Decoding The Game

How they get your money.

Starting with this game. I will be sharing some data which reveals how the game developers manipulate the probability of tokens dropping for different characters in order to get you to spend your money on crates rather than use free methods to get them.

I started recording this data when I bought the Elaine character. As usual when a new character is released, the developers provide incentives to encourage you to level it as soon as possible. What they would really like you to do is buy a bunch of crates ($70-$100 for a set of them). But what if you try to do it via the free options? There is no indication from the developers which says the drop rate should be anything but uniform, but is it? The drop rate for a new character’s tokens is not the same as other characters you may have.

Consider the following results. This data represents the number of character tokens that dropped for each character from all crates, mission rewards and event rewards from the day I purchased the Elaine character. The chart on the left shows the number of times a character received at least one token from a crate or reward during the incentive program (total of 68 instances of a crate being opened or a reward received). The chart on the right shows the same data but taken from the time the incentive program ended to the most recent occurrence of a token or tokens being received (293 samples).

There are a few interesting observations to note…

First this list does not include all characters in my collection. I have a total of 31 characters but only 14 characters seem to be receiving tokens. Eleven of my characters have 7700 tokens. I noticed none of them show up on these distributions. This must be the cap for how many tokens a character can have. So that leaves 20. Why aren’t all 20 of these characters receiving tokens?

So that’s one observation. The second observation is that the drop rate is far from uniform. If it were uniform, the probability of a character receiving tokens any time a crate is opened should be 1/14 = 0.071 or 7.1% (really it should be 1/20, shouldn’t it?). The following charts have the horizontal axis converted to probability by dividing the number of occurrences for each character by the total.

Some characters are seeing a much higher probability of receiving at least one token than others (I have no idea why Faye is favored so much). Interestingly, if I average all the probabilities, I get… 7.1%.

The third observation, and the point of this exercise, is that during the incentive program, Elaine was seeing a lower probability of getting tokens compared to some of the other characters, but after the program was over, she shot up the chart. This is where the developers are really playing mind games with you. During the incentive period, you are seeing other characters come up instead of Elaine over and over, but why not Elaine? To be fair, the probability of finding a token for Elaine during the incentive program was actually 7.3%, a bit higher than the what it should be if the probability distribution was uniform!