Reality Skewed Gamers: March 2017

Think your sim tickets are going down? Others think you are crazy?

Well... YOU ARE NOT CRAZY! THE TICKETS ARE GOING DOWN! =D

This is a post to show you what the current sim ticket situation is for many free to play (f2p) players, and also what you can do to plan for it. Let's start with some assumptions so this can be generalized...

1) With your regular energy, you are farming 6 hard nodes per day (maybe 2 for 3 different characters). Everyone's situation is a little different, but this will probably be a rough average, which means 18 hard node attempts each day.
2) Hard nodes can vary in range, but an average of 16 will be used as the cost of the hard nodes done for the purposes of these calculations.
3) Most of the gear people are farming will be in the 10 energy nodes, but also things in the 8 energy nodes (like mk3 sienar) and also some 6 node attempts to get some of the overly used low items, like the mk 1 armor piece. So with that, an average of 9.5 energy per node will be used for gear.

Now, with that said, let's start with figuring out how much energy you get in a day and all the activities you do:

So in this table, most things are set values, like the natural regular energy you generate in a day, the energy boosts, etc. The variable ones are the refreshes you do. For this first example, I am assuming 2 regular energy refreshes a day and 1 cantina energy refresh a day, which is 200 crystals spent a day. This may be high for some f2p players, but I think it is a good starting point. With that, I figured out the energy per node being used:

So you can see how the energy per node attempt was calculated. First is the total energy used, which is based on the natural energy, refreshes and boosts; then the number of hard node attempts (which is 18 in the calculations I am doing for 6 hard nodes), and then based on the average of 9.5 energy per node mentioned before, the number of node attempts was calculated by dividing the remaining energy by 9.5. I wont show this table again because it is redundant, but the values of the average cost per node will vary based on the number of refreshes since it changes the amount of energy you have.

Now, with these values, you can figure out how many sim tickets you get each day consistently (which means the number of tickets you get from attacking nodes is too variable to include) and the number of sim tickets you spend:

So what you can see is that every week with 2 regular refreshes and 1 cantina energy refreshes, with the stats I used (6 hard nodes with an average cost of 16 energy + regular nodes for gear with an average cost of 9.5 energy) will result in approximately 28 sim tickets lost per week. If your average energy cost per node goes down, then you will be MORE in the red in sim tickets. So, let's look at what happens if you do 1 energy refresh and 1 cantina refresh only:

So what you can see is that losing that 2nd energy refresh dramatically increases your sim ticket usage with everything else being the same. Now, you are losing about 80 sim tickets per week. What if you are doing the minimum and just doing 1 regular energy refresh because you are trying to save crystals but still want to make sure you get the 600 energy for your guild:

So you can see that the sim tickets isnt really affected when you drop the cantina refresh by much. The biggest impact to the sim tickets is how many energy refreshes you do. But for most f2p, that is usually 1 or 2, which puts you in the red!!!!!

So how can you prevent yourself from losing sim tickets to the point where you are depleted and have to do that stupid Light Side 9-B Hard node manually again? Simple! Start to auto your challenges!

As soon as you cut out the simming of the challenges and instead auto them (hurray for the new 4x speed), you will now GAIN 10 sim tickets per week instead of LOSE 80 sim ticket per week.

Don't let the sim ticket crunch hit you without being prepared. There are ways to prevent yourself from losing sim tickets, and the easiest ways are increase energy refreshes if you can afford it, but even easier is to AUTO ALL CHALLENGES, REGULAR AND FLEET!!!!

Love, Finity =)

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Gamer Fuel March Madness Final Four #swgoh

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

F2P Sim Ticket Crunch! #swgoh

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Gamer Fuel March Madness Week 2 (Elite 8!)

Thursday, March 2, 2017

Gamer Fuel March Madness Week 1