The 2021 Legendary Bundle Isn’t Overpriced…Or Is It? Value Series, Part 2

I know, I know!

“Cryptic apologist!”

“He’s saying this bundle’s WORTH IT!”

“Shill.”

Nope, kinda-ish?, and no.

I was ready to go on a bit of a tirade about how this Bundle is soooo not Overpriced. But…uh…according to the Cambridge University dictionary, there are a few options, including, “offered for sale at too high a price.” This is a legitimate concern with most releases since February of last year as we’re used to $30 ships and $60 bundles.

So what will my definition be for this post?

• Overpriced will be defined as a price higher than the contents (useful and potentially not useful, separated below) would individually be worth, perhaps even taking into account a steep C-Store discount.

Why do I state the definition like this? It’s the only way to get bias out of the way. “Here are the contents, here are their values if you were to buy them separately,” is the only objective way to determine if the asking price really is too high. If we go with, “Well, I can’t use X, Y, and/or Z,” now we get into subjective valuations and that has to be entirely up to you, the reader, what you want out of this. All I can do is provide as objective a view as I can so you can determine if this is right for you.

That all being said, let’s get into the dirty work of crunching numbers! (NOTE: Dollar amounts are done at $1 = 100 Zen and don’t take into account Zen Charge Bonus amounts. I can only do so much, and this is a hobby! But any variance would be ~$10 per $100 max at the higher dollar amounts.)

BASIC VALUATION: Items to Product Cost

Considering last year’s 10th Anniversary Legendary Starships Bundle had 10 ships for 30,000 Zen ($300 USD, before Zen Charge Bonuses) full price and around 20,000 Zen ($200) on sale, seeing a 4-Legendary Bundle at 25,000 Zen ($250) full price and 18,750 Zen ($187.50) on sale made me scratch my head.

I have to look at the contents of this Bundle to figure if it’s worth it!?

Last year was easy! If you got it for anything less than the 30,000 Zen full price, making the average ship price under 3,000 Zen, you were saving money compared to buying 10 random C-Store non-Bundle ships.

This year, we have to dig deeper…a lot deeper. We only have 4 Legendary ships, now fully revealed (from the original official blog post, now updated with the below pic):

That’s a Vor’Cha, Ambassador, Excelsior, and B’Rel Bird of Prey.

We have to look at things like:

• T6-X Upgrade tokens
• Ultimate Tech Upgrade
• 2x T6 C-Store Coupons (essentially giving us a 6-ship bundle, just 2 are your choice of non-New Items, non-Legendary, non-Mudd’s Market ships)
• etc.

Can we get 18,750 Zen out of all the contents of this Bundle? I try to answer this with 2 sections.

• Easily Quantifiable – I can point to a random C-Store T6 ship or a specific item in the C-Store and go, “Yep, there ya go! There’s the value if you wanted to buy this separate of the Bundle!”
• Hard to Quantify – Based on what’s available and at what discounts and your method of obtaining certain items, a couple ballpark estimates are given for low-end and high-end costs (and assumed the highest traditional C-Store discounts)
• Bundle value totals will be presented after each section.

What value can we get? Let’s see!

2021 Legendary Bundle
EASILY QUANTIFIABLE
CONTENTS	Full Price	At 30% Off	NOTES:
4 Legendary Ships	12,000	8,400	* Assuming 3,000 Zen each, no Bundle discount
2 T6 Coupons	6,000	4,200
Cross-Faction Flying	2,000	1,000	* Put to 0 if you have a KDF Character at Level 65.
6 Ship Slots	1,500	1,050	* 3 sets of 2 Ship Slots @ 500 Zen each
6 Experimental Upgrades (“T6-X Tokens”)	4,000	2,800
11 Master Keys	1,250	875	* One 10-pack plus 1 single
11 R&D Promo Boxes	2,900	2,030	* 2 4-packs and 3 singles
Gre’Thor Targ Combat Companion	800	560
Boreth Robes (if C-Store)	550	385
Worf BOFF (if C-Store)	500	350
TOTAL:	31,500	21,650
HARD TO QUANTIFY
500 Lobi – Promo Boxes Only	12,600	8,820	* Takes 50 Promo Boxes, assuming no ship wins = 12 4-packs and 2 singles.
500 Lobi – Keys Only	14,125	9,888	* Assuming only 4 Lobi per box, takes 125 boxes = 125 Keys: 12 10-packs and 5 singles.
11 Ultimate Tech Upgrades – Old Galactic Red Alert	11,000	7,700	* Old Buyout was 1,000 Zen for 5 days.
11 Ultimate Tech Upgrades – Rough Normal Value	22,000	15,400	* New Buyout is 2,000 Zen for 10 days; other methods at reasonable prices are ~2,000 Zen each.
Title	0	0	* Rarely sold separately.
FINAL TOTAL, Low:	55,100	38,170
FINAL TOTAL, High:	67,625	46,938

We already hit a potential snag.

“EASILY QUANTIFIABLE” COMPARISON

At full C-Store pricing, before we even hit the Lobi and Ultimate Tech Upgrades (as those values aren’t exactly set in stone) we have a total Bundle value of 31,500 Zen, beating out the full 25,000 Zen price of the bundle for a 6,500 Zen discount (~$65 USD equivalent). If we compare this to the 18,750 Zen introductory price, we get a discount of 12,750 Zen (~$120).

However, some players wait for the C-Store to have a significant discount. I separately give a generous 30% discount to everything I list (except the Cross-Faction Flying, which is currently 50% off at 1,000 Zen). If you only look at regular C-Store sale pricing, this bundle only clocks in at 21,650 Zen, which means a 3,350 Zen ($33.50) overpay compared to full price. HOWEVER…however…compared to the 18,750 initial sale price we save 2,950 Zen ($29.50).

We haven’t hit all the contents, though.

“HARD TO QUANTIFY” COMPARISON

What I did in the “Hard to Quantify” section was give a couple estimates at the lowest end of what you’d expect to pay for equivalent amounts of both Lobi and Ultimate Tech Upgrades (as there are various methods and values when those items are available and how you prefer to get said items). The top-right total is the absolute lowest value of everything, while the bottom-left is the absolute highest value of everything.

At the lowest end, meaning the method that yields the highest Lobi for the lowest cost, the cheapest Ultimate Tech Upgrades could be valued at, and giving a generous 30% off those amounts, we arrive at a bundle total price at the low end of 38,170 Zen ($381.70). This is a 13,170 Zen ($13.170) discount from the full price and 19,420 ($194.20) off the introductory price.

If you do your pricing at the highest end (most inefficient Lobi gathering, and highest average value of an Ultimate Tech Upgrade), we get a Bundle total value of 67,625 Zen ($676.25). That’s a 42,625 Zen ($426.25) discount off the full price and 48,875 Zen ($488.75) discount off the introductory price.

To give the most benefit of the doubt to the player that they’d only buy at the highest discounts while also giving Cryptic/Perfect World Entertainment the benefit of the doubt that players will buy outside of sales periods, I’ll use the “FINAL TOTAL: High” full undiscounted value of 67,625 Zen and the 30% discount lowest end price of 38,170 for my comparisons later.

“THE FLUFF”

Everyone has various definitions of what “fluff,” or extra contents to make the pack more appealing, is.

• Some think that any Bundle offering more than just the ships (and perhaps Ship Slots) is fluff.
• Others would say anything that’s not useful at all (titles, costumes) is fluff.

My view/bias is this:

• Fluff is defined for this post as anything that would have potentially 0 play value based on if the content(s) change combat in some way for the average player.

So what is the actual fluff of this Bundle, I feel? Well…

• Title (Yay, I made it to 11!…now what?)
• Costume (no practical use for it, though I admit it’ll probably look quite nice)
• Worf Bridge Officer (Sorry, Worf! Unless they give him fantastic Space or Ground bonuses, he won’t be replacing Jem’Hadar Vanguards or Nausicans or other useful BOFFs. It’ll be nice to have him, but I doubt I’d go out of my way to grab him.)
• 6 Ship Slots (very rarely will a player want to hold on to every ship in active reserve)
• Before it was announced we’d get 500 Lobi in addition to the other items in this Bundle, I’d have said the Master Keys and Promo Boxes. That would have amounted to a maximum of 165 Lobi (assuming 5 Lobi per Lockbox average). If there’s a Lobi store sale, that would be enough for one piece of Space gear (console or weapon). However, with the 500 Lobi now included, that raises the maximum to 665, meaning you don’t need to wait for a Lobi sale to grab a 3-piece space set (like the Ba’ul Linked Sentry set), so I won’t be counting this as fluff.

So let’s re-run the numbers with the unhelpful fluff out of the way:

2021 Legendary Bundle – No Useless Items
EASILY QUANTIFIABLE
CONTENTS	Full Price	At 30% Off
4 Legendary Ships	12,000	8,400
2 T6 Coupons	6,000	4,200
Cross-Faction Flying	2,000	1,000
6 Ship Slots	0	0
6 Experimental Upgrades (“T6-X Tokens”)	4,000	2,800
11 Master Keys	1,250	875
11 R&D Promo Boxes	2,900	2,030
Gre’Thor Targ Combat Companion	800	560
Boreth Robes (if C-Store)	0	0
Worf BOFF (if C-Store)	0	0
TOTAL:	28,950	19,865
HARD TO QUANTIFY
500 Lobi – Promo Boxes Only	12,600	8,820
500 Lobi – Keys Only – minimum 4 per box	14,125	9,888
11 Ultimate Tech Upgrades – Old Galactic Red Alert	11,000	7,700
11 Ultimate Tech Upgrades – Rough Normal Value	22,000	15,400
Title	0	0
FINAL TOTAL, Low Values of Each Item:	52,550	36,385
FINAL TOTAL, High Values of Each Item:	65,075	45,153

Uh oh…we end up with a possible valuation that won’t go over well.

If we assume a full price of 25,000 Zen and that players buy only at the steepest C-Store discounts, we have a 25,000 Zen Bundle selling at 19,865 Zen ($198.65) before looking at Ultimate Tech Upgrades and Lobi. Ouch! Full price looks a bit better at 28,950 versus a 25,000 Zen full price. However, you’re still saving money at 18,750 introductory pricing, losing nearly $20 (USD) of value.

We still come out well ahead of both the full price and introductory price once we include Lobi and Ultimate Tech Upgrades. At a full price of 25,000 Zen, setting everything at full price and the highest possible individual prices still gives us nearly a $400 savings.

ADJUST TO PERSONAL TASTES

From here, you can take this and basically adjust your expected return based on what you value.

• Let’s say you have more than enough T6-X tokens (you had a TON of Ultra Rare Phoenix Prize Tokens and traded them all in on T6-X tokens during one of the newer style Phoenix Box event). That takes 2,800 – 4,000 Zen out of your valuation as you’d not have picked up more tokens for these ships.

• Let’s say you have the Grethor Targ pet. Take another 560 – 800 Zen off your valuation.
• You have Cross-Faction Flying. Take 1,000 – 2,000 Zen off. (This is basically for those who play Federation-only characters and may want this Bundle to try KDF ships alongside the Federation ships.)

As you can see, a lot this year can hinge on what you already have or even want.

Sample Personal Valuations

Let me take 3 scenarios that I feel most will fall into:

• SCENARIO 1: You only value the Legendary ships. That’s 12,000 Zen ($120) of value at most and 8,400 Zen ($84) at 30% Off for 18,750 Zen. You’re overpaying by between 6,750 Zen ($67.50) and 10,350 Zen ($103.50).
• SCENARIO 2: You see 6 ships (4 Legendaries, 2 T6 Coupons), 11 Ultimate Tech Upgrades but only valued at ~$10 each, and will use the T6-X Tokens. This is 18,000 + 11,000 + 4,000 = 33,000 Zen, a savings off both the full price (by 8,000 Zen [$80]) and the introductory price (by 14,250 [$142.50]). If we go to 30% Off pricing, we get 12,600 for the ships + 2,800 for the T6-Xs + (unrealistically) 7,700 for the Ultimate Tech Upgrades for a grand total of 23,100 Zen, overpaying compared to the Bundle’s full price by 1,900 Zen ($19) but saving compared to the introductory pricing by 4,350 Zen ($43.50).
• SCENARIO 3: You only want 1-2 ships and want nothing else. I don’t need to do the math, but I’ll do some quickly. That’s 5,400 – 6,000 Zen you’re willing to pay compared to even the 18,750 introductory price. Don’t do it. You’re spending way more than they’re worth.

“HOLD ON, HOLD ON!!! These are LEGENDARY! Why are you valuing them at $30 each?”

I think that’s a fair question, and it requires a subjective answer: These aren’t otherwise Lockbox, Lobi, or Promo ships.

Aside from last year’s big Legendary Bundle, we had 3 smaller Legendary bundles released:

• Legendary Romulan Captain Bundle (T’Liss): 12,000 Zen base (50% off initially)
  • T’Liss had a Promo version [Temporal T’Liss] and comes with the beginning T’Liss T1 skin plus the Promo’s console and trait, so to me it counts as a Promo-based Legendary and not C-Store [Malem].
• Legendary Discovery Captain Bundle (Walker): 12,000 Zen base (50% off initially)
• Mirror Universe Bundle (Galaxy Dreadnought): 6,000 Zen base (25% off initially)

This, to me, set up the expectation that Legendary versions of previously Lockbox/Lobi/Promo ships would be around 6,000 Zen, while Legendary versions of previously C-Store ships would go for around 3,000 – 4,000 Zen.

I went with 3,000 Zen…and in a future article you’ll see why that was wrong (and why I disagree to an extent with Cryptic and/or PWE’s management). However, I’m going with customer perception that a ship is generally only worth 3,000 Zen if it’s only based on a previous C-Store version. (I also disagree with player perception somewhat. I’m a complicated person!)

PERCENT DISCOUNTS WITH FULL CONTENTS

Okay, so let’s get to the final rundown of everything I can control for: that the Bundle has all these items that we can put value on, that we’ll assume you’ll use everything in some way, and we’ll break it down by both Easily Quantifiable values and then add in the items that are harder to put a specific value on, using the lowest low value.

This is just a standard “difference / price = percent” calculation.

EASILY QUANTIFIABLE VS. FULL AND INTRODUCTORY PRICE

• Against Full Bundle Price:
  • Full C-Store Pricing: 3,950/28,950 = 13.64% Discount
  • 30% Off Pricing: 3,350/21,650 = 15.47% Overpay
• Against Introductory Price:
  • Full C-Store Pricing: 10,200/28,950 = 35.23% Discount
  • 30% Off Pricing: 2,900/21,650 = 13.39% Discount

FULL BUNDLE CONTENTS VS. FULL AND INTRODUCTORY PRICING

• Lowest Low against Full Price: 13,170/38,170 = 34.5% Discount
• Lowest Low against 25% Off Price: 19,420/38,170 = 50.88% Discount
• Highest High against Full Price: 42,625/67,625 = 63.03% Discount
• Highest High against 25% Off Price: 48,875/67,625 = 72.27% Discount

As you can see here, depending on what you count and what values you put to the not-so-easy-to-value bunch, you could wind up with anything from a 15.47% overpayment to a 72.27% Discount.

Personally, I’d look at the Lowest Low values for the best full bundle comparisons. We then see discounts of anywhere from 34.5% to 50.88% depending on the price point at which you buy this Bundle.

YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY…AND THAT’S A SHAME

As I talked about above, some items in here are flat-out fluff (extras that most likely won’t affect combat performance), while other contents are things I’ve heard other players say is fluff to them.

With the release of the Legendary Ambassador’s stats, I’ll have to cave and say I feel a whole ship here is fluff. It’s still a Temporal ship with minimal strictly superior changes (+.5 turn rate, an Ensign Tactical seat becomes an Ensign Universal, and the Lieutenant Commander Universal seat adds Command specialization, and a +1 Science Console slot that’s already on the Fleet Yamaguchi). So you may want to take 3,000 Zen off the valuation for that.

• NOTE: The above paragraph was written before the stats for the Ambassador changed. It became an Intel ship with Temporal Operative being secondary, and the Hull Modifier was set to that of the Fleet Yamaguchi’s. This makes it different enough you might want to consider it a separate ship, but if you just want the console and traits it’s still effectively a 2nd Vor’cha and could be counted as fluff.

You may not need more T6-X upgrades. That takes some value away.

The Excelsior doesn’t excite you? Take another 3,000 off.

This bundle, much like the Mudd’s Choice Packs, really comes down to these questions:

• What do you really want out of this Bundle?
• What do you value those things at (be realistic; you won’t get Ultimate Tech Upgrades for $5 each unless you’re close to buying out multiple Galactic Red Alert Events over the span of a few years)?
• How does that compare to the pricing that’s available when you want to buy it?

All I can do this time is put a value on the contents and tell you what it all comes out to. From that perspective, this Bundle isn’t overpriced at all. It’s probably underpriced.

If all you wanted were the ships, 6 ships is 18,000 Zen at full price. If you wanted all 6, I’d suggest “sucking it up”, get the extra 750 Zen, and enjoy the “Build a Build” Bundle.

• 6 ships to choose from: 4 Legendaries and 2 of your choice (non-New Item, non-Mudd’s Market, non-Legendary)
  • If you get this Bundle, don’t buy the Narendra with a T6 Coupon. Please, don’t. As much as I don’t like this Ambassador, if you don’t have the Narendra already it’s still mostly strictly better (just not by enough to warrant being Legendary, IMO) and already has your History Will Remember tank-themed trait.
• Over 600 Lobi gets you 3 Space Gear items (and maybe enough left for a single Ground Gear item).
• 11 Ultimate Tech Upgrades will upgrade almost every hard-to-upgrade item to Mk XV Epic: 7-8 weapons + 3-4 of Deflector/Impulse Engine/Core/Shield.

If you want only the ships and only a selection of the ships, this will be overpriced to you no matter how it’s justified. And that’s fine!

“GASP!“, I hear.

No, I mean, let’s be real here. Cryptic is asking nearly $200 for a Bundle that has 4-6 fewer ships in it than last year (depending on how you count the T6 Coupons, but we’ll have to count the Ambassador as a ship since it has different stats and BOFF seating). That’s what most players base the value on: number of ships, with anything else being considered extra/fluff. Even if it’s roughly at par (18,000 Zen in ships for just under 19,000 Zen), not everyone wants a Cruiser (3 ships in this Bundle) or find one or more of the Legendaries underwhelming (Ambassador for sure, though I believe the Excelsior also falls into this category for some).

By all means, have your opinion and value based on what you want and what you are willing to spend on it.

Don’t call it overpriced due to objective value. I think I’ve shown that, aside from pricing the fixed-price items at a 30% discount and comparing that total to the full price of the Bundle, there’s plenty of discount to be had. Stuff in this Bundle has value, and we can’t completely ignore that value.

You can call it overpriced due to subjective value. Some stuff truly is fluff with no effect on gameplay. Other things may be fluff to you like the T6-X tokens if you’d been lucky enough with Phoenix Prize Tokens. You may not like some ships because they’re not much better than their C-Store and/or Fleet counterparts. You may just not like Cruisers, like I said above! So you may be looking at 1-2 ships you like, which makes this overpriced for what you’re interested in grabbing.

BLOG UPDATE SPEED GOING FORWARD

I need to address how often I’m posting to the blog. I’m lucky if I can get one time a week to post, perhaps once per 2 weeks. This was too important to not post before the Bundle hit the C-Store.

If I have a “personal hot take” post on this Bundle, I’ll post it probably sometime next week. There is something that happened this weekend I want to address, so you may see a post this week and a “personal hot take” next week. There’s no rush as this 18,750 introductory pricing is available for 2 weeks. I’m sure I’ll have the post(s) I want to make mostly ready by then.

Sorry for the lack of pictures and links, but I hope the information is helpful. If so, this post has done its job.

Until next time, enjoy STO, I hope your Klingon Recruits are going well, and if you get this Bundle I honestly hope you enjoy it. 🙂