The Vault! Some basic statistics

Elayne

One thing to note in all of this math...it appears to me that the order of the prizes displayed is always the same, minuts it removing prvious ones you got. Given that it may be very possible to time when to click for the cover you want or at least increase your odds.

Of course now that I say this, the next patch will randomize the prize order each token but I guess the extremly dedicated could watch the cycle through multiple times if they were dedicated enough.

Unknown

good job here's your degree

OnesOwnGrief

Elayne wrote:

One thing to note in all of this math...it appears to me that the order of the prizes displayed is always the same, minuts it removing prvious ones you got. Given that it may be very possible to time when to click for the cover you want or at least increase your odds.

Of course now that I say this, the next patch will randomize the prize order each token but I guess the extremly dedicated could watch the cycle through multiple times if they were dedicated enough.

Talked to Ice about this already and the cover is totally radom. Has nothing to do with when you click the icon. Just a moving graphic they wanted to add basically.

halirin

Pylgrim wrote:

DaveR4470 wrote:

Also -- and I'm not sure how you'd quantify this, exactly -- there's a DISadvantage to the vault that's not being mathematically expressed. Namely, if you have 30 regular tokens, there is a statistically non-zero chance that you'd pull, say, 17 4*s. For the vault, that's completely impossible.

On the other hand, having complete, visible information on the quantity and nature of prizes, allows you to stop when you got all you want. Under the old ways, if you got three 4*s at the beginning, you may feel tempted to keep opening tokens just to see if your luck keeps up. With the vault, you know that you must stop and save your tokens for the next vault.

Yes to both of you! If you get lucky early in the vault draws, then you need to recalculate the odds to decide whether or not to keep pulling from that vault or wait a couple weeks for a new vault. The general rule of thumb would be "if you get 4* in the first 100 draws, then stop drawing." But the numbers get a little tougher if there are more prizes that you want (like one or two 3*s that you still need) and you weight them differently (e.g., finishing off your cyclops would be nice, but you really want the 4*s).

It gets even more fun if you want to include a cost of waiting for the next vault (especially when you get to the point that you don't just need all 4* covers). At that point we'd be getting into some real economics! So maybe that doesn't belong in the "basic vault statistics" post. If anyone has specific ideas for scenarios, I'd be happy to play around with modeling the decision optimization problem.

Argon Flame

Just a quick thought for everyone out there thinking about chances at drawing covers you should look at it as "x" chances out of only 287* not 300, because if you hit one of the HP rewards you can always redraw

*On my current vault there are 12 x 250 HP rewards and 1 x 1000 HP

On a side note, I'm currently sitting at (1/8) 3-star return compared to (34/300) or (34/287) items
4x 2-stars
3x Health Packs
1x 3-star

AXP_isme

Could you model the whole thing in terms of ISO and HP?

Where a cover is one you want it has a replacement value of 1250 or 2500 HP (I'm going to assume that no one will pay HP for 2* covers) where it's one you don't want it's worth 1000, 500 or 250 ISO. N.b. This doesn't account for cases where you don't have any of the cover I'm which case it has a higher value but it's difficult to model what that incremental value would be (you could assume it would be the average HP cost of buying enough packs to expect to draw that particular colour but that's a big number - I think someone else should try and work this up). There's also missing element here of relative cover utility, you'd be hard pressed to argue that a MoStorm yellow and IF purple are 'worth' the same to anyone, but in the interests of simplification on I go... You could also substitute health packs for HP but I can't remember the number (is it 200?).

Then you're trying to optimise for drawing HP from a particular vault given:
1 - the contents
2 - the number of tacos you already have
3 - the HP cost of purchasing packs of tacos (this may need to incorporate your current HP stash)

If you wanted you could normalise to real money as well using a rate for the real value of ISO and HP (this is probably user specific given the utility of real money...).

It should be possible to build a calculator to tell you exactly what to do in any given set of circumstances. If you wanted to improve the modelling you'd need to add idiosyncratic elements (the personal value of health packs, a character preference weighting etc...) but I think it could work.

Thoughts?