Discussion about when monetary imbalances are acceptable

[Wingflier]

Alright cool.  So now I'm going to do some math on how long it would take to unlock 30 Champions and 3 full rune pages of T3 runes, and we can discuss whether that's a reasonable amount of time ;p

[chemical_art]

Alright.

Just keep in mind that to compare it with any commercial game, where you spend 20 to 40 dollars retail, you need to tack that on as well. So for LoL case, you need to tack on between 20 to 40 dollars in benefits.

In addition, remember that some things, like runes, cannot be bought directly (they can be boosted indirectly so you can get them twice as quickly). EVERYONE has to earn them, so it would be like comparing the time it takes in AVWW to get all the the spells, or the amount of time it takes to get max level in guild wars. That is a matter of game pacing, and is not dependent on money.

Also, keep in mind that you must be lvl 30 to even enter ranked (competitive) play, so any time spent doing that is game progression. A forced shakedown to ensure you probably (but certainly not always) that you at least understand what you should do. This you may or may not agree with, but its enough to get at least 75% of the runes you would need outright.

Lastly, none of this goes with the fact that in the highest competitive play you get access to all the champions and runes, so there is no time sink requirement. And if you have a 5 v 5 team on amateur status, everyone has 2 or 3 roles, not 5, so you really need more like 15 champions and 2 rune books.

[Wingflier]

Lastly, none of this goes with the fact that in the highest competitive play you get access to all the champions and runes, so there is no time sink requirement.

So you're saying that if all of PA's Commanders were unlocked in tournaments that only invited teams could play in, you would be okay with that?

[chemical_art]

Yep, as long I could earn one after no more then an average of every 20 hours of play in non competitive modes, and I got to choose the one I unlocked.

Or I didn't get to choose, but I unlocked one after 10 hours of play.

[Wingflier]

Alright it's time for a little Maths:

Now with these calculations I'm basically going to be as generous as possible, and use statistics that basically don't even reflect reality just to prove how ridiculously high your playtime would have to be to unlock "competitive champions and runes" as you're saying.

So out of 100+ Champions and thousands of runes, I'm going to pick the top 30 Champions and top most used runes (more explanations of this later):

We're going to assume that each League of Legends game lasts 30 minutes.  In actuality I think games last longer than 30 minutes, but like I said I'm being generous, so each game lasts 30 minutes.

According to the wiki page:

You get 87.36 IP per won 30 minute game (rounded to 87)

and

You get 58 IP per lost 30 minute game.

http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Influence_Points

Since we're going to assume that in our quest to unlock these "competitive necessities" we've won and lost 50% of the time, it averages out to be 72.5 IP per game. 

We need to decide how much we're going to play each day.  Once again, I'm going to be generous and assume that we play 8 hours each day.  That's 16 games per day.  I know for a fact that nobody in this forum plays 16 games per day, and this isn't INCLUDING the times between each game waiting for queues and queue dodgers (very common), but once again, I'm being generous.

You get 150 IP once each day per win.  150/16 = 9.375 - Rounded to 9.5

So 72.5 IP + 9.5 IP = 82 IP per game, assuming you win and lose equal amounts and assuming you play 16 games per day.

Now let's find the costs:

I'm using Elementz competitive tier list from this page to calculate the top 30 Champions' IP cost:

http://www.reignofgaming.net/tier-lists/competitive-tier-list

Alistar - 1350
Nunu - 450
Morgana - 1350
EZ - 6300
Karth - 3150
Shen - 3150
Sona - 3150
Jayce - 6300
Kat - 3150
Zyra - 6300
Graves - 6300
Olaf - 3150
Irelia - 4800
Shyvana - 6300
Diana - 6300
Malphite - 1350
Gragas - 3150
Corki - 3150
Maokai - 4800
Anivia - 3150
TF - 1350
Skarner - 6300
Vladmir - 6300
Blitz - 3150
Rengar - 6300
Rumble - 4800
Cho - 1350
Ryze - 450
Jax - 1350
Darius - 6300

Total = 114750 IP

114750/82 = 1399.39 = round it to 1399 games.  If each game takes 30 minutes then that's basically 700 hours of playtime.

That's almost 3 months of playing 8 hours (of playtime) per day, and we haven't even entered the rune costs yet.

I calculated the rune costs by looking at the top 10 highest rated guides on mobafire.com and taking 12 different types of runes (to make rune pages for 3 different champion roles).  All runes are T3.

Mark of Insight x9 = 3690 IP
Seal of Resilence x9 = 1845 IP
Glyph of Shielding x 9 = 1845 IP
Quint of Resilience x3 = 3075 IP
Mark of Strength x9 = 1845 IP
Seal of Vitality x 9 = 3690 IP
Glyph of Force x9 = 3690 IP
Quint of Potency x3 = 3075 IP
Mark of Desolation x9 = 3690 IP
Seal of Clarity x9 = 1845 IP
Glyph of Warding x9 = 1845 IP
Quint of Swiftness x 3 = 6150 IP

36285 IP

36825/82 = 442.5 games = another 221 hours.

So 921 hours - Nearly 1,000 hours of playing 8 hours a day to reach "competitive status" according to Chemical_Art.

Yet if instead of playing League you're instead working and making minimum wage in California (and getting taxed 25% of your paycheck) you could work 166 hours and buy the $1000 PA Kickstarter Tier. 

Also let's please remember 30 Champions and 3 rune full rune pages is what Chemical_Art considers "balanced".  To actually unlock ALL the content with playtime it would take well over 3,000 hours of playing 8 hours a day for over a year (with new content constantly being released). 

And League of Legends considers itself to be a "competitive game".  A competitive game that you have to play nearly 4 months of 8 hour days just to compete?  When there are games like DotA that have all the content unlocked to you right from the beginning?

I'm sorry, but if you have a problem with PA, you should have a problem with League.  You can spend the time grinding through the game or spend your own money to become "competitive", but either way you're spending your life to be able to compete.  I see no difference.

[Volatar]

Your numbers are off somewhere. I have about 40 champions (a pretty good competitive set). I have about 480 normal games played.

[Wingflier]

They aren't off, you've probably only played a few games a day for a year or two.  The 150 daily IP boost helps a lot over a long period of time.

So if you're fine playing the game over a several years, then you can acheive "competitive status" eventually.

But for a person who wants to be on even footing right when they start, you'd have to play around 1,000 hours to get there.  I'm not okay with this for a game that claims to be competitive.

I could work 30 minutes a day for a year at a minimum wage job and have the money to pay for the $1000 Tier PA Kickstarter.  What is the difference?  You're still spending your time or money to get on even footing.

[Volatar]

They aren't off, you've probably only played a few games a day for a year or two.  The 150 daily IP boost helps a lot over a long period of time.

Ok yeah, thats about right.

[chemical_art]

If you wanted to do 3 out of the 5 roles, which most players should decide to do (better a master of some then a jack of all trades) you can cut everything by a third, and your rune counts could be cut by an additional third for some of them aren't viable instead of one or two builds (quints of swiftness, resilience) the same with champions (I can't remember last time I saw Skarner win competitively).


So it is closer to 650 hours base.

If you had the willpower to play 18 hours a day, it would take 36 days. So for 35 days you get that win of day which comes out to 5250 ip, which cuts out 72 hours.

If you treated it like a full time job, and did 40 hours a week 5 days a week, then you would earn an additional 750 ip every week, which comes out to about 48 hours of in game time. It would take 13.5 game weeks, or about 540 hours.

If you paid the game for what you would pay a retail game, 35 dollars, which I'm going to base the cost of PA as well, you get 5 of the most intensive IP intensive characters, which would cut out 31500 aip, saving 362 hours.

If you played full time to and paid what you would pay for PA, it would take around 175 hours of time to unlock everything you feel your need.

If you felt a need to pay for almost everything, you could get everything you need for less then 200 dollars.


You can say to yourself "I win" in whatever goal you wanted to accomplish of me writing this out.

You still haven't changed my opinion that is ok for a company to charge a grand as the only method to unlock everything in a game. You are still claiming that it is ok to work in a real job 140 hours (8 dollars an hour after payroll taxes) to unlock a game.

An hour in a game you enjoy is not the same as an hour spent at work. And paying 35 dollars is not the same as paying a grand.

[wyvern83]

League of Legends also offers champion packs that you can purchase for money such as this one: http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Collector%27s_Edition
Three others are also linked to on that page, there is some overlap between some of them and buying them is only worth it if you haven't been unlocking stuff already for money/time cost effiecency reasons.

Note these packs don't include newer champions, nor do they contain every champion by the same token.

My personal opinion on League of Legends is that the grind isn't worth it for my enjoyment personally. I like Dota 2 better, I'm not pro in the slightest but I enjoy playing against bots with friends now and then as well as reading about it or watching it. However I could do without the swearing some heroes and the kill-streak announcer does, which I doubt would be made optional sadly, and the name of the best lifestealing item, which I doubt will change either. Why the item doesn't have a more descriptive or dota mythos consistent name is beyond me.

As for grind by time or money to get competitive at a game, I'd like to point out the use of the word competitive in this context isn't the whole story as you are just talking about player options in the game and not Player Skill as time spent learning the game to gain those skills isn't being reflected in these equations. Sure you could put down $1000.00 for every option but until you've played enough, assuming your pay-for-only units are balanced, buying doesn't make you competitive it just skips the option-grid part.

[Wingflier]

My personal opinion on League of Legends is that the grind isn't worth it for my enjoyment personally. I like Dota 2 better, I'm not pro in the slightest but I enjoy playing against bots with friends now and then as well as reading about it or watching it. However I could do without the swearing some heroes and the kill-streak announcer does, which I doubt would be made optional sadly, and the name of the best lifestealing item, which I doubt will change either. Why the item doesn't have a more descriptive or dota mythos consistent name is beyond me.

The Christian Mentality on violent video games is highly amusing to me.

You're offended by a few curse words and an item named "Satanic", but you have no problem spending hours on end shedding the blood of enemy soldiers and killing heroes in gruesome and horrifying ways, only for them to resurrect and be killed again.  Or is that what makes it acceptable:  That they resurrect?  I guess I never understood the theology ;p

As for grind by time or money to get competitive at a game, I'd like to point out the use of the word competitive in this context isn't the whole story as you are just talking about player options in the game and not Player Skill as time spent learning the game to gain those skills isn't being reflected in these equations. Sure you could put down $1000.00 for every option but until you've played enough, assuming your pay-for-only units are balanced, buying doesn't make you competitive it just skips the option-grid part.

I guess my point is that if there is grind involved in becoming "competitive", then it's not really competitive.

Can you imagine a Chess Game where one play had been playing longer, so he had access to a several Queens in place of his pawns?  Can you imagine Starcraft if your units leveled up the longer you played?  Would anybody take these games seriously?  I certainly hope not.  Yet this is pretty much exactly what League of Legends asks its players to deal with.

I respect Planetary Annihilation more because they're not fostering any illusions about it:  "Yeah, you're smashing planets into planets, who gives a sh*t if its perfectly balanced?"  At least they're not trying to be something that they're not.  To me the $1,000 reward tier was proof from the beginning that the game was never meant to be perfectly balanced (as if the game concept in itself isn't screaming that at you).  As I said earlier in the thread, I'm not sure what kind of wishful thinking would need to take place in order to miss that the people paying $1,000 were getting their own unique commanders.

[keith.lamothe]

On violence-in-games compared to swearing-in-games (or a number of other things), I agree that shedding rivers of blood in a game isn't something that should just be assumed to be ok, but it's important to remember one distinction when evaluating something in a game (or movie) : is it a simulation of the thing, or the thing itself?

In other words: in a movie, if a woman shoots someone else, the actress is simulating violence (assuming it's done with blank-rounds or CG or whatever).  If she takes all her clothes off in front of the camera, she is actually being immodest, even though it's "just a movie".  Whether a given person has a problem with that (or the violence) is beyond the scope of what I'll try to address here, but the two cases are fundamentally different on at least that one point.

Similarly, if the voice actor lets loose a string of profanity/obscenity/vulgarity (I'm not talking about Dota2 specifically, I don't know how much is used there), and it's not bleeped-out or whatever, then that's not purely a simulated action.  It is partly simulated in that it doesn't mean that the voice actor, personally, really thinks all those mean things about your mother.  But it's a different thing than the AI programmer indirectly slaughtering your character, because no real violence happens at all.

On whether the AI programmer indirectly slaughtering your character is ok, I offer no argument, having a conflict of interest

[Wingflier]

In other words: in a movie, if a woman shoots someone else, the actress is simulating violence (assuming it's done with blank-rounds or CG or whatever).  If she takes all her clothes off in front of the camera, she is actually being immodest, even though it's "just a movie".  Whether a given person has a problem with that (or the violence) is beyond the scope of what I'll try to address here, but the two cases are fundamentally different on at least that one point.

Okay, but we weren't talking about movies, we were talking about video games.

By your logic, a naked woman in a video game should be okay, because it's just the simulation of a woman being immodest, instead of an actual woman being immodest.  No woman actually had to be immodest in order for us all to see that character's breasts.  By the same token, sex in a video game (by CGI characters) should also be okay because it's not actually happening, it's just simulated.

I get the feeling that most Christians would be just as offended by a woman's CGI breasts as they would the real thing, yet we can spill thousands of liters of CGI blood and there's no stigma against that.  Keyword here is stigma:  It's a social stigma.  It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Why are we so sensitive about some things and completely numb to others?  We can watch a movie where hundreds of people are brutally murdered (Kill Bill), but if one woman lets a tit slip we're completely up in arms.

Similarly, in a video game, are you saying that if the cursing done by a "character" was created using a completely human-sounding computer-generated voice, it would somehow make it better than using a voice-actor?  Once again, I get the impression that the same people would still be offended.

[keith.lamothe]

Things get more complicated when it's cgi/computer-generated (which can happen in movies as well as games, incidentally, just as games can have live-action recordings or nearly so incorporated into them), but there are still real things going on with the "almost wearing something" female League-of-Legends champions.  Similar with computer-generated voices.  In both cases there's some graphical/sound artist(s) behind it.  Even if there weren't (can you think of any examples?  I can't off the top of my head but I could be missing something), the player's participation in it also has distinctions between simulated/real.

For instance, if someone is playing a shooter game, mowing down thousands of civilians, and genuinely wanting to be doing the same thing in real life, that also crosses the simulated/real line.  At least in my opinion, which is admittedly bound to have internal inconsistencies.

[Wingflier]

Yeah I'm a bit confused.

In your first post you said the issue was when it was "simulated" violence (pistol blanks and CGI blood) vs. real immodesty.

Yet when both the violence and the "sex" are simulated, you still seem to have a problem with it.

I think our society just has a problem with sex and not violence, which is extremely dysfunctional I've got to say.  Sex is a completely natural function, and vital to our species survival.  The human body is a beautiful and natural thing. 

Violence is natural too I suppose, but violence against our own species should be discouraged for obvious reasons, where sex should be encouraged!