The Contraband Slot Machine

[MeNaCe-NZ]

I was "doing something wrong"? in a game of (statistical) chance? Are you normally this daft, or is this a recent thing? No seriously, you're kind of stupid if that's what you got out of this.

 

I'm stupid and you can't see how your numbers aren't anywhere in line with the statistical odds of the slots? Riiight.

 

I can see now why quite a few people failed to make a profit or were "poor" in the game before the slots heh.

[Bachannal]

Hmm.

 

The purple drop rate was about 10-12%. Working backwards, 10 purples would be require (on average) a stack of 99 coins.

 

I believe a single slot machine has a 6 second timeout between pulls? So about 10 minutes on the machine would end up with (on average), 10 greens, 10 blues, 10 purples, plus the other stuff. Vendoring excess reputation would turn a 49.5k expense into ~17k expense.

 

So basically, 17k and 10 minutes to produce 10 green/10 blue/10 purple mats on a single slot machine (prior to today).

 

That sound about right?

 

 

Nowhere close. Less than half of that in terms of mat drops from the machine pre-nerf.

[Bachannal]

I'm stupid and you can't see how your numbers aren't anywhere in line with the statistical odds of the slots? Riiight.

 

I can see now why quite a few people failed to make a profit or were "poor" in the game before the slots heh.

 

 

Nice try at a dig, but I actually have millions of creds per toon, so...nope, not "poor", and I know what my experience was. I happen to also know you're a moron given your average response. You're so cool and elite, and we all wish we could be just like you, oh god of SWTOR. *insert giant eye roll here*

[scottocamp]

The fact that people have profited from the use of the slot machine does not make Bioware's actions less objectionable. Bioware offered up for sale an item of a certain value, accepted payment for that item and then completely stripped the item of that value. Bioware tacitly encouraged people to purchase coins in advance of a price increase by concealing and downplaying the full scope of the changes. Bioware offered up a mount that is nearly impossible to obtain as a substitute for the stripped value. Bioware has been deleting posts that reveal the slot machine's new drop rates. I don't think it really matters if people received 100, 1000 or 10,000 purple drops while the slot machine was available. The relevant issue to me is Bioware's credibility, honesty and willingness to be responsive.

[Skorm_xD]

You just give time for the market to normalize IMO. At first it's a money grab, or rather could be by the way some people have mentioned using them in multiples for hours on end. Man, I really don't have that kind of time on my hands, if I did, I'd be worried.....

 

Anyways, if the drop rates remained the same, how could they then remain money printers? Once the market is flooded with mats and the prices are super low, the money obsessed people won't spend so much time on the machines. Most people who had them, were not using them like that. I know I for sure was not. They'd use it when they need mats or to play for rep or a prize. The market will adjust, prices will normalize and wouldn't be astronomical or too low for mats simply because most of us don't have time to sit there and spin a slot machine in a game for 15 hours a day.

 

I used it to get mats to use for crafting because god knows as sub that doesn't play all that much, that's basically hell. It was going to make the game more enjoyable and playable for me. Added bonus is everyone can play in end content and be geared for it and not have to spend weeks or months trying to raise money, or sending out companions on 10 alts for mats. It seems the OG form of the contraband slot machine was only a bad thing to greedy folks in game. I'll still agree the jawa junk drop could have decreased a tad, but a tad, not a friggin leap year. Just a few thoughts I'm having here. Don't slaughter me.

 

That's what fits my exspirience. I got a machine from a cartellpac and guess what in one week i used maybe 1200 coins on it. The junk is still on my ramp for craftig stuff and for alts. I did not sell one rare item on the market and I am not rich (3million on mainchar). I was glad to get two nice mounts and a cool pet, the rest is for selfuse.

And yes, most people who complained are the ones with the greedy prices

I sold my second machine random for 500k and guess what, my butt does not hurt. Things would have normalize very quick like always.

[Khevar]

Nowhere close. Less than half of that in terms of mat drops from the machine pre-nerf.

First, I suggest you visit reddit, and look at the drop rates that Voldemort obtained.

 

Then look at this thread:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=790748

 

Where lironBD ran 5000 coins (in the real world) and obtained:

 

669 greens (13.4% drop rate)

639 blues (12.8% drop rate)

589 purples (11.8% drop rate)

 

Which lines up with the reddit info pretty much to the T.

 

(p.s. 'Voldermort' as in 'he who should not be named on the forums lest I get in trouble')

Edited January 22, 2015 by Khevar

[WastedLight]

The problem was they would basically drive the prices down so far as to actually make running crew skill mission a loss making exercise thus no one would really bother doing them when they could do slots to get the mats instead.

 

This is clearly not what bioware intended to happen though else they would have left the slots as they were to take over from crew skills.

 

They even said themselves that it more or less had an effect on the economy to put it out of line as to where they think it should be and in the end they are the ones controlling the economy by introducing various money making/taking methods.

 

 

I beg to differ but that's a matter of opinion. I don't know why people would fork out cash for something they weren't going to use and there was a dev msg saying they it would be looked at in terms of Jawa Junk drop rate.

 

 

I see where you come from in terms of the QoL it gave you and fair enough. Maybe they should have made any mats bought with Jawa Junk BOP so you couldn't sell them and could only use them to craft andm aybe make anythign crafted BOP also *shrug* - THAT would have been interesting to see community reaction to. It would have also affected the economy but only by removing people who were happy to click and click and click from purchasing mats. Others who couldn't be bothered would still buy from GTN.

 

Gold sellers I believe profited heavily from this addition as they could macro it etc.

 

Personally I stood on the fence over the whole thing. Whilst I thought it was a blood stupid mistake to make to bring it in as it was with the same drop rate over all Jawa stuff ( isntead of 15/10/3 like it is in packs ) and I also thought ruining the gathering skills would be a really bad thing I in the end didn't care too much because as you say the market would have adjusted. i.e. rich before might be 100 million, after a few months of slots it might be only 10 million due to less credits in circulation and lower prices etc. ( deflation as opposed to inflation ).

 

Personally I long ago made my money from crafting and most my money comes now from buying packs with creds and selling the contents as they become profitable. Thus this whole thing didn't affect me too much.

 

What annoys me is the people utterly crying over how hard done by they are and refunds this and that when in most cases many of them came out on top in terms of credits or items worth credit value they have a use for over what they could have normally sold hypercrate/contents for or the price they paid in credits for the slot machine. It's these people that bug me and many don't even seem to have much in the way of finding a decent solution - they just want to rage on and on because it's not how it was before and it needs to be a money tree for them or they'll quit ( even if it's just less of a money tree 0 still needs to be a money tree heh ).

 

It basically needed a whole more thought put into its implementation and intent. The whole thing, including the patch reeks of lazy. It should have just been pulled from release, or pulled immediately after until it had been reworked. I find it hard to believe this team didn't think of any of this happening? If they didn't, let me work there because I can get something good going, I can critically think big picture style. LOL.

 

This was a really bad way to deal with this as far as I am concerned. I got it because I needed a faster way to get crafting done as a person with little time to play during college. I don't want to not engage crafting missions. I was still doing them, but didn't know that it was making crafting missions worthless until I read your reply here so I get that an adjustment had to be made, but it was ultimately beyond severe and maybe an adjustment to the wrong thing. ****, maybe they need to up what the crafting missions provide. They are pretty dismal. It's unfortunate that the few destroy what could have been helpful for me and many others who have lives to attend to outside of gaming, to play the game more enjoyably and thoroughly.

Edited January 22, 2015 by WastedLight

[ChopSueyO]

Seriously, the mat drops off of the slots prior to nerfing, were obviously high, but nowhere near high enough to farm "millions of creds per day" as i have seen some folks claim. Nowhere even remotely close.

 

Yeah you were indeed doing something 'wrong' or you're a troll and you're trying to downplay the value of the slots pre-nuke.

 

With a casual approach and ONE slot you could easily gather 25-30 Jawa junk in addition to all the other goodies from almost 4 stacks of coins. It really doesn't take too long to burn through 4 stacks either

 

With only grabbing a slot on the last day before nuking and even going to the cinemas in between, I pulled about 315 jawa junk + 50odd certs + all the other goods. Not even thinking about all the other goodies and just turning the jawa junk into purple mats that sell for about 10k a piece, there is already your 3mil in one day and that is from being pretty casual and relatively impatient with sales.

 

Do the exact same thing with two more machines so you're burning through it faster around you and you were trebling your potential profit.

 

So yes... if you'd been using the machine since it's release, it is quite a many millions a DAY, just from being casual with it. Focus or use a macro, and 'hello'.

[ivanhedgehog]

Just curious, but would you be okay with some middle ground between how the slots were yesterday and how they are today?

 

Or is the only thing acceptable to you is to revert the drop rates to what they were initially?

 

middle ground would be fine..buffing missions would be fine, a return to the previous status quo is not fine. more people were crafting, interested in that part of the game than I have seen since launch. that needs to be kept and built upon. maybe its time for the devs to look upon crafting as a whole and do some updates? good use of some development time? if enough people are participating, yes.

 

a few people that want thier mats empire back? not worth worrying about. or disrupting the game

[ivanhedgehog]

Oh cry me a river already. Everyone can make money in this game easily and the same as anyone else. Everyone can run crew skills, no one monopolises anything. Thus there is no price gouging, it's a figment of the imagination of those too lazy or stupid to work out how to easily make money for themselves.

 

and everyone can run a slot machine..so what is your problem with it? I dont care how efficient gathering missions are if the mats are available...the slot machine let a lot more of the user base participate. wider participation generates interest and that keeps the game running.

[ivanhedgehog]

How is that not 'making out' you got what items you needed instead of having to buy them from GTN at a much, much cheaper price ( they practically paid you for them when you include cartel certs ).

 

Also which items do you RE that already need purples? I only really use Biochem/Artifice in which case you already have the purple schem once you use up the blues/greens getting it. The slots were never really a good source of blues/greens imo.

 

 

 

Really? One hour say = one stack of purples ( being generous really ). One stack of purples would ideally be worth 10K per purple ( much, much higher earlier on in the week ) not to mention now it's been changed any purples people were sitting on are worth even more now. So even then let's say 800K - 1 Million to be fair per hour in just purple junk. Cartel certs in that hour 20 on average and I think the average cost of items per cert were still arund the 50K mark at the lowest from what I've read. So that's about 1.8 - 2 million per hour right there if you so wanted it ( which I can only assume people did because they went to such lengths to get the damn machine ). The cost for the above? About 300-400K after you sell trophies.

 

I don't think any of the above is unrealistic since it's the smaller scale of the market and lowest prices I noted so would only assume things were selling easily then ( else prices would have dropped further ).

 

 

 

The only people trolling are those that can't back up anything they say with solid numbers.

 

You came out on top and are just butt hurt that you can't come out "more" on top.

 

the only people getting stacks of purples in an an hour are the ones that wanted the slot machines gone...looks like they had a different model if you believe what they say.

[ivanhedgehog]

Hmm.

 

The purple drop rate was about 10-12%. Working backwards, 10 purples would be require (on average) a stack of 99 coins.

 

I believe a single slot machine has a 6 second timeout between pulls? So about 10 minutes on the machine would end up with (on average), 10 greens, 10 blues, 10 purples, plus the other stuff. Vendoring excess reputation would turn a 49.5k expense into ~17k expense.

 

So basically, 17k and 10 minutes to produce 10 green/10 blue/10 purple mats on a single slot machine (prior to today).

 

That sound about right?

 

no. that is 10 jawa junk, they dont exchange at 1 to 1. that is 3 mats.

[ivanhedgehog]

I'm stupid and you can't see how your numbers aren't anywhere in line with the statistical odds of the slots? Riiight.

 

I can see now why quite a few people failed to make a profit or were "poor" in the game before the slots heh.

 

10% with 100 rolls gives 10 items..your mad hacking skills accounted for the rest

[RiVaN_]

Spent 4 stacks in the slot machine tonight.

I got one scavenged scrap and some Rep tokens.

This is ridiculous, freakin Knee jerk reactions. Get your heads out of your posterior BW, you took a really fun item and turned it into crap.

IDC if I never get another Jawa Junk from the slots, but damn, let the other stuff drop the way it was. It really is no big deal if you completely remove Jawa Junk, but you didn't have to make the thing unfun.

[Menolley]

Certainly with the massacre of the slot machine, missions need to be looked at seriously. Just as an example, I have 11 slicers and managed to go 2 full days doing crew missions as soon as they popped from 8 am til 11pm. I did not get one single purple to drop from fich and bountiful missions in that time. As for the 'mission discovery' missions. I made a comparison. Using Scorpio (specialization slicing crit and I have her at 10000 companion rep) doing a lvl 450 slicing mission .. I got 5 purples, 10 blues and random schematic and loot box. When I managed to crit I got 6 purples and more blues and higher yield from loot box. For lvl 500 mission I got 3 purples, 10 blues, schematic that is vendor trash and loot box that gave me less than regular rich yield mission. The number of purples and blues is identical to the rich missions from mission list. I have yet to crit and get more than 3 purples. This comes nowhere near comparing to the previous level. It is the same across the board for all gathering missions and mission discovry missions. This definitely needs work to make purples more accessible and keep the costs to a reasonable amount. If it costs me 240K to finally get a purple, there is no way I can sell a crafted item for double that (it takes 2 for crafted item) and I am even reluctant to use them for personal use when they are so extremely rare. The slot machine evened that out, but totally trashed prices of crafted items. They are coming back up, but the cost of acquiring purples is still way too high with current crew mission drops.

[blingdenston]

This was a disappointment...especially vis-à-vis the Cartel Certificates, which have dried up. Ah, well...I guess it's more like gambling, now. The satisfaction of getting it coming and going...

[Bachannal]

First, I suggest you visit reddit, and look at the drop rates that Voldemort obtained.

 

Then look at this thread:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=790748

 

Where lironBD ran 5000 coins (in the real world) and obtained:

 

669 greens (13.4% drop rate)

639 blues (12.8% drop rate)

589 purples (11.8% drop rate)

 

Which lines up with the reddit info pretty much to the T

 

(p.s. 'Voldermort' as in 'he who should not be named on the forums lest I get in trouble')

 

 

I read them both...my experience does not match that in terms of mat drops. I was getting maybe 6 mats TOTAL in a 99 coin stack, and most of those were green. Sure, there'd be the occasional extra purple, and I (like many others) were ok with them adjusting the drops. But they simply were NOT so bad prior to nerf that they were actually going to impact the in game economy any more than they did for about a day.

 

What I can tell you for sure post nerf, is now I get ZERO mats or certs from the machine.

[DurdensWrath]

Just curious, but would you be okay with some middle ground between how the slots were yesterday and how they are today?

 

Or is the only thing acceptable to you is to revert the drop rates to what they were initially?

 

I don't care about the jawa junk. I'm fine with that nerf. I think the nerf went too far.

 

It's the blatant lie and stealth way they went about nerfing everything else that I am upset about.

 

Especially the cartel certificates.

 

I didn't use the slot machines like apparently many others did. I regret that now.

 

But I learned one lesson from Eric and the devs. Exploit early, exploit often.

[BuriDogshin]

His problem is, that he requires some trust from the player-base. Which right now is obviously gone,

 

Yep. Once Eric Musco loses the trust of the players, they might as well just have Server Droid make the posts.

[DurdensWrath]

Yep. Once Eric Musco loses the trust of the players, they might as well just have Server Droid make the posts.

 

I pretty much equated him to Casey Hudson. In both cases, anything that person said from then on I considered at best, 100% bull.

[XiamaraSimi]

I pretty much equated him to Casey Hudson. In both cases, anything that person said from then on I considered at best, 100% bull.

 

Oooh that guy grrrrr. Im just waiting for the word "speculations" to be used. Maybe we should look up cupcake bakeries and see if they can make on them

Edited January 22, 2015 by XiamaraSimi

[Khevar]

I read them both...my experience does not match that in terms of mat drops. I was getting maybe 6 mats TOTAL in a 99 coin stack, and most of those were green. Sure, there'd be the occasional extra purple, and I (like many others) were ok with them adjusting the drops. But they simply were NOT so bad prior to nerf that they were actually going to impact the in game economy any more than they did for about a day.

Your experience runs quite contrary to others.

 

In fact, the typical drop rate was SIX TIMES MORE than what you are claiming.

 

Did you only run one stack or something? I could see an unlucky run skewing your perception of the drop rates, with more runs (i.e. a larger sample size) bringing you closer to the expected return.

Edited January 22, 2015 by Khevar

[Khevar]

no. that is 10 jawa junk, they dont exchange at 1 to 1. that is 3 mats.

Only for Adaptive Circuitry.

 

Doonium and Midlithe have a 1-1 exchange rate. Autoimmune Regulators have a 2-1 exchange rate.

[DurdensWrath]

Your experience runs quite contrary to others.

 

In fact, the typical drop rate was SIX TIMES MORE than what you are claiming.

 

Did you only run one stack or something? I could see an unlucky run skewing your perception of the drop rates, with more runs (i.e. a larger sample size) bringing you closer to the expected return.

 

I only ran enough to get one stack of jawa junk and enough certs to get the hoverchair and meditation mount. I deeply regret not using the hell out of this machine. I've learned my lesson though. Exploit Early, Exploit Often.

[OddballEasyEight]

I read them both...my experience does not match that in terms of mat drops. I was getting maybe 6 mats TOTAL in a 99 coin stack, and most of those were green. Sure, there'd be the occasional extra purple, and I (like many others) were ok with them adjusting the drops. But they simply were NOT so bad prior to nerf that they were actually going to impact the in game economy any more than they did for about a day.

 

What I can tell you for sure post nerf, is now I get ZERO mats or certs from the machine.

 

I ran through 3000 coins the morning before the patch.

 

I got almost exactly as many greens as I got blues or purples.

So they had the same chance of dropping.

 

That needed to change.

 

But it didn't need to be nuked like it was.