? SWL is younger than the average time to be expected for a red gadget.
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And now lets see how it looks for more casual players aka the pessimistic expectation:
A mythic every 237.6 days (So nearly a year…they probably do backflips of happiness for seeing their first if ever) and a legendary every 3103.2 days or every 8 and a half years. Which is longer than SWL and TSW are out combined!
How funcom expects someone to ever reaching this is beyond me. Even the most optimistic outlook is still a minimal rng that makes even things like the box look common. (if you do the first set of dailies on 4 bag sidemissions you get 12 bags…with 431 days that gives you 5172 tries and since the most common suspicion is that it is 1 in 1000 that means 5 boxes by the time you optimistically get a red). But the fun doesn’t end here cause there is also unique gear and the chance getting all that for the achievement “Curious of our time” (For the sparkle faction agent…snort).
There are 21 possible agent gears and 6 we want and we obviously don’t want doubles, assuming one can get that even, who knows (double unique gear XD I want screens of that).
So 28.6% for the first, 23.8% for the second, 19% thirds, 14.2%/9.5%/4.7% for the fourth, fifth and final.
Which means you get them around: 3.5, 4.2, 5.25, 7, 10.5, 21 bags…after a total sum of 52 bags you should have them all.
Given our previous calculations we can see how much in aurum/mof and money that one achievewment would cost:
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Buying the achievement clocks in at 9360-13780 Bucks or 304-455 MILLION Mof…which probably is more mof than the whole free 2 play community has by a longshot and more money than any sane person should or could spend.
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How long would you need to play for it:
Optimistic: 61-62 years
Realistic: 184 years
Casual: 441.8 years
Which pretty clearly shows that one will not get the achievement without paying plenty.
There are many things one can do to change this grim looking prospect and I really let it up to everyone to think up something. You guys were always good at brainstorming wild ideas.
Some things I would like to see but I don’t bet on.
- Gearys Coffee should give a epic bag on normal success.
- Epic missions that currently give only destillates should also get epic bags. Noone cares for epic missions that cost like epic bag missions and give like 1200 destillates.
- Quality of life remove the green bags from tier 5. Once you are settled to do tier 5 regulary you already have better stuff that green bags are just a waste of space. Even if you want to have them go on the AH and just buy them or better
- Give us a way to cycle in new missions. We pay for it.
- 1 percent on an already relatively rare and hard to get mission is rough. Either make epic missions easier so you don’t need dungeon/regional or rare booster/SA collectors agent or up the chance. Even doubling wouldn’t swamp the market.
How smart or dumb those suggestions are if someone of the devs even reads it, I don’T really expect it but more than anything wanted to get my gripe with legendary agent gear of my soul and show how ludicrous it is.
I do have one other issue with the system which is the unrewarding boosters but other people already talked about that in length and it is a corner were the problem is the hex system and not some fancy pancy math. I can do math but I feel like I would fail more with criticizing systems.
P.S.:Feel free to point out mistakes in my logic. The post is long and the edit window crappy…hard to spot it during creation especially when you need to think in 10 diffrent directions.
