TOPIC: "Ghosting" a run for Treasure - Changed at GenCon?

Nice analysis. I'd like to see the numbers for GHC. Lodging and tickets are both much less expensive.

Fixed costs for CoA are recouped much more quickly when you consider 3 cons/year as well.

Matthew Hayward wrote:

jedibcg wrote: It might not be profitable, but it still could have a negative impact on a game we all love. I think that we all can agree we want what is best for TD to last a long time. What we disagree on is how to do that.

I'm not disputing that.

I'm just trying to bring some perspective to the idea that ZOMG I get 17 pulls worth $5 each and the ticket only costs me $40 that's $45 profit per ticket I'm gonna be rich WHOOHOO!!!!

There are expenses beyond the ticket price to the dungeon.

I agree that to the extent we chase away new players it's bad, and to the extent these dynamics make players have a bad time it's bad. Not saying there aren't any problems. I just don't think I'll be watching infomercials on late night TV about how to get rich selling TD tokens by a guy with a Lamborghini and an in ground pool any time soon.

All true, but most of the expenses you quoted earlier are sunk costs.

If:

• I'm going to GenCon anyway,
• and I have the tokens anyway,
• and I have 20 minutes between runs anyway,

then why not buy a run with nine ghosts and sprint from the coach room to the XP desk and turn $540 in tickets into (insert your number here)?

There are people who would spend ten minutes to do that for much less than a Lamborghini. That means there are newbies who won't be able to play.

Or, why shouldn't I pool with a couple of people to get to a total of ten CoAs between us? That's how a lot of people turn their $1k orders into onyx orders, you know. That extra 1/8 of a Wish Ring and Dragonorb means you come out over $100 ahead entering a pool vs spending $1k on your own. I'm actually better off doing two half runs in partnership with someone else with the equivalent of 5 CoAs than to just do one with my suboptimal draws.

We're obviously still a long way off from anyone flying to Indy ONLY to farm. But we don't have to get to infomercial stage for there to be consequences.

But since most people aren't worried about it, then I'll just do what I'm going to do and we'll see what happens.

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote:

jedibcg wrote: It might not be profitable, but it still could have a negative impact on a game we all love. I think that we all can agree we want what is best for TD to last a long time. What we disagree on is how to do that.

I'm not disputing that.

I'm just trying to bring some perspective to the idea that ZOMG I get 17 pulls worth $5 each and the ticket only costs me $40 that's $45 profit per ticket I'm gonna be rich WHOOHOO!!!!

There are expenses beyond the ticket price to the dungeon.

I agree that to the extent we chase away new players it's bad, and to the extent these dynamics make players have a bad time it's bad. Not saying there aren't any problems. I just don't think I'll be watching infomercials on late night TV about how to get rich selling TD tokens by a guy with a Lamborghini and an in ground pool any time soon.

All true, but most of the expenses you quoted earlier are sunk costs.

If:

• I'm going to GenCon anyway,
• and I have the tokens anyway,
• and I have 20 minutes between runs anyway,

then why not buy a run with nine ghosts and sprint from the coach room to the XP desk and turn $540 in tickets into (insert your number here)?

There are people who would spend ten minutes to do that for much less than a Lamborghini. That means there are newbies who won't be able to play.

Or, why shouldn't I pool with a couple of people to get to a total of ten CoAs between us? That's how a lot of people turn their $1k orders into onyx orders, you know. That extra 1/8 of a Wish Ring and Dragonorb means you come out over $100 ahead entering a pool vs spending $1k on your own. I'm actually better off doing two half runs in partnership with someone else with the equivalent of 5 CoAs than to just do one with my suboptimal draws.

We're obviously still a long way off from anyone flying to Indy ONLY to farm. But we don't have to get to infomercial stage for there to be consequences.

But since most people aren't worried about it, then I'll just do what I'm going to do and we'll see what happens.

Hopefully there will be guidance in place before you do what you're going to do. Maybe there won't be though.

For GENCON, it won't let you buy a run that fits in a 20 minute window between runs, will it, because they would overlap?

@Kirk - interesting analysis, but a bit of a straw man.

A more likely scenario:
A team of three or four people, possibly volunteers, pool the TEs they have already and buy a run or two, and spend the rest of the weekend doing other things. Maybe they get lucky, maybe not. No big deal.

What does that look like? Because that's more of what I was planning, not your BttW approach. I have other things to do.

But a few dozen teams can do the same thing. That would have the same alleged consequences as one guy playing 24x7

Mike Steele wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote:

jedibcg wrote: It might not be profitable, but it still could have a negative impact on a game we all love. I think that we all can agree we want what is best for TD to last a long time. What we disagree on is how to do that.

I'm not disputing that.

I'm just trying to bring some perspective to the idea that ZOMG I get 17 pulls worth $5 each and the ticket only costs me $40 that's $45 profit per ticket I'm gonna be rich WHOOHOO!!!!

There are expenses beyond the ticket price to the dungeon.

I agree that to the extent we chase away new players it's bad, and to the extent these dynamics make players have a bad time it's bad. Not saying there aren't any problems. I just don't think I'll be watching infomercials on late night TV about how to get rich selling TD tokens by a guy with a Lamborghini and an in ground pool any time soon.

All true, but most of the expenses you quoted earlier are sunk costs.

If:

• I'm going to GenCon anyway,
• and I have the tokens anyway,
• and I have 20 minutes between runs anyway,

then why not buy a run with nine ghosts and sprint from the coach room to the XP desk and turn $540 in tickets into (insert your number here)?

There are people who would spend ten minutes to do that for much less than a Lamborghini. That means there are newbies who won't be able to play.

Or, why shouldn't I pool with a couple of people to get to a total of ten CoAs between us? That's how a lot of people turn their $1k orders into onyx orders, you know. That extra 1/8 of a Wish Ring and Dragonorb means you come out over $100 ahead entering a pool vs spending $1k on your own. I'm actually better off doing two half runs in partnership with someone else with the equivalent of 5 CoAs than to just do one with my suboptimal draws.

We're obviously still a long way off from anyone flying to Indy ONLY to farm. But we don't have to get to infomercial stage for there to be consequences.

But since most people aren't worried about it, then I'll just do what I'm going to do and we'll see what happens.

Hopefully there will be guidance in place before you do what you're going to do. Maybe there won't be though.

For GENCON, it won't let you buy a run that fits in a 20 minute window between runs, will it, because they would overlap?

If only there was a way to buy tickets in the forums without GenCon knowing... Oh wait

I haven't bought a TD ticket through RUBI in years. I get them all here.

Mike Steele wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote:

jedibcg wrote: It might not be profitable, but it still could have a negative impact on a game we all love. I think that we all can agree we want what is best for TD to last a long time. What we disagree on is how to do that.

I'm not disputing that.

I'm just trying to bring some perspective to the idea that ZOMG I get 17 pulls worth $5 each and the ticket only costs me $40 that's $45 profit per ticket I'm gonna be rich WHOOHOO!!!!

There are expenses beyond the ticket price to the dungeon.

I agree that to the extent we chase away new players it's bad, and to the extent these dynamics make players have a bad time it's bad. Not saying there aren't any problems. I just don't think I'll be watching infomercials on late night TV about how to get rich selling TD tokens by a guy with a Lamborghini and an in ground pool any time soon.

All true, but most of the expenses you quoted earlier are sunk costs.

If:

• I'm going to GenCon anyway,
• and I have the tokens anyway,
• and I have 20 minutes between runs anyway,

then why not buy a run with nine ghosts and sprint from the coach room to the XP desk and turn $540 in tickets into (insert your number here)?

There are people who would spend ten minutes to do that for much less than a Lamborghini. That means there are newbies who won't be able to play.

Or, why shouldn't I pool with a couple of people to get to a total of ten CoAs between us? That's how a lot of people turn their $1k orders into onyx orders, you know. That extra 1/8 of a Wish Ring and Dragonorb means you come out over $100 ahead entering a pool vs spending $1k on your own. I'm actually better off doing two half runs in partnership with someone else with the equivalent of 5 CoAs than to just do one with my suboptimal draws.

We're obviously still a long way off from anyone flying to Indy ONLY to farm. But we don't have to get to infomercial stage for there to be consequences.

But since most people aren't worried about it, then I'll just do what I'm going to do and we'll see what happens.

Hopefully there will be guidance in place before you do what you're going to do. Maybe there won't be though.

For GENCON, it won't let you buy a run that fits in a 20 minute window between runs, will it, because they would overlap?

You only need a couple people buying full runs and then they can get multiple runs in less than 2 hours. The one person model isn't good anyway because we would all learn who that was pretty quickly I imagine and not buy from them and get the word out quick that no one should buy from them. Some still would but it would drive down their profit as they are having harder time selling. A team or worse several makes it more difficult to detect.

Kira's scenario would be hard to achieve given theGenCon ticketing system. There is a limit on the number of events you can have in your cart and wish list processing, IIRC, prevents overlapping events. Beyond that, even with myself and my son hitting the event registration queue we only got one of the two time runs we put I for. And we had a lot on our wish lists. I only got a second run later in the day and it as only a partial run and during one of my volunteer shifts. So I got one run that I used for team synergy and a second partial for my sons group and I was unable to run with them.

IIRC, TD ticketing at GenCon work differently than it does for other events. Let's not screw that up and lose Our ability to buy out runs

I admit this year I did not do well getting runs (3 Full and 1 with 9 tickets), but I am also attempting to get 1 of each run versus just grabbing runs. However the past 2 years (maybe 3) I have ended up with 7 to 10 FULL runs in my cart when the wishlist processed. I believe earlier in this same thread Raven said she has had the same experience of getting full runs.

If I had either multiple badges, or multiple someones attempting the same thing, it is not inconceivable for someone(s) to end up with a fair number of runs. 10 people could easily end up with 5 full runs each or 500 tickets.

No I don't think anyone is going to try this today. But don't think it is impossible to pull off.

@Harlax, I am not worried about any of us. I know most of you well enough to know that you love this game as much as I do.

Sorry, I meant to price rare @ $3/ea and uncommon @ $2/ea. It wasn't meant as a strawman argument rather the "worst case" scenario from a consumption of TD tickets perspective. Note that if somebody did this it would account for about 3% of the True Dungeon tickets for that year.

I agree getting 26 full runs would be pretty tough, but perhaps you could find 10 other people to help you out just to buy the runs. Offer them $100/ea for their efforts. Then do this at GHC and WYC each year, where the runs and travel costs are cheaper. I priced in $1000 for the cost of the capital (Charms of Avarice) but that's assuming a 10% ROI per year. If you did three conventions per year then that could be lower.

Here is another scenario:

Absolutely best case somebody could run 8 runs per day Thur-Sat and 2 on Sunday. That's 26 runs, or 260 tickets, or 4,940 treasure draws, 260 10-packs, 260 uncommon, and 260 rare completion tokens. Now let's add in another 8 runs (80 tickets) between GHC and GenCon:

If you look at some fairly conservative values (assuming treasure draws stay the same as they were this year):

340 10-packs @ $3/ea = $1020
340 uncommon completion tokens @ $2/ea = $680
340 rare completion tokens @ $3/ea = $1020
6460 treasure draws @ $4/ea = $19,760
Total revenue: $28,560

Fixed Costs:
10x Charms of Avarice worth about $10,000

Expenses:
$14,560 for the Gen Con tickets
$3,200 for the GHC/WYC tickets
$200 for badges
$2,000 for hotel & travel
$1,000 cost of capital for CoAs

Profit: $5,800

If you assume 68 hours for the runs, 30 hours for prep, and 60 hours to sell/ship everything, that works out to about $37/hour, which is lower than my last number, but perhaps I put too many hours in for prep and shipping.

It is also possible you could sell the treasure draws for more than $4/ea if the treasure mix stays the same as last year. Then profit goes up quite a bit. But if the treasure draws sell for more like $3/ea then you are breaking even with a lot of effort.

Finally, one could consider filling the empty slots with players at a discounted ticket rate. If I could sell the other 9 slots on each run for say $10/ea that would bring in an extra $3,000 in profits.

The completely other way to look at it is this:

I'm at Gen Con anyways, so I take about 2 hours of time to do a treasure run. Gen Con ticket, hotel, travel, and Charms of Avarice are sunk costs. So effectively (with my prices above) I can get $840 worth of tokens for a $560 full run. That's a $280 profit. I could probably sell and deliver all of the treasure draws right there at Gen Con, so really I can make $280 profit with say 4 hours of work, or $45/hour. But I gave up 4 hours of my Gen Con time. For me personally I wouldn't be willing to give up precious Gen Con hours for only $45/hour of profit, but some might.

Kirk Bauer wrote: Sorry, I meant to price rare @ $3/ea and uncommon @ $2/ea. It wasn't meant as a strawman argument rather the "worst case" scenario from a consumption of TD tickets perspective. Note that if somebody did this it would account for about 3% of the True Dungeon tickets for that year.

I agree getting 26 full runs would be pretty tough, but perhaps you could find 10 other people to help you out just to buy the runs. Offer them $100/ea for their efforts. Then do this at GHC and WYC each year, where the runs and travel costs are cheaper. I priced in $1000 for the cost of the capital (Charms of Avarice) but that's assuming a 10% ROI per year. If you did three conventions per year then that could be lower.

Here is another scenario:

Absolutely best case somebody could run 8 runs per day Thur-Sat and 2 on Sunday. That's 26 runs, or 260 tickets, or 4,940 treasure draws, 260 10-packs, 260 uncommon, and 260 rare completion tokens. Now let's add in another 8 runs (80 tickets) between GHC and GenCon:

If you look at some fairly conservative values (assuming treasure draws stay the same as they were this year):

340 10-packs @ $3/ea = $1020
340 uncommon completion tokens @ $2/ea = $680
340 rare completion tokens @ $3/ea = $1020
6460 treasure draws @ $4/ea = $19,760
Total revenue: $28,560

Fixed Costs:
10x Charms of Avarice worth about $10,000

Expenses:
$14,560 for the Gen Con tickets
$3,200 for the GHC/WYC tickets
$200 for badges
$2,000 for hotel & travel
$1,000 cost of capital for CoAs

Profit: $5,800

If you assume 68 hours for the runs, 30 hours for prep, and 60 hours to sell/ship everything, that works out to about $37/hour, which is lower than my last number, but perhaps I put too many hours in for prep and shipping.

It is also possible you could sell the treasure draws for more than $4/ea if the treasure mix stays the same as last year. Then profit goes up quite a bit. But if the treasure draws sell for more like $3/ea then you are breaking even with a lot of effort.

Finally, one could consider filling the empty slots with players at a discounted ticket rate. If I could sell the other 9 slots on each run for say $10/ea that would bring in an extra $3,000 in profits.

The completely other way to look at it is this:

I'm at Gen Con anyways, so I take about 2 hours of time to do a treasure run. Gen Con ticket, hotel, travel, and Charms of Avarice are sunk costs. So effectively (with my prices above) I can get $840 worth of tokens for a $560 full run. That's a $280 profit. I could probably sell and deliver all of the treasure draws right there at Gen Con, so really I can make $280 profit with say 4 hours of work, or $45/hour. But I gave up 4 hours of my Gen Con time. For me personally I wouldn't be willing to give up precious Gen Con hours for only $45/hour of profit, but some might.

... Unless you skip the dungeon, give the volunteers an unscheduled bubble, and go straight to the XP desk (or wander off and come back 2hrs later if you're going low-profile.) That cuts way down on the 4-hrs.

Thanks

Kirk Bauer wrote: I agree getting 26 full runs would be pretty tough, but perhaps you could find 10 other people to help you out just to buy the runs. Offer them $100/ea for their efforts. Then do this at GHC and WYC each year, where the runs and travel costs are cheaper. I priced in $1000 for the cost of the capital (Charms of Avarice) but that's assuming a 10% ROI per year. If you did three conventions per year then that could be lower.

I have no interest myself in farming runs or doing this myself.

But to stir things up again, here is an offer: IF someone actually wants to do this, I would be willing to help you buy the runs. You don't need to pay me anything extra, as long as you pay me the cost of the runs (without incurring any fees like PayPal fees).

The thing is that I can charge the GenCon purchase on my credit card. So even if you pay me back the face value, I still get a certain amount of points through my credit card.

(Though my primary motivation would be to show that farming is viable and hence a problem!)

If you look at some fairly conservative values (assuming treasure draws stay the same as they were this year):

340 10-packs @ $3/ea = $1020
340 uncommon completion tokens @ $2/ea = $680
340 rare completion tokens @ $3/ea = $1020
6460 treasure draws @ $4/ea = $19,760
Total revenue: $28,560

It is also possible you could sell the treasure draws for more than $4/ea if the treasure mix stays the same as last year. Then profit goes up quite a bit. But if the treasure draws sell for more like $3/ea then you are breaking even with a lot of effort.

Your valuation of participation tokens is definitely on the low side (though you admit it is conservative).

This year there has been demand for all participation tokens because of the Ring of Heroism.
Usually there are some completion tokens that go for A LOT more (Ruby Prism, Lamps, Cadaver Charms, Goblets of Healing, Necklace of the Oak, Flask of Sharing, Horn of Blasting.

Also, I think you are severely undervaluing the treasure draws. For example, if we were to say 1% are UR's (valued at $100), that would contribute $1. If 15%-20% are monster trophies (valued at least at $10), that is another $1.50 - $2.

OK, im curious. Say someone had 2000$ to spend next year on tokens. Could someone more knowledgeable on the token market roughly calculate which is the better (more profitable using this years data) option:

1. Buy a 2k pack from TD
2. Buy 2k worth of runs with full treasure enhancers
3. Buy 2k worth of tokens on the secondary market