User blog:AKFrost/Scarcity of Blue and Purple stones - artificial?

One thing I've noticed is that the orange stone is much, much harder to dig up than blue past tengu. I'd often waste bars of health for the orange and get the blue within a few tries, yet my one orange LS stone has been sitting for a good day and half without anybody bothering, but blues get taken within 2 hours of digging (usually though, I get a generous payout from people who feed me trying to get it), and purple once was so rare that according to the game only 3 people had it (all with $3000+ teams).

So, what's different? Why is blue so much rarer when it shouldn't be, and purple even more rare still? Was it a systematic scarcity (in which the drop rate is lower), or an artificial scarcity because people are reluctant to dig it up?

I'm leaning towards the latter for a few reasons:

You probably completed chapter 1 and 2 for the SST's, which means that you know what your seal stone colors are.

From my observations, seal stone colors come in 3 variations at that level : red orange yellow green, orange yellow green blue, yellow green blue purple.

This would suggest that red and purple should be equally rare, but for anybody who fought for LS stones, that's simply not the case.

Why? based on a straw poll of about 20 accounts, red orange yellow green is somewhat more common than the other two, this would explain red, and why blue isn't as represented as the other colors.

To dig deeper, we have to check the structures of chapters 1 and 2.

1-1-1 red/orange/yellow, crystal maga, Wind Weasel 1-2-1 yellow/green/blue, tourmaline maga. 1-2-2 green/blue/purple, crystal maga, pillow demon. 2-2-2 blue, but costs 2 HP. 2-3-2 blue/purple, costs 3 HP

Also to keep in mind is that 1-1-1 supposedly has better maga drop rate than 1-2-2, which is also stated on this wiki.

What does this mean?

for one, if a player is farming 1-1-1 or 1-2-2, he/she will choose 1-1-1, because inaba stones only serve to be stolen from others. Therefore there is a significant advantage doing 1-1-1 over 1-2-2, and off the bat purple and blue gets shafted.

1-2-1 also produces blue, but as we can notice, it's extremely unfriendly to new players to field anima unless they spec a 4-star out of it, because negociations are unlikely to succeed, and until chapter 5 your only real viable animas outside of summon is barbetta/kotetsu, which in itself is uncommon from normal summons, whereas you're handed white angel and rabbit, making divine far more attractive.

Therefore, even at the beginning, there's little reason to get blue/purple stones once you complete a chapter, which you will fairly quickly unless your luck is bad. Then, blue/purple holders will have no incentive to dig out blue/purple stones until they need them (or if they have purple and a lot of anima to level, which they don't because anima kinda sucks).

Past chapter 5-6 or so, and it becomes extremely unprofitable to actually complete chapters for the ticket. At the lower levels you're basically handed stones, so whether you like it or not they'll be there for people to steal, and with the exception of rabbit, you have no reason to unlock them more than once since neither Kaguya nor Tengu has skills.

Therefore, once you get to the hotly-contested stones like LS and Kiri, and all of a sudden people are no longer farming stones, and when they do, they're much less likely to go for the "rare" stones until they need them. The experience of getting it stolen right when you dig one up also doesn't really help things.

Something needs to be done about this, and it's not "get people to dig stones out of the goodness of their heart". Zynga needs to make these stones available.

They can do it in several ways:

They can increase the purple stone payout, or let people dig up multiples in the higher levels. I honestly couldn't care less if everyone had a suzuka with level 20 skills (and I don't even need her because I got better cards), because precisely that it's not the f2p solution to the upper levels (it's not even a defense card), and its value is extremely limited unless you have good support cards, which you won't because there are none that's F2P, even Amaterasu (which you're not gonna get 4 of).

They can also implement a trade system, so that people can actually sell these things for a profit, even in silver. I've heard a lot of arguments about how silver is useless, but in large fusion sessions I still find myself running out of them (and thus i have to dig up a blue LS to fish with it), and, if you can now buy stones from other players, then you actually have a place to spend that silver. The side effect is it will kill whatever market is left for maga summon, but personally that's more of a compelling argument for maga summons to give skilled magas, so we actually can stand a chance of ever skill-capping non-event, non-bell daemons (and capping bell daemons is already out of this world expensive).