Five Star Draw Pattern

The rockett

The best way to think of this is a never ending deck of cards.  Each “store” has its own deck of cards and this does include BH. 
If in Latest you have 20 pulls using CPs, you could pull 1/9/20
If in classics you have 25 pulls using CPs, you could pull 5/25
if in a new release 5* vault you have 20 using CPs, you could pull 7 with a BH and that’s it.

The question that some don’t know is how deep into the deck of cards is this predetermined. It could be 1000 pulls deep.  Not really sure. 

stewbacca

my question is this, if they publish odds and then say things are predetermined, and then real world currency is used to purchase.. how are they not under investigation by the government, schools and charity organizationd have to get licenses and legal permissions before they can even hold a raffle, how can they not be held to similiar standards being a business selling you a chance to win..  shouldnt a gambling comission be checking if this was true, or are we still in the world were online "gambling" is still an outlaw issue..

Dotproduct

It's probably like the Japanese Pachinko machines. It's not really 'gambling' if the payout is not in $.

jredd

The rockett said:

The best way to think of this is a never ending deck of cards.  Each “store” has its own deck of cards and this does include BH. 
If in Latest you have 20 pulls using CPs, you could pull 1/9/20
If in classics you have 25 pulls using CPs, you could pull 5/25
if in a new release 5* vault you have 20 using CPs, you could pull 7 with a BH and that’s it.

The question that some don’t know is how deep into the deck of cards is this predetermined. It could be 1000 pulls deep.  Not really sure. 

is someone's deck of cards who spends 100s of dollars filled with more 5* than someone who is ftp?  should it be?

i think the only way to make this fair is to just say 'ok, every 7th pull is a 5*'  otherwise, who's to say that player x isn't getting more 5* pulls than player y over the same amount of pulls. 

TheDobot

If it is predetermined then why don't I get a 5* every 7 pulls?  It been at least 35 to 40 classic pulls, for me, since Ive got a 5* and its not like I ever get back to back 5* to make up for the odds.

I recently opened up around 30 LT and only got one 5* gambit too.  To me, this doesn't make sense if its predetermined.

VoltaicDuke

TheDobot said:

If it is predetermined then why don't I get a 5* every 7 pulls?  It been at least 35 to 40 classic pulls, for me, since Ive got a 5* and its not like I ever get back to back 5* to make up for the odds.

I had a seriously bad run of 30-40 pulls without a five star but it broke with 2 five stars in a row.   Things balance out in the long run.  I would rather have consistency (every 7 pulls) but it is fun pulling a whole bunch of five stars is semi-succession, even if you have to pay for it with long droughts.

TheDobot

For me its always 30 to 40 pulls for a 5* and Ive played everyday since the beta.  

Also, on that magic day the 5* rate dropped to 1/4 why was I able to pull 5* like wild fire?  If it was predetermined there is no way I would have pulled as many 5* on that day as I did.  I wish the developers would just tell us.  It seems like everyone already knows whats going on.

Does this also mean, lets say, you tell customer service they did a subpar job or you were upset with them over a non cover swap.  Can they go into your account and move and back load your 5*s?  Lets say you were supposed to get a 5* on token 110, 120 and 135, but you told CS to bug off, can they now move that 110, 120 and 135 pulls to pull 1000, 1100 and 1300.  Legally you still get the right odds, but you have to play 4 years to receive them?

Polares

I think people here is using the predetermined word incorrectly. What you are going to pull is not predetermined, it is generated randomly and then saved, but not predetermined, as no one knows beforehand what you are going to get, it is still in all effects RANDOM.

The rockett example is a good one, and it is easy to visualize. Basically every time a new store is on offer the system gets a deck of N randomly generated cards, shuffles it, and puts it on the table for the user to start pulling cards. Then every time you open a token it is like if you were pulling cards from that deck.

In reality what happens is that when the store is created a number of N pulls are generated into a queue and saved, so when the store is created your pulls are created and saved. But those pulls are randomly generated. I would also assume, but no one really knows, that every time you pull a token, a new one is randomly generated and saved in the queue so you always have N tokens ready to pull (and I say N because no one knows how big this queue is).

Devs basically changed the system to this so people would not be able to exploit the other system. But for most players (the ones not cheating), the system is effectively the same, as everybody is still getting their pulls randomly. It just changes when the dies are thrown, before it was when you pulled the token, now it is when the store is created.

ThaRoadWarrior

It's interesting to see reactions to this; It's almost like before, we felt like we were rolling the dice, and had our own "luck" at play. Now that we find out all our rolls were done at some point in the past, out into whenever, it feels like "the computer" or "the devs" took our turn, so to speak, and we're stuck with "their" rolls on our behalf. It's an interesting "human nature" study I think lol. It would be interesting to know whether any "smoothing" was done on the queue of rolls to make sure that it matched some statistical equilibrium or not to balance out either a wild hot streak or a lengthy cold streak. I feel like that's probably the tinfoil hat suspicion, that now that a list of your future rolls exist, it could be modified in some way to normalize your peaks and vallies.

moss04

Random number generators are pseudo-random since computers are deterministic.  The RNG is actually a pattern that appears random, but it is a pattern that might not repeat for a very long time, like 500 billions sequences (at one sequence per second that's over 15 thousand years).  In simplistic terms a seed is a way of determining the starting point in that pseudo-random sequence.
Previously a seed was generated by the device that runs the application.  If you had a method (not to be discussed here) of rolling back your pulls and getting a new seed from your device you could then change what you pulled.  Now seeds are created and/or stored on the servers and there is a seed for each cover store, so even if you could roll back your pulls you can't get a new seed so you will end up pulling the same covers when you try again.  This is what is meant when people say it is "predetermined".  But it has always been predetermined because that's how seeds and pseudo-random algorithms work.  Now it's just tamper-proof by storing the seeds somewhere where it is harder to tamper with them.

fmftint

TheDobot said:

For me its always 30 to 40 pulls for a 5* and Ive played everyday since the beta.  

Also, on that magic day the 5* rate dropped to 1/4 why was I able to pull 5* like wild fire?  If it was predetermined there is no way I would have pulled as many 5* on that day as I did.  I wish the developers would just tell us.  It seems like everyone already knows whats going on.

Does this also mean, lets say, you tell customer service they did a subpar job or you were upset with them over a non cover swap.  Can they go into your account and move and back load your 5*s?  Lets say you were supposed to get a 5* on token 110, 120 and 135, but you told CS to bug off, can they now move that 110, 120 and 135 pulls to pull 1000, 1100 and 1300.  Legally you still get the right odds, but you have to play 4 years to receive them?

Because when they change the ODDS the old deck is thrown out a a new one is generated

abmoraz

jredd said:

Bowgentle said:

It's fixed per player, but completely random between players.
No set pattern across the whole population.

wait a sec...

so you're saying if i pull 50 pulls, it's already determined that i'll pull a 5* at say pull numbers 5, 15, 17, 45?

but if you made 50 pulls at the same time you'd pull a 5* at pull 11, 17, 27, 28, 35, 41, 44 and 49?

They use a concept called "Random Repeatability".  It means that your pulls *ARE* random, however they are repeatable as well.  This blog has a good explanation of it: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/01/07/a-primer-on-repeatable-random-numbers/


Each player has a "seed" that sets them apart from other players.  That seed is fed into a function that determines a random number.  Let's use a vault with 80 rewards and a function that determines a random number between 1 and 10,000,000.  If your seed value is 123,456 and we feed that into the function, that function returns 99,457.  To determine what item you get out of the vault, it starts at the first reward and counts up (starting over at 1 when it hits the end) until it gets to 99,457.  In an 80 card vault, this would get you the reward in the 17th slot. 

Now the next draw you make, it uses the result from the last pull instead of your seed value.  So this time it uses 99,457 instead of 123,456.  Putting that into our hypothetical random function, it could return 23.  In our vault, that would get us the reward in the 24th slot (since 17 is already gone).

Now the thing here is that if you crash the game or otherwise game the system so you get to redraw, you will get the same rewards again starting from wherever the last pull (and value) the server has on record.  The fact that they use the previous result to determine the next one means that the sequence is not random even though each individual selection is.  This is an extremely common practice in software development (especially useful in simulation, but that's a different story for a different day).

The same process works for tokens.  The percentages they list for cards (1 in 5, 1 in 33, etc...) work the same way.  The have a list that says "draw number 1 through 10 wins 5*CardA, 11 through 10 wins 5*CardB, .... 9,999,001 through 10,000,000 wins 3*CardZ" (obviously spaced out so that the odds they report line up).  This method is slightly less resource intensive since you can have re-draws of the same reward (unlike vaults).

TL;DR:
Your results are random and predetermined at the same time, and that is not an oxymoron.

abmoraz

Hadronic said:

If I was gonna code this up, it would go a little something like this.

old method: cover was rolled when token was opened.
rerolling changes outcome.

new method: cover is rolled when you acquire the token.
rerolling does not change outcome.

I know what you ask next. If they are rolled on acquisition how do i get new characters out of my hoard of old tokens? That is easy. You don't store the result of the role as green 5* thor, you store the result of the roll as a number, say .078456.

You convert this number to a cover using a loot table.

When the token updates, you change the loot table itself, not the rolled number.
so .078456 corresponds to 5* thor in todays latest, but .078456 corresponds to 5* archangel when the tokens update.

That's essentially how random repeatabilty works, only the rolls aren't done at acquisition, but based on previous results.  The outcome is the same, only requires a lot less storage.

sinnerjfl

TheDobot said:

If it is predetermined then why don't I get a 5* every 7 pulls?  It been at least 35 to 40 classic pulls, for me, since Ive got a 5* and its not like I ever get back to back 5* to make up for the odds.

I recently opened up around 30 LT and only got one 5* gambit too.  To me, this doesn't make sense if its predetermined.

The advertised rate doesn't mean you're guaranteed a 5* 15% of the time, rather, on every roll the RNG makes you have a 15% chance of getting the 5*, 85% chance of something else.

Its very unlikely but the RNG could pull a 100 times and still not give you a 5*...

It would be nice to have a guaranteed 5* after X pulls without one but that's not gonna happen.

Pwuz_

A lot of the misconceptions here are tied to our (as humans) flawed understanding of statistics and likely the gambler’s fallacy.

Let’s say hypothetically that the devs released a Token with a 50% draw rate of Bagman & 50% Yelena.

You draw your first Token and it’s Yelena.  Your 2nd draw has the same 50-50 shot of being Yelena again!  Same for your 3rd draw, and your 4th, and so on.  If taken into a large enough sample they will statistically even out.

But when you’ve pulled 10 Yelena in a row, averages don’t change that initial 50-50 chance of pulling another Yelena.

Dogface

Pwuz_ said:

A lot of the misconceptions here are tied to our (as humans) flawed understanding of statistics and likely the gambler’s fallacy.

Let’s say hypothetically that the devs released a Token with a 50% draw rate of Bagman & 50% Yelena.

You draw your first Token and it’s Yelena.  Your 2nd draw has the same 50-50 shot of being Yelena again!  Same for your 3rd draw, and your 4th, and so on.  If taken into a large enough sample they will statistically even out.

But when you’ve pulled 10 Yelena in a row, averages don’t change that initial 50-50 chance of pulling another Yelena.

For those lamenting 5* draw chance, the chance of pulling 10 Yelena's in a row is much smaller (about 1 in 1000)