Legends of IdleOn Companion System Sparks Backlash Due to Gambling Mechanic

On June 17th Legends of IdleOn received the companion update which brought the new companion shop. The companion shop has a gacha like system where you pay real world cash and receive a random pet, with one of the pets being “Doot” which grants a considerable advantage that allows you to have all of your divinities from World 5 as active. This is a very strong bonus in the game.

Some Quick Math

If we assume the average cost of a single Doot is:

Average cost = (1 / Probability of success) * (Cost per chest in gems) * (Cost per gem in dollars)

Taking into account basic probability and the geometric distribution, with a .28% original drop rate and after 5,660 gems reaching tier 3 and having a x3 drop rate, we figure it would be about 176.05 chests to get a Doot.

Average cost = 176.05 chests * 100 gems/chest * ($5.99 / 400 gems) ≈ $263.54

Gambling in an Idle MMO

So that’s a lot of money for a big advantage in an idle game and quite weird that such a strong mechanic exists. I do not want to discredit this issue and what it is to players who love the game.

As this is an idle game and an optional mechanic, this would for all intents and purposes be, just a weird cash grab sort of ordeal. The thing about companions is that they, in a future update, will be tradable between players. This has created a speculative market around the companions and accounts that have companions in them.

Players are infuriated with this update and have taken to the community Reddit & Discord to voice their complaints. This has resulted in the game’s developer, Lava, avoiding conversing with the community while player after player is banned for voicing overt criticism on the bans or the new companion system.

This is a very strange mechanic. Rarely have I seen a game allow a gacha component that also has a tradable component to it. Considering the rarity of Doot, there likely will be a very interesting and very expensive secondary market for it as Lava continues to suggest more cooperative content. Meaning that these game buffs will impact actual multiplayer game performance, past dungeons.

Where’s LavaFlame?

The developer is currently not responding on Discord and has been silent for roughly 10 days. There are threads that continue to pop up and get deleted on the subject and on other sites there seems to be a lot of discontent about the update. There has always been an opposition in the IdleOn community to new currencies after a promise about autoloot being a W4 feature and the paid autoloot being a way to get it earlier was broken.

We’ll continue to follow along to see how things progress with the community. The developer hasn’t provided additional commentary on how the trading feature will work, outside of the free companions being untradable. We’ll see what happens as the game continues to develop.