Farming Calculator Showing Probability?

stohelit
149 posts Member
edited August 2017
Do any of the farming calculators show the probability that you will get the character in the time calculated? Even better, one that lets you set the probability threshold, or shows you the chances of farming within a given number of days?

e.g. the calculator at crouchingrancor ( @RancorRider )
http://apps.crouchingrancor.com/Calculators/CantinaPlanner
gives 37 days with no refreshes to get my 4 star Old Ben up to 7 star. But obviously that is not guaranteed, so what are the chances that I will actually get to 7 star in that many trials?

That is 763 rolls, we need 250 (or more) shards, with probability 1/3 (not indicated on calculator, but seems to be consensus from forums)

Plugging that into a binomial distribution calculator, such as this one at Vassarstats.net http://vassarstats.net/binomialX.html
Come up with 64% probability of getting to 7*.

So, about a 2/3 chance of getting there in that time. How they picked that cutoff probability or number of rolls is not specified.
--
The calculator at swgoh.life http://www.swgoh.life/farming.html
Gives 42 days, i.e. 866 rolls, assuming probability 1/4
Plugging that into aforesaid calculator shows that the binomial calculator was not put together carefully, because it gives an answer which is unlikely to be correct, when it should flag it as an error (or switch to whatever long-math/high precision routines are needed to give meaningful answers).
--
So, while they are interesting calculators, it would be nice to have one that gave you a feel for what your chances are of getting Old Ben to 7 stars in (just to chose an example at random) 7 days.

Replies

  • I recently got my RG from 50 shards to 100 and today I got my Snowtrooper from 20 shards to 100. Began farming their 7* when they announced the CLS event. So ~10 days ago? Anyways, from what I've noticed 3 refreshes + 60-80 energy(So about 420-440 energy) gave me 8-12 shards.
  • Hey, good that you mentioned me !

    I can't say for the other websites, but I collected 4374 attempts, with 1460 shards, for a 33,38% drop rate.
    This is covering multiple characters. Here's my drops character by character (Format : Attemps/Drop/Percent) :

    - Kylo Ren : 631/210/33%
    - Finn : 552/187/33.9%
    - JKA : 542/176/32%
    - TFP : 770/251/33%
    - Wedge : 763/297/39% (I guess I was lucky)
    - B2 : 1070/324/30%
    - Lando : 289/101/35%

    I collected data over 8 months, and I stopped because, that's boring and I consider my data sample significant.

    As for the calculator, it uses 33% ; and if it can't guarantee a perfect result, it never falls very far from the reality !

    What are your thoughts ?
  • Hey, good that you mentioned me !

    I can't say for the other websites, but I collected 4374 attempts, with 1460 shards, for a 33,38% drop rate.
    This is covering multiple characters. Here's my drops character by character (Format : Attemps/Drop/Percent) :

    - Kylo Ren : 631/210/33%
    - Finn : 552/187/33.9%
    - JKA : 542/176/32%
    - TFP : 770/251/33%
    - Wedge : 763/297/39% (I guess I was lucky)
    - B2 : 1070/324/30%
    - Lando : 289/101/35%

    I collected data over 8 months, and I stopped because, that's boring and I consider my data sample significant.

    As for the calculator, it uses 33% ; and if it can't guarantee a perfect result, it never falls very far from the reality !

    What are your thoughts ?
    I notice bad streaks and good streaks but always runs more or less 33% every time m, glad you collected data, it's quite amazing you tracked so much, thanks for the confirmation!!!!
  • stohelit
    149 posts Member
    edited August 2017
    Hey, good that you mentioned me !

    I can't say for the other websites, but I collected 4374 attempts, with 1460 shards, for a 33,38% drop rate.

    As for the calculator, it uses 33% ; and if it can't guarantee a perfect result, it never falls very far from the reality !

    What are your thoughts ?

    I guess my question/suggestion wasn't clear. I am not talking about the probability of getting a shard when I do a cantina node. The accepted probability for that seems to be 1/3 (or approximately 33%, as your results suggest).

    I am talking about, if I farm the cantina for however many days, there is no guarantee that I will have any particular number of shards. (I could farm for 37 days and have no shards, or I could have 763 shards - a shard every single time I play. Neither result are likely, but they are both possible if the game is fair.)

    So the calculator gives me an answer, like 37 days. What can I expect to happen if I actually do the farm? At the end of the days, will I have 250 shards? (Answer: not necessarily). If you had 10,000 people farm that node for that many days, how many of them would have that many shards? (According to my calculations: some number close to 10,000 x .64, i.e. 6,400) So about 2/3 of people would have their character to 7 stars, but 1/3 wouldn't.

    A hot topic lately has been "Will I get Old Ben to 7 stars before the Commander Luke event ends." If the calculator estimates so many days, how likely is it that I might farm away and still be disappointed due to "bad luck," (or "bad RNG," or whatever name you want to give to things not working the way you would like)?

    For some, it is a bother to have to go find a binomial probability calculator, plug the numbers in, and get the result. Many others may not think to ask the question, or know how to find the answer. But I suspect that even if they are a bit hazy on their probability, they have some idea what it means to say that 1/3 of the time, people who try this farm still won't have what they want after their investment. [Edit: Obviously many of those will be close, but when there is a hard deadline like this, close won't be good enough.]

    I think it would be a handy and possibly educational feature to add to such a calculator.

    "The lottery is mostly a tax on people who don’t know math." -- Bill Nye

    Actually doing the calculation can result in some numbers of large magnitude as intermediate results, so while it is just basic arithmetic, one may need to use some care to avoid overflow/underflow, use alternative ways to calculate approximate results, or just pre-calculate the basic results for common cases, and use a lookup table.
  • @RancorRider I should have said - I like the calculator, it is handy, and I have recommended it to others. I appreciate the work you put in on it. This is just and additional idea which could make it even better.
    (It might be that the probability I am talking about is always the same for the number of days you figure, so adding the statistic could even be a simple static thing you could add to the text of the page. One would have to check to be sure.)

    Thanks.
  • The calculator in crouchingrancor is very good. I've used it to calculate a couple of toons, and so far it's been quite precise. So thanks to the creator. :)
  • stohelit wrote: »
    @RancorRider I should have said - I like the calculator, it is handy, and I have recommended it to others. I appreciate the work you put in on it. This is just and additional idea which could make it even better.
    (It might be that the probability I am talking about is always the same for the number of days you figure, so adding the statistic could even be a simple static thing you could add to the text of the page. One would have to check to be sure.)

    Thanks.

    That's an interesting idea !

    But to be honest, I'm working on another feature and despite a better accuracy, I don't think it changes the main objective of this planner : it's not designed to be give a perfect number of days, it's more to know in a given time how many refreshes will be needed.

    Commander Luke Skywalker's event is the best example. I chose how many refreshes/day I should buy on cantina energy to reach my personal objective.
    By the nature of randomness, I hope every user understand that it's not perfectly accurate ; even if they probably curse me when a full cantina refresh produces one shard ! But in the long run, over a full character, the probability is steady, and the results of the planner are close enough to the reality...

    As for now, I have territorial battles in my sight...
  • We missed a bit of an opportunity here if we'd though about this last week. What the OP wants is not just the average number of shards, but a feel for the spread of possible outcomes based on RNG. A bit like all characters hit for a given average damage, but some have higher variance than others (e.g. SThan).

    What we could have done is collate the data from all the people doing hardcore farming and produce a bell curve of attempts/shard showing how tight or loosely it is centered around 33% over given numbers of refreshes. This would give a feel for how unlucky you could get with RNG, and also how many attempts is usually takes for results to converge on 33%.

    A huge data sample, like the heavy farming of Old Ben and Luke, would easily give enough data for that. Bit late now though.
  • Peer
    299 posts Member
    stohelit wrote: »
    I am talking about, if I farm the cantina for however many days, there is no guarantee that I will have any particular number of shards. (I could farm for 37 days and have no shards, or I could have 763 shards - a shard every single time I play. Neither result are likely, but they are both possible if the game is fair.)

    From my experience the standard deviation for shard drops results in a range of 30-44 days for your example with a probability of >70% for an outcome between 33 and 41 days. I did not calculate this properly because it is not worth the time. I just tracked total duration for a couple of toons I farmed.
Sign In or Register to comment.