There have been a lot of questions such as "What bundles are worth buying? What is worth it or not?" Well, that's actually a very complex question, but let's get into it.
To begin, I want to be very clear that only you know what sort of expenditure is correct for your life. There is no shame in any way to play the game - be that as a free-to-play (f2p) player, as a whale dropping hundreds of dollars per month, or anything in between. PLEASE do not take anything that is written within as a judgment of any sort on you or your playstyle. Personally, I have done neither extreme and instead rest somewhere in the middle - a dolphin player. I buy the season pass regularly and great value bundles when they come up. I said in a prior article that I think Second Dinner is really doing a lot to make this sort of player feel good...and in all honesty, these bundles just confirm that in my mind.
Now, we can look at the table:
To begin, this is all assuming someone is series-3 complete. If you are not series-3 complete, this is still what it looks like for the long run, but your short term gains will be slightly lower on currency, yet higher on series-3 card gains. Past that, all variants are being 100% ignored. If you want a variant, I cannot attach a value to that - that is entirely up to you. But you can at least see the other value linked to the variant here!
In "March 2023 TT #X", the TT stands for "Token Tuesdays." As of the writing of this article, this is not guaranteed to persist forever...but I hope this test run is successful and it does!
The top half are bundles that are priced only with gold.
The meaning of first 3 columns should be obvious. The 4th column, "Tokens per gold w/ Credits Normalized as if Purchased" is basically saying any credits that you got from the bundle are being treated as if you had spent your gold to get those credits directly. Do you do this? I think most players are not doing this once they are series-3 complete, but it is worth mentioning. It basically gives more value to credits.
The 5th column on the other hand, is saying that we only care about credits because they help us unlock more Reserves, and thus gain more tokens. This is the column that is likely more appealing for more players.
The final, 6th column, is looking at tokens per $USD spent. This is more to be able to compare apples to apples to the bottom half of the table bundles, which are only sold for cash. This can help you answer the question of "Should I just buy $100 worth of gold once per year to buy these bundles as they come up?" All pricing is based on buying $100 at a time, so if you buy less than that in one sitting, you will get a worse rate!
The bottom half are bundles that are priced only with cash (and the default $100 gold purchase as a baseline).
The 5th column here is turning all gold into credits, and then looking at both credit and token gain per $1 USD spent...it's just a simple way to normalize things. The 6th column is turning everything into Collection Level (CL) with the intent of getting more tokens through that (same as the top half final column). It is worth noting that Daily 5 in March is the exact same rate as purchasing the $100 USD gold, yet it lets you do it at a much lower rate (generally, you get a better rate as you make larger purchases otherwise). I assume this is an experiment on Second Dinner's part - see if more people will buy straight gold when they can get smaller quantities at the best dollar rate.
The "Season Pass Low Estimate" is basically just looking at the currency gained from the Season Pass (and the fact that you will not have to open the season pass card, thus getting you 400 tokens on average). It removes all value from having access to the card for 3 multiple months (when locked in pass or in s5 or s4 that you don't want to buy perhaps).
Now we get into some of the various playstyles!
F2P
We will start with F2P players - because despite not spending money, you still have decisions worth making on how to spend your gold. Lets start with gold income as a F2P player:
- 200 gold / week (finish the 25 quests per week) - 867 average per month.
- 500 gold per season @ Rank 90 - 500 gold per month.
- Season Pass Free Rewards - 300 gold per month.
- Season Cache - 10 gold per average. These are the things after level 50.
- Collector's Reserve - 20 gold per average.
Assuming you hit rank 90 (subtract 500 if you don't), do your 25 quests, and get to Seasn Pass Rank 19,this puts you at a base of 1667 gold per month, with some amount added from Season Caches and Reserves. An highly active player can likely hit something like Season Pass Rank 80, giving an extra 300 gold roughly. If you do not play that much, no worries, adapt what will be said moving forward to your own liking! For simplicity's sake, I am going to assume 2000 gold earned on average for an engage F2P player, and perhaps closer to 1200 for a more casual player (that doesn't get as high on the Season Pass track, and doesn't hit rank 90). A very active player could get up to 2200, however.
Now, the next assumption for the F2P player is that you do not care about variants so much. If you do, by all means do what makes you happy! As mentioned earlier, Token Tuesdays bundles are not set in stone, but for math's sake - let's assume they are! They sum up to 2400 gold cost per month and reward you with 2200 tokens per month. While there are 2 other bundles listed that have better value, it seems to me that TT bundles are more likely to be regular than the others. Regardless, if we can take any precedent from this at all, you will have the option to spend all of your gold earnings monthly, to walk away with somewhere between 1400 and 2400 tokens. In all honesty, you are not likely to be able to obtain every good value (column 5 ratio >0.85) bundle with this spending pattern, but you will be able to get tokens to purchase what you desire!
Dolphin
So we move onto the Dolphin players - people that will buy very good value cash bundles infrequently. Thus far, this means Season Pass and Welcome Bundle almost certainly. Some other options include Festival Fireworks (Jubilee bundle a bit ago) and the March and April Weekend bundles coming up. This slightly depends on how much cash one wants to drop on top of the ratios being presented. Looking at the bottom half of the table, a ratio on the final column >70 is very likely something you'd be interested in, with ratios >50 are distinct possibilities.
Your gold income is as follows:
- 200 gold / week (finish the 25 quests per week) - 867 average per month.
- 500 gold per season @ Rank 90 - 500 gold per month.
- Season Pass Total Rewards - 1200 gold per month.
- Season Cache - 10 gold per average. These are the things after level 50.
- Collector's Reserve - 20 gold per average.
This puts base income at 2567 per month if you are hitting rank 90 and playing somewhat regularly (25 quests weekly), with a possible range being 2000 - 3500ish. I did make this range larger than the F2P player, seeing as these players are more likely to be more invested in my mind. It is also worth noting that I did not include the added variants that you are obtaining from the season pass. Some seasons I love them (Storm and Kazar from the Zabu season were awesome) and some I don't (Antman and Wasp, not a fan really). Personal preference, 100%. They also have a negligible credit value gain.
Looking at the bundles and selecting all 4 Token Tuesdays, More Magik, and March 2023 Special, we have a total cost of 4000 gold. We would earn 3500 tokens with these 6 purchases This is slightly over our listed gold range, however. At that point, you have a couple options. It is surely fine to miss out on 1 or 2 of these bundles. Perhaps you have gold saved up from not buying some of the less good bundles prior (such as the Mr. Negative one). OR, perhaps you want to drop a little more than just season pass as mentioned earlier. The March Weekend bundle gets 200 gold, and the April weekend bundle gets 300 gold (and should hit right before the end of this season, if we are using season in place of month here). Let's not forget that if our goal is tokens, both these bundles give 1000 tokens per, making them solid deals. It is also worth mentioning all of my above income numbers were based on average - so some seasons will have 4 weeks and others 5 weeks. This matters when we look at the long run. Once again, the choice is entirely yours. I am sitting on gold for now, but I care about future prospects. The general idea here is if we use March as a means to estimate the future / set precedent, dolphins are almost able to get all high value bundles without extra purchases (either skipping one here or there, or spending more cash here or there).
Also realize that there is a huge spectrum of spending available between here and "Whale". Ultimately, decisions in this area are entirely yours to make, as you know your finances better than anyone else can.
Whale
I am not sure the best way to analyze this scenario. The table above gives a good idea of value of various bundles (and we will try to get updated tables regularly as more bundles are datamined). Don't forget there are variants in many bundles as well. For your gold income, see the dolphin section to start.
One regular idea that comes up for whale value is "should I buy the seasn pass + 10 levels for $5 USD more?". 10 levels on average, from Season Caches after level 50 gives you:
- 325 Credits
- 100 Gold (125 Credit equivalency)
- 50 Boosters
- 1/2 of a Variant (1 Variant every 2 months. Variant is worth 25 credits even if ya hate it.)
Normal purchase of 8000 gold for $100 scaled to $5 is equivalent to 500 credits.
The above is worth 462.5 Credits, 50 Boosters, and 1 random Variant per 2 months (for the cosmetic part). As such, it is slightly less "value", with an added cosmetic gain. Furthermore, in circumvents the time gating of credit-from-gold purchases, for whatever that is worth to you.
Conclusion
So in conclusion...I am very happy with the amount and sizing of the bundles that were spoiled this month. If you want to see the cosmetics involved, etc, check out the news post here. I mentioned in the whale section, but hopefully this sort of a spreadsheet at least will be published monthly as new bundle datamines are available. Personally, I like knowing all my options for the month before I make any purchases...I was about to buy the Negative bundleeee that expires at the end of February before we got this new datamine...and I'm really glad I didn't.
If there is any sort of further analysis you would like to see in the future, let me know (discord is the best way to do so). Until next time!