Around May last year, the rates that bonus shards for favourited characters were awarded were increased significantly.
The rate tables shared at the time suggested that going forward average bonus rewards for LL pulls (over a large number of pulls) would equate to: 9.0 bonus 4* shards per pull 8.4 bonus 5* shards per pull
Both of these figures are in additional to the automatic 15 4* shards and 3 5* shards that are earned for each pull.
In addition, a pity system was introduced which would progressively increase the odds of bonus shards during a bad streak, which in theory should increase the overall average bonus shards figures quoted above (but difficult to estimate to what degree as very little further detail was divulged).
Now, almost a year on, there is probably enough data out there to get a reasonable picture of the real long term bonus shard rates that you are likely to see over a large number of pulls (say 1000+).
So if you have been recording this information, it would be really interesting to see. I am particularly interested to understand the figure for 4* bonus rate because of ascension, and also to see if the rates for Classics look to be the same as for Latest.
Foolishly, I haven't been recording this data myself, except for my last 100 Latest which gave me 900 bonus 5* shards, so an average of 9.0 per pull, and 1900 bonus 4* shards, an impressive 19.0 per pull, but far too small a sample from which to draw any conclusion.
Daiches has tracked several thousand pulls and their bonus shard rate. He isn’t on the forum here, but he is on both Reddit and Discord. You might want to reach out to him there.
Since Aunt May was released, I've pulled 2,983 LTs. Over those pulls, I got:
431 5* covers (14.4% rate) 34,300 5* bonus shards (11.5 per LT) 40,420 4* bonus shards (13.6 per LT)
Those are just the bonus shards, so do not include the 3 5* + 15 4* you automatically get every pull. If the bonus rate is influenced based on a "pity" timer, I would suspect my bonus shard rate would be lower if my 5* pull rate was closer to or above 15%.
Hope that helps.
I believe the pity timer to get bonus shards and the pull rate of a 5 cover are independent from each other, no?
@Zarqa said: I believe the pity timer to get bonus shards and the pull rate of a 5 cover are independent from each other, no?
This is correct. The game locks in pulls for, well, every store as far as covers you get. And the pity counter was specifically added to address the issue of “random bonus shards aren’t happening often enough to make players feel like they’re getting enough of them”.
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/88608/upcoming-in-r278-chapter-select-update-and-bonus-shard-update
@helix72 thanks for this data. On a related point, you mention a target 15% pull rate for 5*. I have a hazy memory that in the dim and distant past we were told that the rate was 15% even though the vault has always stated 1 in 7 (ie. about 14.3%), but I'm sure that a couple of years ago it was adjusted to the stated 1 in 7. If that is true then your recent 5* pull rate is just about perfect (5 better than expected, rather than 16 worse if the target is 15%). This is my understanding, but I might be wrong.
@trenchdigger
The “~” is doing a lot of work here. I don’t remember when/if it was added to the 1:7 odds but my understanding is that it has always been 15%.
The thing is the game doesn’t guarantee 15% over a certain range of pulls but what’s really being promised is that over a very very very long string of pulls (effectively infinite) you will get basically 15% of the pulls from that specific store to be 5*s. But even then maybe it would be 14.999999 or 15.00000001 or something. The game doesn’t adjust the pulls to meet that target, it just seeds each store with a string of results that will get infinitely close to 15% over enough of them.
Also: stating the odds as an approximate fraction means they save themselves some CS complaints vs putting up say ~15% which is much more specific, and they don’t really want to tell everyone they need to pull many thousands of times to get basically to 15%.
I was at 13.3% lifetime over my first approx 3000 pulls but it’s gotten much closer to 15% since. However I also have stopped tracking it, because it’s not like I could demand a bunch of 5* covers I was missing (but I tried once, ha ha).
The fact the @helix72 basically got there is mostly luck in terms of the way their store was seeded and the specific range of pulls that were measured.