Do average free players get enough gems to keep decent progress?

[Attirm]

12 hours ago, lepidocter said:

I think I'm the average player here, reading about 7 Mythics and DIII Leagues go a bit beyond what I consider 'average'.

I'd agree, but it is important for high-level players to gauge themselves because we do have to compete with players following that strategy. Understanding how far we will fall behind that strategy is important.

12 hours ago, lepidocter said:

I don't understand the speed issue: without gems, I still just hold the L5* girls capped at my own Level. Rising my Level seems to me slower than this Awake mechanic.

I have two different thoughts on this. On the one hand, I completely agree; all my spreadsheeting indicates that it's way faster to get level 750 girls than it is to reach player level 500. Only very high-level players that were already close to level 500 will reach it before hitting the girl level cap. So on that respect it's definitely much faster.

On the other hand, we're not really comparing against what used to be. We're comparing against what is there now, and many players already have level 600-650 battle teams, and I suspect we'll be seeing the first level 700 battle teams very soon. Level 500 isn't really a relevant benchmark anymore. For the next few months until things stabilize, it's "keeping up with the Joneses" and until then no one is going to feel like they have "enough" gems... except maybe Voyeur gems because the drop rate on those is annoyingly high given how low some of the others are. 

Edited December 28, 2021 by Attirm

[Zteev]

For me, it's comparing a few things:

1. New system league results to prior system league results. Right now, I can't make a whole lot of determination, as finishing 16th on a week is decidedly within my prior range of results, and given how I had to leave attacks unused to get sleep, I think that's okay. I feel that comparing to my prior results is important, because I can use that as a benchmark to see if I'm falling off. Another factor in leagues, is that I think we're starting to see some very high end players dropping down and out of leagues, which should mean a contraction of the number of leagues.

2. How I'm doing at the newer features. Path of Valor isn't an issue to complete for me, but I need to begin to think about what my strategy will be in them moving forward after I get a sense of one of each.  Eventually the XP rewards won't matter, assuming the level cap remains the same, so that changes the value of the extra path. I posted my gem counts earlier in the thread, and am going to track them periodically.

3. How my girl ascension & experience progress is going. I once again have all 5* girls up at 5*, after getting the 2 newest one resolved. This leaves me with just 4 Mythics that need to be maxed out, but they are at 5* going on 6. Unlocking has begun in earnest to get girls freed up to go to level 550, and I feel that I'm less behind than when I posted earlier. This PoV was timed perfectly for this push.

I generally agree with Attirm that we need to compare to what is there now, but one has to compare to what used to be for a snapshot of how one is doing in the new environment versus the old.

I haven't revamped my spreadsheet heavily yet to figure things out in long-term detail, due to too much real-life stuff going on, but I know that I can generally get a high level of results playing by the seat of my pants, so I'm relying on general gaming skills for a bit. I will need a bunch of girls pushed up, so going by feel is fine, as long as every girl I push up is a 5* or higher girl with long-term utility. Figuring out which 3* will have longer-term utility will have to wait.

[Liliat]

In my case, for PvP, Awakening definitely helped. I now have a decent lvl 550 team at lvl ~365, and I'm comfortable in D2. Last time I was in D2, I was lvl 350 pre-awakening, and I couldn't reach top 50. Now I have to be careful not to hit too hard, to avoid promoting to D3. Even my lvl 470 opponents aren't much of a challenge anymore. And I should be able to reach 20500 Mojo in Seasons, vs 18k in the previous seasons (pre-awakening). I even reached top 1000, vs top 2~3000 in previous seasons.

This is mostly due to the fact that in D1/D2, most players either didn't use awakening at all, or just awakened one step (But mostly not at all).

On the PvE side, however, things are different. Previously, I could find a Champions Team with the appropriate poses, and then level up the ones that were too weak to fight. Now, I can't afford wasting gems and books on PvE girls (3*). This makes Champions a bit more annoying. But since I now only have to care about Club Champions, this isn't a big deal anymore (I suspect it's still very annoying for lower-level players though). When fighting champions, I don't think awakening a few girls makes up for the loss of 85% of my harem, unless I'm very lucky when drawing my team.

Regarding Villains and Pantheon, this isn't an issue, because teams aren't random.

So, am I an average player? Considering that I use Awakening and most other players in my leagues don't, I guess not. But I'm F2P. Do we have enough gems? I think I'm still book-limited, and not gems-limited (Except for Yellow gems). So I guess we do.

But then, do average players have enough gems? Well... Average players don't seem to use awakening, and I don't understand why. Surely, after 5 weeks, anyone should have enough gems to awaken at least once, even the more casual players, even for the lvl 500+ costs?

[Kaitana]

I'm not the average player : six months of play, no interest for mythics, pachinko, secondary quests and dicktator leagues (it's even repulsive for me, because I'm not a competitor and I have the feeling there's nothing to gain, and everything to loose, in competitive leagues), picking only the girls I like and the 5 stars legendaries, spending kobans if necessary but never paying real money, and little interest for the main quest. But with more datas it's possible to reach an artificial but interesting view on this average player.

I have 46 girls 5 stars level 400 (11 legendaries, and 35 commons), in 4 girls I could reach level 450. 3 stars and 1 star are left behind and I had no problem finding the gems I need. What I need now, that's books, not gems. And I more or less have the necessary books too, for now, so what could make me faster in building high level teams is only spending more time. I have 3500 to 6000 gems (depending on the color), probably one day I will need them but not now. No need to make plans for upgrade, when a girl is maxed I begin to max the next one (with fewer girls than other players, resources are never a problem, so I chose the easy way).

[JustVisitingReborn]

I'm not actually convinced that there is a good answer to this question.

In the first instance, what is an "average" player? I appreciate that there will be a mathematically average player experience, but how many players are actually close to it? And even if player experience falls into a neat bell curve, how likely is it that the posters on the forum are representative of the peak of the bell?

My guess would be that the 'average' player is likely very very casual. I would imagine this game has a realtively high turn over of players leaving - as do most games of this nature - and that forum members generally - especially those posting regularly - represent the far right of the graph. As such the answers being seen here are very much skewed to the very engaged player. I would guess that the 'average' player doesn't play long enough to engage with the gem system as it's usually a month or two of reasonably committed play before this even becomes an issue. In fact, I worry that this mechanic is convoluted enough that it could put off a lot of newer players who were looking for a more straight forward, casual, experience.

Secondly, how far ahead is the game intended to allow you to go? There's a distinction between what players want to do and what the game will actually allow them to do. Most players are pushing up against one bottleneck or another right now. To one degree or another the bottlenecks are what make the game fun. The bottlenecks force you to choose what to prioritise, with different players taking different approachs.

Take the comparison of myself and @Liliat who posted just above: I'm sitting on Level 369 (vs 365). I have only Awakened to Level 500 (vs 550). This is my second week in D3. The first week I played poorly and finished #54. This week I've been forced to improve my playing strategy significantly and I should finish top 45 (meaning better rewards that D2 16-30), maybe even top 40. As the lowest Level player in my league this week (2nd lowest last week) I'm happy with my current performance and feel that I'm outperforming a lot of players who have a lot of advantages over me. I don't view the current situation as having overly retarded my progression.

Liliat indicates that they feel the constraining factor for them right now is GXP. That's understandable - if you use more of your gems you have more availablity to use GXP. While I'm not swimming in GXP, I've got enough right now that I'm not at all worried about this resource. When I push up to 550, that may change.

For me, right now, the bottleneck is gems. I have enough of them that I could push enough girls through the 450 Awakening now allowing me to reach the '50 at Level 500' target to Awaken to Level 550. But if I do, I'm going to be very gem poor on the other side, meaning that the available resources to upgrade the best girls each week are going to be very limited to take advantage of the extra Level availability. So I'm waiting. Each time a 'Give girls XP' DC comes up I run up a handful more, while I allow my gem stockpile to grow. At this rate it's likely to be 2-4 weeks before I hit the '50 at 500' target natuarlly which should make a few thousand extra of each colour of gem available to me.

Liliat and myself have made different strategy choices and as such we have different bottlenecks right now.

If I was to give as simple an answer as possible - based on my playing experience - to whether we are receiving enough Gems, it would have to be 'no'.  They are what's currently holding me back. Give me more gems and I'm confident that I could be managing top 30 finishes with Level 550 teams. But If they gave me more gems, I'd simply run out of GXP and I'd start saying (complaining?) that we're not receiving enough GXP as I wanted to push on to Level 600 and was frustrated by having to wait.

Whether it's gems, GXP or both that's the bottleneck really simply comes down to how far ahead you've pushed. And whether or not KK were subtle and insightful enough to have planned the degree of these bottlenecks, for their sake - and that of players - I think they have to remain in place in some form or another. Without them everyone would be sitting on 500/750 with all the girls and it would be a very very boring game.

Edited December 28, 2021 by JustVisitingReborn

[DvDivXXX]

1 hour ago, JustVisitingReborn said:

what is an "average" player

That's a very good question and it's clear we need to differentiate (ideally use two distinct terms, even) between:

• average on the casual to hardcore scale -> reasonably engaged -> typical
• average on the new to veteran scale -> didn't start yesterday, but didn't start ages ago either -> active for a year+

It's a long-term game. Newbies come and go, but only those who stick even enter the equation. No one gets anywhere significant in this game before they've been playing consistently for a year or two, and/or have invested a thousand bucks or two (now than P2W is actually a real option).

In this discussion, I think the main thing people have in mind with "average player" is "middle of the road, among those who stuck with the game long enough for this to even be a consideration". So yeah, it's not average in terms of skills or results necessarily. Time invested and consistency, definitely (and since the question adds "free", as in "F2P", we can exclude the new P2W accelerated path to victory).

So, basically anyone who started in 2020 or later, and has been playing daily or close to it since. Which means, ironically, that the OP himself, as a veteran player, along with quite a few of us myself included, are NOT your average player in that sense.

[Kaitana]

Il y a 3 heures, JustVisitingReborn a dit :

now allowing me to reach the '50 at Level 500' target to Awaken to Level 550. 

Thank you, you made me understand I counted the same girls two times... Not easy to know who has the good level without a filter intended to do so.

And I agree the average player is not real, the average being the closest point between different stages/practices. This sort of thread allows only to have (partial) elements on how far you are from the average, but you will never be "the" average.

You are probably right too on most of the players who post on the forum are already exceptions. See who's coming here in your club, and you'll have an idea, even a partial one. To that you can add the numbers of names you see in daily contests and never here. Very casual players, I don't know, however, and I would be surprised (why not?) if it was the case. Most of the features only offers long-time rewards, especially the 5 stars legendary girls (whether in league, club, champions or pantheon, it takes time and often kobans), mythic girls, and even something like poa, who stays an entire month, or like daily missions, who are impossible to finish without multiple connections and a certain time of play each day.

[Attirm]

9 hours ago, JustVisitingReborn said:

Liliat indicates that they feel the constraining factor for them right now is GXP. That's understandable - if you use more of your gems you have more availablity to use GXP. While I'm not swimming in GXP, I've got enough right now that I'm not at all worried about this resource. When I push up to 550, that may change.

Speaking as someone who is at level 600 and working on unlocking level 650, I can attest that GXP is very much the bottleneck at this stage of development. It doesn't quite feel like the bottleneck since I can pay kobons for shop refreshes at a pretty decent rate (whereas there is no cost-effective kobon-> gem conversion mechanic) but when I look at overall resource acquisition there's no way I could afford to use all my gems if I weren't regularly purchasing market refreshes. And I'm not even at level 650 yet, it only gets more extreme as you go higher level.

Even if you're nowhere near level 600 now, you will be eventually. Sooner or later, everyone is going to reach the point where GXP is their bottleneck.

[JustVisitingReborn]

40 minutes ago, Attirm said:

Even if you're nowhere near level 600 now, you will be eventually. Sooner or later, everyone is going to reach the point where GXP is their bottleneck.

Yet it will be a tiny sliver of the overall player base in that position. Would a guess of 1 in 500 players ever reaching Level 600 girls seem unreasonable? Only the most engaged fraction of the player base is likely to reach that advanced stage of play.

My point was not that GXP isn't the ultimate bottleneck - my point was that there are different bottlenecks at different points depending on the strategy you choose. My point was also that while I find myself short on gems, I'd be reluctant to say that we are being given too few of them and that ultimately the bottlenecks are a necessity both for the economics of the game and to stop everyone running off to Level 750 girls in the next few months and the game becoming stale. The bottlenecks - be they gems, GXP, PXP, Ymen or something else entirely - are what force players to make choices about how they invest their resources and what ensures that the game does not encourage a uniform strategy where the only actual variation between the top players is the RNG.