Workshop 2.0 and the Not Great Recession

Fellow Pilots,
Workshop 2.0 is here.  It has a clumsy user interface, but a very strong up side.  A player can set the oven and bake any item in the game with only two ingredients: silver and patience.

To understand how much silver and time, the U provides the following handy-dandy guide:

• SILVER multiplied by 25 (Silver price of 400 components x 25 = price of 10K components)
• TIME multiplied by (production time of 400 components x 5 = time for 12K components)  

In a hurry?  The fully leveled workshop has six slots, so you can make 2400 components at a time.  To avoid a fifth "batch" and the associated time, you could try acquiring at least 400 components in Royale or the Black Market before or during the workshop production.  If you were REALLY organized, you could run one batch of six different component types, so your next six items all finished in four "cycles."

Example - for my F2P/Level 6 account, my first new item was a Lancelot.  When you click on the "list" icon, you will see the price of 400 Lancelot components is 440K Ag, and the time is 2 hours and 35 minutes.  So, for 11M silver and just under 13 hours, you get a Lancelot.  That's a dramatic price cut from the previous one (5000 Au).  On the high end, the Spectre requires 1.23M Ag and 86 hours (3 days, 14 hours) per 400 components.  This results in about 31M Ag and two weeks to completion as long as you get 400 components elsewhere along the way.

If you use the workshop, make sure you use it at maximum capacity - 400 components at a time.  This is much more efficient (about 33%) in both time and silver.

Some things that used to take a really long time can happen VERY quickly.  The old workshop items, in particular, are almost immediate.  Perhaps your helper elves have a lot of experience building Tarans, which you can build in under three hours for 3.25M Ag.  It used to be 5,650 workshop points, which took 10 days to collect.

You don't need your phD in industrial processes to see how you should use Workshop 2.0: build the things you want, one at a time, using the workshop at max capacity.  We still very much recommend deciding on an overall level for your hangar and sticking with it.  Whether it's 6, 9, 12, or MK2/12, you will enjoy the game more if you have determined how much upgrade "rat race" you can stand!

Doc Yat's Predictions Come True ... Which May Not Be A Good Thing

The acquisition price cuts are something your University team saw coming a mile away in "The Good Old Days Are Gone."  At the July 2018 introduction of the "new economy," I informed our dozen or less readers that I had taken "the unusual step of warning the company that the new upgrades are so cost and time prohibitive that I believe they will trigger a recession."  Further, "There is an iron rule in economics: when demand falls, prices must follow."  Because none of us has access to real data regarding sales, I did NOT know whether demand for new items had fallen yet.  I DID know upgrade costs had gone through the roof, so I thought we'd see "recession behavior" among pilots.  Just like real people spending real money to fix old cars instead of buying new ones, we would fix up old robots rather than buy and upgrade new ones.  This is what I thought would trigger a price drop - for "new" cars - and this is what happened.  It might not be a good thing, though, in the end.  If Pixonic is working overtime to get people back in the market, it could indicate declining sales and a troubled future for War Robots.  The September 10th boycotts, though poorly organised*, may also be a bad sign.

*Dear boycott organizers: companies that wish to survive must succeed financially somehow.  If you don't like the prices of in-app purchases, stop buying them.  If you don't like the game, stop playing it.   But telling people to stop watching the in-app commercials is criminally dumb.  Advertising is the reason Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and virtually every other online thing is free to the user.  

Professor Dope's theory is that Pixonic has simply shifted the emphasis of its in-app purchasing system from item acquisition to item upgrades.  Supporting this idea are recent, subtle changes like lower silver payouts per battle and the removal of gold from Royale games.  

Two Gusts > One Storm
A Redditor took me to task for sloppy shooting, so I've been practicing!  The suggestion that a Storm on the side would be better than Gusts didn't work for me, though.  Gusts are a LOT faster, and two of them deal a lot of damage.  Here are two videos - the first using the Slammer (my term of endearment for a Raven with Tulus and Gusts) in Beacon Rush on Dreadnought and the second in Team Death Match on Carrier.

It's the weekend, so the U's undergrads will be partying and the old wizened professors will be reading their dusty books and napping on the sofa.  Have a good one, and see you next week!
Your humble servant,
Dr. Yat


Faculty Notes

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