Hello fellow Cointipliers!
I haven’t been very active with my faucets these past few months but I kept a close eye on what Cointiply and other faucets have to offer. This month, Contiply introduced a brand-new feature – Cointiply Arena! Arena is simple game where users purchase heroes, upgrade them and at the end of the month all heroes enter a giant brawl to earn coins from a huge and constantly growing prize pool.
The prize pool is very impressive, over $12k a time of writing, yes $12,000. Cointiply provides a base prize pool (5 million coins, or $500), every additional $ are what users buy in game. I could not find information as to how the prize pool is redistributed and what percentage await the big winner.
Only basic information is available, and because it’s new it’s hard to see how the whole thing will play out in the future. Cointiply says that “Each hero has a fair chance of winning” and “Even a level 1 hero has a chance of winning multiple battles in the initial rounds”. Is that enough to earn more than you spent? You can read and watch more here and here.
I stayed cleared of it for almost a week as it was not clear if Arena was just a giant gamble or if there was, even remotely, a winning strategy to follow. It’s very easy to sink 10s or 100s of thousands of coins into one or more heroes, for a very uncertain return at this point. Let me share what I found, what I think and my “strategy” for this first month of Cointiply Arena
The Basics of Arena
You need to first buy 1 hero among the list of 45 heroes currently available. They have different attributes and different prices. As far as I could tell, the ratio coin/attribute point (how much does it cost per attribute point) is the exact same for all heroes (I did the math on 21 of them across the spectrum). All but one, the Brown Golem. For all heroes, it costs 40 coins per attribute points. It costs 39.51 coins per attribute points for the Brown Golem (should have had 3 attribute points less to have the same ratio as all the other heroes).
What the attribute points do is explained in the help. For now only the Luck attribute seems to matter the most, all other attributes having the same “value” or usefulness.
So which hero is best to buy? The one with highest luck? The most expensive one, the cheapest one? I don’t really know. I don’t really know either how all of this will really matter in the end. Based the available help, 1) having a high luck attribute is good, 2) having the highest overall attribute score and 3) the highest level is what will matter in the end.
With this, it becomes quickly evident that what you need to do is upgrading your hero(es) and increase their stats. In words, spend your coins!
Leveling Up Your Heroes
Leveling up your hero increases its attributes, which will in turn give your hero better odds in the end-of-the-month fight, which means a better chance to take a larger share of the prize pool.
For all heroes and per upgrade, it will cost you 1,000 coins (that price never changes). Each upgrade however will not grant your hero the same number of levels. Depending on the upgrade rate you are buying into, you can get as low as 1 level up and as high as several 10s of level up (the highest I have seen was 86). Each time you want to upgrade your hero a range of levels is made available: “1 to 3 levels”, “8 to 12 levels”, or “56 to 86 levels” (the highest I have seen so far).
As part of the game, Cointiply states that the range for level upgrades fluctuates in "real time" and as demand occurs from users. The more users request upgrade, the lower the range. The lowest the demand, the higher the range. The ranges can fluctuate very quickly, especially as it gets higher and higher. From what I could see, upgrades with high ranges only last a couple of minutes. Since there's a cool down of 15 seconds between each upgrades you can't just snap buy 100 upgrades even if you had the coins.
At “56 to 86 levels” range I was only able to upgrade my heroes about 8 times before it sharply went back down to “4 to 6 levels” range. You can check on the real time graph provided how the ranges evolve over time. You can’t even see anything as high as 56 or 86 levels on the graph, it went by too fast and 40 seemed to have been the pick average range during that short period of time.
In the end, the name of the game is “how cheap can you level up?”. The less money you spend on your hero(es) getting as “powerful” as possible will determine your return of investment at the end of the month. The goal is not so much to finish 1st but to earn more money than you spent. Winning $20 if you spent $10 is better than winning $1,000 if you spent $1,100.
Your hero CPL (Cost Per Level) is the one metric you want to pay attention to. You can also see other heroes CPL in the current ranking of the top heroes (image). You want that number to be as low as possible. The current top hero is not only far above everyone in terms of hero level but is among the lowest CPL (50 at time of writing).
The hero in 4th position has a CPL of 210, meaning he spent ~4.2x more than Digitalcash per level. Digitalcash roughly spent less coins (a whopping 800k coins nonetheless!) to get his hero to level 16,003 compared to Cole who spent about 978k coins only to reach level 4,662. Based on what we can see, a CPL of 50-80 seems relatively good, under 50 is a great CPL! I suspect things will change, keep evolving… and that leveling up your hero might get cheaper as the “new toy” frenzy dissipates, and as people runs out of money 😊 Compared to the first week of Arena, we can see spikes of “cheap” CPL arising.
My Strategy & Tests For This First Month
To give Arena a shot, I decided to buy 4 heroes:
1) the cheapest hero
2) the brown golem since it seems to have a slightly better attribute per coin ratio initially (probably doesn’t mean anything long term)
3) the blue bold man since he has the most starting luck attribute
4) the red hair & yellow eyes man since he has the most starting power attribute (which doesn’t change anything at the moment).
Next I leveled up all my heroes 10 times, just to compare after 10, seemingly similar, leveling up. Here is what they look like after 10 upgrades each.
After 10 leveling up, my cheap guy cost me 11.6k coins. This is cheaper than the initial cost of the most expensive hero, with now much better attributes. The problem is, it seems that my cheap guy’s attributes are leveling up more slowly than my other heroes - they are about 10x lower!
For upgrading, I'm checking the upgrade rates several times a day and if the if I can get a CPL of 50 or less I pull the trigger. I will stick with the blue man for the rest of the month and level him as much as my bankroll permits and with good upgrade rates.
At the moment, it’s a blind experiment. The only thing I know is that I want to pay the least to upgrade my heroes, even if it means not finishing with a great level overall. As mentioned above, the goal is to earn more coins than you spent, not to finish first or reaching a certain hero level. Only at the end of the month I’ll see if anything pays off.
After the battles end, I hope we can see the final ranking, top heroes attributes and CPL, it might guide us for May… or convince me that this is a waste of time and coins. Maybe boosting one hero to the top is the best strategy? Maybe having multiple heroes at different levels, but still with a good CPL, is the best strategy to maximize gains and even variance? Maybe Cointiply will introduce new rules, such as the use for all the other non-luck attributes?
Good luck to all and see you next month for a debrief!
Thanks for reading!
-OMS
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