Captain Teemo!

what's "small"? that's non quantified.

I need numbers.

Depending on how you see it, 10%, or some harder to define number.

Your "dumb pick" model simply doesnt work like reality. It ignores the nature of the game, the strategy of picks, Skills of player (including "maining" as an effect), bans and the matchmaking of the system. I'll ignore how much time someone sinks into it, as i'll assume that skill is a function of that time.

It can be argued that a high-winrate champion will have both a high pick and a high banrate. From my experience with Yasuo and tristana, it's close to (but not entirely) 50/50. Either they get picked, or banned. Since you are with 5 people in a team, with unique picks and a pick order (1/2/2/2/2/1) , there's a small chance that you can actually pick that high-winrate champ.

So let's see. Yasuo had a 90% or so banrate. So you enter the lobby and you have a random spot. there's a 1/5 chance you're first on your team (and 1/10 for being first in the game). So because 9 out of 10 games will see your champ (yasuo) banned, there's a 1/10 chance (of that 1/10 chance) that your can play your champion. AKA 1/100. That's because if you don't pick him first, there's a very high chance (not entirely always, but very close) the first of the enemy will pick him. So if you aren't first in queue of the lobby (1/10) you have very slim odds (i don't know the statistical likelyhood of your opponent in first place being crazy/dumb), especially because you'll ban an OP champ if you aren't first in lobby (but are first in team) or don't have him.

The moral of the story? You'll rarely get a chance to play that OP champ. Yet per my previous post, cheaper champions with better odds (at winning and being picked) are available. So there's simply no use to pouring money into the game to get more IP to get expensive new champions. Not to mention that quite a few high profile OP champions recently (tristana, yasuo, akali) weren't even new champions. tristana is 450 IP for example. I do recognize that it may be possible to think of moments in time where an IP boost may give a small advantage. e.g. when unlocking tier-3 runes. Even then, however (in my experience) the game is still in a rough enough stage of play that differences in strategical skill and champion skill weigh much heavier than a few extra runes (or champions) here and there.

Note;
*At some points i used "high chance" or some variation because they're close to, but not entirely absolutes. I had one game where an (enemy) yasuo was picked last. and yes i lost that one.
*At some points i made some generalizations (there IS a chance that the enemy is first in the pick order, does not ban a champion and does not pick the OP champion.) so let me know if i did anything outrageous.
*i ignored the case where a teammate can pick the OP champ (and thus increase your team's chance of success), since you obviously didn't pay either money or IP for that to happen.

EDIT:

not to be rude or anything, but have you played LOL, and if so, how long/what skill level? Maybe our experience just vary a lot. I'm in silver division (s4) and gathering the bravery and nerves to dive into the preliminary shitstorm once again. i won 4 games preliminary last round, and that got me to silver IV, losing two games where i was on a roll because of an even-harder-carrying Tristana, one to people going to the toilet and two more because of retarded feeders. Normal Draft Pick is a far happier and safer place than Ranked.

not your personal estimate please, sources?

His source was the rest of his post afaik.

the simplest case is to say:

there are 10 people in the game (5v5) so what you do is (you / all summoners) = 1/10 = 10%

The more difficult case is to say the above, plus individual skill (but then it gets messy real, real quick and IMHO adds no real value to the end result.)

The source of that 10% was indeed below, yes but i could've specified that, so i can't rule it out as
my mistake . i thought the 1/10 chance was an obvious thing since it's a 5v5 game.


In the end, that's why i believe people use p2w as a term for when you *need* to pay to win, rather than whenever it fits some definition. In both my assessment above and in my experience, there's enough skill and luck involved that more IP does not directly lead to more success. Unlike e.g. Candy Crush where you have to pay to play (for more than 5 minutes) or some shooters where you either have crap armor, crap guns and crap vehicles, or all awesome stuff for a price or hundreds of hours of grinding.

i played for some 4 years i leveled a American server account to 30 and an EUW account to 17 i think I was bronze since I really didn't get that far after lvl 30.

I played with alot of platinums but i'm not sure that was a good thing for my skill.

in the end I wasn't an expert at this game and it didn't cater to my potential nor my 'fun' drive...

my point is that if it factors, it factors. period.

drowning it in other factors is the creed of f2p salesmen (yes f2p have salesmen) you gotta find a way to make the pill go down the hatch.

for players to accept it without complaining too much.

I don't know why the debate isn't simply settled by the fact they have revenue.

and not revenue from cosmetics alone.

period.

no need to go further then that.

the randomization factor created by the other factor will never be anything other than random.

whereas paid for non-cosmetics are always going to factor as an "UP" factoring in by the thousands.

That's funny because in tf2 weapons are dirt cheap while all the cosmetics can be worth 1000$ I mean this because as it turns out weapons drop A LOT whole cosmetic items barely drop, heck I keep getting dropped duplicate weapons that are annoying the heck out of me. In tf2 the drop rate is so quick.

You forgot about buying keys and such, 2$ a key for people to open a crate that most likely gives them a hat worth less than 2$.

look you're not a statistical analyst, so it's normal that to you the end-product doesn't seem worth it.

otherwise they would have failed as statistical annalists.

that's the whole art of it, you can make something seem either incredibly valuable even though it's not or incredibly worthless even though it is. and give either impression to different people with different mentalities.

they gotta convince people it's fair with randomization (which justifies the examples you mentioned) allthewhile making sure the interest is strong enough to reap dat benefit.

But why would you ever buy a weapon in tf2 when there are so many more ways to get weapons? Nobody _buys_ weapons.

You can craft weapons out of other weapons, heck you can even craft hats. (But they're worth less than drop hats)

You can trade more common weapons/hats for more expensive hats.

Heck you can just wait for them to drop for you.

Weapons are worth nothing in tf2, most weapons are dropped so often, and as duplicates, that you just combine two into scrap which a bunch of scrap combine into a ref, a ref is basically POCKET CHANGE.

Yes two weapons produce a scrap which is worth barely anything, have to combine into a ref with a couple scrap (don't but me I can't remember the value, i think it's either 6, 7, or 12.) all that work for Pocket change within trading.

And ironically enough something that used to be free to all apple users (when tf2 came to mac) is now one of the big bills in the tf2 trading mechanism, ear budds- now worth around 30$ last I checked.

You don't know anything about the tf2 economy, while I do trading in both It, and CS:GO, it's a way for me to make money.

personal impressions. the whole point of this mind game.

you'll have to refer to valve to back those claims.

No I don't, nobody buys weapons from the in game store anyway, they'd buy them from community market, anyone who buys a weapon is a n00b in tf2.

and am I to deduce from your reasoning that nobody is a "n00b in tf2"?

Mostly not, nearly everyone on Steam owns and plays tf2. If someone buys a weapon on the ingame story than they just lost money, and made no gains.

It's pay2losemoney, because you should never buy from valve's store.

That's why I always suggest you trade on CS:GO lounge or something. =)

or That one tf2 trading site. They're not hard to find. XP

heeyyyy

you could play online without a key? how was I supposed to know?

Hehe, and that is how valve makes money! That tax tho.

?

They open up cases. XD (or crates in tf2)

okay confusion slipped in here xD

I was thinking CS GO was f2p from what I read.

Nah you pay to play and yet it still has the whole cosmetic bit with it. Weapon skins.

Hmm.. Valve decides to make a pay to play game yet still includes the whole cosmetic bit?

It's almost as if they make most of their revenue from the cosmetic items... Interesting!