Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26109599-20150719031552

Okay, I think it's time to address Monkey Knowledge packs. Sure, they make the game easier (which is nice because BMC is a pretty hard game), and sure, they provide a few useful upgrades for towers, but the work/reward ratio is way off. In other words, MKP's aren't worth the effort put into them. Need proof? I am only too happy to oblige.

It's a little hard to work with this mathematically, since everyone's experience will be different, but I've tried to choose values and timeframes which are fairly reasonable. The results may not be right on, but I think they're accurate enough to let the reader get the idea. If you'd like to skip the data and analysis, be my guest, but be advised that you won't be aware what I'm basing my results on. That said, here we go.

The way I'm approaching this problem is an attempt to visualize what length of time it will take to get the amount of EXP needed to fully upgrade all the towers via MKP's. First of all, I'm going to need the average amount of EXP each MKP contains. Conveniently enough, the averages are on the page about MKP's (here: http://bloons.wikia.com/wiki/Monkey_Knowledge_Packs). However, I need to assume that an average player will get 99% regular MKP's, and 1% ancient MKP's (which I think is a pretty reasonable figure). So, I multiply the average of a normal MKP (154.1 EXP) by 99, making 15,255.9. Now I add the average for a ancient MKP (451 EXP) to the previous figure, making 15,706.9. Now we divide this by 100 to get 157.069, which we'll round to 157. So our average EXP from an MKP throughout the game is about 157 EXP.

Now we need to know how many MKP's it will take to achieve the amount of EXP needed for all fully upgraded towers. The said value is 630,000 EXP (also derived from the aforementioned webpage). So, we simply divide 630,000 by 157, which makes 4,012.73885, or about 4013. So we need 4013 MKP's to fully upgrade all of our towers.

The last step is to find out how long it will take to accumulate all these MKP's. This part is the trickiest, partly due to special events such as Monkey Knowledge Madness or Bloonarius. I've chosen to ignore such events, as my other figures are assuming that the player plays 24/7/365, which far outweighs the other events. I'm guessing that when these two issues are balanced, the player is required to play about 18 straight hours every day. That said, let's get down to the numbers.

Let's say that it takes about 15 minutes on average to capture a tile (assuming the player loses every so often: it can actually take as short a time as 10 minutes). Since there is only a 33% chance of acquiring a MKP for each tiles captured, this means the player gets 1 MKP every 45 minutes. This means the player gets 8 MKP's every six hours, which is added to by a ninth from the Bloon Beacon, which recharges every six hours. This makes 36 MKP's per day. Now we divide 4013 by 36, making 111.472, or about 111.5 days.

Think about that for a minute. 111 and a half straight days, every one of which you play for 18 hours straight. 111 and a half days is almost four months. Would you really be willing to spend that much of your life on one game? And all it really gets you is lower-than-average upgrades for your towers. Of course, no one can actually do something like that. I'm guessing it would take the average player over two years to fully upgrade everything. Possibly three years.....or you could just buy MKP's at an exorbitant price from Ninjakiwi! See how websites make their money now?

So it boils down to this: either you can spend hundreds of hours playing the same game to get mediocre rewards, OR you can pay hundreds of dollars to a company for the exact same rewards. Not much of choice, if you ask me. If you aren't convinced by this, then I don't know what you're thinking. Keep it in mind folks. I apologize for the blocks of text. Feedback is appreciated. 