Dear Jack Emmert - You Answered my Question, Here's my Response "Perception".

LOL XD Who DIDN'T expect this post, though, to be fair

In defence of Jack, he might not necessarily be wrong, telling porkies or trying to mislead you because it's entirely possible for the drop rates of TC1 to be the same as the drop rates in TC2 & TC3.

The reason Jack is wrong, you are right and it's definitely not just perception is because they HAVE made it fundamentally harder to get the rare collections in Time Capsules due to the fact that since TC1, they've inflated the rare collections loot table and made it 3 times bigger than it initially was.

What that means is that if the chance of seeing a rare collection piece in TC1 is 2% (example), even if the chance of seeing a rare collection piece in TC2/TC3 is also 2%, you have a 1 in 3 chance of seeing a blue collection and then another 1 in 3 chance of seeing a specific blue collection.

By comparison, in TC1, if the chance of seeing a rare collection was 2%, you were guaranteed 100% to get a rare blue collection, but then had a 1 in 3 chance of seeing. There's missing level of RNG in this version of Time Capsules, in comparison to the Amazon and Qwardian Time Capsules and this is ultimately the reason why it's easier to get the things from TC1 than TC2 or 3.

I can understand why they've done this, too. I believe we've had a mini discussion about it in another thread a couple of weeks ago. It's caused by the horrific in-game economy, created due to poor decisions made in 2011 to restrict the economy to the smallest minority of players in the game.

Supply of the common goods exceeds demands (because you only need 1 collection piece per character), this causes a back log of goods to appear on the broker and thus fierce undercutting drives the prices down as everyone fights to secure a sale.

Low priced collections devalue the Stabilizer, because why pay for a Stabilizer when you can spend <$20,000 of in game currency on the majority of the collection pieces? Even to the most inept players who can't make money in game, this isn't a difficult amount to achieve. I've often seen the prices drop so low, that even non-members can afford to buy the collection pieces.

This is most likely the reason why they've made it harder for us to get the collection pieces, in attempt to keep the value higher so that people still feel compelled to buy Stabilizers. Basically the "make it harder for everyone " approach instead of looking at the bigger picture and understand why things are the way they are in our economy.

In the Qwardian Time Capsules, they seem to have done the same thing with Emblems. Emblems have never been difficult to find. Yet the anecdotal evidence of other players saying they haven't seen many Emblem Capsules combined with the higher than normal broker prices suggest that they've made it harder to get emblems this time around because of how common they've been in previous Time Capsules.

Of course, none of this is new to me, as I predicted this happening months ago during the testing phase of the initial Time Capsule.

To summarise, Jack might not necessarily be wrong. In terms of drop rates, all Time Capsules may have equal drop rates and thus it's harder to identify why people perceive the newer ones as being more challenging to complete. But he's definitely wrong that it's just perception, because the newest Time Capsules have more layers of RNG compared to the first one. The more RNG you give something, the harder it is to beat.

I know this is a taboo topic but maybe its time to put a limit on how much things can be listed on the broker

They would have to limit trade amounts too.

Jack, you got some "splaining" to do !!!!!!! Lmao.

The other day on the broker someone placed the original plasmic on the broker for get this
999, 000, 000 (or 999, 999, 999). There are people in this game that have enough money to waste on listing an item for that high that aren't members of the development team?

Prices and supply on the AH dont prove anything. People could either hoard their mats or be skipping the AH alltogether to save the fees. Most certainly plenty get sold to friends/league directly. Therefore the AH is barely representative for the overall droprates especially when the newer mats are that desirable.
According to Jackster the goal is to give you more than your 1$ worth anyways whenever you open a TC- pretty generous imo.
After all Jackster knows aboout the overall data/droprates and therefore he should be able to distinguish between reality and whats merely your perception. Why should he lie straight to your face?

Funny you say this, we were just joking about this last night on Xbox. Somebody put something up for about 50mil ( keep in mind our economy isn't near as bad as ps/pc so for us that's high ) but yea we were like they may as well take that down lol...then the other day there was a scale model city base item listed for 15mil lmao so yea I personally wouldn't mind some sort of cap, but it'd probably cause a riot if one was put in.

I think it's possible we could be looking at a situation were these collections and items get so rare in these time capsules that in game messages pop up to tell you who got something I believe it's coming they have it in STO and Neverwinter both game that Jack worked on in the past . I was happy when he mentioned the ingame store to get stuff you didn't get in the capsules by using coins that drop from them but then I realized that the drops will just keep getting worse when that happens.

Businessmen and Politicians lie to our faces all the time. I'm not saying Jack would lie to us though.

This is an amazing, well written, intelligent succinct post. Thank you Proxy. +100

It was 100% a bad choice of words on his end. The fact that the percentages are even tweaked from capsule to capsule proves that the ability to finish everything is different.

Drop rates being tweaked every capsule have definitely irked me to say the least. It's plain to see that in the Qwardian capsules the gear boxes are far more common than past capsules, whereas the emblem capsules are far more rare. It's gotten to the point where I just want them to pick a drop rate and stick with it. The types of content remain, more or less, the same throughout each capsule (we know we're getting gear, emblems, same amount of collections) so they should find a drop rate that works and stick to it. IMO the drop rates for TC1 were fine, at least compared to what we have now.

The prices in the broker, as Proxy showed, just prove that certain items are FAR more rare than others.

The devs make the pretty things, they want us to wear the pretty things, but the pretty things come from items that are so rare that only a few people (in comparison to the size of the playerbase) only ever GET the pretty things.

At some times, i think he was straightout lying or was at least not totaly honest. However: when he was answering that question, it looked like he was struggeling because the question about the escalation of rigged down RNG in time capsules hit the core of the source of all concearns regardind TCs and why we hate them directly. However: by deflecting on proxys PERCEPTION, he dodged to give a real answer.

Guess the suggestion about TC currency saved a lot...

Proxystar at some point


Dev team right now







I keep trying but i dont have enough gifs to convey how much of a "Oh snap" "Mic drop moment" this is. So i leave you with this:

The community to proxystar right now

I whole heartedly agree with the OP.

Jack's answers were, frankly, disheartening and disgusting. I've already stopped spending money on this game, and I now feel better about it.

I'm looking forward to the next DLC reveal, but that's about it.

I think this would be more on the users that pay that amount. I've always said that the people who put up things on the broker are more "proud" of their stuff than I am. As soon as one "sucker" pays 3m for an item, then the next one will go for 4m. When the sucker comes in and pays 4m for it, then the next time they'll do it at 5m, etc. The only time it comes down if the "suckers" don't go for it. So I wouldn't say "acceptable price" but more of an "asking price".

Let's play the "definition" game:
ac·cept·a·ble

ADJECTIVE

1. able to be agreed on; suitable:

2. able to be tolerated or allowed:

If a seller finds a buyer willing to pay the amount listed then it's an "acceptable" (1st definition) price since both parties agree to the amount of purchase. For me, I would never pay that amount for an item, so my comment to the seller is that it's an "unacceptable" asking price.

You can say it's an "acceptable" (2nd definition) price because the game "allows" anything to be put on the broker for any price.

I would never take the broker as a place to place a value on an item, since most of the items on it are inflated anyways.

I really appreciate your efforts to pin them down on this Proxystar.

Unfortunately, I think the essential facts of the situation are:

• we know that the time capsules, feats and drop rates are a grubby, shameless and exploitative cash grab
• he knows that the time capsules, feats and drop rates are a grubby, shameless and exploitative cash grab
• the time capsules, feats and drop rates are a grubby, shameless and exploitative cash grab

I believe that the PR exercise we saw last night was designed to deflect from the grubbiness, shamelessness and exploitative nature of the time capsules, feats and drop rates.

I will say something for Jackster though, he at least has the cajones to at least pay some lip service to the complaints and unlike certain members of his staff he doesn't pretend to not quite understand that the feats are what we're upset about. He knows we're upset about it, and last night he politely told us all he's doing nothing about it. At least that's clear.

tl;dr translation "Jack's use of the word 'Perception' was a condescending and dismissive deflection from a real (not perceived) problem. The end"

PS - Your post was SUPER GREAT!!!

QUESTION
How much money are we expected to pay to complete these time capsules? Is $100 every 2 months per time capsule not enough? Will an extra $600 per year not assure that I can complete these feats? Jack change your perception please. These time capsule feats are not fun. Take off your green tinted glasses and see this through our eyes. Its unacceptable its sickening and I haven't even been one of the idiots to spend this kind of money. I myself have the means to purchase these keys but don't see the value in them at this price point. Most of my financial decisions are backed by logic and I see only one reality in this model. These time capsules are impulse buys and designed to keep people chasing the rainbow. Keep this **** out of our game.