Sometime today we will be releasing another Upgrade Finder feature improvement:
Valorstone/Crests Cost Efficiency Ranking
At the bottom of the Valorstone/Crests search you will see a box with some optional settings. This is a bit of an experiment right now: it is a way to rank upgrades based on how efficiently they use your currencies.
First, you tell us how many of each currency you are typically willing to obtain in a week, and also up to which type of crest you are willing to downgrade and use for lower upgrades. (For example, often people won’t want to downgrade Guilded crests to do upgrades that require Runed crests, so you can set this at Runed and it will only downgrade Runed or lower crests if necessary for an upgrade.)
Then, you tell us about how many hours you estimate that takes you to obtain in-game. This can be a pretty rough estimate – it only changes the magnitude of the scores shown in the result, not the relative ranking of efficiency.
Press ‘Find Upgrades’ as usual, you’ll see your results. By default it will probably show it like it did before, with the ranking method set to “Biggest Upgrade”. Change that to “Most Efficient” to see the new ranking.
How is the score calculated?
We already know how much of an upgrade each item would be from the standard “Biggest Upgrade” result.
Then, we determine how much of each currency it costs to do your upgrade. You can hover your mouse over the score for each item to see the cost that we determined. We take into account any valorstone or crest discounts you may have (requires that you have exported with v145 or later of the AMR addon).
Finally, using your settings described above, we calculate how many hours it would take you to obtain the currencies for this upgrade.
The score shown is your estimated percent score increase per hour spent obtaining upgrade currencies.
Why did we do it like this?
As we started writing this feature… it became frustrating to assign a relative cost to each upgrade. Some upgrades take only valorstones, some take crests and valorstones, some require different kinds of crests, etc…
But even more problematic is the fact that each currency is of a different value to each individual player. If you do a lot of casual content and not much high M+ or raid content, you might be swimming in valorstones but really hurting for crests. Crests are “expensive” for you.
Conversely, if you log on only to raid most weeks, you might have a lot of crests but nowhere near enough valorstones. Valorstones are “expensive” for you.
The constant quantity here is your time or effort. By telling us about how many of each currency you get and about how long that takes, we can directly compare the value of each currency for you.
Even then it’s a little complicated… as different activities award currencies at different rates… but we wanted to strike a balance between relatively simple user interface options and a realistic estimate. Behind the scenes we do some weighting of each currency type based on the relative rate at which you can obtain them via various activities in-game.
Give it a try and let us know what you think!