Multiple Server Adventure Pack TP Efficiency

[Saavedra]

I have posted previously that I am planning on remaining 100% F2P, and I plan on saving up all my TPs and not spending any until I am ready for Gianthold, so that I don't run out of TP and have none to buy high level content. I am at the point where a sale at the right time could change my mind, and here's why.

Using's basic TP/favor ratios at http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=2521152&postcount=110 I know how many TP each adventure pack gives, along with its (non-sale) cost. Also using Robi's Adventure Pack cost thread at http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?p=2396345#post2396345 I know that each 100 favor gives you 25 TP.

Since I am considering buying low level adventure packs, I assume that your favor is already above 50, and the favor gained from the adventure pack will not bring your favor above 500, so I am discounting the advantage of once per server favor rewards.

Now that there are 7 servers, if we are favor grinding, we can run a character up on each server, or if we're crazy, 2 on each server, and run them through the adventure pack we buy. So to get the number of Favor earned from an adventure pack, you multiply the Favor gained by either 7 or 14, depending on how crazy you are. :) For example, According to the thread above, STK gives you 48 Favor, so if you play 1 character per server, you get 48*7, or 336 Favor.

Now to figure out how many TP you get out of that (eventually - more on this later), Robi says you get 25 TP for every 100 favor. So in the above example, 336 favor gives you (round down to nearest 100 to make it 300) (300/100)*25, or 3*25, or 75 TP. Since STK costs 250 TP, you're taking a loss. Actually, at the time of this writing, STK is on sale for 200 TP, so you're still taking a loss even on sale.

Even now, this is assuming that you have an odd 52 TP on each character. So EACH CHARACTER gets only 48 Favor, and you don't get the 25 TP until you run another 52 Favor to combine that with.

The other reason why it's such a bad deal is that we ended up rounding that 336 favor down to 300, not getting any TP for that favor.

The moral of this story is that if you buy an adventure pack that provides a total amount of favor very close to a multiple of 100, you are being more TP/gained to TP/spent efficient in 2 ways, assuming you're not combining the efforts with other TP gained outside the adventure pack (which I don't count, because let's face it- you can get favor from outside any adventure pack without buying an adventure pack.)

So lets look at a pack that gives a total amount of favor close to that magic number of 100, Tangleroot. Tangleroot costs 550 and gives you 99 Favor. So in order to make this work, you need to supplement your Tangleroot Favor with ONE whole favor point from outside the pack. Shouldn't be too big of a deal. Assuming Tangleroot gives you 100 favor, across 7 servers it gives you 100*7 = 700 favor. 700 favor at 25 TP for each 100 favor gives you 7*25= 175 TP. If you use all 14 characters, you get 14*25 = 350 favor. So you still lose favor over your cost of 550. But if you ever see a sale for Tangleroot for 350 (which is about 36% off, something we'll never see!) it would be worth if you have characters on all 14 servers. Although I believe they occasionally have 30% off sales, correct? So in this case you might be willing to buy Tangleroot to almost break even, but I think few F2P players will be grinding with all 14 of their characters.

However, Reach also gives close to 100 Favor (96 to be exact) but only costs 350! So if you are in a position to run 14 characters through Reaver's Reach, you can actually break even on TP, and it pays for itself. The obvious problem with that is that I imagine few F2P players have 14 characters who are level 17. But if Reaver's Reach goes on sale, it can become profitable to go with less.

The conclusion we can draw here is that I'm sure the devs already did this math before they opened the 7th server, and have determined, as I have, that you're not going to be making TP by buying adventure packs. But if you want to stretch the value of the favor you've spent, should you buy a pack that gives a total amount of favor close to a multiple of 100? Tangleroot costs exactly twice as much as STK and gives exactly twice as much favor, but what is the total ratio of TP gained to TP spent? Assuming 7 characters, STK has a ratio of 75/250 = 0.3 and Tangleroot has a ratio of 175/550 = 0.318. Not too much of a gain, and if you supplement the STK favor with the 52 favor from outside the quest (on EACH character), it will make up this difference. So this is almost certainly not as useful as the basic TP/favor ratio calculation quoted in the thread above. But it's something you can keep in mind if you want to convert your favor rewards into TP instantly so that you can then make further purchases.

[Sogrin]

now there is only one more thing to figure out.

can you buy a character slot (625 TP afaik) which gives you another 7 characters (1 per server), favour them up (each character would need to get 400 favour to match the cost of buying that character slot, leaving a 100TP bonus) and gain any TP by having that 3rd character per server.

going by your calculation (and robi's), if we get 3 character per server (21 total) we would have 48*21=908 favour total.

9*25= 225 TP.

therefore, if you ran every character, got an extra character slot, and ran every extra character through, you would gain 25TP if you took STK by it's own, not counting the work required to get 400 F2P favour to make the character slot pay itself back (with the bonus 100). And this is only while it is on sale. you would need a 4th character slot to make it pay itself back when not on sale.

in most cases, too much bloody work if you ask me.

[Quintun]

Spend some cash and help the game. Its not like F2P is profitable for Turbine unless you do.

[ivar415]

Spend some cash and help the game. Its not like F2P is profitable for Turbine unless you do.
This!

Also your precious math musings don´t take rerolls into account at all. There´s nothing hindering you to have a main character on every server and use the 2nd slot to grind the low level quest for quick favor till 500 for example, then wiping it and starting a new char.

This is even more of a possibility, if you invest just a bit of money and turn premium.

Thank god there aren´t enough cheapskates like you around, to kick Turbine into bankruptcy in that way.

[KualaBangoDango]

Thank god there aren´t enough cheapskates like you around, to kick Turbine into bankruptcy in that way.I think this was a bit unnecessary. When DDO:EU released in September it was my intention to play free for a while (granted I bought the game and paid for a few months back at original release), but while I was playing free in September I introduced the game to one of my roommates and he immediately went VIP, bought some TP to go along with his VIP account, and a couple weeks later I, too, bought the $40 pack of TP.

As long as the game is good, even free players can help out the game. Heck, just by playing for free they make Turbine money just because the servers are fuller and paying players stay longer because of the healthy game. Look how many players left DDO back when it was subscription only simply because of the low population.

You are correct, however, in your advice that if you don't plan on permanently playing the "grinding" characters they can always delete them and re-roll a new one to gain favor on. The TP stays on your account even if the character is deleted, so if the first 100 favor (25 TP) is the easiest to get, might as well re-roll new characters for grinding that favor.

[Saavedra]

I never considered the possiblity of deleting characters and running through your new paid content over and over. This then begs the question, if I am going to delete and recreate characters, how many long will it take for content to pay for itself?

It is pretty easy math wise to figure out how many characters it would take, but I feel that if you are creating a character for the sole purpose of getting him to a favor level and then deleting him, it is now far more important to ask how long it will take, and you can no longer say that the favor gained outside of the paid content "doesn't count."

The issue now is finding the fastest way to get to 100 favor, or perhaps the fastest way to get to 200 favor, although I assume 0-100 favor is faster than 100-200 favor. Obviously, you can reach 100 favor without paid content, but is it more efficient time wise to get the last part of that 100 in or out of STK, Tangleroot, or Catacombs?

Since we're now talking about spending time instead of TP, and I have not bought any adventure packs, I have no means with which to put forth an opinion. So if a veteran could comment on how time efficient early level adventure packs are, I'm sure we'd appreciate it.

I suspect, however, that there would be little gained with time/favor efficiency from unpaid to paid content, as I already have a good idea of what harbor quests can be done quickly. The good news is that we can safely assume that almost all of these characters start sunnyside, and can skip korthos entirely if you want. Although you'll probably want to do the very fast korthos town quest - certain storehouse and cannith crystal, and possibly heyton's rest.

What we need, then, is a guide to the fastest way to 100 favor with any character, or perhaps with an ideal solo low level character constructed solely for that purpose. There are a lot of character options that can now be considered that we previously would never have considered, if we're just going to delete at 100 favor, anyway. So a full guide with a build and specific instructions would be very interesting

[KualaBangoDango]

What we need, then, is a guide to the fastest way to 100 favor with any character, or perhaps with an ideal solo low level character constructed solely for that purpose. There are a lot of character options that can now be considered that we previously would never have considered, if we're just going to delete at 100 favor, anyway. So a full guide with a build and specific instructions would be very interestingAsk and you shall receive. http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=212705

That's another thread answering this very question. You can also check out the link in Robi3.0's sig to get more quest/favor info.

[Halvus]

This thread http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=212796 describes an attempt to grind 100 TP per hour. The most expensive way to buy TP is the $6.25 per 400 TP pack. Comparing this to the grindfest, which would take 4 hours to "earn" that $6.25 pack, I think the grind comes off poorly. Thats about $1.56 per hour!

So, unless grinding TP is your idea of fun, I recommend splashing some cash to buy TP instead :)

[andweir]

Ive seen a lot of people flaming others for asking how to earn TP without spending money.In today's economy many people cant spend anything,its that simple.I'm sure they would and probably will when they can.So if u have no comment to help people with what they ask...DON'T POST.The game is advertised as a friendly helpful community lets act like one.

[ivar415]

There´s a BIG difference between being friendly and just taking the abuse with a big smile.

I´m currently f2p too, so it´s like throwing stones in glasshouses. BUT I very well understand that Turbine is having a bit of an experiment right now.

Free cake attracts people, giving away too much free cake is killing the bakery. If people like Saavedra become the majority, Turbine will act and everybody will get less free cake. Simple as that.
There´s time for a smile and time for calling a spade a fracking spade.
Notice BTW, that I gave the guy a big fricken hint, so I did my cumbayas.

[dunklezhan]

Personally I'm a premium player. I've spent probably going on for $70 (my maths isn't good enough to work out the exchange rate properly. I've spent about £50 on buying points). I've reached the point now where I have enough content through packs to get me through to L12 ish without having to buy more packs, endlessly grind quests for favour for free TPs and all that.

I am happy with this.

I have also reached the point where I know that if I find I do have the urge to buy another batch of points, the time has come for me to go VIP.

This is not a F2P model. its a 'pay as much as you want your experience to be' model, and in that regard its excellent. If you want your experience to be grinding and regrinding the same quests over and over so that you can get some new content to grind over and over and over... then more power to you. I don't have the attention span for it, personally.

This isn't killing the game - that player who has been through everything dozens of times will learn lots of useful things about that content. Because of this, they will be able to pass on their knowledge to other new players, hopefully a decent chunk of whom will be like me, and actually will spend a bit of cash here and there and eventually may go full VIP, encouraged to stay in the first place by the good free content, and well-worth-it expansion pack content, and by the existing (some of whom are pure F2P) playerbase being helpful and knowledgeable because of all that grinding they've done...

So I say if you want to be a full F2P type, then please do continue to go for it. I'm mooching off your knowledge as much as you're mooching off me giving Turbine money for my own benefit - and I don't begrudge either you or Turbine for your relative business models.

I do appreciate that too many free vs paying players will kill the game. But I just like to make the point whenever I see someone complaining about F2Pers that there's at least three - me and my two friends - who started F2P and have started chipping in to get more out of it. And in my case I've spent more than 3 months subs in 2 months. So Turbine are actually up, not down.

[Pfold]

I've been in all three categories as far as account types go and I have been playing since October of 09.

While the window for what I have done will close either today or tommorow I'll share with you my thoughts and process regarding TP's.

I, like many others, started out as F2P. I was looking for a distraction from WoW. With that being said, understand that I've played WoW for over 4 years (in a competitive raiding guild) now coming blindly into DDO by myself and having a similar expectation that the game didn't really begin until you were level capped (which I'll get into later in another post).

I started off just messing around, but then quickly became bored with all the similar type quests where the layout/environment/mobs were all the same. Don't get me wrong, I'm bored of all the WoW dailies as well (but I'm flying in style on a 310 mount while doing those=P). So, I did the quick to 50 favor on a couple of servers deal and picked up Cat. and SD Isle. While this may or may not be 'efficient' point usage it added some diverisity to the leveling grind. IMO though, these packs suck as far as content is concerned but did make leveling faster.

At this point, my main was ~15 with plenty of quests available (meaning hard/elite were not completed; explorers were not fully completed).

When Turbine put the double points for vip I went ahead and subscribed. I mean 1000 points and full access for 15 bucks/month is a good deal IMO and doing this did 4 things for me:

1- It allowed me to grind towards cap unimpeded.
2- It allowed me to assess all of the content available for future purchase.
3- It allowed me to preview/compare the full scope of amenities the game offered (banks, guilds, etc.).
4- It allowed me to see how DDO endgame compares to WoW endgame.

With the end of Turbine's promotion I stopped subscribing for a couple of reasons. I don't think it's worth the money on a monthly basis. 1000 points put it over the top. Anything less seems unreasonable now. Think about it. While I won't go into specifics, this applies to everybody: "there are some areas/zones/packs I downright loathe, some I need for particular gear and some I consider fun". With that in mind, why subscribe (rent) the full monte when you can buy (own) exactly what you want? Secondly, I know you VIPers just face palmed when IQ and Dreaming Dark came out. Seems like a no brainer to me especially with how lackluster the incentives are for VIP's in their current state. Seriously, maybe if you got a free druidic (true reinc.) item or something along those lines... ... but VIP's, like the rest of us, still either have to purchase that item or grind out epics. Not very enticing IMO.

With all the points stockpiled I was able to pick and choose the content I wanted. Like so many posts suggest, I of course got the big three first : GH, Vale, and Sands (mainly because I haven't tried epic yet) and will more than likely pick up devils here shortly after I get my second guy to 20.

Now, some will make the arguement that eventually f2p players will kill the game if they do not become paying members of some sort. Well, in my particular situation I only can pay for 1 mmo subscription. Period. With that being said, by comparing DDO to the only other game I can, DDO is just an inferior product. I'm not saying that to get personal or hurt anyone's feelings, it's just a fact. Game customization isn't there (ui, macros, etc). The gear/loot carrot is random. How fun is that? Running something for any amount of time and noone in group getting anything useful from it? pfft.

For the people bashing folks for grinding toons for favor/points, how many characters do you have total? Seriously? What's the difference? I think it speaks volumes in itself on how ironic that is.

As far as for grinding for TP, I've found personally just getting the premade dps fighter is the quickest. Roll everything in the starting area 1 time, level, sell everything, get a healing hireling, faceroll everything in the starting area to elite and you'll be over 25 points of favor there. Personally, I can't stand the korthos island explorer quests (Necro, misery, etc) so I only did those once to get to stormreach. Now, if you can find someone opening it on hard/elite before you get to stormreach, by all means jump in. I think it's more time efficient to quickly get to one quest and repeat it until elite is done rather than run the length of an explorer area twice for one regardless of how much favor comes out of it. The korthos island quests have too much running around for each quest. At least in SR, you can grab every quest you see while in route to the one you want to do and the quests are usually 15 sec or less away from the giver. Pump all stat points into jump then bal, and enhancements into con, strength, HP and +hit (+ hit probably more important here). It is a disposable character afterall so not much thought is needed. You can't hire a rogue, you can't disable traps and traps are what can make a 3 min run into a 10 minute run real quick, so know the quest layout. I'm pretty sure you can get to fifty favor without running any 'outdoor' quest or 'long/very'' quest in SR and stay in the northern part of the area. Info is key is too long; butcher's path, eh, depends on how saucy you play your toon (too long for my taste). Durk's, haverdasher, the gambling den one and the solo quests are all gravy.

All in all, the fastest way to 100 favor will be the way you are most comfortable with.

When in doubt, backpeddle and swing a 2 hander.


lewlz

[Lorien_the_First_One]

As long as the game is good, even free players can help out the game. Heck, just by playing for free they make Turbine money just because the servers are fuller and paying players stay longer because of the healthy game. Look how many players left DDO back when it was subscription only simply because of the low population.
.

Almost no one (actually no one at all I know) left over that, they left over new content being released too slowly.

[Kiralyn2000]

This thread http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=212796 describes an attempt to grind 100 TP per hour. The most expensive way to buy TP is the $6.25 per 400 TP pack. Comparing this to the grindfest, which would take 4 hours to "earn" that $6.25 pack, I think the grind comes off poorly. Thats about $1.56 per hour!

So, unless grinding TP is your idea of fun, I recommend splashing some cash to buy TP instead :)


Yep. So many people, in so many situations, never account for the "value" of Time.

Like, "Instead of wasting gold on tapestries from the auction, I just farmed em up over a few hours in the Orchard. It was free!" No, it wasn't "free". It cost you however many hours it took to get the tapestries.

Or farming TP - those TP aren't free. They cost you time.

The question each person has to ask is - how much is my time worth to me?


(And, yes.... I ran up one character to 50-100 favor on each server to grab some free TP when I started a couple months ago. I've dropped $$$ since then to get more. And haven't gone back to my non-main servers since. :)