Impossible 5*

carrion_pigeons

Arphaxad wrote:

Actually, the 10% chance of pulling a 5* is per a token. You can't look at 100 tokens and think you'll get 10 5*s. The odds are not over a large number, they are per/token, so they reset with each token. There is no cumulative effect.

Yes, if you have a 10% chance and you pull 100 tokens you should get close to 10% but there is nothing wrong with the RNG if you get 5% or even 0%.

If you roll a die you have a 50% chance of getting an even number. But roll the same die 100 times and you will probably not get 50 odd and 50 even numbers. Same with LTs. Just because you have a 10% per a token does not mean you will get 10% of a 100 tokens.

It's fairly easy to calculate the odds of getting screwed as badly as the OP (and they are miniscule) but ultimately he isn't complaining about his bad draws. He's complaining that the endgame design is forcing him behind his teammates due to something outside any of their control.

MPQ is a game designed by very cynical, manipulative people. We all pretty much knew that going in. It's possible to have fun playing the game, but you have to recognize at some point that there are games where top-end competition is exciting and enlightening and rewarding, and other games where top-end competition is a pyramid scheme. I think you have to be very careful playing a game like this to realize that every time you start to think of yourself as being "competitive" what you're really doing is being a sucker.

Arondite

Where do people get this weird notion that a 10% pullrate over a given number of pulls won't roughy equate to 10% of the number of pulls?

Saying "you can't expect 40/400 with a 10% pullrate" is really counterintuitive, and saying as much really shows you don't understand probability (but overheard a conversation with someone who did understand it, and took away a remedial/malformed opinion of what they said).

Let me elaborate. In 400 pulls at 10%, you should expect 40 pulls. Period.

You're getting confused about individual pulls not relying on previous pulls. Yes, if you go 0 for 360, it's totally irrational to think you'll go 40 for 40 to balance out the luck, since luck doesn't care about balance. But that's not relevant when considering the initial pull of 400; going 17 for 400 is VERY unlikely at 10% per pull. Saying its to be expected is really... Well. I'll stop now.

kalex716

Arondite wrote:

Yes, if you go 0 for 360, it's totally irrational to think you'll go 40 for 40 to balance out the luck, since luck doesn't care about balance. But that's not relevant when considering the initial pull of 400; going 17 for 400 is VERY unlikely at 10% per pull. Saying its to be expected is really... Well. I'll stop now.

What is said to be expected in the scenario of an outlier outside 2 standard deviations of the mean is...

They're going to come to the forums to **** about it. That should be expected. Someone that badly on the bottom side of the math deserves to vent.

These people do exist mind you, they are very rare.

Unknown

Hey boss. I gotta shill my calculator again.

I see that you have cashed in a total of 17 5* covers. If you've made 400 LT draws (assuming, for simplicity, that they were all at the 10% post-Phoenix rate), you've had worse luck than 99.998% of draw permutations.

A person who is as lucky as you were unlucky has pulled 67 covers out of those 400.

Meanwhile, as for I7 "not settling" for 30-40 covers out of 400 - that's absolutely right. 30 covers is only roughly bottom 5 percentile, so that's 1 out of every 20 people. This is a lot of people that are relative losers and a lot of people who are presumably relative winners. People who put the same amount of work in that are either 10 covers ahead or 10 covers behind. This is the mundane, but still unacceptably unjust failure of random distribution.

On the other hand, I7's bottom 0.002 percentile is one out of 50,000 (!). There might be 50,000 MPQ players, but what are the odds that I7 is at the bottom of that pile? Oh wait, we know the answer to that...

snlf25

I pulled my 4th OML yesterday. It was a yellow like the three that had come before it. Really makes me wish they were color agnostic because while I'm having great luck pulling 5*s, I'm only getting their healing/resurrection powers so they are all but useless in the matches and they are killing me in scaling. So the grass isn't always greener.

Vhailorx

snlf25 wrote:

I pulled my 4th OML yesterday. It was a yellow like the three that had come before it. Really makes me wish they were color agnostic because while I'm having great luck pulling 5*s, I'm only getting their healing/resurrection powers so they are all but useless in the matches and they are killing me in scaling. So the grass isn't always greener.

(1) best not to complain about getting 4 of the single best cover in the game right now in a thread made by someone who has had miserably bad luck

(2) If you have a few maxed 4*s, then just don't level your 5*s and you will have no scaling problems. If you are sitll in the 3* land, then you will just have to make do with relying on your 11k health tank that regens something like 1k each round. poor you

(3) People really have a hard time wrapping their heads around probability. Yes, if you get 400 pulls at a 10% pull rate, you should expect about 40 5*s. But if you DON'T get 40, it doesn't mean the system is broken. That's true even if one (very unfortunate) person like TC does extremely poorly. If a large portion of the community starts to notice that 5* drop seems lower than the stated amounts, THEN we can start with the conspiracy theories. Until then it's just small sample size noise.

(4) completely random rewards at the very top tier of play are a terrible idea. especially when 5* are available in all areas of normal play and so wildly outclass everyone else. It's even worse when extra random draws (i.e. LTs) are available at truly absurd real world money costs ($60 for a 40-pack with 1 LT; 25 CP that requires either $100 and a buyers club, or several hundred dollars each).

TxMoose

snlf25 wrote:

I pulled my 4th OML yesterday. It was a yellow like the three that had come before it. Really makes me wish they were color agnostic because while I'm having great luck pulling 5*s, I'm only getting their healing/resurrection powers so they are all but useless in the matches and they are killing me in scaling. So the grass isn't always greener.

I'd gladly trade you 2 reds for a yellow. my 2/-/4 OML could be so good, but he's not. yet. not even really usable. he survives it to the end of LR seeds...most of the time. in fact I'd trade you a bss green and ss red or black for another. 4 for 2 right now.

snlf25

Vhailorx wrote:

snlf25 wrote:

I pulled my 4th OML yesterday. It was a yellow like the three that had come before it. Really makes me wish they were color agnostic because while I'm having great luck pulling 5*s, I'm only getting their healing/resurrection powers so they are all but useless in the matches and they are killing me in scaling. So the grass isn't always greener.

(1) best not to complain about getting 4 of the single best cover in the game right now in a thread made by someone who has had miserably bad luck

(2) If you have a few maxed 4*s, then just don't level your 5*s and you will have no scaling problems. If you are sitll in the 3* land, then you will just have to make do with relying on your 11k health tank that regens something like 1k each round. poor you

(3) People really have a hard time wrapping their heads around probability. Yes, if you get 400 pulls at a 10% pull rate, you should expect about 40 5*s. But if you DON'T get 40, it doesn't mean the system is broken. That's true even if one (very unfortunate) person like TC does extremely poorly. If a large portion of the community starts to notice that 5* drop seems lower than the stated amounts, THEN we can start with the conspiracy theories. Until then it's just small sample size noise.

(4) completely random rewards at the very top tier of play are a terrible idea. especially when 5* are available in all areas of normal play and so wildly outclass everyone else. It's even worse when extra random draws (i.e. LTs) are available at truly absurd real world money costs ($60 for a 40-pack with 1 LT; 25 CP that requires either $100 and a buyers club, or several hundred dollars each).

1) Not complaining about my pulls so much as advocating for color agnosticism. I pull one more yellow and that's it. The next one goes in the trash. an OML, in the trash! If I could chose color I could distribute it however I wanted.

2) I'm still firmly in 3* land. Nothing I can do about the damage done to my scaling. Poor me tried using my 11k tank in PvP it was basically a giant flashing neon kill me sign. He is terrible on defense with only yellow covers and he doesn't help in PvE for the harder nodes nearly as much as you'd think either. So what I'm trying to do is bring to light other problems with the 5* program. Too many either can't get them or get punished for having them.

As far as the trades go, I wouldn't trade him for any other 5* because they don't help and it will be a good long time before they will. If I could trade 1 yellow for 3 Hulkbuster red covers and the iso to bring him to level 225, yes I'd do that gladly because it would have a tremendously positive impact on my game right in the here and now.

DC1972

I am in the same boat as IM7. I was at 14 5* pulls out of 400+ pulls. I did get 2 in the last 10 which still puts me at 16 for 400+ (possibly closing in on 500), and I don't think I'll ever catch up to even a 5% pull rate for 5*. If Malenkov's calcs are correct that puts us at the extreme bottom of the curve. Not sure how many total MPQ players there are but with two of us at the bottom already (and I am sure there are others with as much bad luck as us) are we bucking the statistical trend. We can't both be worse than 99.998% although I guess we are talking theory versus reality.

Carrion Pigeons hit the nail on the head though. I wouldn't care what percentage I got as long as it was the same or close to the same as everyone else and not based on luck.

TheXMan

I haven't gotten 400 tokens but have only gotten 1 out of my approximate last 50. I didn't used to keep track but after opening around 30 tokens in a row, champions happened for which none gave me a 5 star. I asked support for my legendary token history and they won't give it to me. I then asked if they could just give me the total number of legendary tokens and they won't give that either. I don't know why this is so secret unless they want to protect cheaters. Personally I would love to see a Web page or API where you give a gamer name and see their draw history. I assume they don't want people to try to figure out how much money some are spending.

Unknown

I was just thinking that I wish I had 400 attempts at Legendary tokens. I think I've maybe had 10-15 total...

Ludaa

TheXMan wrote:

I haven't gotten 400 tokens but have only gotten 1 out of my approximate last 50. I didn't used to keep track but after opening around 30 tokens in a row, champions happened for which none gave me a 5 star. I asked support for my legendary token history and they won't give it to me. I then asked if they could just give me the total number of legendary tokens and they won't give that either. I don't know why this is so secret unless they want to protect cheaters. Personally I would love to see a Web page or API where you give a gamer name and see their draw history. I assume they don't want people to try to figure out how much money some are spending.

This is now several seasons past, but I know of someone presenting CS a spreadsheet of their LT pulls to show they weren't getting 10%. They got a cover. They went on to be a bit whale-ish though, so maybe CS already had him listed as a top priority. Maybe that's why they don't give the info out

mr_X

In total agreement with the OP. The way 5*s have been implemented is completely broken. They have managed to disregard the rpg underpinnings of the game. Instead of dedicated play over a prolonged period of time being rewarded as was hinted at by ice x.

The whole thing has degenerated into a game breaking lottery. That is, unless you have the resources to mega whale yourself to 5* land.

philosorapt0r

A lot of FTP games where the top-tier characters are only available via lottery-pulls have some sort of 'backstop' to guarantee a minimum rate of acquisition (like, if you go 20 pulls without a rare, you are guaranteed to pull one with your next pull). Since being on the extreme low end of the distribution for 5*s from LTs is such a giant fun-killer for people, this game could really use one of those systems put into place, to ensure at least an X% rate (5? 10?). Even better would be to look at people's pull history and throw the unlucky few a bone, but I don't even know that they have the tech to do that. So, the sooner they implement something like that, the better. Luck will still advantage those who pull above-average, but everyone will be guaranteed to progress at a minimal rate over time).
(Just pulled my first 5* after ~30 tokens myself, but that *is* a small enough sample size that it's actually no big deal / I'm happy to keep my scaling down anyway.)

Unknown

DC1972 wrote:

I am in the same boat as IM7. I was at 14 5* pulls out of 400+ pulls. I did get 2 in the last 10 which still puts me at 16 for 400+ (possibly closing in on 500), and I don't think I'll ever catch up to even a 5% pull rate for 5*. If Malenkov's calcs are correct that puts us at the extreme bottom of the curve. Not sure how many total MPQ players there are but with two of us at the bottom already (and I am sure there are others with as much bad luck as us) are we bucking the statistical trend. We can't both be worse than 99.998% although I guess we are talking theory versus reality.

Carrion Pigeons hit the nail on the head though. I wouldn't care what percentage I got as long as it was the same or close to the same as everyone else and not based on luck.

Here's the link to the calculator: http://dropproxy.com/f/CBF

400 is large enough of a sample size that we would not expect to see substantial deviations from the mean very often. For extreme edge cases, even small shifts in successes is enough to shift the probabilities dramatically.

So 14 out of 400 is actually far less likely than 17 out of 400. In this case, my calculator just rounds it to the nearest 1/100th of a percentage, so it just shows 100% of people getting a better draw. I had to nix the rounding on my local version to get the real value: you're in the bottom 0.00000078 percentile. So that's a one in 1.3 million chance.

Congrats?

Unknown

Considering the money I have spent and Customer support/D3 care nothing whatsoever to help it just goes to show they don't care unless you have 10k+ money spent into this game. 2-3k is a lot to me but apparently not for decent customer support. If it weren't for the great people in my alliance I would have walked away from this game a long time ago. Although going through this horrible streak for 5* has already made me delete the app and it took my alliance members messaging me to get me to return. It's just extremely disappointing to not get supported when I have supported this game more then I probably should have (which is my fault) but I truly enjoyed this game. Unfortunately the fun is basically gone which sucks because I loved this game. Thanks everyone for the feedback both negative and positive.

Raffoon

This is still an issue that they need to address. Somehow they have yet to even acknowledge the issue after months.

Bowgentle

Raffoon wrote:

This is still an issue that they need to address. Somehow they have yet to even acknowledge the issue after months.

They're too busy counting the money from buyers clubs.

Lemminkäinen

Raffoon wrote:

This is still an issue that they need to address. Somehow they have yet to even acknowledge the issue after months.

They really can't. I mean, there's no way they could acknowledge and somehow make good retro-actively without pissing off the mega whales. So the best we could hope for would be a better system for the future but it still won't help the ones lagging behind.

At least switching from the LTs to CP awards is a tiny step in the right direction.

GrimSkald

Hey, out of the last 46 draws I've made, I pulled one 5*. Pheonix, for whom I had one cover before. At least it wasn't the same cover...

I'm so furious right now I'm this close to just plain quitting. This is just plain stupid.