I’ve never made a secret of my hating grind events in the game. I’ve mentioned once or twice that I’m not a big fan of the crates or chests either. I don’t mean the free crates with that we get every day in the game. Though 90% of the time utterly useless, they do give you some spare parts and very rarely a tank, and it’s free stuff, so why complain? No, I’m talking about the events where you can buy crates and if you’re very lucky (or if you spend a ton of money on the game), you might be able to get something cool.
It’s pure gambling. Because with each crate that you open, you don’t get any closer to getting what you want, you just have the same chance of actually getting it per crate that you open. And that’s the problem, because the probability of that has always been very low. But now we’ve got something that hits an all new low. The Blitz Winter Fair. Or rather, the Blitz Unfair, because there’s nothing fair about it in any meaning of the word.
There’s the in game fair, where you can earn a currency called flags from missions, and you get 50 of them per free crate that you open. You can spend those flags on any of the rewards in game that you like – spare parts, xp, credits, a slot, tickets for the event-crates, etc. There’s quite a lot to pick from. And, if you finish all the stages, you can finish one extra stage for 60 tickets (8 legendary crates in there, so wowsers. Sounds good, no? But it really isn’t. With the flags you get from missions, you can generally get 2k flags per reset, meaning 4k per day, and from your three daily free crates, you’ll get 150 flags per day as well.
The event lasts 29 days, but you can only earn flags for 14 days of that, so that’s 4,150*14=58,100 flags, give or take a little bit because it’s not really certain what you get from your missions. So let’s round that up to 60k flags for easy numbers. Now, that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? well, it is, until you realise that in order to complete all the stages, you need 355k of those flags. Though of course, you can also throw a ton of gold at it to complete all those stages. This costs you 30k gold or so at the beginning. If you want to buy that at the store, that costs you only about 100 euro. What a steal, right?
And that’s just the first part of the event that makes me feel like WG just wants us to spend money on it all, more so than ever before. It gets worse when you go to the portal.
There, we see it’s a crate/chest event, again, where you have to use 4 tickets to open a standard chest, or 7 to open a legendary one. According to the news, you can get quite a few prem tanks from them, and other cool stuff, which I mean in my best possible sarcasm. With cool stuff, they mean spare parts (which, I’ll admit, can be fairly cool, because the game is still very much a cheapskate about that, so you generally never have enough spare parts), or credits (can be useful if you don’t play with prem time and don’t play with equipment in general, so never wait for tanks to be at least one level equipped. In my case, I’ve 28 million credits now, so credits are useless), or boosters (don’t think I even need to go into that). So, overall; yayyyy useless prizes.
And no, you can’t just get the tanks the news advertises are in the crates. For most of them, you can only get parts of them. You get 500 parts in a crate, but those parts are for a specific kind of tank, not for a tank of your choosing. And you generally need 4k to 6k to get a tank. So, that’8 to 12 crates to get one of those tanks. Assuming you get parts for that specific tank all the time in every crate you open. Which, of course, you don’t.
There’s also an auction – where people can buy the tanks – such as the Defender and the Goose tank, for a starting price of 1,500 tickets – equalling 72,000 gold = well over 200 euro’s worth of gold. Yes, the price for the tanks will drop, but I don’t believe it will ever drop to a level where the tank you’re buying is actually worth the money.
Then there’s the spins. For a spin, you need to get other stuff that you get from opening crates, which they call Progress Points. And from those spins, you can get the big prizes – the Chieftain and the M60 (which was a tank that WG said would never be sold, just like they did about Jagdtiger 8.8 that’s currently in the store, btw). But the chances of getting them is about 10%. Which means that every spin you take you have 90% chance of -not- getting it.
Now, Gentlefun (fellow CC) took the time to open 150 standard crates and 100 legendary crates, and did the 9 spins that those crates got him. He kept track of the drops, and you find the results here. It shows how dismal the drop rates are, and that you need to invest a ton of money if you want to get anything decent out of it.
Originally, if you managed to get a tank, you’d get tickets instead of gold or credits, which you could invest in getting the tanks you want (which still wouldn’t be the M60 or the Chieftain, because you can only get those through spins). In the end, people that experimented with opening crates, and started with 2k tickets, ended with like 4k tickets. But I’m hearing more and more about people not getting tickets anymore, but credits instead, so it could be that that has been changed.
Now, I’ve watched a bit of the videos that have been made about this (which is a big thing, because I really really really hate watching youtube), and what struck me is this:
I’ve started it at 5 mins, because that’s where a few very ridiculous things happen. For one, if you think about the fact that every standard crate costs you 200 gold if you converted gold to tickets, and you get 10k credits as a prize – or even worse, 25 gold – you will not be a happy player. The vid, btw, is definitely worth a watch, because it shows you how to do it, and how to still get pretty much nothing for your buck.
Truth be told, if you don’t have any of the tanks that are in this event, it can be worth it, because you’ll generally end up getting at least something. But if you have most of the tanks and just want that one special one, or if you want the Chieftain or the M60, it’ll cost you a heck lot of money, and then you still can’t be sure you’d ever get it. It’s very depressing.
With the way Wargaming is organising its events this year, especially this one, the events are more and more about spending money in the game. And with the Winter Unfair, it’s basically getting people to gamble. It’s addicting, and I’m wondering about the amount of people that spend way more money on this than they think, or than they can afford. And I’m really dreading what this will mean for future event, because there’s still a lot of people that fall for it.
Apple has recently made its policy so that for these kinds of events that the company behind that has to publish the odds, only it’s not enforced yet.A friend of mine actually contacted Apple about it, and got this back:
Which is, of course, absolutely useless. I’ve actually asked our community manager about it, and he thought I was joking. I didn’t really expect to get an answer, to be fair, but all the same, there’s no way WG is going to publish the odds of the Winter Unfair, because showing just how low the odds are will make it so that only those that haven’t actually read the odds would spend money on it. But I can’t wait for this to actually be enforced by Apple, even if just to protect the consumers that use the apps offering this casino-feature.
If you read the comments on Sk8’s video, or Meadsy69’s video, you’ll see that the people that watch them, really aren’t impressed with the Blitz Winter Unfair, or about the way WG is handling it all. Ever since we started voicing our discontent with it, WG seems to have gone silent, which is even more worrisome imo.
Wargaming has gotten feedback from the community for every grind event they’ve organised. But they don’t seem to be doing anything with it, as they just get worse and worse, and more and more money grabbing-orientated. It’s one of the many things Wargaming is doing right now that makes me wonder if they’re aware of the messages they’re sending, and one of the many things that show their total disrespect for their playerbase and community.
And yet, despite all of that, we keep playing. And we keep spending money on it too. Maybe that’s the most ridiculous thing of it all.
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