How much are permanent stat boosts unfair? Should there be a cap?

[Ary Endleg]

In recent discussion about fairness of tokens, it was mentioned many times how unfair percentage stat boost from shop is due to it being exponential gain. There is another topic in this section that speaks about how easy or hard it is to obtain premium stuff without spending money.

 

So far shop allows you to get around 50% in increase in attack and defence stat per reset. It is in no way balanced in relation to how long it takes to get those stats just by grinding, it scales exponentially the more you buy it the more it gives. When you have 2 million of attack it will give another million for just 20 credits. In matter of minute player got 1 million attack, just like that. How long it takes to gain 1 million attack without using premium shop at all? Does this seem fair?

 

What if we were to put a cap on that stat boost, instead of it giving 2% increase it would give 2% or 10k which ever is lower. That way it would still be helpful to players in transition to reach bigger numbers and eventually catch up, while preventing the top players from slipping way too far. Exemplary cap of 10k means that once you reach 500k stats you have hit it, it's a long way to half million and once people would reach it they would no longer have exponential gain. Then max gain per shop reset would be 200k stats, which is fairer than it is now.

 

What do you people think about this?

 

Certain person give me this idea and asked me to post it instead, so here it is.

[Chewett]

people will raise the same issues as they did with the tokens "others could do it, My strategy depends on it, now it will be harder to beat those ahead"

My first response is "yeah, and?" same issues with the tokens, I would consider reducing it quite honestly, and will consider it unless some better alternatives are given.

The exponential scaling of some effects are bad.

[dst]

Actually the solution is quite simple imo: after a certain amount, stats will not matter (same way as negative stats work).

Eg (totally random number so don't take those as benchmarks) :you have 10k stats. You gain more. But once you hit 50k, everything above is discarded and you only use the 50k (although you can have 500k). And the extra points can be used for other stuff (remember Mur's idea about transforming stats to other stuff).

[Ary Endleg]

I think his idea was only for volition...

 

I'm unsure about putting a hardcap on stats, even though the majority of other games do it. Reaching a common agreement about stat cap would be very hard thing to do and would require rebalancing of whole system.

[dst]

The initial discussion (at least in game, no idea if it reached the forums) was about all stats.