Calculated Spending

As with any other gachas, Limbus Company is no exception to it’s microtransactions. Sometimes, some of the microtransactions looks like such a weird purchase. In this article, we will study the following points.

1. Is the Identity Growth Pack and E.G.O Upgrade Pack worth it?
2. How many times should we refill?
3. How do go about getting such answers?

Another goal of the article is to explain the methodology, as we do may critical assumptions that do have an impact on the result. These assumptions are made to strike a balance between usefulness and applicability, and should be up to the individual to critique. Of note, we do apply mathematical tools as needed. But, we will attempt to make the conclusions self-sufficient. Next, the graphs are embedded images, and the author had not made a serious attempt at making them compatible in dark mode, mostly due to lack of expertise in web design. The author apologises on the last point.

There is another argument we would like to mention, that perhaps this is the wrong frame of reference for analysing spending. (Woods 2022¹) argues that the true cost calculation should be considering the time-money tradeoff that one invests into the game. We will not use this paradigm as it is unclear to the author that the exploitativeness of gachas to spend time overcoming the lack of spending money persists when players are made aware of this tradeoff explicitly. (Aside: The social science articles are qualitative on this topic, and do not pry into the calculation of whether the perceived explation is really reflective of reality. Though, who can really argue with the time sink that is the Mirror Dungeon grind?)

That being said, we will merely acknowledge that we are trading off time in exchange for reducing the amount of money spent. We are not going to explicitly calculate the time required in this article, for two reasons:

1. The analysis will be to consider the tradeoff between the number of days to reach a goal (henceforth, abbrievated to “NDG”) and the amount of lunacy required. The inclusion of time would make it a “3-factor” consideration, and make the results both more complicated to understand and use.
2. We will instead model the time spent into the “type of player” we’re considering.

Types of Players

First, the first barrier for this analysis is that it turns out that the value greatly changes

References