TOPIC: Question about Legendary Transmutes and Reprints

Brad Mortensen wrote: Every individual request has an equal chance of being met. Agreed.

But if people can play for free, or even make money at it, they will increase their demand for tickets. (ECON 101) No, farmers won’t snag them all, but they’ll be trying to get a lot more, and buying them in bulk. The chances of newbies getting tickets will necessarily decrease, not necessarily to zero. It’s just math.

The premise seems sound, but I dont necessarily agree with your conclusion. Most, if not all of us could make more money not playing TD than by playing.
Unless we started doing things like dying in room 1 and leaving, which would draw a lot of negative attention quickly.
Con time has value, and every run is played at the expense of doing something else, in addition to the monetary cost.

If we added 13 to the max draw, yes, there would be profit. There might even be profit now, but it is so minimal.

Wade Schwendemann wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: Every individual request has an equal chance of being met. Agreed.

But if people can play for free, or even make money at it, they will increase their demand for tickets. (ECON 101) No, farmers won’t snag them all, but they’ll be trying to get a lot more, and buying them in bulk. The chances of newbies getting tickets will necessarily decrease, not necessarily to zero. It’s just math.

The premise seems sound, but I dont necessarily agree with your conclusion. Most, if not all of us could make more money not playing TD than by playing.
Unless we started doing things like dying in room 1 and leaving, which would draw a lot of negative attention quickly.
Con time has value, and every run is played at the expense of doing something else, in addition to the monetary cost.

If we added 13 to the max draw, yes, there would be profit. There might even be profit now, but it is so minimal.

Yet we needed to create ghosting limits

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Wade Schwendemann wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: Every individual request has an equal chance of being met. Agreed.

But if people can play for free, or even make money at it, they will increase their demand for tickets. (ECON 101) No, farmers won’t snag them all, but they’ll be trying to get a lot more, and buying them in bulk. The chances of newbies getting tickets will necessarily decrease, not necessarily to zero. It’s just math.

The premise seems sound, but I dont necessarily agree with your conclusion. Most, if not all of us could make more money not playing TD than by playing.
Unless we started doing things like dying in room 1 and leaving, which would draw a lot of negative attention quickly.
Con time has value, and every run is played at the expense of doing something else, in addition to the monetary cost.

If we added 13 to the max draw, yes, there would be profit. There might even be profit now, but it is so minimal.

Yet we needed to create ghosting limits

Ghosting isn't just about farming though, it's about TD wanting actual people to do TD runs. If nearly all 8,000 tickets are going to sell out, it's in TD's best interest to have as many of those as possible be real people. Even if someone is "farming" and recruiting 9 other people to do the run with them and then hand over the treasure chips and completion tokens, some of those 9 people might become hooked and become ticket and token buyers. There's of course zero chance that any ghost players will become real people that buy tickets and tokens.

Mike Steele wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Wade Schwendemann wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: Every individual request has an equal chance of being met. Agreed.

But if people can play for free, or even make money at it, they will increase their demand for tickets. (ECON 101) No, farmers won’t snag them all, but they’ll be trying to get a lot more, and buying them in bulk. The chances of newbies getting tickets will necessarily decrease, not necessarily to zero. It’s just math.

The premise seems sound, but I dont necessarily agree with your conclusion. Most, if not all of us could make more money not playing TD than by playing.
Unless we started doing things like dying in room 1 and leaving, which would draw a lot of negative attention quickly.
Con time has value, and every run is played at the expense of doing something else, in addition to the monetary cost.

If we added 13 to the max draw, yes, there would be profit. There might even be profit now, but it is so minimal.

Yet we needed to create ghosting limits

Ghosting isn't just about farming though, it's about TD wanting actual people to do TD runs. If nearly all 8,000 tickets are going to sell out, it's in TD's best interest to have as many of those as possible be real people. Even if someone is "farming" and recruiting 9 other people to do the run with them and then hand over the treasure chips and completion tokens, some of those 9 people might become hooked and become ticket and token buyers. There's of course zero chance that any ghost players will become real people that buy tickets and tokens.

Right. But the only reason people could afford to do that, and create that problem in the first place, was the amount of loot they drew to subsidize it, yes?

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Mike Steele wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Wade Schwendemann wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: Every individual request has an equal chance of being met. Agreed.

But if people can play for free, or even make money at it, they will increase their demand for tickets. (ECON 101) No, farmers won’t snag them all, but they’ll be trying to get a lot more, and buying them in bulk. The chances of newbies getting tickets will necessarily decrease, not necessarily to zero. It’s just math.

The premise seems sound, but I dont necessarily agree with your conclusion. Most, if not all of us could make more money not playing TD than by playing.
Unless we started doing things like dying in room 1 and leaving, which would draw a lot of negative attention quickly.
Con time has value, and every run is played at the expense of doing something else, in addition to the monetary cost.

If we added 13 to the max draw, yes, there would be profit. There might even be profit now, but it is so minimal.

Yet we needed to create ghosting limits

Ghosting isn't just about farming though, it's about TD wanting actual people to do TD runs. If nearly all 8,000 tickets are going to sell out, it's in TD's best interest to have as many of those as possible be real people. Even if someone is "farming" and recruiting 9 other people to do the run with them and then hand over the treasure chips and completion tokens, some of those 9 people might become hooked and become ticket and token buyers. There's of course zero chance that any ghost players will become real people that buy tickets and tokens.

Right. But the only reason people could afford to do that, and create that problem in the first place, was the amount of loot they drew to subsidize it, yes?

That is a big point! My group looks like it is going to be 7 people at Gen Con this year. I'm not sure we will be able to get one of each run. That would really be a hummer if we miss a run because a farmer was getting his 6, 7th, or 8th runs in, and it didn't cost him much buy subsidizing runs with loot.

I agree with you in principle Brad, but I'm coming around to the view that farming/ghost runs may not be the issue we think it is due to the human factor if nothing else.

Those of us who could farm are a small percentage of the playerbase, even if we had a percentage of us who farmed non stop I dont think it would have a significant impact on the token economy or new playerbase at large. I also still kind of feel like were a small enough community to identify bad actors and just not deal with them. I mean worste case if we did identify a poblem player TD could always just ban them from the event.

That said, again I agree with you in principle and think we need to be very careful with future TEs.

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Mike Steele wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Wade Schwendemann wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: Every individual request has an equal chance of being met. Agreed.

But if people can play for free, or even make money at it, they will increase their demand for tickets. (ECON 101) No, farmers won’t snag them all, but they’ll be trying to get a lot more, and buying them in bulk. The chances of newbies getting tickets will necessarily decrease, not necessarily to zero. It’s just math.

The premise seems sound, but I dont necessarily agree with your conclusion. Most, if not all of us could make more money not playing TD than by playing.
Unless we started doing things like dying in room 1 and leaving, which would draw a lot of negative attention quickly.
Con time has value, and every run is played at the expense of doing something else, in addition to the monetary cost.

If we added 13 to the max draw, yes, there would be profit. There might even be profit now, but it is so minimal.

Yet we needed to create ghosting limits

Ghosting isn't just about farming though, it's about TD wanting actual people to do TD runs. If nearly all 8,000 tickets are going to sell out, it's in TD's best interest to have as many of those as possible be real people. Even if someone is "farming" and recruiting 9 other people to do the run with them and then hand over the treasure chips and completion tokens, some of those 9 people might become hooked and become ticket and token buyers. There's of course zero chance that any ghost players will become real people that buy tickets and tokens.

Right. But the only reason people could afford to do that, and create that problem in the first place, was the amount of loot they drew to subsidize it, yes?

Well, not entirely. As others have pointed out, Ghosting also happens because people want to do runs with fewer people (some preferred the 8 person per room for example), some like to do specialty runs like solo runs, and sometimes people just don't show up and groups don't want to take a chance on someone from the wait list (they might want to run a different difficultly level, for example). You are right that even those reasons probably are used more if the people can get ghost loot.

All I’m saying is, solo and double-team runs used to be a thing. I don’t care why because it’s not important.

Point is, I haven’t heard of anyone doing them since the ghost rules went into effect, even though they’re still legal. I have heard of people having five in a party, because only five ghosts can get loot.

But I don’t know everything. Has anyone heard of anyone doing a run with more than five ghosts lately?

Brad Mortensen wrote: All I’m saying is, solo and double-team runs used to be a thing. I don’t care why because it’s not important.

Point is, I haven’t heard of anyone doing them since the ghost rules went into effect, even though they’re still legal. I have heard of people having five in a party, because only five ghosts can get loot.

But I don’t know everything. Has anyone heard of anyone doing a run with more than five ghosts lately?

I haven't lately - but I'm aware of exactly 3 runs in the history of TD (Chad's solo nightmare in... 2015?, Raven and Kirk's 2 player nightmare in... 2017?, and one other solo nightmare who I've forgotten - maybe Mongo?) with 1 or 2 players - so I'm not sure I would have if they were happening.

Matthew Hayward wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: All I’m saying is, solo and double-team runs used to be a thing. I don’t care why because it’s not important.

Point is, I haven’t heard of anyone doing them since the ghost rules went into effect, even though they’re still legal. I have heard of people having five in a party, because only five ghosts can get loot.

But I don’t know everything. Has anyone heard of anyone doing a run with more than five ghosts lately?

I haven't lately - but I'm aware of exactly 3 runs in the history of TD (Chad's solo nightmare in... 2015?, Raven and Kirk's 2 player nightmare in... 2017?, and one other solo nightmare who I've forgotten - maybe Mongo?) with 1 or 2 players - so I'm not sure I would have if they were happening.

MasterEd did one once, belive he played a druid prestige but dont quote me on that.

To Brad's point, other than an unplanned 2 man I sent when the rest of the group didn't show up, and Ravens double downs I haven't heard of any short handed runs recently, but I'll admit I dont make it out to every convention

Mongo said he was doing some solo runs at GC last year.
That was before the ghosting rule changes. Not sure if he returned the tickets or not.

Ed has a solo run listed in his signature, fwiw

Matthew Hayward wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: All I’m saying is, solo and double-team runs used to be a thing. I don’t care why because it’s not important.

Point is, I haven’t heard of anyone doing them since the ghost rules went into effect, even though they’re still legal. I have heard of people having five in a party, because only five ghosts can get loot.

But I don’t know everything. Has anyone heard of anyone doing a run with more than five ghosts lately?

I haven't lately - but I'm aware of exactly 3 runs in the history of TD (Chad's solo nightmare in... 2015?, Raven and Kirk's 2 player nightmare in... 2017?, and one other solo nightmare who I've forgotten - maybe Mongo?) with 1 or 2 players - so I'm not sure I would have if they were happening.

I thought Raven did at least one Solo run.