For me, Cryptic really dropped the ball on the lock boxes. They drop so often that many people just ignore/pass on them. I could have 50 easily in a play session.

I can't possibly buy keys for them all - so I buy keys for NONE. Now say the boxes dropping were rarer - say I could expect 3 or 4 a week - maybe I'd buy keys for them. Maybe I'd be excited to get them.

Anyone else think the frequency of drop rates is HURTING key sales?

Jo

No, because they're feeding off of people with little to no self-control or those with a massive disposable income. If they have 500 of those boxes in their bank/inventory, some will continue to buy keys because it just might be in the next box...

actually yes i do.

the winter one had the green boxes for free and the red where part of the store. you knew that spending money would get you the better chance. now you hardly come cross a gold so i think people are going to spend less on this one. (complete guess on my part).

the idea of this one is to get the boxes into players hand and make them want to open them but im not sure its worked.

im sure this is a learning experience for them too. to see what works and what does not. i guess the beauty for them is they dont really lose much by trying different things out, but i dont think this formula is a very good one.

i much prefer what we had before, at least you could get some free boxes by just doing a small race, and open the c-store ones straight away without having to pair them up.

I doubt it very much. Cryptic isn't trying to make money on the boxes, it's trying to make money on the keys. It's in their best interest to make sure the market is saturated with them so people don't get upset that they don't have a box but have the keys.

If the OP is right, I think the droprate should be multiplied by 3... at least.

well that's not going to happen what I'm interested in does anyone have my attitude of 'I can't open them all so I won't open any'? would you be more willing to buy keys if there were less boxes so they were more 'special'?

Less boxes looted means less keys sold. The whole idea is to saturate the server with them, so players can spend a little at a time. Long term goal, not short term.

Keys aren't going anywhere, they're staying in the store if I understand the Devs/Mods right, so the keys can be bought at any time. Even with the Dilithium exchange for C-points I don't see sales being hurt too much, there will always be those who don't want to wait to see what they have in their box and will buy the C-points they need to unlock keys

Its an interesting tactic. There's still an artificial scarcity of a given resource, but that appears to be the ONLY scarcity. Drop enough of these lockboxes, and most people will probably buy at least one key to see what's in it, even if that key is only for a gold box.

Ignoring the chances of a Galor drop from a gold box, consider that for every spam message saying that so-and-so@such-and-such got a Galor, 199 other people -- on average -- paid 100CPs for a key to open their own boxes. So for every Galor message, multiply by 200 people and 100CPs.

(Aside: , this game has a LOT of LTS's. Consider that most of the money from LTSers, paid in the time that Atari owned Cryptic, probably went to Atari and not to Cryptic. That's revenue that PWE can't rely on. And yet 400CPs/mo need to be pushed to them. Anyone else still think that PWE values LTSers?)

Anyway, that's a lot of CPs. If Dunnlang's calcualtions are accurate, for every Galor spam message, that's 20,000 CPs , or $200. Cha-ching, cha-ching. Of course, this gets skewed downward, when taking into account gold crates, and especially if some people only open gold crates, which seem to have higher chances of dropping Galors.

So.. swamp the playerbase with lockboxes. Some few will be compulsive enough to open all the crates they get, on the chance that a Galor will drop. Some -- maybe even most? -- will open a few crates, or only gold crates. It's hard to tell how many people won't try to open more than a few of the crates they get, or none.