setsuna, all your calculations are based on one mistake and let's keep it mathematical since you seem to like it so much:
Let's say, someone wants to make a video with all items from a DL live. Let's say, that someone is so impossibly lucky that he gets all the items with just 4 lives, which is theoretically possible, but the probability of that happening is almost 0. Now let's assume that DL live didn't exist, the probability of being able to make that video is exactly 0, even with investing hundreds of hours.
If there never were DL lives to begin with, you wouldn't be complaining about this right now, you are complaining about getting more possibilities for your videos, even if this possibility is incredibly low. And 2 out of the 6 items are even guaranteed after 4 lives.
And again: are you guys telling me that because of the people who want to make videos with items that wouldn't exist at all otherwise, the vast majority of people who doesn't want to make these videos should not get the DL lives?
And btw: you are way way luckier than i am with your drops, i'd love to have so much luck with getting gold drops as you do, from what you wrote (16 presents with 1000 lives) you got 3 times as many as i did (2 out of 450 lives).
Edit: Just to be clear: I completely agree that the drops rates are way too low and that i don't like the method the DL live accessories are delivered at all, but it doesn't change the fact that the DL lives are content that otherwise would be missing completely, and i'd rather take the 33% of it (2 guaranteed out of 6 items) than 0% of it if they didn't exist at all.
Nice try except that we're not dealing in the maybe, we're dealing with the now. You can't strawman the 'But if we didn't get the DL Lives' to ME in particular, because I already knew about them six months prior to the game's release, and was already enacting plans AROUND these lives with internal information.
There's 3 DL lives activated. There's another 9 scheduled. THIS is the reality we're dealing with (And yes, the idea was planned. I was warned about it, although the version they ran with was significantly blunted - originally, they were supposed to be on rotation in 2 week periods, to drive p-drop sales. They balked once they saw the backlash. (There's a reason why there's a warning that the lives may disappear without notice in that blog. It's an internal matter with NBEI.)
And yes, the data's on disc with remote activation on PSN. It's been part of the design for months. If you're bored and want to test it, just disconnect your PS4 from the internet. Unless they patched it recently, you'll find that the DL live presents won't work even if you do a DL live and you'll draw from the regular gold present pool instead. (It might take you a while to test it though, since you're not allowed to spend p-drops while disconnected from PSN. On release, the game would actually disable DL Live 1 from being accessed at all if you didn't connect within a day or so.)
You can't cheat this system though, as it won't accept any time unless it's sent through PSN (as it grabs the JP Tokyo server's clock upon running any live as part of the p-drops check) although if you could theoretically spoof the PSN clock, you could actually force the other 9 lives (or at least the 9 I'm AWARE of) from the game disc to run immediately.
In short? You can't put the theoretical of 'Well if the DL lives didn't exist we wouldn't have any content...' only because this was part of the Platinum Stars DESIGN. In short, they made a concerted effort to extend the length of the game.
As I said, the idea was sound, the execution was poor because of several major baseline assumptions and a failure to understand what happens with low % odds without a floor put into place.
And I also addressed the numbers. There's a flaw with yours:
You know those two costumes (The C and the S costumes)? They're in the GOLD present cycle for the DL Live. You get a flat 1/6 (1/7 with the E/F costume bug, although it's not known if they occupy more than one additional slot, and I've received one of 3 different ones, so it could actually shoot out to 1/10) to receive a specific DL live accessory.
That's after the odds on getting a gold present to drop, which is governed by the % chance a major appeal note will be registered during a live performance.
It is common (and it's happened to me THREE TIMES, 2 S ranks and a C) to get a costume associated with the DL live. You in fact can get the DL live's S BEFORE you complete DL Live part 4, and ironically, you can even get it before part 1 even if you fail part 1 due to insufficient score (Usually helped by using p-drops to artificially boost the rate of big appeals), meaning if you're lucky enough (or paid enough), you don't have to suffer the penalty for more than one attempt, and the DL live becomes trivial as you have the required costume.
Of course you could end up with 3 of the costume, and NO accessories after 3 gold presents. I guess it sucks to be you if that happens.
You didn't read that bit in the earlier responses, because if you did, you'd have tried to address those notes.
And your notes also show a demonstrated lack of understanding of statistics. I talk in Standard Deviations (Namely an accepted base + rough estimates of what would be considered well outside the median) because there is NO WAY to control 'who gets lucky and who gets shafted'
Someone out there is statistically going to do the near impossible.
Someone ELSE out there is also going to do the other end of the near impossible.
Here's the flaw of your argument when you claim it doesn't matter - Someone who made videos for OfA. im@s2, im@s 1/L4U, SP, Arcade, DS or anything else doesn't get to pick WHICH END they end at. It's a black box, and they can end up anywhere.
If we could, we'd try our damned hardest to PICK the winning end of the extreme, but alas, we can't. Other forces (namely the PS4's seed, time of day we made the save, producer name, PSN account name and a raft of other stuff) will determine that, and although we can alter the odds very slightly, we don't know HOW to (because we aren't told what affects the seeds that influence the appeals in game to give big appeals on any given note to get enough to force a gold present to drop) so most of it is as blind luck as we can make it, and whatever NBEI's baseline is.
As I said, the problem with the design is mostly the numbers.
The problem isn't the model per se - it's the fact the numbers didn't come with a floor. There's a few ways to address the lack of a floor (Such as PRNG where all misses will increment the chance up for a future hit until it hits, then reset again upon a hit back to its base) but they're not present for now.
Either we accept that they forgot to insert a floor or we have to accept their assumptions when making their model - That they really DO want us playing 4 hours a day for an ENTIRE YEAR to stand roughly 66% chance to get all the DL items.
Think about that for a moment.
28 hours a WEEK.
That's easily most casual jobs. Heck, it's close to what I'm working for at the moment.
You have got to be kidding that's a good assumptive baseline. For something you've been told is free, and you're spending enough hours to call it a job. For a ~66% chance to experience all the content.
For an idea, BLIZZARD don't count on you playing 4 hours a day every day (Tuesday Maintenance for starters) for dailies. They model on from my discussions about 2h30m. (2 hours to complete dailies, 30 minutes for other stuff, not including Raids etc)
Let me emphasize again - Blizzard, you know the guys who made WoW and would presumably know more about MMOs and long play better than either of us just due to sheer experience modeled their MMO around an expectation that 'daily tasks' are at MOST 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Even mobages in Asia don't count on 3 hours of game time over a course of the day without significant AP/energy expenditure, and they're social games closer to Platinum Stars' base design. You get whales who will spend for more energy/AP, but the base model? God no.
There's a significant amount of fudge factor (Cause I'm collecting data from all the people I know who play so my data is not going to be more than a spitball) but 4 hours a day, every day for a year? That's 'You're playing a Korean MMORPG' territory.
Applied to a SINGLE PLAYER GAME with very little interaction with the outer world.
If you don't see the actual absurdity involved in the above statement, let's put a bit MORE perspective. (or at the very least, can I have some of whatever you're smoking?)
If this sort of time was put into League of Legends, DotA Counterstrike, or any other multiplayer vs game, you'd be putting in this sort of time and you'd be expected to be in the top 5% of the playerbase by the other end of the year.
If this was a MMORPG, you would be expected to after all the hours, be in a high end guild, and running end game content.
Hell, if you put this level of practice into Project Diva, you should be able to Perfect a few extreme songs.
If you're expecting THAT profile out of a single player game and believe more than a tiny fraction would actually complete the profile, you have to be an incredibly patient gamer and believe everyone else is like you, or certifiably insane or at least a very, VERY persistent bastard/bitch and believe everyone else is like you.
Even the likes of Xenogears or other megalong jRPGs wouldn't break 150 hours to get every last bit of content.
To expect 300-400 hours as a norm to get 50% of the released content?
Yeah, you might see there's a bit of a problem with the design. As I said, the design is fine - it's the numbers IN that assumption which are completely shot.
(I'd argue that 300-400 hours should be what's expected to 100% the content, tops (Namely, there should be actual catchalls preventing you from missing content at that point). You're already risking sanity and brand saturation and lack of future positive response for running a game primarily about MUSIC that long.
But you're telling me that the model is fine for people listening to say a 20 large, maybe 40 (If we include all DLC) in a loop (assuming they play each song in sequence) 72000 times?
Or more accurately 1800 times EACH? Roughly 67.5 hours of each song repeatedly?
Like I said, you have no appreciation about what the numbers MEAN, which makes your statements a flat out insult to a LOT of people.
