[SteemMonsters] The Economics of Quest Farming
The other day @holoz0r published his post on farming season rewards:
and he pointed out that you can rotate your deck through multiple accounts and farm huge pack rewards if you get up into Champion I.
It's an open exploit right now, but it won't last long per @yabapmatt:
Thank you for this constructive feedback! We are definitely aware of these issues and we plan to address them asap. We hope to have some quick adjustments, similar to one of the ideas you described, implemented before the start of season 3 and additional changes which we feel will both address these problems and improve the overall game for season 4.
In this post, I want to talk about the other extreme, and one that I think is perfectly ethical to use: quest farming
The daily quests are available for all players at all levels. So far, we have seen quests to win 10 battles in a certain splinter. Some days that's easier than others, depending on what the conflict rules are. But it's doable if you have a complete deck.
So buy a starter pack and fill out the rest of your deck with level 1s from the marketplace. Total cost will be somewhere around 70-100 USD.
Then get to battling, following the quest requirements.
Earn your 1 pack per day, currently equivalent to 2 USD per day.
In straight cash value, that's a 2% daily return or a 60% monthly return.
Chances are, you'll get up into the Bronze or Silver leagues as well, and will get another 5-10 packs as a season reward. Now we're up to 40-50 packs per month, pretty close to a 100% return per month.
This. Is. In. Sane.
Nowhere else are you going to get that kind of return on your investment/gamevestment/staking/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. On top of that, you might get lucky and pull some gold cards out of your packs and boost your ROI. If you decide to keep your reward cards, then your deck will get stronger over time and your season rewards will go up.
Ethics
There will be those that think this is unfair or unethical in some way, but I don't agree. If you decided to buy into the game through a starter pack and fill out the rest of your deck then you are simply creating more gameplay for everyone.
Unlike the method that @holoz0r described, you aren't using the same assets to reap multiple rewards. This method is one asset group to one set of rewards. It just so happens that the current rewards structure is crazy good.
And, in fact, that's my main concern: that the rewards rates will be turned down. But oh no, instead of making 1200% per year we'll only make 600% per year. The horror!
One wouldn't need to invest any other then the initial $10 USD for a starter pack. Its very easy to get 10 wins at the entry level. It can be done with any splinter using the cards provided in the starter pack.
My ethical strat to farm daily packs :
I estimate one could easily win 24 boosters with a $10 purchase using this system. 14 free from the daily giveaway and 10 once you are ready to climb the league. The only changing number of free packs is the league payout and with some luck you could possibly get more then 10 free packs. That goes in the other direction as well as you may get less also.
So on "average" That is a $38 profit and almost 5 x your initial investment back in just 14 days. Its a great time to become a new member of SM and use the above Strat to get you started in the game as free boosters won't be given out forever.
After mentioning this in the comments there yesterday, I kicked up seven of them last night. You don't actually need to invest in more cards - with persistence the starter pack is good enough to win ten battles a day in each splinter, and Holger's bot makes persistence easy.
I think the thing to do here is not turn down the rewards but increase them elsewhere - if I'm farming the cards and dumping them on the market that's a problem, but if I'm farming them and holding them because they're good for something else, that's not necessarily a bad thing for anyone.
Right now once I have a single max-level version of a card I have zero motivation to hold onto other copies, and that's a bug. Solving it should help the rest.
Hmm, Interesting.
I'm not sure even dumping cards would be a problem. If the cards are dumped, prices come down, which makes it more affordable to build high-level decks to use in tournaments.
Tournaments are going to have those increased rewards. Last I heard we are looking to have those go live by the end of 2018.
Card leasing/delegation will help with that some.
You could also have clone war modes that would use multiple copies.
But if card market prices come down across the board it also reduces the value of buying packs, and we need pack-buying to happen for development to continue.
I think we're at a weird point in the beta where the buying between now and when tournaments go live don't really matter for yaba and aggro.
Once the tournament incentives are live then I think we will be appealing to a much broader audience and everything will be re-evaluated.
I'm very curious to see what Matt has up his sleeve for the next period.
100% agree there
Bots everywhere.
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