R2's Misleading Pricing - Golden Holy Water

(posted by Ashira of the DolyGames Team)

Hey guys,

It has been mentioned often before that R2's valuation of in-game items is quite inflated (for instance, when displaying the value of a recharge reward pack as 999999 balens or so).

It is not only inflated though, they are also inconsistent with their own valuation. The players who have been playing for a long time know this very well anyway, but if you are a relatively new player and consider spending on Hot Shop items, as they seem like special offers, be careful.

One example is the new item that is required for sylph equipment refining - Golden Holy Water. The BR increase from refining sylph equipment once is substantial, as the sylph equipment does not have any initial refinement stats at all (unlike character equipment), and you have to refine it once to "unlock" these refinement stats. So if your main sylph has 6 pieces of equipment and you want to refine all of them once, you need 108 of these Golden Holy Water items and will get a BR increase of several thousand from it - so having these items and at least refining equipment once is very desirable.

So what is this item worth? Should you get the Hot Shop offer? First of all, Golden Holy Water does drop from Dimensional War and also from the new Cloud Adventure event. So if you don't mind waiting for a bit, this definitely is not an item you should get from shop. Second, while Hot Shop sometimes really gives special offers (e.g. resistance material), this is not one of them - actually, R2 charges a higher price in the Hot Shop sale than they value the item at.

You can see that at merchants in Dimensional War, 4 Golden Holy Water items cost 36 balens and the discount is displayed as 10% - so without discount, they would cost 40 balens according to R2's own valuation, which means 10 balens per item.

In the Hot Shop sale, you are offered 20 Golden Holy Water items for 599 balens, which makes it 29.95 balens per item. Almost 3 times as much as R2 values it at!!! If you take the offer that gives you 200 of the items, you get a slight discount compared to the other one and "only" pay 5299 balens, which makes it 26.495 balens per item - still over 2.6 times the value of the item. Decide for yourself if you consider this a hot deal - in my opinion, advertising something as a hot deal that costs at least 2.6 times as much as it usually costs in-game is misleading at best (if R2 managers just cannot calculate correctly) and fraud at worst (if they do this consciously). Hot Deal? Yes, for the operators, not for the players.