Fuzzy Legacy Math

Update (26 June): The patch is live, see this post for updated numbers.  Bottom line: the first ranks are now worthwhile for most characters, but the higher end bonuses are still probably a bad deal.


SWTOR patch 1.3 has hit the test servers, bringing a new round of various legacy bonuses.  The numbers may change in testing, but they did get me thinking about how some things that sound good on paper don't work out so well.

I did a fair amount of math, summarized below, trying to figure out if the companion gift affection bonus was ever worth purchasing.  The answer is extremely borderline, because the bonus is per-character, there is a limited amount of affection you can earn on each character, and the only way to "cash in" the bonus is to consume a gift that has a cash value.  In order to profit from a 5% affection bonus that costs 25K credits to unlock, you need to be spending over 100K credits per companion for each of your five companions.  This is technically possible if you intend to powergrind each companion from 0-10,000 as quickly as possible using vendor gifts and paying whatever it costs on the trade network.  Most people probably will not do this.

I got sufficiently into the analysis of this that I lost sight of the bigger picture.  There are two additional ranks and these boost the costs even further - a total of 250K credits for the top rank.  It's also worth noting that the two perks for conversation gains and gift gains are somewhat mutually diminishing in value - due to the cap, the more affection you gain from one of the two, the less remaining affection there is to gain from the other.  (The conversation option has the advantage that players will do this anyway - you still have to earn more affection than you could buy with the credits for this to be worthwhile, but at least you don't have to be planning to spend an unreasonable total amount on gifts to profit from it.) 

Don't get me wrong, some of the new legacy unlocks are legitimate luxury item credit sinks.  These particular bonuses, though, especially for the top two ranks, are never worth the money for anyone.  As with your real money, I suppose the lesson is "buyer beware". 

The numbers
The chart below summarizes the cost of power-grinding the 80% of companions who have at least one gift they "love" for maximum favor using vendor gifts.  You can get from 0-8000 affection for under 100K credits using gifts from the vendor - which means that the 5% bonus you paid 25K credits for saves you fewer than 5K credits per companion.  If your crewskills and/or the auction house are more cost-effective than the vendor - or if you are less excessive in your use of gifts, you will save even less.   

Affection Range	Affection/Gift	Total Gifts
0-1999 (base)	96	21 (to 2016)
0-1999 (+5%)	100.8	20 (to 2016)
2000-3999 (base)	48	42 (from 2016 to 4032)
2000-3999 (+5%)	50.4	40 (from 2016 to 4032)
4000-5999 (base)	19	104 (from 4032 to 6008)
4000-5999 (+5%)	19.95	99 (from 4032 to 6007.5)
6000-7999 (base - rank 2 gifts)	19	105 (from 6008 to 8003)
6000-7999 (+5% - rank 2 gifts)	19.95	100 (from 6008 to 8001.55)

Total Rank 1 cost saved: 8 rank one green gifts (1600 credits) per companion, 8000 credits for five companions (assuming none who are picky)
Total Rank 2 cost saved: 5 rank two green gifts (3000 credits) per companion, 15000 credits for five companions (assuming none who are picky)
Total "saved": 23000 credits
Total Spent to earn these savings: 25,000 credits.

Legacy Chapter 2

My SWTOR trooper cleared out the finale of Chapter 2, hit level 40 (along with Legacy Level 3) early in the Chapter 3 content, and unlocked a bunch of goodies. All characters on my legacy now get:

• +2% Bonus to healing received
• +1% Bonus to surge (affects critical multiplier)
• +20 Presence (improves all Companion stats)
• Heroic Moment, normally a 20 minute cooldown that lasts 1 minute, now lasts 24 seconds longer and has a cooldown that is two minutes shorter.  (This will be a more significant buff when I complete Chapter 3 on one or more classes for bonus abilities.)  
• Trooper Class Buff: +5% endurance (grants HP) to any class that does not already have the trooper/bounty hunter buff from another source (e.g. party member, drive-by buff from a player, being a trooper/BH)
• Trooper emote

None of these things are game-breaking, though I can imagine the presence numbers adding up for a player who has enough companions unlocked.  Still, it's kind of fun that I already get to take advantage of some Legacy bonuses even though this is my first character.

Min-Maxing Affection
Part of the reason why I was able to top out two of my five companions immediately upon starting Chapter 3 (required to unlock all conversations) was through efforts to min-max companion affection using some web resources (note: links contain companions' names, if you still think that's a spoiler). 

Dulfy's guide contains two crucial pieces of information - each companion's favorite gifts and how much total affection each companion needs to cap out.  My strategy was to throw tier 1 gifts that each companion views as a "favorite" at them as soon as possible until each companion hits 6000 affection.    (Psynister has some tips on how to deal with the handful of characters who do not have any "favorite" gifts.)  I wasn't quite able to afford this much of a headstart on all of my companions because this was my first character, but this is a huge bonus for the ones that I was able to pursue - said companions only needed 2000-3500 to the maximum required affection, rather than 8000-9500 that companions starting from scratch require.

Beyond 6000 affection, gifts begin to become costly - the tier 2 vendor gifts cost three times as much and are only good for 19 affection once you're above 6000, while higher end gifts are more difficult to obtain (or costly on the exchange).  Assuming that you don't have indefinite numbers of credits to throw at this problem, the solution is questing with a site such as TORhead open so that you can always determine which dialog choices will award the most affection.  This approach does mean spoilers, but it can make a huge difference - picking the correct dialog with the correct companion out can be worth over a hundred points, where the incorrect companion gets absolutely nothing for the same amount of work.

I suppose such is the paradox of removing choices that irreversibly affect gameplay - when all that are left are "moral" choices that your companions will always forgive by spending credits on gifts, these reversible choices are what is left to min-max.

P.S. In principle, Human is the optimal race for a first character in SWTOR because it is the only race that has any non-cosmetic benefit - another 100 points to presence (which is almost exclusively a solo stat).  However, I opted to go with more interesting races instead, as the human racial unlock is the cheapest to purchase.  I'm already over halfway to the requisite 500K credits and at Legacy level 3 out of a required 5. 

P.P.S. EA's press conference at E3 announced what sounds like a mini-expansion to SWTOR.  Perhaps it's early yet, but I have not seen the word "free", which makes me think that they plan to be the latest MMO to suffer extreme backlash for attempting to charge for content within the first year of service.  Dulfy reports that there was a survey that may have been attempting to determine pricing/features for this update.  One intriguing item was the idea of including game time in the price of the mini-expansion.  Depending on pricing, this could be a good thing (effectively free for subscribers, while console players who are more tolerant of non-subscription DLC get some time to use the content Bioware is potentially selling) or a bad thing (forced to buy game time along with the thing as a way to inflate the price). 

Level versus /played

Via Massively comes an interesting tidbit of Warhammer Online news.  Beyond the first fifteen levels, the game will now use the RVR Reknown level, rather than the PVE character level system for RVR scenario matchmaking.  Characters with a low PVE level will be bolstered up to some baseline while in the scenario, while higher PVE-level players with low reknown ranks will remain what's functionally a training bracket until they rank up. 

It's an interesting concept.  In PVP in general, player skill is going to play a larger role compared to /played time, and that effect is only amplified if the player spends their leveling time in (possibly solo) PVE content.  Depending on how well Warhammer has tamed the AFK problem, the time to Reknown rank 70 may actually be enough to train newbies to play with the veterans. 

On the downside, last I checked Reknown rank was character-specific rather than account-wide.  Players who really know what they are doing are potentially trapped in the training bracket for 69 levels - it's not clear to me from the patch notes whether level 40 players can group up with their friends and queue together as a group, or whether these folks will be split by reknown rank.  By the same token, someone who really likes steam-rolling newbies could presumably serially re-roll to stay in the entry level bracket and feast on the tears. 

This may be a moot point in the context of a game that's down to its last server (or two, I've lost track) simultaneously rolling out a stand-alone spinoff version of the scenario gameplay in a free to play somewhat-level-less MOBA.  Faults with the execution aside, though, separating players by some measure of skill rather than time /played may be a sound concept, especially for PVP, and it'll be interesting to see who steals it in the future. 

The Shortening MMO Retention Curve

Psychochild writes:

"Raph Koster has pointed out that big MMOs follow fairly predictable growth curves. The fact there's been a drop so far so fast means that curve has gotten shorter, or the curve has changed dramatically. Neither is a positive sign for traditional MMOs."

I wonder if Koster's famous graph from 2007 was the last point in history in which the model worked. 

I stayed with WoW raiding through 2006 despite generally low satisfaction because where else was I going to go?  LOTRO wasn't out yet, nor had EQ2 completed the Rise of Kunark era revamp that made it accessible to solo players.  If solo play was a substantial part of your gaming, it was WoW or bust through mid-2007. 

I've never seen hard numbers for what happened over the summer of 2007, but Blizzard made a dramatic shift towards "accessibility" starting in the fall of that year.  I don't think it's a coincidence that this change in emphasis coincided with Blizzard's first real competition for the solo demographic and their revenue. 

By contrast, a dissatisfied customer today almost certainly has one or more alternatives (unless, of course, they're focused on open world PVP, sandbox games or other things that don't fit in the "theme park" model) - as Psychochild points out, this includes increasingly high-production-value single player games.  Moreover, recent history suggests that it is very rarely a good investment of your time and money to stick with a game that launches in an unsatisfactory state.  Games that ship unfinished are very likely to do poorly enough to force layoffs that ensure that they never get finished. 

It's easy for us talking heads who spend time writing about games on blogs instead of playing games to admonish our peers for failing to "support" innovation.  In reality, we're customers, not investors, and it is very unlikely that our one purchase, or even several hundred purchases, are going to make or break a game's success in a way that shapes future development.  As a blogger I might prefer to see any and all games succeed, but as a consumer I can't in good conscience recommend throwing money at something you aren't enjoying just because it has some trait you would like to encourage.   That may indeed be a non-positive sign for the market, but I don't see it changing anytime soon.