Round 2
Hey everyone! At the end of last season, the first time I felt I had the experience, CP, CEP, time, and attention to rank up at the end of season, I wrote a post showing the total cost vs. rewards of renting up to a higher rank at the end of season for juicy rewards. The TL;DR from that post was that in expectation, I would have lost about 500 DEC going Silver III -> Silver I, but because of some lucky Venari Wavesmith drops, I made about 1,000 DEC (see here for the last post)
I'm back at the end of this season with a redux of that post. Because 1) last season was the first time peakmonsters' auto rental feature was available, 2) I am a statistician and n-of-1 trials never sit well, and 3) I had fun calculating and writing the post last time.
So here, again, I will 1) quickly explain my strategy, 2) Detail the costs of renting, 3) Detail the rewards I got, and 4) tie it all together.
Strategy
My owned CP is ~30k, and I usually rent out ~15k of that so that I am right over the line for Silver III during most of the season. My strategy at end of season is to cancel those rentals and rent the remaining 40k CP to hit Silver I. On top of that, I make sure my energy capture rate is at 100% and that I have 2 daily quests stored up to maximize drops. I wait until <24 hours to EOS then rent the 40k at the highest CP/DEC using peakmonsters' auto rental.
Rewards gained
As last time, the rewards break down into two categories: 1) extra DEC from wins at a higher rank and 2) extra rewards from chests
Extra DEC from wins
Last time, I took a few hours and cranked out victories. This time, the timing of the EOS was a little awkward for me, so I was able to play less, meaning fewer wins. But, I increased my deck significantly during this season, so got more wins and got a solid win streak, so I actually ended up making more this time.
In total, I won 20 games for a total of 467 DEC. Because I would have normally gotten ~5.5DEC per win in Silver III, this netted 357 DEC. (Last season I netted 212 DEC).
Chest rewards
As with last time, I opened 2 extra chests for my 2 daily rewards and 6 extra chests in my EOS rewards, for 10 total chests.
At the time of writing, one chest was worth on average 60 DEC, so this should translate in expectation to 600 DEC. (Last season was expected to earn 74 DEC/chest).
In actuality, I did alright. I messed up my first daily reward, opening it too fast and only getting 3 chests instead of 4. I got another Venari Wavesmith this time, but that was the best.
A mistake
While writing this, I realized I made a mistake calculating my observed chest reward value last time. I counted the value of all my chests instead of only the 10 extra I earned. And it's not really possible to know exactly which of the chests were those 10. So this time, I'll take all the chests I earned from daily reward and EOS (4+4+18=26) and multiply by 10/26, the fraction of them that I earned extra.
Because of this, I netted less than I thought last season. Because of the high cost of renting, I lost some DEC in actuality even with my two Wavesmiths.
In total, I earned 895 DEC from my chests, about half of the expected, resulting in 344 DEC earned from chests.
Costs
Part of my rationale in doing this post for this season was to see whether the auto-rental feature hit similar levels as last time. Due to its novelty last time, the auto bid feature quickly went to very expensive from all the demand, and I rented cards for an average of 40CP/DEC. This affected both categories of costs, and I wanted to see if it was a little less frenetic this time around.
Renting up to 70k
In total, I rented 47k CP (I messed up with the timing of renting out my cards and needed to rent a little more than I normally would), for 790 DEC, at 56 CP/DEC. (This was better than last time, by a good margin. So it makes me think the auto bid did settle down a bit in the last two weeks)
As with last time, some of the fun of doing this lay in what random cards I rented. This time, 30k of my rentals came from a single card, a Level 6 Gold Alpha Frozen Soldier (rented for 1,200 DEC). I didn't use it once, but it was fun to have access to a $10,000 card.
Opportunity cost of not renting out my excess CP
Assuming I would have rented out my 15k excess CP at the same rate of 56 CP/DEC, I gave up **268 DEC ** in rental earnings.
Conclusions
In total, I earned an expected 957 DEC or an observed 701 DEC and spent 1058 DEC, for a net total of -101 DEC in expectation and -357 DEC in reality.
As with last time, the expected value was negative by a bit DEC. Because the auto rental costs went down significantly, the expected value was only a loss of 100 DEC. Even though it's still negative, doing this is worth it to me for a few reasons.
It's fun. This should not be undervalued, as fun is what keeps people invested in the game. Getting more chests, playing with random rentals, etc. is all fun.
The chance of a big payout. Unlike the lottery, getting a legendary or other decent card isn't unheard of. So doing this, while negative in expectation, wouldn't require crazy luck to make money each time (e.g. last season two rares were sufficient).
I enjoy the math. Similar to reason 1, I enjoy calculating the value here and sharing my numbers. Going through my market history, seeing the going rate, and how it changes season to season will be a fun exercise going forward.
So as with last time, the TL;DR is: slightly negative in expectation, but makes up for it in fun and in a decent chance at being positive in actuality.