TOPIC: Treasure Inflation

I thought it might be useful to start a thread discussing treasure inflation.

The spreadsheets over the past 3 years seem to be telling us that the rates of drops of URs and higher value items is decreasing. Simultaneously, the max treasure people can draw has increased by 4 (and 2 more in another couple years).

Is it unreasonable to conclude those things are related?

If so, that presents a problem for TD for newer players. New players drawing a UR is a pretty cool sight. It likely has a big impact on driving them more into the hobby as well. With decreasing value of treasure draws, someone getting a really great item out of their 3 draws becomes increasingly unlikely.

At the same time, it is pretty likely that the new treasure enhancers are the best sellers. Ironically, they are also the best sellers for new players since it helps them get more out of each run (in terms of getting equipped).

How can TD solve this?

Currently it seems you have a greater chance of pulling a UR from a 10 pack than out of the treasure box.

The dilution of the treasure mix has been predicted for some time now. For me, I’ve come to think of treasure draws as monster bits plus stuff for making trade goods. I really enjoyed the RRF pulls and the slow reveal of what they were for. More of that please.

Inflation is a tricky beast. Normally you control for it by way of sucking money out of the economy somehow. That’s tricky though, TD kind of tried it a few year back by having story scape games that could be played with treasure chips. Just to brain storm a bit some radical ideas might include

1) A treasure Cap, say 20 to be close to what it is today (we’ve seen similar done with slot expanders)

2) A treasure squish, so 21 treasure today is equal to say 10 treasure tomorrow.

Could be done in conjunction with a treasure cap. So for example treasure generated by old style TE’s is capped to 10 (3(base) + 1(lv6)+ 6(3 nuggets) . All old TE’s are then subject to this cap.

Then to keep people from rioting, we create a new legendary TE ( made say in 2025 by combining 1 COA + 1 of each nugget, or Some quantity of AoTf, or Some number of that years in print TE + trade goods & gold) that lets you break the 10 cap

3) Another option would be a treasure tax, we could implement it by say adding treasure chips to some transmute recipes.

4) We could try to invent additional treasure sinks. Maybe in the form of items or class abilities. For example a new rogue ability that lets you get the clue after a box failure by turning in a treasure chip. Or an items that consumes treasure in order to activate (similar to how the death pouch consumes gold). The trick would be to make sure they were ongoing and didnt require staff (which is my understanding of what largely hindered the mini games)

5) I would also like to bring up the idea of community group quests again. Perhaps something like if the community can collectively turn in 1000 treasure chips, we can create a horde large enough to revive the spirit of Wirts Cache the following year, which would result in say an arcane recipe being given to the largest single contributor and enhanced treasure the following year. Not a permanent solution , but more “fun” and it kicks the can down the road a bit.

Fred K wrote: If so, that presents a problem for TD for newer players. New players drawing a UR is a pretty cool sight. It likely has a big impact on driving them more into the hobby as well. With decreasing value of treasure draws, someone getting a really great item out of their 3 draws becomes increasingly unlikely.

To very new players, drawing useful rares can feel like a win for them.

But in general I agree. I would like to see a higher % of URs in the box than there has been in recent years.

Or throw a ton more low-level transmutes in there. The value of those isn't very high but still it feels like an exciting pull because it's a different color.

I like the idea of a community quest. Perhaps have a small benefit and recognition for people who donate 100 or more but have a total requirement of 5,000 or more. If the quest is achieved then a benefit for everyone is achieved. It could be an extra room added to a certain adventure, a PvP arena (teams) replacing grind for a year, or something mechanical (like the cost for trade goods is reduced from 25 units to 20 for the remainder of the year for some or all trade goods.)

Separately, it seems like the inflation is inevitable. As long as that is the case, perhaps we have multiple treasure boxes available. The first box is only for people with 5 or less draws (mostly newer players) that has mostly rares, relics, and UR’s. The second box is for everyone else. Perhaps a third box that is for large scale draws (100+) where you turn in enough for 100 draws but you only get a small number (or 1) draw but it is more likely to be something really cool (or be items only available in that special box.) Personally, I find it annoying to have 200 draws and have 10# of tokens - usually all of them being something I’ll transmute (I either do great on URs or get none for a couple cons in a row.)

Fred

I think a good first step would be to stop printing new treasure enhancers beyond re-prints (or functional reprints like a Faded Ring of Riches that gives a lesser bonus, does not stack with RoR or COA).

A hard cap on treasure draws would be a good alternative or addition to that.

I am going to take the other side of the market on this. We do not know the total number of tokens in the treasure by distribution. Over the past three years many have told me that the number of people looking at this forum is significantly lower as a percentage of total players playing TD. With this in mind, I don’t think we have enough data to declare that the number of URs pulled has diminished. The collective pool of people “mining” the treasure has significant increased therefore the distribution of tokens is wider and as a result, the natural percentages of a similarly tracking population would diminish.

Kinda reminds me of bitcoin mining at the beginning of the mining heyday

I will say to the postings before...my second dungeon run was the Redoubt Helm UR...and it set me forward for sure. The following year, fluorite cube...this was doing 3 pulls per run. In each of those cases, you would not see those pulls in your spreadsheet tracking mechanisms this group carries

As a group, we now carry CoA...haven’t had a UR yet...5K GP was closest

Jamie Campbell wrote: I am going to take the other side of the market on this. We do not know the total number of tokens in the treasure by distribution. Over the past three years many have told me that the number of people looking at this forum is significantly lower as a percentage of total players playing TD. With this in mind, I don’t think we have enough data to declare that the number of URs pulled has diminished. The collective pool of people “mining” the treasure has significant increased therefore the distribution of tokens is wider and as a result, the natural percentages of a similarly tracking population would diminish.

Kinda reminds me of bitcoin mining at the beginning of the mining heyday

I will say to the postings before...my second dungeon run was the Redoubt Helm UR...and it set me forward for sure. The following year, fluorite cube...this was doing 3 pulls per run. In each of those cases, you would not see those pulls in your spreadsheet tracking mechanisms this group carries

+1

I am a firm believer that treasure pulls should entice casual players to want to play more. If they're always pulling bits, there is no real hook for the game overall. Limiting treasure pull enhancers moving forward would certainly go a long way to correcting things. What is max pull now with CoA; 20?

Bob Chasan wrote:

Jamie Campbell wrote: I am going to take the other side of the market on this. We do not know the total number of tokens in the treasure by distribution. Over the past three years many have told me that the number of people looking at this forum is significantly lower as a percentage of total players playing TD. With this in mind, I don’t think we have enough data to declare that the number of URs pulled has diminished. The collective pool of people “mining” the treasure has significant increased therefore the distribution of tokens is wider and as a result, the natural percentages of a similarly tracking population would diminish.

Kinda reminds me of bitcoin mining at the beginning of the mining heyday

I will say to the postings before...my second dungeon run was the Redoubt Helm UR...and it set me forward for sure. The following year, fluorite cube...this was doing 3 pulls per run. In each of those cases, you would not see those pulls in your spreadsheet tracking mechanisms this group carries

+1

Someone much smarter than my knowledge of statics broke down how close our numbers would at various multiples of treasure. If I can find the post I will reference here. Our numbers are high to have a good idea.

Allen John wrote:

Jeff321 wrote: And the sample size just affects the margin of error I guess. But you can get good data with pretty small samples. Look at the presidential election polls. They poll a few hundred people and that's good enough for the whole state.

Yeah, but the margin of error on those is usually +/- something like 4%. While that might be useful for polls like those, nobody's going to be impressed if you tell them the rate of "others" in the token bags is 5%, plus or minus 4%.

I just took the numbers we have so far, and plugged them into the first result via an online search for "sample size calculator". Using the sample size we have thus far (1761), and estimating the total token pool at 48,000, these are the 95% confidence intervals our data supports:

Uncommons: 35.26% to 39.70%
Rares: 35.54% to 39.98%
Bits: 17.66% to 21.30%
Other: 4.10% to 6.12%

In other words, there's a 95% chance that the actual numbers fall somewhere inside those ranges. More data points would allow us to narrow the ranges down.

So if you doubt we have a high enough number apparently there are online calculators for sample size and you can see about how accurate we have for various sizes. I think you will find it doesn’t move the needle much.

There is also the fact that in all the different cons the numbers have tracked about the same con to con in the same year. If the sample was too small then we should have lots or varierty between cons.
TLDR: UR percentage in treasure has gone down. Period. Just because you may still be hitting close to 1% doesn’t mean pulls overall have, we have data.

Loremaster wrote: What is max pull now with CoA; 20?

3: starting minimum
13: Charm of Awareness (if 10 CoA or CoGF)
2: Ioun Stone Gold Nugget
2: Ioun Stone Silver Nugget
1: 6th-level____________________
21 maximum possible for non artifact owners

And we got P. Nugget coming
For 23, maybe one more new TE and cap
It at 25.
Otherwise as is it won’t ever stop.