Drop rate peculiarities
My son and I have been playing this game just under a year now. We have had a blast playing, mostly building the same teams.
When the KoR team was released we both started exhausting each KoR node daily, buying the energy refreshes every day since they have been released. (Technically I worked 1 of the 2 cantina nodes until 7*, he spread his between the 2 nodes there in a balanced build.)
He recently took a break for 3 weeks to rock climb in California. He played sparingly, even had about a week of zero access at all. When he returned recently, I disheartened and bewildered to find that (without spending money) he was almost 300 shards ahead of me AND he had several already 7* so he was significantly ahead of me.
How on earth can the drop rates be so different over a period of a couple months? If it were truly random then the law of averages should have kicked in - hell I could understand a 100 shard swing - but 300 AND he stopped because several were at 7* way before me?
Are others seeing this?
I'm not pushing the buttons different than him - is there a trick to this game that I am just not doing?
When the KoR team was released we both started exhausting each KoR node daily, buying the energy refreshes every day since they have been released. (Technically I worked 1 of the 2 cantina nodes until 7*, he spread his between the 2 nodes there in a balanced build.)
He recently took a break for 3 weeks to rock climb in California. He played sparingly, even had about a week of zero access at all. When he returned recently, I disheartened and bewildered to find that (without spending money) he was almost 300 shards ahead of me AND he had several already 7* so he was significantly ahead of me.
How on earth can the drop rates be so different over a period of a couple months? If it were truly random then the law of averages should have kicked in - hell I could understand a 100 shard swing - but 300 AND he stopped because several were at 7* way before me?
Are others seeing this?
I'm not pushing the buttons different than him - is there a trick to this game that I am just not doing?
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Replies
Even so it’s entirely possible with your sample size of two people of course. The law of averages isn’t really a law in the sense you’re using it — extremes will exist across the many people who play this game.
RNG is random and that could be one explanation. Another could be crystals spent for shards directly through shipments or the 600 crystal energy packs available in the store. Also, 3 of the KOTOR toons are also available through fleet battles (Jolee, Bastila and Z) - so is it possible that he was cross farming those characters there?
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*
Sir Winston Churchill
You flip a coin 9 times and it lands heads all 9 times.
What are the odds that the tenth flip will be heads? Law of average it must be really low right? Wrong. Its still 50 50. The coin doesnt have feelings it doesnt know its been heads 9 times in a row.
Rng resets each attempt. It doesnt care about any other attempt.
Strictly talking, the odds of having head is 50%
The odds of having the 10th head after 9 of them is 0.098%...
No. That’s the odds of having 10 heads in a row before you know any of the results. If you’ve already flipped the coin 9 times, the odds of the 10th flip being heads is 50%. It’s completely independent of the results of the first 9.
But for what it's worth, I don't believe the 30% is true for all characters. I do accept that it might be true across all characters averaged out but it's not 30% for each individual characters. So if you were farming different characters, I can easily see why you would have large differences in your results.
But as I say, not everyone agrees with me.
So if I roll all 8 attempts at once (in the case of current hard node limit), I can expect that roughly 1 of every 25 times I'll get 0 shards.
I can say that's happened to me many times, but probably not enough to be far apart from the odds.
There's a ton of anecdotal evidence from the community, but until/unless CG actually confirms a drop rate, we'll never know if they have other factors in play that affect drop rates.
That being said, I have one account that "feels" like it has better drop rates than another on character shards, but the other account gets significantly better drops from challenges (zetas / heists) and bronziums (higher percentage of full character drops). And while I stopped tracking it, it was pretty consistent. For example, I farmed KRU for both at the same time with the same number of refreshes. One finished up a week in front of the other for both character and ship. The other finished the character a week later and was still 50ish shards short on the ship?
If I were a social scientist whose business was understanding how to incentivize spend in a mobile game, it's entirely possible I would create a reinforcement bias (different drop rates, drop rate as a function of completion %, that sort of thing) in certain profiles to see if there was a correlation between the profile's reinforcement bias and the likelihood of that bias to produce spend.
No way. For my farm , mission has been giving great drop rates after I got the first six stars. I was ready to grind it out but I couldn’t believe how easy it’s been for me to get the final 100 shards, and especially the last 10 of those. This is both close to a revan return , and close to completed mission. Which both are the exact opposite of your claim. Was much harder in my initial farm of her. I’ve been farmin off of natural energy since the revan event. No refreshes.
What I am seeing is a significant shift in what should happen under random value generation, a simple 1 or 0. As someone pointed out, yes – in theory if you flip a coin it has a 50/50 shot of being one or the other – BUT if you flip it 10 times, the odds of it hitting 1 to 9 are very off. Hitting 1 to 9 every day for months while someone else hits 3 to 7 every day is not random, not at all.
More details:
Every day that the Old Republic people have been out my son and I have used the 8 energy attempts for each character (not for T3, I did not start him until Vao was 7* due to shared energy), every day (for me – not for him). Yes, there is a chance I missed a couple here and there along the way but for argument sake, lets say we both hit all 8 for all 4 characters (T3 was not hit until I got Vao up).
I am sitting at:
Vao – 7* (a couple weeks)
Bastila – 63/100
Jolee 18/100
Zaalbar – 0/85
T3 – 49/65
I also did most the attempts in the ship battles for Bastila. T3 was not started until Vao was 7*
My Sons team is:
Vao – 7*
Bastila – 7*
Jolee 7*
T3 – 7*
Zaalbar – 6* (unknown count)
He has been 7* for some time on many of them. He did 0 ship attempts for Bastilla…
So that is about 120 days, 8 attempts per day on 4 characters – doing the math it works out to:
I am seeing a 15% drop rate for the 4 characters
He had a minimum of 29%, he finished up a while back so the % is much higher.
Once again – how is his drop rate 2x mine over a significant time period? His appears to be in the right % range over time.
A) RNG
B.) The drop rate is somewhere around 33% because people who mathed it out said so and it must be fact
C) Don't dispute that with your experiences because See Above
Again, there are tons of people playing this game. Your son has had a normal drop rate. If your numbers are correct you have had a very unlucky drop rate. But across the large number of people playing this game, there are going to be some with exceptionally lucky or unlucky streaks. It’s like winning the powerball. The odds are extremely low, but with enough people buying tickets over enough draws, eventually it’s going to happen.
I'm interested in reading what CG has said about drop rate of shards, but haven't been able to find this info. Care to share a link?
Currently:
Bastilla 7*
Z-71/100
Jolee- 55/100
Mission- 34/100
T3- 0/100
Most days I spend 200-300 crystals on cantina refreshes. Do you spend any crystals on refreshes? How about your son?
Not surprised it's hard to find it was a live QA with with a member of CG staff, all I remember is she was female. But I do remember the main bullet points. Gotta go back to work now I'll come back later with a link.
Yup pretty much, she went into a little more detail but that is the main takeaway of it.
*It's. *Their.
I wouldn't normally bother with such pedantry but you are the one who got snippy about someone else's apparent "lack of education".
Good catch, I blame it on auto correct.;)