Let's put some R in the RNG.

Corn_Noodles

In the last 6 Elite Packs I have opened, I have received 6 Uncage the Menagerie in a row.

Six.

I purchased a 400 Jewel Elite pack on August 17, 2017 at 7:55am (MST) and received Uncage the Menagerie (new card). I purchased a second 400 Jewel Elite Pack at 9:47am the same day and received another Uncage the Menagerie. I requested a replacement pack from support and was credited a replacement pack later that same day. At 5:35pm, I opened the replacement pack and received another Uncage the Menagerie. I requested another replacement and was credited the following day. I waited to open the next replacement pack, but did so at 10:33am on August 19th. Guess what? Uncage the Menagerie. Another replacement requested. Since it was the weekend, it took a few days for the credit. On Wednesday, August 23rd, at 10:34pm, I opened another disappointing Uncage the Menagerie. That's 5 in a row. Based on my rough estimation, the chance of that should be around 1 in 3000. I requested another replacement knowing that I hit my 3 replacements and expected my ticket to be escalated. Support replied that I was being escalated and I waited for the resolution. To my surprise, on Saturday, I was credited with another replacement pack. I didn't think support worked on weekends, so it was a pleasant surprise to find the credit to my account. I decided to wait a day to open the pack because I dreaded hitting the lottery of 6 in a row (roughly 1 in 150000). At 2:04pm yesterday, I opened the pack and recieved my 6th Uncage the Menagerie.

Why am I writing this? Well, there's a couple possibilities going on and neither are very good. The first possibility is that my account is broken somehow. Actually, this is the best possibility. I requested support look at my account after 5, but I have not received a reply in regards to that request. The second possibility is that not all cards of a given rarity are weighted the same for drops. For each rarity level (common, uncommon, rare, mythic, masterpiece), a card in that level should have an equal chance of dropping as any other card at that same rarity level. My experience with 6 Uncage the Menagerie in a row lead me to believe that the RNG may not be as R as we would like to believe. If the RNG is being manipulated in this way, I think Wizards of the Coast might have something to say. I don't think they'd like their image being tarnished with manipulation such as this.

In their most recent reply, support stated that "Please keep in mind that this will be the last time for this rotation that we can provide this exchange." To me, this is unacceptable. If I was getting different cards that I already had, I would be willing to accept a refund of my jewels and wait for the next rotation. However, this is not what has been happening. I have been receiving the EXACT SAME CARD 6 TIMES IN A ROW. I purchased from this rotation specifically for a number of the cards that I am chasing. <sarcasm> Frankly, for my trouble, I think they should credit me all the cards in the pack rotation. </sarcasm> Yes, I know that isn't going to happen, but a person can dream.

I posted the times I opened the packs because it has been demonstrated that the time you open packs has direct bearing on what you receive. This is a known fact. With crowd-sourced data, it was possible to get a number of cards as guaranteed drops. I don't know if they're still tracking this information, but I would be very surprised if they weren't.

So, to sum up: 6 times in a row. Really, D3? Really?

[EDIT] Where do I get the 1 in 3000 or 1 in 15000? Let me explain. There are 3 Masterpieces and 4 Mythics in the 400 jewel Elite Pack. For simplicity sake, I put the 3 Masterpieces into one probability of 20% with the other 4 Mythics at 20% each. So for each open, I had a 1 in 5 chance of opened Uncage. So that's 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 or 1/15625. In reality, the chance for Masterpiece is probably a lot lower. I wouldn't be surprised if the 1 in 15,000 is closer to 1 in 10,000, but that's still pretty damn small. I'm tempted to spend some more mana jewels and see how many of these cards I can get in a row.

//Removed Coalition Reference -Brigby

babar3355

I am always conflicted when I see these posts.  Typically if it is a random person who creates an account just for the purpose of screaming foul, I dismiss the post.  After all, the odds of getting 6 Uncaged the Menageries are the exact same odds of getting any 6 cards in a specific order.  So say, Uncaged, Swarm, Swarm, Sunmare, Uncaged, Swarm has the same odds (in that sequence) as 6 of the same card.  In other words, with enough people ripping open packs and with assumed randomness, someone is going to get a sequence that doesn't smell remotely random.

I would also add that I heard from a little birdy a long time ago that the probability rates of drops weren't evenly distributed within the rarity structure.  Someone had apparently looked under the hood and found the drop rates for cards such as Olivia and Drowner to be far lower than other mythic level cards during those blocks.  Anyway, I can't confirm this one way or another, but there does seem to be evidence that card rates aren't evenly distributed even within the elite packs (based on the surveys on these forums).  Although N was too small to reject any hypothesis.

But, I will say that after playing for a long time it does "feel" like there is an element of luck that is not evenly distributed across the player base.  There are several players in my coalition who literally open a mythic in roughly every 10 packs.  Others more like every 40 packs.  And this effect has been persistent for over a year.  It just seems so unlikely that the same people would keep pulling winning lottery tickets every single new set if the randomness was equivalent.  Could your UID be linked to different drop rates?  Could D3 then figure out what "luck" level generates the most revenue?  Could this be a reason that they don't publish drop rates?

The only way we will ever have a more solid answer on this is to keep uploading our drop rates to Volrak's site and see if there is credible evidence to reject the hypothesis that all player drop rates are identical.  Or of course D3 could actually communicate with us.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JUeuf0BcOlNHpt3dA7SQ838ws7AOlWMEz-4AAG2dYrE/edit#gid=545160007

Steeme

Regarding the Elite Packs, they really need to draw three cards and let the player choose one.  It's a compromise between keeping RNG packs while getting rid of these ridiculous boundary cases where you proc the same dupe repeatedly.

TheDragonHermit

Sounds like you are fated to Uncage the Menagerie, any plans to go to the zoo in the near future? 
Maybe we can get @Volrak in on this (he is the card statistician right?)

Corn_Noodles

Back when Anointed Procession was in the Elite Pack, I received 4 in a row there. I thought that was a bit strange then, but not as strange as 6 in a row now.

Formulator

I think you may have been ed!

Ohboy

Back in my uni days, I was studying abroad and applied for the summer program. That meant that all my friends actually went home and I was left alone I'm a foreign country. I was all alone on my birthday, so I decided to spend the day in the casino with a fancy meal and drinks. 

So on that fateful day, the 31st...i sat down at a roulette table to play a few hands. The ball landed on 31 all 5 games I played. I never bet on it. Dealer told me it happened all the time. He wasn't even impressed. 

Abenjes

babar3355 said:

I am always conflicted when I see these posts.  Typically if it is a random person who creates an account just for the purpose of screaming foul, I dismiss the post.  After all, the odds of getting 6 Uncaged the Menageries are the exact same odds of getting any 6 cards in a specific order.  So say, Uncaged, Swarm, Swarm, Sunmare, Uncaged, Swarm has the same odds (in that sequence) as 6 of the same card.  In other words, with enough people ripping open packs and with assumed randomness, someone is going to get a sequence that doesn't smell remotely random.

I would also add that I heard from a little birdy a long time ago that the probability rates of drops weren't evenly distributed within the rarity structure.  Someone had apparently looked under the hood and found the drop rates for cards such as Olivia and Drowner to be far lower than other mythic level cards during those blocks.  Anyway, I can't confirm this one way or another, but there does seem to be evidence that card rates aren't evenly distributed even within the elite packs (based on the surveys on these forums).  Although N was too small to reject any hypothesis.

But, I will say that after playing for a long time it does "feel" like there is an element of luck that is not evenly distributed across the player base.  There are several players in my coalition who literally open a mythic in roughly every 10 packs.  Others more like every 40 packs.  And this effect has been persistent for over a year.  It just seems so unlikely that the same people would keep pulling winning lottery tickets every single new set if the randomness was equivalent.  Could your UID be linked to different drop rates?  Could D3 then figure out what "luck" level generates the most revenue?  Could this be a reason that they don't publish drop rates?

The only way we will ever have a more solid answer on this is to keep uploading our drop rates to Volrak's site and see if there is credible evidence to reject the hypothesis that all player drop rates are identical.  Or of course D3 could actually communicate with us.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JUeuf0BcOlNHpt3dA7SQ838ws7AOlWMEz-4AAG2dYrE/edit#gid=545160007

interesting, I have long felt that specific players have been singled out and have a better drop rate, this benefits D3 by ensuring there are always players with good collections that will in theory increase the difficulty of matches.

Firinmahlazer

Man. I would have stopped after 3. You sure are persistent. 

Ohboy

Abenjes said:

babar3355 said:

I am always conflicted when I see these posts.  Typically if it is a random person who creates an account just for the purpose of screaming foul, I dismiss the post.  After all, the odds of getting 6 Uncaged the Menageries are the exact same odds of getting any 6 cards in a specific order.  So say, Uncaged, Swarm, Swarm, Sunmare, Uncaged, Swarm has the same odds (in that sequence) as 6 of the same card.  In other words, with enough people ripping open packs and with assumed randomness, someone is going to get a sequence that doesn't smell remotely random.

I would also add that I heard from a little birdy a long time ago that the probability rates of drops weren't evenly distributed within the rarity structure.  Someone had apparently looked under the hood and found the drop rates for cards such as Olivia and Drowner to be far lower than other mythic level cards during those blocks.  Anyway, I can't confirm this one way or another, but there does seem to be evidence that card rates aren't evenly distributed even within the elite packs (based on the surveys on these forums).  Although N was too small to reject any hypothesis.

But, I will say that after playing for a long time it does "feel" like there is an element of luck that is not evenly distributed across the player base.  There are several players in my coalition who literally open a mythic in roughly every 10 packs.  Others more like every 40 packs.  And this effect has been persistent for over a year.  It just seems so unlikely that the same people would keep pulling winning lottery tickets every single new set if the randomness was equivalent.  Could your UID be linked to different drop rates?  Could D3 then figure out what "luck" level generates the most revenue?  Could this be a reason that they don't publish drop rates?

The only way we will ever have a more solid answer on this is to keep uploading our drop rates to Volrak's site and see if there is credible evidence to reject the hypothesis that all player drop rates are identical.  Or of course D3 could actually communicate with us.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JUeuf0BcOlNHpt3dA7SQ838ws7AOlWMEz-4AAG2dYrE/edit#gid=545160007

interesting, I have long felt that specific players have been singled out and have a better drop rate, this benefits D3 by ensuring there are always players with good collections that will in theory increase the difficulty of matches.

The bell curve predicts this exact observation. Long tails are a thing. 

I opened an average of 4 mythics per big box in Kld. In the last 2 expansions, I opened about 1 mythic in each entire expansion from boosters. 

You literally expect to see this kind of uneven gains. It's actually a sign that it's random. 

Volrak

Corn Noodles said:

In the last 6 Elite Packs I have opened, I have received 6 Uncage the Menagerie in a row.

You have my sympathy.  I know what it's like, because I had a similar experience with Crested Sunmare.  I got 4 dupes in a row from the elite pack rather than 6, and finally got a different mythic after also being "escalated" and told it would be the last attempt.  I can't imagine feeling satisfied had my next roll been another sunmare, and I'd suggest reaching out for further tries, since as far as I can tell, the limited rerolls are intended to prevent players exploiting the system, not to screw players with terrible luck.

Corn Noodles said:

I decided to wait a day to open the pack because I dreaded hitting the lottery of 6 in a row (roughly 1 in 150000).

Assuming equal probabilities, and using 10% as the chance of a MP in elite pack, the chance of 6 of the same mythic in a row is about 1 in 2000.  (The first mythic can be any mythic, with 90% chance, and from there, a pull of the same mythic is 90% / 4, a 22.5% chance, giving 0.9 * 0.225^5 = 0.052%).  So it's only terrible luck, not preposterous luck.  Anecdotes like yours and mine do make me wish we had more data, so we could test objectively if there was something strange going on.

Corn Noodles said:

I posted the times I opened the packs because it has been demonstrated that the time you open packs has direct bearing on what you receive. This is a known fact. With crowd-sourced data, it was possible to get a number of cards as guaranteed drops. I don't know if they're still tracking this information, but I would be very surprised if they weren't.

//Removed Coalition Reference -Brigby

I'd be very interested to see that data.  Needless to say, it's easy to see patterns in noise, but whether some factor is truly forcing or not on a particular outcome can be tested statistically, and it's not clear that it has been.  So I take "this is a known fact" with a rather large grain of salt.

Volrak

babar3355 said:

I would also add that I heard from a little birdy a long time ago that the probability rates of drops weren't evenly distributed within the rarity structure.  Someone had apparently looked under the hood and found the drop rates for cards such as Olivia and Drowner to be far lower than other mythic level cards during those blocks.

This isn't quite right.  The public info is that one person said a friend looked at the code and found weights assigned to cards.  Despite much speculation, no link was made from those weights to drop rates, especially given that drops are determined on the server, and the weights they saw were in the client.  There are plenty of other possible (and necessary) reasons to have per-card weights, such as how the AI decides how to order their hand.

babar3355 said:

there does seem to be evidence that card rates aren't evenly distributed even within the elite packs (based on the surveys on these forums).  Although N was too small to reject any hypothesis.

If all statistical hypotheses are rejected, then there's no evidence.  It's normal (pardon the pun) and absolutely expected for results of perfectly random events to be imperfectly distributed.  For small samples, like you say, actual results aren't predictive of future results.

It's also worth noting there have been analyses done which looked specifically for evidence of non-uniform drop rates within a rarity.  All results were consistent with uniform random drops, and none were consistent with different probabilities for different cards of the same rarity.

babar3355 said:

But, I will say that after playing for a long time it does "feel" like there is an element of luck that is not evenly distributed across the player base.  There are several players in my coalition who literally open a mythic in roughly every 10 packs.  Others more like every 40 packs.  And this effect has been persistent for over a year.

If it's random, then it's again totally normal for some people to have experienced more luck than others.  But that shouldn't be conflated that with the idea that some hidden influence must have caused the pattern and will also continue it.  Regarding mythic every 10 packs vs every 40, I don't suppose there's any recorded data, or just their perception / impression?

babar3355 said:

The only way we will ever have a more solid answer on this is to keep uploading our drop rates to Volrak's site and see if there is credible evidence to reject the hypothesis that all player drop rates are identical.  Or of course D3 could actually communicate with us.

I fully support both of these ideas.

Tilwin90

I still don't get why drop rates are not public. I play a different online game (not card game but that still gives these random rewards based on probabilities) where these probabilities are actually revealed. There you can get this random reward with a certain probability, of three rarities (whose probabilities are also mentioned). 
I really don't think transparency in this case would hurt players at all or the business model. Especially when we are talking about Elite Packs. It may seem like too much transparency enrages players more, but in truth transparency denotes a "nothing to hide" attitude which actually helps towards building the trust of the player base.

Also individual card probabilities are possible as they have already revealed that with the "super offers on getting this or that mythic with twice probability". How else could they do that if the base engine did not support it?
So yes, I strongly believe that this is true - I have yet to see most of the SOI chase mythics (Olivia, Pig, SA, BTB, etc.) yet I have all rares from both SOI and EMN.

Formulator

Tilwin90 said:

I still don't get why drop rates are not public.

This is why I don't think it's random, regardless of any in game experience I've had. I honestly can't understand why people assume it is.


As far as drop rates being a gut punch...

yunnnn said:

"The disheartening wasteful feeling of a big box full of duplicates".

The general complaints about drop rates can be summed up as:
1. It feels bad to open a big box and get a single rare (a dupe of course).
2. Spending 20$-100$ for big boxes to get nothing new feels bad.
3. Getting dupes in the same booster pack is stupid and feels bad.
4. The relative low number of cards in the set vs the high number of mythics makes whaling feel bad. After a couple of boxes, everything is a dupe and you're only looking forward to the mythic, which may just never come.

TL;DR: Once you've opened a couple of boxes, opening more almost always feels bad. This should not be the case in a game that is trying to get you to buy as much as possible! There is no feeling of progress made when everything is a dupe. And when it costs a relatively high amount, it is incredibly discouraging.

There are many solutions to this, which people have already pointed out:
1. Remove dupes from the same booster pack. It will increase the morale of pack opening by miles. I've personally opened packs with 3 of the same cards in the same pack before. I've also opened big boxes with 3 of the same Mythic in the same big box. It was disgusting. I violently vomited over my screen, and needed emergency surgery.
2. There needs to be a better guarantee of high quality cards, especially when a big box costs 20$. The IAP in this game is way more expensive than other games, and the game operators need to realize this and compensate accordingly.
3. There is no progress made when everything opened is a dupe. Big Boxes need to give a special token, and 5 or 10 of these tokens can be traded in for any mythic or promo. The point here is to make it feel like the player is progressing. If someone sinks 200$ into the game and nothing happens... guess what? They are never going to iap again.
4. Have a hearthstone-esque guaranteed "pity" mythic after opening some packs. This is to balance out the randomness. D3, you don't want a player with simple bad luck to quit the game, as they will not contribute to your revenue stream anymore. You need to give them some incentive to keep opening packs, even if the luck does them wrong.

The game operators need to provide a rewarding IAP experience. Right now, the most satisfied players are the non-IAPers who are glad to get whatever they can for free. It doesn't matter if the server crashes or cards don't work, because they didn't put monetary investment in the game! If the experience of IAPing feels bad, why would anyone want to IAP?



Source: Updated from my older post at viewtopic.php?f=31&t=53854&p=589863#p589863:

Other mobile games know how to put the "R" in RNG. Hopefully the new crew stepping in gets it too.

Gilesclone

I imagine they don't want to give drop rates because they're so much worse than other CCGs.

[Deleted User]

I would like to see an actual money spent to drop rate ratio. Of course spending money to buy packs will increase your chances but I wonder if there are brackets. Spending X amount puts you in a monetary teir, i.e. an internal VIP system that offers slightly better drop rates. As we know, businesses like profit and there are many that would implement such methods... but it's just a suspicion and hopefully it is nothing at all. 

Dave808

jimpark said:

I would like to see an actual money spent to drop rate ratio. Of course spending money to buy packs will increase your chances but I wonder if there are brackets. Spending X amount puts you in a monetary teir, i.e. an internal VIP system that offers slightly better drop rates. As we know, businesses like profit and there are many that would implement such methods... but it's just a suspicion and hopefully it is nothing at all. 

I've long suspected this is going on in this game. Also just to add my experience, I also opened 3 elite packs a couple days ago. 2 out of the 3 were uncage the menagerie. 

HypnoticSpecter

Someone used to post polls each rotation to get data of elite pack drop rates. You could try that if you want to investigate this further.

octal9

If I had to wager a guess, they're using the same RNG server side that is used in the client. Most of you have seen the analysis - it's sufficiently random.

it remains to be proven with evidence that there's any droprate weighting going on within rarities.

@Volrak maybe it's time we add a sheet to track actual card drops for rare+? I know our bulk sheets have this data but I'm not aware of any analysis performed on it. 

Ohboy

jimpark said:

I would like to see an actual money spent to drop rate ratio. Of course spending money to buy packs will increase your chances but I wonder if there are brackets. Spending X amount puts you in a monetary teir, i.e. an internal VIP system that offers slightly better drop rates. As we know, businesses like profit and there are many that would implement such methods... but it's just a suspicion and hopefully it is nothing at all. 

So your hypothesis is that they identify players willing to pay... And give them better stuff so they don't have to buy as much? 

Steeme

If you want to obtain cards in this game, the law of large numbers is your best bet.