Chance to Catch Up: what 5* RNG really means for players

MarvelMan

Ive been decently lucky with 5* pulls, but they are mostly spread out over the current colors so no strengths (aside from 4 into OML red), but horribly unlucky with 4* pulls. Ive opened about 70 LTs, and ZERO have been icegollum and I missed his release to being on a break. Between that bad luck, and the way my 5*s are spread I feel like Im falling behind....and losing motivation. How is any of this good for the game?

Unknown

XandorXerxes wrote:

There was already a big luck element involved in the 3 and 4* transition, it's just that the people I usually see on here (long-timers) largely missed it after their initial climbs. This new 5* tier has put the older players in the same spots as the newer players trying to hit the next tier level - good luck getting lucky enough to get the covers you want/need. No surprise, the older players like the new reward structure about as much as the newer players do - not at all. To make matters worse, the 5* tokens are more scarce and some take dedication and effort.

This isn't to say that this isn't a bad thing - it's to say that it's not really anything new.

I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that riding at the front of the character-release wave has been a bit easier than climbing up the ranks when the environment is already dominated by 4*s (not that it was always as easy as people sometimes seem to think - there was a time when almost the only way to get a 4* was to take the top placement reward in an event).

But this is different. It might be hard to transition to 4* these days, but that's not the problem here. Come on now, I'm not a baby boomer complaining about how kids these days move back in with their parents after college when I had to kill Hitler. I know what it's like. I know that with a solid 3* roster, you can hit the 1K pvp progression at least about half the time, a reward that you can see ahead of time and choose when you want to commit to. 4* DDQ isn't too helpful for people starting the 4* transition, but with how many fights I've had to do with my own under-covered and under-leveled 4*s, I know that it's pretty often doable with persistence. Not to mention the new PvE rewards structure now. None of these are necessarily easy things to do, I agree. But even if it's hard, there's at least a lot of hard things to do and many of those hard things guarantee a particular result.

As I said, all I really want for 5* covers is all the stuff that's already in place for 1*-4*s. Hard and rare are fine, but ditch at least some of the random.

Unknown

aesthetocyst wrote:

Malenkov wrote:

Randomness has always determined a lot of micro-level success or failure in MPQ....

Wow, Malenkov! Thanks for that write-up. The calculator is hilarious.

Yep, MPQ has always been RNG, but the stakes ratchet up with each tier ... and the iterations (chances to catch up!) become fewer and farther between.

Progress is so fast in 1* and 2* land, it's hard to even recognize bad luck in terms of acquiring covers. Another one will come along in minutes or hours, days at worst.

I recall luck giving players boosts in 3* land, and surprise hands up in 4* land. Weeks and months, respectively, at worst to 'recover'.

But on 5s ... with only 1 means of acquisition ... and odds of succeeding being 1 in 10 of the games hardest to acquire tokens .... no fixed rewards anywhere ... yeah, if you have a cold streak, you're stuck. And it could be a long time. A time measured in ..... fiscal quarters? Ha.

And yes, the regression to the mean .... the only thing less unlikely than a spectacularly sustained streak of bad or good luck ... is a similarly spectacular, sustained streak of the opposite luck by the same player.

With enough iterations it will even out. But this is a mobile game, not a life endeavor.

Well said. I'll add that even if reversion to the mean can take a long, long time to even out the noise, it might not even happen at all if you can't win old 5*s with LTs going forward. With Championing now a major source of LTs and CPs, reversion will also be significantly **** after the one-off champion rewards of extant max 3 and 4* champions are expended.

simonsez

aesthetocyst wrote:

And yes, the regression to the mean .... the only thing less unlikely than a spectacularly sustained streak of bad or good luck ... is a similarly spectacular, sustained streak of the opposite luck by the same player.

With enough iterations it will even out. But this is a mobile game, not a life endeavor.

If pulls are random, regression to the mean isn't because your luck has flipped. It's because you're always most likely to draw 10% in your next set of pulls. It doesn't matter if your first 100 tokens yielded 5% 5*s or 15% 5*s. Your expected hit rate is still 10% going forward. A player who hit 15% 5*s on his first 100 tokens is just as likely to get 15% on his next 100 as someone who got 5% 5*s on his first 100. It doesn't "even out.", it asymptotes to 10%.