AssassinationsdoneWrong wrote:
This would actually be an idea. I know the "justification" would be similar to "The Bonks have to pay for themselves" and I understand the business model but seriously guys, it would be nice to see you literally go one ticket one player just once.
I understand there are promos for that but really you do make a shedload of isk not just from the Bonks and MiniBonks but from the extremely heightened levels of play around these events. Even the great 1 Q was nowhere near as philanthropic as it was painted out to be.
This isn't even coming from a space poor newb either I just think you can actually shorten the odds at minimal gain for huge events rather than letting the usual suspects shorten them for themselves to the point where there are actually no real surprises except for who of the few won what.
Hi!
The "heightened levels of play" around events like 1 Quadrillion actually bankrupt us pretty hard :P
With the Quad Bonus turned on, we lost staggering amounts of ISK. The total cost of the 1 Quadrillion celebration, for example, was approximately 680 billion ISK. Not 680 billion cost and then X profit-- 680 billion ISK net loss after everything. The Quadbonk broke almost even in and of itself-- that's because slightly under 10% of the players bought about 55% of the tickets. Without them, Blink goes broke pretty quickly. That 10% of the players did not represent 55% of the winners, either, since we only allowed one win per person. If we cap the number of tickets at some low amount, the Bonk top prize would be like a pirate battleship or something.
We also drew 40 winners from one-ticket-per-person ticket lists as runners-up in the Quadbonk, for 4 PLEX apiece. I'd say it is pretty difficult to make the argument that you can't win with just a few tickets.
Each event, not just the giant celebrations has a significant number of people who:
-- bought a ton of tickets and won nothing, or
-- bought just a couple tickets and won something, or
-- won something without spending anything at all (singing contests, shoot Andrev, promos, etc)
These just aren't as visible as the "well-known" names that you see with a higher regularity because they do play with a higher frequency.
Believe me, if we were running this to try to eke out super profit, we wouldn't run Bonks like the "125% Bonk" that is literally guaranteed to lose money, we wouldn't have 100b of minibonks that we give away literally for free every week, and we wouldn't run promos at a token apiece to allow literally thousands of people to never actually play the site except for free promos.
We do put a lot of thought into ways to create as many winners as possible and to make things as fun as possible. It's not something that we disregard.