The biggest benefit of Premium is the way it speeds up your progress and increases your Credit income. Caliber’s Premium doesn’t give you in-game advantages. A user with Premium won’t have any kind of an advantage over other players during battle, but they’ll receive considerably greater rewards after it’s over. This approach to monetization in free-to-play games is called soft monetization. This way, you can always play Caliber for free and observe some progress — in your upgrades, income, unlocking new operators. This progress can be sped up for a small payment — money can be spent on in-game currency, materials or Premium. Premium is basically Caliber’s subscription equivalent.
Online games employing soft monetization schemes work in a very similar way to other subscription services such as video streaming ones. Many of them provide their basic functionality to everyone while including the option to add some extra features and variety by paying. Streaming services give access to some of their content for free, require a small monthly fee for access to the rest of the content and additional features and sell some particularly big or popular releases separately.
A player with Premium gains six constantly active benefits:
In addition, once per day, when logging in, the user will receive one Material Container.
Caliber has four types of XP, all of which have different functions: Account XP, Operator XP, Free XP and Battle Pass XP.
Account XP is awarded at the end of any battle, in any mode. It’s a fixed amount which only depends on the battle’s results. Leveling your account up will open up new features for you: materials as loot, stages of upgrades for operators and their skills, access to new modes and to the Battle Pass. Account XP gain can’t be sped up via Premium or some other way.
Battle XP is XP for the operator the player selected for a particular battle. Battle XP, like Account XP, is awarded at the end of any battle, in any mode. By gaining XP, the operator will increase their efficiency and unlock new skills. Battle XP gain can be sped up with Premium or consumable boosters.
Free XP is extra XP the player receives at the end of a battle. It is accumulated separately on the player’s account. Operators of Master and Elite level can earn Free XP, as can Premium players. It can be used to upgrade any operator.
Battle Pass XP is a separate type of XP that comes into play while a Battle Pass event is active. When the Battle Pass progress bar crosses certain thresholds, the player receives unique rewards. With Premium, Battle Pass XP gain is sped up.
And even that’s not all. Premium also provides a boost to the XP gain of your teammates, which is spread around based on the number of Premium players in the team. This way you can earn up to 50% extra XP per battle. That said, it’s a specific mechanic within Premium, we’ll review it in more detail slightly later.
To better illustrate the benefits of Premium, let’s use an example of one of the most lucrative modes in the game — Special Operation. Let’s say it’s a battle on the Caravanserai map.
Special Operation is the most lucrative mode not only because it has the highest potential reward for victory. Caliber’s statistics show that, on average, players earn the most Credits here. This isn’t entirely obvious, because players win in Special Operations thrice as rarely as they do in Clearing — 23% win rate vs 62%, respectively. However, on average, the income in those two modes looks like this.
Average player income in Clearing:
- no Premium — 246 Credits;
- Premium — 384 Credits.
Average player income in Special Operation:
- no Premium — 506 Credits;
- Premium — 893 Credits.
Let’s imagine that Nikita Filatov, Caliber’s lead game designer, is playing Voron, without Premium. Nikita’s team wins the match and he receives the following rewards: 1000 Operator XP and 1000 Credits. If it’s Battle Pass season in Caliber and Nikita played a “perfect” game and completed several tasks at once, his rewards might look like this:
Now let’s consider what would happen if Nikita played the same perfect match while having Premium. Victory will give Nikita twice as much Operator XP, extra Battle Pass XP, a new currency — Free XP, as well as 50% more Credits for each Task. The numbers will look like this:
As you can see, thanks to Premium, Nikita earned 3100 Credits more and twice as much XP. Moreover, he sped up his Battle Pass progress and gained some Free XP. Oh, and as soon as Nikita logged into the game, he received a container with materials of every type.
Each daily container for Premium owners has the following material drop rate:
Let’s say Nikita plays regularly and loves difficult tasks. On average, he logs into Caliber five times per week. Each time he does, he completes the Daily Task and always completes the Weekly Task. Each week he wins 7 Special Operation matches. If we look at just those activities, without taking losses and other modes into account, in a week of playing with Premium Nikita will earn:
Playing like that, just the Credits earned will total a whooping 39 300 — and that’s without taking losses and other modes into account.
Another important benefit of Premium is that it provides a good reason to cooperate with other players. Just one Premium owner in the team is enough to speed up the progress for everyone else in it. The thing is, each such player adds 10% to the Battle XP earned by his teammates, and four Premium players will give 50% extra Battle XP to every teammate at the end of the match.
Thanks to that mechanic a Premium owner can have an easier time finding teammates.
Let’s use an example. Nikita plays alone, with a Premium account. His friends couldn’t support him today and he doesn’t know we have a place for players to cooperate. He finds a Special Operation match, but all his teammates lack Premium.
In this case, the operators’ XP will have the following spread:
If the team had another operator with Premium — for example, playing as Sputnik, — the Premium-less players would get +20% XP, and the Premiums — +10%.
- Voron — 2100 XP;
- Sputnik — 2100 XP;
- Bard — 1200 XP;
- Komar — 1200 XP.
Likewise, three Premium players give +30% XP to the non-Premium player and +20% XP to each other.
Another example. It’s weekend, and Nikita made plans with Andrey, Caliber’s main game designer and Lisa, junior game designer, to spend the whole evening playing together. All three have Premium, and they found another Premium player in a Facebook discussion. Together they go farm in Special Operation, win a lot and each victory gives them double XP from Premium plus an extra 50% XP on top of that for a “Premium team”. The reward totals would look like that:
If you aren’t planning to constantly play with Premium, you can buy it from time to time,, for short periods — for a day, a week or a month.
This is efficient for a variety of reasons. For example, when you have a period when you want to play less but maintain your income. Or the other way around, you’re planning to play a lot to save up for the purchase of an operator who’s going to be sold for Credits instead of Coins on Wednesday. In these cases it can be useful to purchase a short Premium sub — for one or several days, up to a week.
During a Battle Pass event it’s a good idea to purchase Premium for, say, a month. This will speed your progress up by a third, give you all the other Premium benefits and be thrice as cheap as purchasing each day separately.
Each of the Premium purchase options can be found in the Store at the website or in the game in the respective section. And in this picture, we’ll show you the benefits of the Premium periods most popular among players.
And, of course, we’re not forcing you to buy Premium. The main game is built in such a way that account and operator progress is constant. It’s just that those who want to speed it up can do that by getting a subscription-like service called Premium.
