While plenty of online games with lockboxes already have transparent lockboxes and far more are due to get them over the next year thanks to the ESA’s soft-mandate, there’s something you can do right now to confront lockboxes: Don’t buy them. Of course, you’re gonna buy them anyway, so maybe – just maybe – you should know what’s in ’em before you gamble away your hard-earned money, and if the studios aren’t gonna tell you, it’s down to the players to sort it out.
And that’s exactly what Star Trek Online players have done.
Rather than open a bajillion boxes on a video for views, dukedom01 instead hiked over to the Tribble test environment and opened 10,000 Infinity lockboxes to meticulously record how much of everything he got in order to estimate the drop rates of all the foozles inside. He found a 7.15% drop rate for regular duty officer packs and 6.61% for special duty officers – so nearly 14% rate for duty officers total – as well as almost 11% for kits. The tester’s conclusions, however, focus more on items that have become more rare unintentionally, on player-unfriendly bind-to-character mechanics, and on what he characterizes as the “carpal tunnel inducing” weapon pack opening system.
And then Redditor joxterthemighty performed a similar experiment with close to a thousand Phoenix prize boxes, pulling in only one epic and two ultra rare items for his trouble.
So there you go: the closest thing to transparent lockboxes in STO right now.
I’m having flashbacks to that time I ran tests on whether a certain stat affected crafting rolls in another sci-fi MMORPG. It didn’t. But a decade later, people still believe it does. I wish these napkin-math rundowns had the effect they ought to, but nope.
