The Problem with Repeatable Boosters

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Welcome to what’s going to be a long winded post with a lot of math about the current exploitable nature of stackable battlepass XP boosters and why they’re probably going away now that the devs have seen what they can do, and probably done better math than me.

A lot of us have seen this screenshot, right?

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That’s a 1,656,302 experience bot battle, because of a 5000% booster.
The rest of the results would be excellent against players, but not the 1000+kill games we’ve also heard of and seen screengrabs of from bot matches, so this clearly isn’t exclusively a bot farming issue.

The problem here is that anyone who spends enough money can achieve comparable results in a PVP battle. All you have to do is buy premium time, premium BP, and however many repeatable battlepass levels you need to get the amount of experience you want, and basically no matter how much that costs, it will be cheaper than the gold cost of the campaign levels themselves.

I made a spreadsheet. It’s probably not perfect, but I’ve done the math the best I can. All costs do not include the cost of elite battlepass or premium time going forward, and all currency values are in USD because that’s my native shekel. I’ll link the sheet if mods allow.

For Lear_the_cat’s specific battle, assuming he was already battlepass level 60, to achieve a total 5000% xp bonus he would have to have purchased 100 bp levels for a total of 4500gold. The best I can figure, the cheapest you can get enough gold is to buy the $50 pack, and you’d have some left over. That battle resulted in him reaching level 29 from level 22 in a single battle. The result would be the same if he’d accomplished the same results in a PVP fight, but that’s not gauranteed.

If he had been starting fresh at level 22 with no progress toward 23, based on the best math I can do for campaign xp per gold spent (after level 1 to 2, it appears to be ~50, but it scales in a way I don’t have enough data to calculate, and I don’t know how many places are used/how they round) the total cost in gold to purchase those levels on the campaign screen would be 41040, requiring 4 $100 gold packs, or $400. He accomplished the same result for $50 minimum, and there’s no way the company doesn’t see that.

Let’s explore a similar scenario, an experienced player who knows on average how much experience they earn, base, per fight, and lets say it’s 3000xp because that’s easy to do.

This player wants to skip the entire grind for axis normandy to unlock the squads and weapons, and looks in dismay at the cost of campaign xp, soldier level ups, squad level ups (I didn’t do the math yet for squads and soldiers, so they won’t be in the total) as he realizes the total cost in gold to go from level 1 to level 32 is 3,564,500xp, which would cost 71,480($600 in packs) gold to achieve. To do the same without paying for premium time, not accounting for random daily booster drops, he’d have to play 1,189 matches maintaining an average of 3000xp per match.

He reads the forums, or the reddit, or is on the discord, and sees the BP has endlessly repeatable levels for stackable boosters at the end, and does the math it took me some time to do. He quickly sees that with his premium account bonus, on a winning game, with at least one battle hero award, at his average of 3000xp per match, it’s a safe enough bet that he could accomplish his goal of finishing the campaign, in addition to earning loads of bronze orders, by simply purchasing enough BP levels to stack an 18800% booster. If he’s starting with no BP progress, the first 60 levels can be had for a $25 gold pack, and the remaining ~368 bp levels needed to stack the booster cost 16560, the cheapest way to have more than that is to buy a $100 pack and a $50 pack. $150, one decent game where you win and earn a hero medal, and you’ve skipped the campaign grind, earned hundreds of bronze weapon orders so equipment isn’t a problem, 224x Silver Weapons and 112x Silver Troops orders from his purchased BP levels, and has successfully skipped the entire Normandy Axis grind. $150 is definitely a lot less than the $600 required to level the campaign the other way, and this way he gets all the goodies, too.

Now, if he doesn’t win and get a medal, but still achieves at least 3000 base xp, he’d have needed a 39,600% booster, which could easily be done in this scenario for the cost of $325, probably less but I just took the shortest route to 35640 gold here, not the cheapest. $325 to guarantee the result you want, as long as you earn 3000xp. This less optimal scenario can be had by finding a group of friends to form a private game, even after the bot nerf, and managing the results. If you had 20 people doing this in a single custom lobby, you’d only have to play twice, and make sure everyone on the winning team got a hero medal and 3000xp minimum both times. This could be hard to coordinate, but isn’t impossible. If all those players are starting their campaign of choice from scratch (and assuming all the campaigns went to 32, I know they don’t, but we’re in the ballpark) it would cost all of them (a full 20 player lobby) a total of $4500, for all of them to do the same thing buying campaign levels and skipping out on the juicy xp and bp rewards would cost $12000, a 166% increase, and there’s no way the devs wouldn’t notice that, if they haven’t already.

It wouldn’t be cost effective if you’re average xp per match is 1000 or so, at a cost of ~$825, but that’s not counting the orders. If you earn 2000xp average, the cost is ~$425.

I checked and rechecked the math, checked and rechecked the post, but if I’ve made an error somewhere please point it out.

This is all to demonstrate that, at least from the Devs point of view, those stackable XP boosters must go, unless they’re happy getting any money at all from the players and not interested in maximizing potential profit. I might be wrong in this conclusion, and welcome argument and criticism.

*None of this was a suggestion or bug, so I put it in mess room. I know I’m inviting troll comments. I’ll live.
*Edit, 11/02/2021: With the added BP levels at the end, the cost of stacking these boosters has gone up 300%, based on my original numbers for the cost of BP levels. I haven’t figured out how to account for the scaling cost yet, but it’s safe to say that this is still a substantial increase.

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Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read all that, but I felt it needed to be said.

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tl;dr: You can repeatedly buy boosters at the end of the BP to reach whatever multiplier you want for your next match leading to astronomically spastic amount of XP for however much work you decide to put in

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And importantly, with predictable results, cheaper* than buying campaign and squad levels + orders.

*it’s still not cheap, and the cost will vary per individual

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Yes, also that.
though idgaf about that because I was of the opinion the game should have been pay 2 play, but that ship has sailed

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Ahhh…

If only…

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That guy wasted 17k gold (about €150) to do it. If that becomes the standard the devs will probably welcome it since all they care about is short term profit.

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Ah, he spent 150 euro, but that one 5000% booster only cost 4500 gold to accomplish if he’d already maxed battlepass, that’s one $50 pack (~42 euro.) I don’t really know or care what he did with the other 108 euro worth of gold, but the devs had to notice that he did with $50 what would otherwise have cost $400 to accomplish, ignoring the value of silver and bronze orders.

I could be wrong, this could be an intentional method to encourage us to spend (x) money to accomplish a thing that previously cost (X), but I still doubt it.

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The price increases as you buy out battle pass levels.

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Does it? I didn’t know. The only testing I could do was up to 400%, and the 12 levels I bought all cost 45 each. If you know, could you tell me how much they start at, and how much they increase and when? No worries if you don’t have the numbers, just wanna refine my data.

Edit: Just checked, they’re still 45g each for me, even after paying for several over the lifetime of the pass and the 12 yesterday.

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I was impatient to get the gold weapon order so I spent around 600 gold or so to get there quicker. At some point the price increased to 75 so I stopped. Someone I talked to confirmed that the price would increase beyond that if you kept buying levels.

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Fair enough. I’d test it if I was made of money, but alas, no such luck XD

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This doesn’t bother me because it doesn’t affect general gameplay and is allowed. I also have maxed the current Elite BP and for me the normal rotating rewards are enough. Personally I’d never do this, mainly because I actually enjoy playing the game.
Some people value their time spent grinding more than they value the money it takes to purchase the gold to buy those BP levels.
It took that player 17:46 of his time to earn 1,656,302 XP, roughly 93,313 XP per minute.
If he was purely F2P he would have earned roughly 10,825 XP for that match, about 610 XP per minute. It would have taken him over 45 hours of grinding to earn 1,656,302 XP as a F2P player.
Lets use your $ amount of $50 for the gold. Grinding would reward a F2P player about a $1.10 of gold per hour.
Seems pretty clever to value time over money if you have the money to spare.
I’ve seen that same players scores several times. He is a strong player. He’s not cheating and he’s not a noob.
Why should he be forced to waste over 45 hours of his time when he can accomplish the same thing in less than 18 minutes? We all have the same choice.

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This does affect gameplay, though, since anyone with enough cash can skip straight to the best equipment and have the orders to spare for soldiers, weapons, mines, grenades, etc. Bot lobbies weren’t any different, unless people were exploiting them, and the only difference between farming a bot lobby and paying to skip the grind is one makes the company money, and no one is complaining about that one. FWIW, I know this game is F2P and needs to earn, this post isn’t meant to complain about what he did. I’m just pointing out that it’s mathematically cheaper to do it the way he did, even if you do it in PvP.

I never accused him of being either. He just provided a solid example for me to explore, that’s the only reason his results are what I used.

I don’t think he should, but I also don’t think it’s time wasted. It’s time spent playing, and I guess if your goal is to get to the end of the campaign, it’s time spent grinding, but not wasted.

That’s not remotely true, not everyone can afford to pay $50 to skip 7 levels of grind. A lot of people can’t afford to reasonably skip one. Giving paying customers an advantage in gameplay, not just progression, makes the game Pay to Win and alienates players just coming in.

Example: Two new players start today, one rich and one poor. Rich guy does what I’m pointing out and drops $225 plus cost of Premium time and elite BP to stack a ridiculous xp bonus and skip the entire grind, normandy axis level 32, all squads unlocked and full of soldiers with top-tier meta gear they read about online. Poor guy doesn’t, and has to spend, based on my data so far, ~250 hours of his life between working to get to where Rich guy is right now. Which one of them is having more fun, most likely? Which one of them has a measurable, in game advantage? I know skill factors in, but unless rich guy is entirely brainless, he’s winning.

I’m fine with game monetization. I’m not fine with Pay to Win, and the Devs probably aren’t fine with this method being, on average, ~1/3 the cost of paying for all the levels, not to mention squad upgrades and equipment. Yeah, rich guy could always have done this, but without the stackable XP cards, it would cost hundreds of dollars more, about $600. See what I mean?

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A lot of what I read on this forum, comes off, at least to me, as “It’s not fair !!!”
Guess what? Life in general isn’t fair.
Want a fancy car….it’s gonna cost more than a beater. Want to live in a beautiful house with a great view….gonna cost more than living in a crappy studio apartment.
The shaming of players who can afford to and do spend money to progress faster is just jealousy disguised as nobility…it’s a fucking joke being played by people who spend WAY too much time playing video games and not enough time figuring out how to drive that fine car and live in a beautiful home.
Life isn’t fair……and complaining about purchasing faster progression in a video game is petty and pitiful. Not speaking of you but of those noisy jealous fools that gang up on people that help fund this game.

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Well, Pay to Win mechanics are blatantly not fair, and this is a game. This is a thing we do to relax. To have fun. Why shouldn’t it be as fair as it can be?

I have no problem with pay to progress, Premium time and Elite BP are fine, and even the normal, ridiculously expensive means of skipping the grind is fine, since players that can and will pay that much are few and far between. The number of people who’ll do it this way? Far more. Hell, I’m tempted, once I’ve got my winrate and average xp data more precise so I know exaclty how much I’ll need to spend to get what I want. And really, if the campaigns were actually balanced (moscow’s the closest, but there’s still some minor issues, tunisia and normandy are entirely screwed, and berlin is currently suffering from a lack of axis players) it wouldn’t be pay to win. The fact that right now, I could drop (based on current small sample size for statistics) $100 and instantly be at top-tier Normandy Axis, where I’ve only played Allies, and suddenly be on the other end of that shitshow is eating at me. I like to think I’m a good human, but I’m not too good to do that.

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Thanks for proving my point. I also hate that so many old ugly rich guys are banging hot sexy young women, driving super cars and living in huge beach homes. “Fair” is for children. Nothing is fair.

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I didn’t prove your point, much less the bad analogy you’re trying to make.

This is a video game. It’s not life. I don’t hate rich guys for their lifestyle. There’s no good or arguable reason, at all, full stop, why video games should be or have to be imbalanced and unfair.

All those people responding to Panther and FG42 balance posts with “learn to play?” If everything was balanced, if the game wasn’t currently pay to win, they’d be right, because player skill would be the only thing standing between a player and victory. That’s how games should be. If we can’t agree, fine, but I still find the idea that video games must be unfair because life is unfair detestable, where is the fun in a game you can’t win?

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Honestly, just get out of the forum.
That is not meant as an offense!
While there are nice people here there is so many whining … I seriously have a hard time taking it. So I try to ignore this threads mostly, but well it is everywhere.
This is OP, that is Unfair, that needs to be nerfed.
I can’t take it anymore.
It is so silly.
We live in an age were the mindset of a child is “normal” as people mentally do not grow up. But hey I am saying that in a gaming forum so whom I am talking to, eh?

It is like Kindergarten kids that argue in a more sophisticated way, what toy/game/tv show they think is better and why the other is worse. It is all in their mind and has little to do with “reality”.

@Squidocide you do understand that if no one pays for this games, the game will die, right? Is that unfair as well? How do you want to have a “fair” game, if you need it to generate money? Either one accepts to play a game, were he can progress quicker with money, or not.
For me Enlisted is the first f2p game since years I spent money on. The last one was “Contracted Wars”. Why did I buy gold in Enlisted? To get premium and the premium battle pass, as it was to grindy for me.
Honestly, I do not have a lot of money. But, considering how much time I already spent on the game and how much fun I already had, it is really worth it. I would never pay money, or better worded, that much money to get seven levels in a campaign. If one does, it is his choice and only because I am not willing to do the same, because I do not want to “waste” that money or do not have enough money for that, it is not more “unfair” than life is.
I mean you do not stand in front of a five-star-restaurant and tell people how unfair it is that they have the money to eat there, but you don’t. I hope I didn’t gave you an idea there.

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Congratulations, you win the “word twister participation award”.
Enlisted is, whether you like it or not, a privately owned business.
They and only they have the ability and right to decide what is “fair”.
I also am a business owner, and I bristle at the gall of anyone who thinks that they can tell me how to run my business. If they don’t agree….take your business elsewhere, but leave youre moralizing at the door.
It’s silly and a waste of time.

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