Of Coins, Gold, and Gems

Of Coins, Gold, and Gems

Yes, this is one of those "Happyface" posts with Fist as a guest commentator.

Fist doesn't have much real use for the Timeless Isle coins that she gets with every kill and quest completion. Sometimes she gets coins just for picking her nose - but let's not go there. She does have a bit of a gambling habit, though, and her new favorite friend on the Isle lately is Kukuru, who lives in a cave full of treasure chests of every size and description. It would be more challenging if gamblers could try to deduce which chests were likely to have the best loot, but, sadly, every chest has the same chance for loot as any other chest. The odds never change.

Fist brought 17,548 coins to her first visit to Kukuru. Each bet she made cost 500 coins. Every bet returns something. There is a 99.8% chance that the "reward" is in coins ranging from a low of 100 coins (the lowest amount Fist received) to - very rarely - a reward as high as 650 coins. It's pretty obvious that this is a losing proposition, although it can be very addicting, since the coins received back can be fed back in again.

The important aspect of this obsession is the 0.2% chance that the reward isn't coins. Fist made 39 bets. Four rewards were for something other than coins. Three of the rewards were i496 gear, the same gear picked up in the moss-covered treasure chests. Those are mostly useless, since Fist, Wild, Philly, JB and even Tiphaine have nearly full i496 gears sets now. Fist also won a pet named Bonkers to add to the families still growing collection of pets for pet battles. Bonkers rewards are fairly common, though.

The one truly valuable reward is a Burden of Eternity. The explanation for what this does is a little confusing, but this is how I think it works. First, you have to have an i496 piece of gear that has not yet been transformed into an equipable item. Using the Burden on that item upgrades the item from i496 to i535. Now that is a tangible reward. One caveat, though, is that doing this makes the item Soulbound, NOT BOA, so make sure the upgrade is done by the character that you intend to use the gear. Early on, Burdens dropped pretty frequently. Now they are very, very rare.

Math Quiz: Blizz doesn't reveal the odds of winning a Burden from gambling with Kukuru. However, I know that Master Li sells Burdens for 50,000 coins apiece. Wild is still trying to get that many coins, himself, for the trinket he wants to buy (he has about 39,000 now). Many players find it easy to amass that many coins over a short period of time. Wild and Fist, alas, don't have the talent for that. Using that value as the base is how I came up with the percentages, assuming that the gambling odds matched the likelihood of a Burden dropped. The odds of that, by my calculation, is 500 to 1 odds.

Way back at the top of the post I mentioned that Fist started with 17,548 coins. When she stopped betting after the 39th bet, she had 10,748 coins left. I expect that she will gamble away those coins, having nothing better to do with them.

The gem market is going through a period of upheaval. For several weeks, the price of gems has been going up, due largely, Happy believes, to all of the gear being dropped in the Timeless Isle. Golden Lotus is the primary ingredient in making a gem, and the price for them has increased from a pretty stable 50g to 65 gold and up, depending how desperate the buyer is, as shortages of Golden Lotus are common. This increase in cost has driven the price of the gems ever higher. In the extreme example, Vermilion Onyx gems went from around 100g to has high as 198g.

Over the past week plus, however, the bottom seemed to fall out. Gem prices plummeted, and the price of Golden Lotus started jumping all over the place, though usually down. Happy has decided to interpret this as good news to buy up the lower prices gems and Golden Lotus. With gem prices down as far as 49g for some, this has the potential of a windfall for Happy should the prices settle at normal rates. Happy could then make a killing. Or, the price could settle at a lower level not worth selling them off. In that case, Happy will pass the gems to JB so she can learn gem enchants using low cost gems. It's all good. :-)