Best Of

For all its pitfalls, I like this game, let me preface. It has surprisingly high production value and great combat/effects if you're into this variety of free-targeting.

But I have a huge, huge issue with the hard limit on runs per day. It's difficult to play this game with friends when timezones differ and anyone who gets on after the activity "rush" is left in the dust. Not being able to help them run difficult dungeons when my run limit is up is also appalling game design. Don't you want people to stay on longer? Play longer? Enjoy your game longer and potentially play with all their friends? Because once you're locked out of every necessary dungeon on your main, there's not much else to do but level alts. And I don't want to feverishly level and gear up an alt just to be able to bypass the dungeon entry limit and actually be able to do the dungeon or help carry people who aren't as geared.

**The real fix is to limit the number of rewards per day and let players run it without rewards afterwards in case they want to practice or help friends/crew members.

The dungeon pass tickets can then be converted to tickets that allow you to gain another set of rewards in that dungeon. **

This solution is much less restrictive and smothering than a hard limit on number of entries and allows players to play their favorite character(s) in their favorite dungeons for as long as they like without affecting the intended core limitations that Naddic wanted to have. It also promotes a better community for new players, who may need help once they reach the endgame dungeons but often run into walls when everyone else has already maxed out their runs for the day. If you get lucky someone has geared up multiple "carries" on their account and can help, but it's not something that I would bet the bank on.

Right now player-made solutions are to just ask in world chat for help or queue endlessly and hope, but the base of the issue is still there. You have a crew, maybe, and you have some friends also playing this game, maybe, but no one can help because their runs are maxed and they can't carry on other characters or their other characters are maxed out on runs, too. Queues are also dead near the end of the day when everyone has finished running all the dungeons that matter on all the characters they care about. This is not a good way to keep new players and it's sure as water is wet not a selling point of the game. It's oppressive, at best, and a dealbreaker at worst. If the developers want to impose hard timegating, the FFXIV method of "limited daily/weekly dungeon drops, but unlimited runs" is far more elegant and healthy for the game in the long run.

Before I begin my thoughts, I'd like to state the following:
1: For anyone who has not yet read it, consider this post to be a follow up on my original post here: https://forums.enmasse.com/closers/discussion/9597/bitnas-gacha-needs-to-seriously-be-looked-at#latest
2: This feedback is entirely on the NEW version of Bitna, the Cross Material Conversion.

With the 7/30 patch update, quite a few things were brought to Closers NA. Some of the things included are Yuri Task Force (about damn time), Dark Zenith (Or Fallen Night as it's called in game), and Bitna's Cross Material Conversion. For anyone who doesn't know how it works, there's a decent enough explanation in this news post: https://closers.enmasse.com/news/posts/bitnas-new-invention . I'll also give a quick summary here:

You have 8 items in a circle. It costs 1 reroll ticket to reroll the 8 items. Reroll tickets can be acquired from logins/events, or bought from the EMP store. 10 for 300emp, 50 for 1400emp, 100 for 2700 emp. In terms of actual monetary cost to reroll, it is AT MOST $0.30 to reroll (with the least cost efficient EMP and ticket purchases) and $0.225 to reroll if you buy $100 of EMP and the x100 bundle. Overall the price to reroll is very reasonable, and from my personal experience you get decent enough items to appear. The fever gauge increases with each roll, making it more and more likely to get the 'hot items', which with the current offerings I feel are all good "main rewards". There is 10/10 for three different signature sets (Fallen Night, Zenith, Dark Command), the 4/4 accessories for the new Fallen Night, and a full 3* box for the CMC exclusive color on the new outfits (The Type C Sunshine outfit).
Now, to roll items out you need Transfer tickets. The number of tickets required depends on the number of items left to roll out. The number of tickets required depends on the number of times you roll that set of 8. The cost starts at 1, then goes to 2, 3, 5, 5, 7, 7, and finally 10 to guarantee the final piece. This makes a total of 40 tickets to roll out any given item. These tickets are rarely from events/login, and primarily from the EMP store. It is 1 for 190emp, 10 for 1790emp, 20 for 3490, and 35 for 5990. The worst price per ticket is $1.90, and the best is $1.43.

Overall, I think the new Bitna has a lot more positives than negatives, but the few negatives it has are HUGE.

Some of the positives (compared to normal gacha) include:

• Character specific pulls. No rolling a ton just to get other characters stuff.
• A lot less trash in the pulls. No talismans, no phase fibers, no exploration tickets, no res capsules, no +11 boosters, no enhancement catalysts. This actually removes 6/7 items that I disliked in the original gacha in my post 7+ months ago. Additionally, even though +12 boosters ARE in the CMC gacha, they are the pouched variant that can be sold on the black market, so that's an improvement.
• Most of the pulls feel worth it overall, as even when I miss the item I want I still don't feel too disappointed with what I pull.

Some of the negatives include:

• The item pool still feels a bit too diluted. A lot of the seemingly "less common" rolls seem like more trash than the actual common rolls. All the original dual chips are in the list, and I feel like there's only a handful that are even worth pulling (Red/Blue, Red/Yellow, Blue/Green, Purple/Black). All the rest are barely worth anything and a complete waste of money. 1 day elite is also a complete trash roll, since the 30 day voucher is only 1490 emp.
• There is some lack of visual clarification, as there are multiple items in the pool that use the same image (7 and 30 day garden/maid, +12/+13 booster pouch).
• Exclusive outfit colors in CMC makes these colors something that F2P crowds will almost never own, especially when it's something with an image set (like the Sunshine sets). I will say that with the sunshine set in CMC being the one with the mixed image it's a little more forgivable, as players can get the image from the normal gacha sets.
• Finally, my biggest problem with the new gacha is how hard it plays into something called Sunk Cost Fallacy. You can read more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy , but I'll summarize it below and how it ties into the new gacha:

Essentially what sunk cost fallacy means is that when you invest time/money into something, you're more likely to continue with that thing due to your initial investment. For example, if you bought the $150 pack for Closers after playing for a week then got bored two days later, you may come back to Closers and play it more since you already spent $150 on the game. How this ties into the CMC is with the Transfer tickets. You wouldn't spend one unless you wanted one of the items in the pool. If you spend a ticket and get the item, that's great. But if you don't, you've already invested anywhere from $1.43 to $1.90 into this pool of items and not gotten what you wanted. The next roll's only two tickets instead of one, so it isn't that bad, right? Roll and miss, and that's another $2.86 - $3.80 down the drain, for a total of $4.29 - $5.70. This ramps up quickly, as the total cost sunk into getting the item is as followed based on the number of attempts needed to get the item:
1. $1.43 - $1.90
2. $4.29 - $5.70
3. $8.58 - $11.40
4. $15.73 - $20.90
5. $22.88 - $30.40
6. $32.89 - $43.70
7. $42.90 - $57
8. $57.20 - $76

Now for the top prizes, I can agree that even if you pay up to $76, that's still WAY worth it for something like a 10/10 signature set, or even the 4/4 fallen night accessories right now. However, what happens if someone ends up doing this for a new exclusive color variant? There is no way in hell that paying $76 for the item is worth it compared to the prior method for a third color variant being EMP store for 2k emp ($20 at most, can go down to $16.67 with max EMP bought).

Honestly, there's two easy solutions to this issue that I see:
1: Stop doing exclusive colors in the CMC gacha. This one's pretty self explanatory. Using it to bring back old costumes is a cool idea, but locking new ones behind it seems like a scumbag move to do, especially if said colors get released later with a cheaper acquisition method (normal gacha, EMP store, etc).
2: Decrease the cost for later pulls. There's no reason that the final pull should almost cost as much as the first four. I personally don't have any real ideas right now for curving the prices, because I will agree that if they get curved too low then the cost to just roll out a 10/10 signature could get too low which could deflate their price on the market. (Oh wait, that's a good thing isn't it? Why don't we do this?)

Overall, I do think that the CMC is a step in the right direction but there's still some rough edges that need smoothed out.