Tumbling Dice

 The second half of the current update landed today and it took me forty pulls to get Akane, which was the very first thing i did when I logged in this morning. It felt pretty good, let me tell you. 

It also made me feel, once again, that it might be worth reiterating my personal experience with gacha games, which is that I can mostly get the characters I want without having to get my credit card out. This bears repeating because it's not the narrative I hear when I'm reading about the genre in the gaming press.  

In the six months since the game started, there have been five characters released that I wanted and I've been able to get four of them right away - Hotori, Lacrimosa, Linko and now Akane. The one I missed out on was Iroi but there I have to say I really didn't try very hard. I could certainly have got her, and for free, if I'd been that bothered. I just didn't want her that much, apparently.

To go over it again, because I do like to repeat myself, the way it works in Neverness To Everness is that if you fail to get a banner character in your first 70 pulls, your chance increases to a minimum 20% (Okay, 19.59% if you want to be fussy.) and the number of tiles you can land on to win increases as well. If that doesn't do it in another twenty pulls, pull 90 is a guaranteed win.

From the outside, that might still sound rough. Seventy pulls? Ninety? That's a lot! Well, yes, you'd think so. But not really. It's generally reckoned to be one of the more generous versions of the system, particularly because there's no 50/50, meaning once you hit that hard pity cap, you will get the character, not just have a fifty-fifty chance. 

When I started rolling for Akane this morning, I had fifty Solid Dice in hand to try for her It's one for every pull, as you'd expect. I'd picked those fifty dice up without particularly trying. I got them from login rewards and just by playing. I also had some left over from previous banners, when I'd bought some with in-game currency and then hadn't needed to use them all.

I rolled my first ten and got nothing. I could just have kept rolling but my mind doesn't work that way. Since I'd started with fifty dice, I didn't want to finish with anything much less than that. I'm in this business because I like to see numbers go up, not down.

Solid Dice are easier to get than you might think, though. You can, of course, pay real money for them but why would you when you can buy them with a couple of in-game currencies. One of those currencies is called Anulith and you get Anulith for doing all kinds of things - achievements, events, mini-games. They hand it out as compensation for downtime, even. It's very common. 

The exchange rate between Anulith and Solid Dice is 160:1. A hundred and sixty Anulith gets you one Solid Dice. When I logged in this morning I had over 18,000 of the things. 

That's enough to buy well over a hundred Solid Dice. And I already had fifty. If I had the absolute, worst luck imaginable, so long as I kept rolling, I'd still be guaranteed to get Akane and I'd have almost enough dice left over to guarantee the next banner character, even if I had the worst possible luck twice in a row. 

By then, of course, I'd have acquired whole stack of the other currency you can use to buy Solid Dice with, because you get it by rolling on the gameboard. Not to mention all the extra Anulith I'd have saved up by the time the next banner arrived. Six weeks playing every day gets you plenty.

As it happens, when Akane suddenly burst onto the screen, I was still thirty pulls short of soft pity seventy. I closed out with forty Solid Dice in hand and about 16,000 Anulith still in my account. As I said, I was pretty happy about the way it turned out.

It would be a different story if I wanted every character. That would drain my resources, I'm sure. But as I discussed in the Linko post I linked above, I don't usually have much of a practical use for the characters I roll on. I just pick the ones I find particularly appealing from the way they appear in the storylines, which is unlikely to be all of them or even most of them. Ironically, the only one I didn't manage to pull, Iroi, was the also the only one I wanted mostly for practical purposes. It almost certainly explains why I didn't go on trying for her for long.

It would also be different if I cared about the weapons, I imagine. Those use a different currency and it's one I don't seem to generate easily through my playstyle. I'm not sure if that's something I could change by playing differently or if it's where Hotta try to make their money. If I was into weapons, I might well have to spend some actual cash to guarantee getting the ones I wanted. (Full disclosure - I barely begin to understand how the weapon system in NTE works...) 

And honestly, I'd be fine with spending some money on the game. I was talking to Mrs. Bhagpuss a couple of days about it. She's playing June's Journey and she was pissed that the Halloween event there seemed to have been specifically designed to fall just barely short of being doable without spending real money. 

Part of the entertainment value in the game for her is seeing how far she can get without spending anything at all and tactics like that are guaranteed to make her more determined than ever, never to give them anything. We both agreed that we wouldn't have the same reluctance to spend a few pounds here and there if the game seemed like it wasn't bothered either way.

NTE manages to give the impression it isn't bothered whether you spend money or not. I'm sure the developers are extremely bothered but they know better than to show it. And it's an excellent game. I've been playing it with considerable enjoyment since it launched. It's probably my main game right now, in so far as I have one. 

And yet, so far, I haven't spent anything. I just keep playing it. Pretty much every day. And enjoying it hugely, too.

Compare that with EverQuest II. It's theoretically free to play and yet I pay an annual subscription of around £80, for which I get a few perks I use and a lot I don't. On top of that, I just paid another £30 or so for the annual expansion. 

I barely play EQII at all at the moment and even when I do it's sporadically, in short bursts. I'm paying over a hundred pounds a year for a game I don't play very much and nothing at all for one I play all the time. At this stage, it's more of a tradition than anything. 

Clearly, I need to take a long, hard look at my priorities. If I'm going to spend money at all, particularly on a game that claims to be free to play, wouldn't it make more sense to spend it on the one I'm actually playing? 

Except, as with Mrs Bhagpuss, I kind of get a buzz out of not paying. Getting something for nothing adds value in a weird way. I've written a post for each of the banner characters I've won because winning them was exciting. Would I write posts about characters I'd just bought in a store?

So why was it exciting? Apart from that great feeling when you think you're getting away with something? I think a lot of it is because it gives the illusion of gambling without the risk.

As I've laid it out above, getting the characters you want is guaranteed. There is no actual risk, provided you're selective and don't just want everything all the time. You can't really lose. It just might take you longer or cost you more but if it's not real money you're spending, that's not going to spoil your enjoyment too much.

Even so, getting them faster or more cheaply than the odds suggest you should is exciting. Gambling isn't only popular because of the winning. The gambling itself is a thrill. Not to mention that the way they've set it up, rolling on the game-board with all the animations and the feel of an actual board game, is entertaining in itself. It feels oddly... wholesome.

Here's a question to which I already know the answer. If I could just buy all the characters from the in-game store for a set amount, would I? If they just cost, let's say, $10 each. Something reasonable like that.

Most likely I wouldn't. I'd still want them but I'd immediately fall into "But do I want them that much?" mode. And from there it's a short trip to "Do I need them?" and the answer to that one is almost always no. I'm really, really good at going without things. Going without is often more satisfying than getting, for me. It's almost a problem, sometimes.

I'm not saying I wouldn't buy characters, ever. I'm saying it's less than likely. I'm also saying I'm almost certain that, if I did, I wouldn't get as much value from it as I do from winning them, even though I know the win is guaranteed. Every time I played a character I'd paid money for, or got them out for a screenshot, I wouldn't get that momentary glow of pleasure I do get now, at least occasionally, when I remember how I rolled for them and won. Instead, I'd be more likely to remember they cost me money and I doubt that would add any sparkle to my day.

But Hotta doesn't sell characters in the store. They sell packs of currency you can use to buy dice to roll for them. The convoluted system - paying real money for crystals to trade for Anulith to swap for Solid Dice so as to be able to roll for more characters - distances the whole financial transaction sufficiently that it would certainly work better for me, psychologically. 

But then we come back to the fact that I don't need the extra rolls. If I had more Solid Dice I'd end up rolling for characters I wasn't that crazy about. I'm already getting the ones I really want. For free.

I think if I was going to throw some money Hotta's way, which I'd be happy to do, since I'd like them to keep on adding content to this excellent game that I'm having such a good time playing, I'd probably have to look at buying some of the outfits. Cosmetic purchases somehow slot into a different receptor in my brain, as I think they may do for many gamers. Buying characters seems off, somehow. Buying dresses is fine!

As is often the case with post like this, I'm not so much addressing an audience here as I am having a conversation with myself. Last time I rambled on about this same topic, someone (It'll either have been Mailvaltar or Nimgimli, those being about the only two people who ever comment on NTE posts.) told me in the comments that you can buy stuff in the store with PayPal. That removes the only real concern I have about giving money to free to play publishers, namely giving my financial information to a somewhat unknown company. Situations like this are exactly why I made a PayPal account in the first place.

I have almost no cosmetics in NTE and I would like some. In today's update we all got an outfit for Akane, which was great, especially since I now have the character who can actually wear it. Regular readers may remember (They won't. Ed.) that when I was rolling for Iroi, I got her outfit but not her, so this is a big improvement. 

The problem with any of the outfits, though, is that 90% of the time, I'm only going to be playing Flora. So maybe I should buy her some new clothes... 

I'll have a think about it. I wish you could get NTE gift cards, like you can for some games. Then I could just put it on my birthday and Christmas wishlist. Problem solved!

And there we come to the end of another post in which I mostly talked to myself about things that ought to have stayed in my head. I guess the post I was planning to write, which was going to be about the update itself, including the latest chapter of the Whoots!!!! story, which I have already finished and which, once again, is excellent, and about which I have plenty to say, will have to wait until tomorrow.

Or even longer, since I have a ton of other ideas for posts just now. And to think I wasted a day on this one! Oh well, I guess I ought to leave the Whoots!!!! post a while longer anyway, so anyone who plays NTE will have had time to see it for themselves. Bound to be some spoilers. 

Yes, that's it! This post was a public service in that I didn't spoil anyone's game! 

No need to thank me!