You will be told that if you buy Keys, sell them on the Exchange for EC and use the proceeds to buy the ship with 100% certainty off the Exchange (by the way this is the only time guaranteed is ever used in these type threads). [Annorax not withstanding, since you still
The Annorax is not that "robber-baron" priced as you imply here. The price exceeds 500 Million EC, whichis why it doesn't make it to the Exchange (and probably now never will), but the price people are offering and people are willing to sell seems to be around 650 Million EC (that's what I paid) to 800 Million EC. The variance seems not that high.
Well, in general, with trading cards and the like, rare draw prizes sell for significantly below acquisition cost, especially when first available. This has been true in MMOs and you can trace this with a site like WoW TCG loot. The same also frequently tracks with Comic-Con exclusive toys and the like. The profit is made from acquiring multiple exclusives in a truly competitive market.
That is to say, in a competitive market, it should cost less for a lockbox ship at resale than it would cost to acquire it by buying keys IF the market is competitive becauser the box opener receives value from the non-grand prize entries and competition drives the economic profit of the grand prize down to cost of acquisition minus value of other prizes.
I think that is an important factor here -the items in a lockbox tend to include a few good things (at least later ones), and I think R&D Boxes also contain a lot of value. But the DOFF Promotion seemed to be the least attractive of all to me. Even though you can sell DOFFs, there are a lot of "duds" in them that aren't of that much interest.
Rare and Very Rare Crafting Materials are guaranteed in R&D Boxes, and fetch a decent prize on the Exchange. The Lockboxes also tend to contain traits, Dilithium Vouchers, DOFFs, and nowadays even BOFF powers (see Kemocite) that might easily be deemed very valuable. The newest lockbox does not even contain ground weapons anymore (they always sold the worst), and it also contains R&D Boxes.
The Annorax basicaly came with the worst type of promo item, and contained a science vessel that seems overpowered compared to other ships, after there haven't been any new science vessels in more than half a year, and no Romulan or Klingon Science Vessel in years. It's the ideal candidate for being expensive to acquisition, and highly desirable.
Oh. Yes.
But even so, the cost of acquisition of an R&D or DOff pack ship is the same as the cost of acquisition for a lockbox ship. The bulk of testing bears this out and we've had devs say as much.
So I think at the end of the day, the difference is that for the average player, not exchange flippers, the value of lockbox prizes > the value of R&D prizes > the value of DOff pack prizes.
I have a few ideas on why this is. Part of it boils down to minimum acceptable standards. I really don't use active duty DOffs unless they're purple quality. I doubt I'm alone on this given the exchange price difference between blue and purple for what are, admittedly, marginal returns.
And while I do use the R&D system, my project slots are entirely taken up with upgrade projects most days as I'm still shooting for 20 in all categories and the novelty value of the system is low. Upgrades are cheap enough I don't mind buying them off the exchange generally and I've had or was generally disinterested in most of the novelty items from crafting. I have some Arc cannons and Omni beams. I'm holding out to get an EPS Sci console at the moment, which I'm in the market for and would rather buy outright rather than play the chance game. The crafting system is by MOST accounts dramatically improved from when it was a straight vendoring system but it isn't exactly something I'd consider to be deep on exploration (ie. custom mods or highly thematic items with materials tied to hidden nooks and crannies of the game or cosmetic perks).
As a complete aside, I think each crafting category ought to get an Odyssey/Bortasqu' variant that is somehow craftable (ie. lab coat for science, vest for engineering). I also think crafting XP gains for personally crafting are fairly anemic. I also would like to see DOff commendation category progression revisited with rewards to better match marauding/diplomacy, costume features like Diplomacy gets, and maybe 3 extra tiers tacked onto each one with C-Store BOffs tagged with an extra trait that boosts CXP. Maybe increase everyone's DOff slots as well. I have 200. I'm not really interested in buying more slots but I'd probably resume collecting DOffs if I had more spots.
Howabout if they actually GAVE us slots that were designated for DOffs from each expansion, eh? Like if I had 100 slots that could only be filled by DOffs from the next expansion pack. I don't know about the technical feasibility of that but I think you have to consider that our DOff storage and utilization is fairly much capped.
Or maybe if each of our bridge officers could be assigned their own active duty DOffs and active duty DOffs didn't count towards the crew limit. Or if DOffs could be "boiled down" for personal and BOff traits and we could change rates.
The reality is, I tend to hoard BOffs and crafting mats, whereas I tend to use things I get in lockboxes, either from opening them or buying specific items off the exchange. I just recently looked into selling down crafting mats to get my hands on a Jem'Hadar Attack ship largely so I have something to barter for the new timeships I suspect will be coming to the game later this year or in 2016, based on what we've seen of the Mirror queue.
I can see that but lockboxes are virtually guaranteed profit.
Let's be real:
If you offered someone $100 on the provision they had to spend it on R&D or lockboxes (all one or all the other), which would they choose?
Now factor in that some (most?) people hate playing the market and the value of things for personal use is oblique. Imagine you could open $100 worth of lockboxes, R&D packs, or DOff packs... and anything the contents of those boxes are used to accomplish is character bound and cannot be traded or sold?
I just queued up 8 Superior Weapons Tech Upgrades, with a 72% chance of Critical Success.
I crit 1/8 of them.
Using a standard binomial distribution, the odds of this happening are %0.07.
Don't tell me that these things aren't rigged.
I'll play yer game you rogue. How do you know your math is the correct equation? How did you get your theoretical starting data? Are you a Game Developer who is currently employed by Cryptic Studios and/or Perfect World?
Unless you can answer yes to that question about being a dev, I don't see how anyone can take your original post on this thread as being in any way factual. Using numbers and esoteric language will never be enough to fool all the people here. You might convince some, while not one bit of it even matters. In a few days this thread will be buried under all the new posts to follow. No one will ever stop and say, "Hmm. I wonder what happened to that thread?"
Why not channel your energy into something more useful, like helping a fleet reach their Holdings higher tiers. The good of the many outweighs the needs of the one.
[
I'll play yer game you rogue. How do you know your math is the correct equation? How did you get your theoretical starting data? Are you a Game Developer who is currently employed by Cryptic Studios and/or Perfect World?
Unless you can answer yes to that question about being a dev, I don't see how anyone can take your original post on this thread as being in any way factual. Using numbers and esoteric language will never be enough to fool all the people here. You might convince some, while not one bit of it even matters. In a few days this thread will be buried under all the new posts to follow. No one will ever stop and say, "Hmm. I wonder what happened to that thread?"
Why not channel your energy into something more useful, like helping a fleet reach their Holdings higher tiers. The good of the many outweighs the needs of the one.
I believe him when he says it said there's a 72% chance of critical success, but I also think either the game was lying about that 72% chance or like someone else said there's a diminished chance of crit success with successive projects and it wasn't shown because they were all at once.
He's either extremely unlucky or the 72% was a lie, by the game not him.
He's either extremely unlucky or the 72% was a lie, by the game not him.
Neither. At all.
If We said instead that the chance to Fail was 28%... and in 5 tries he didn't fail. Would anyone be complaining about it. I mean 28% chance would be a lie right? Cause according to 1 - ( ( 1 - x ) ^ y ) he should have had a 80.65% chance to have failed at least once. lol (its a joke, just in case)
5 rolls is NOT enough of a number to say anything about the 78%. Cause it is very probable with 78% chance to crit to NOT crit in 5 rolls. Its far from impossible in fact its likely to happen pretty often. If you have 100 people roll 5 in a row. Odds are at least one of them will TRIBBLE out all 5 times. (and the op did crit one so he/she wouldn't even count).
If you are honestly curious about how close the math fits the reported %... you need a larger sample size. Go and Roll 100 and keep track... my guess it would be close to 3/4 just like the number says. Roll 1000... and it will be even closer... roll 10,000 and it will be almost exact.
I crafted 200 superior techs earlier and it took me I think 120 rolls. That is almost exactly in line with the number reported on my screen. You can't judge any stat with a stupid small sample size... cause ya odds are they won't jive.
I can see that but lockboxes are virtually guaranteed profit.
Let's be real:
If you offered someone $100 on the provision they had to spend it on R&D or lockboxes (all one or all the other), which would they choose?
Now factor in that some (most?) people hate playing the market and the value of things for personal use is oblique. Imagine you could open $100 worth of lockboxes, R&D packs, or DOff packs... and anything the contents of those boxes are used to accomplish is character bound and cannot be traded or sold?
Then you'd have a what-if so outlandishly bizarre you'd never be able to relate it back to anything in the real world?
Well, I can walk you through why I'd look at that what-if. You're modeling outlier behavior. Few people are going to be the extreme in that scenario but few people are going to be motivated by things they aren't personally interested in -- and the idea of gambling to subsequently play a market has "behavioral" taxes in it. So what I'm suggesting is, you create a model "ideal behavior" and "nonparticipatory behavior" and then chart where players fall on a SPECTRUM between the extremes.
I think you'd find lockbox behavior closer to ideal response with more shades of nonparticipatory behavior in R&D and DOff packs and that this accounts largely for a couple hundred million EC price difference in lottery ships whose acquisition cost is identical.
In doing this, you can chart participation enhancement areas as a developer.
I just queued up 8 Superior Weapons Tech Upgrades, with a 72% chance of Critical Success.
I crit 1/8 of them.
Using a standard binomial distribution, the odds of this happening are %0.07.
Don't tell me that these things aren't rigged.
I'll play yer game you rogue. How do you know your math is the correct equation? How did you get your theoretical starting data? Are you a Game Developer who is currently employed by Cryptic Studios and/or Perfect World?
Unless you can answer yes to that question about being a dev, I don't see how anyone can take your original post on this thread as being in any way factual. Using numbers and esoteric language will never be enough to fool all the people here. You might convince some, while not one bit of it even matters. In a few days this thread will be buried under all the new posts to follow. No one will ever stop and say, "Hmm. I wonder what happened to that thread?"
Why not channel your energy into something more useful, like helping a fleet reach their Holdings higher tiers. The good of the many outweighs the needs of the one.
He's not really using esoteric language. It's standard binomial probability.
With the success rate he showed, assuming the odds on each were 72%, the odds of only seeing one crit are over one in 1400. That said, he could be that one in 1400.
The odds of seeing 8 successes is around 7.2%.
The odds of seeing 7 successes is around 22.5%.
The odds of seeing 6 successes is around 30.6%.
The odds of seeing 5 successes is around 23.8%.
The odds of seeing 4 successes is around 11.6%.
The odds of seeing 3 successes is around 3.6%.
The odds of seeing 2 successes is around 0.7%.
The odds of seeing 1 success is around 0.08%.
The odds of seeing 0 successes is less than 0.0001%.
However, none of these are impossible and a single attempt is going to be prone to being off by plus or minus 3 or so successes. You're going to need many attempts to claim a pattern.
If We said instead that the chance to Fail was 28%... and in 5 tries he didn't fail. Would anyone be complaining about it. I mean 28% chance would be a lie right? Cause according to 1 - ( ( 1 - x ) ^ y ) he should have had a 80.65% chance to have failed at least once. lol (its a joke, just in case)
5 rolls is NOT enough of a number to say anything about the 78%. Cause it is very probable with 78% chance to crit to NOT crit in 5 rolls. Its far from impossible in fact its likely to happen pretty often. If you have 100 people roll 5 in a row. Odds are at least one of them will TRIBBLE out all 5 times. (and the op did crit one so he/she wouldn't even count).
If you are honestly curious about how close the math fits the reported %... you need a larger sample size. Go and Roll 100 and keep track... my guess it would be close to 3/4 just like the number says. Roll 1000... and it will be even closer... roll 10,000 and it will be almost exact.
I crafted 200 superior techs earlier and it took me I think 120 rolls. That is almost exactly in line with the number reported on my screen. You can't judge any stat with a stupid small sample size... cause ya odds are they won't jive.
You're misunderstanding entirely. Like stoleviathan99 said, the chance of only getting 1 crit out of 8 rolls when each roll has a 72% chance of success is incredibly small. It's not impossible for him to be that unlucky but in my opinion it's more likely that 72% chance did not apply to all rolls.
There might be a case for what monkeybone13 said on page 1, that there are diminishing returns on crit chance when you craft multiple items. It may say 72% but isn't.
If We said instead that the chance to Fail was 28%... and in 5 tries he didn't fail. Would anyone be complaining about it. I mean 28% chance would be a lie right? Cause according to 1 - ( ( 1 - x ) ^ y ) he should have had a 80.65% chance to have failed at least once. lol (its a joke, just in case)
5 rolls is NOT enough of a number to say anything about the 78%. Cause it is very probable with 78% chance to crit to NOT crit in 5 rolls. Its far from impossible in fact its likely to happen pretty often. If you have 100 people roll 5 in a row. Odds are at least one of them will TRIBBLE out all 5 times. (and the op did crit one so he/she wouldn't even count).
If you are honestly curious about how close the math fits the reported %... you need a larger sample size. Go and Roll 100 and keep track... my guess it would be close to 3/4 just like the number says. Roll 1000... and it will be even closer... roll 10,000 and it will be almost exact.
I crafted 200 superior techs earlier and it took me I think 120 rolls. That is almost exactly in line with the number reported on my screen. You can't judge any stat with a stupid small sample size... cause ya odds are they won't jive.
You're misunderstanding entirely. Like stoleviathan99 said, the chance of only getting 1 crit out of 8 rolls when each roll has a 72% chance of success is incredibly small. It's not impossible for him to be that unlucky but in my opinion it's more likely that 72% chance did not apply to all rolls.
There might be a case for what monkeybone13 said on page 1, that there are diminishing returns on crit chance when you craft multiple items. It may say 72% but isn't.
Well lets stop beating around the bush. NO THERE IS NOT.
If the OP knew anything about stats he would know that 1) His sample size is SMALL and 2) the chances of only hitting 1 + the margin of Error is in the 3% mark... which means that if 1000 people a day are crafting at least 8 things 30 of them have only hit one crit in 8 rolls... as IS EXPECTED by the math.
Trust me I have crafted 10s of thousands of things in STO... and yes a few times I have even recorded a 100 here and there... and guess what every time I did... I was with in 5% of the % the game said every single time.
As easy as it is to WANT to read other things into the numbers... when you get a sufficient sample size things appear to be just fine.
I just queued up 8 Superior Weapons Tech Upgrades, with a 72% chance of Critical Success.
I crit 1/8 of them.
Using a standard binomial distribution, the odds of this happening are %0.07.
Don't tell me that these things aren't rigged.
I have upgraded 11 alts personally, using the same method and averaged about 2 UR and 1-2 Epics. When I went the Mk II VR route + the experimental upgrades + a research token, the number of UR's tripled, and the Epics doubled.
Many times nothing happened. Such is the fun of the RNG Gods. Some times I got 2 in a row.
It does work.
Regardless of your luck, it still takes 386+ upgrades for a full ship + ground set upgrade.
Comments
Oh. Yes.
But even so, the cost of acquisition of an R&D or DOff pack ship is the same as the cost of acquisition for a lockbox ship. The bulk of testing bears this out and we've had devs say as much.
So I think at the end of the day, the difference is that for the average player, not exchange flippers, the value of lockbox prizes > the value of R&D prizes > the value of DOff pack prizes.
I have a few ideas on why this is. Part of it boils down to minimum acceptable standards. I really don't use active duty DOffs unless they're purple quality. I doubt I'm alone on this given the exchange price difference between blue and purple for what are, admittedly, marginal returns.
And while I do use the R&D system, my project slots are entirely taken up with upgrade projects most days as I'm still shooting for 20 in all categories and the novelty value of the system is low. Upgrades are cheap enough I don't mind buying them off the exchange generally and I've had or was generally disinterested in most of the novelty items from crafting. I have some Arc cannons and Omni beams. I'm holding out to get an EPS Sci console at the moment, which I'm in the market for and would rather buy outright rather than play the chance game. The crafting system is by MOST accounts dramatically improved from when it was a straight vendoring system but it isn't exactly something I'd consider to be deep on exploration (ie. custom mods or highly thematic items with materials tied to hidden nooks and crannies of the game or cosmetic perks).
As a complete aside, I think each crafting category ought to get an Odyssey/Bortasqu' variant that is somehow craftable (ie. lab coat for science, vest for engineering). I also think crafting XP gains for personally crafting are fairly anemic. I also would like to see DOff commendation category progression revisited with rewards to better match marauding/diplomacy, costume features like Diplomacy gets, and maybe 3 extra tiers tacked onto each one with C-Store BOffs tagged with an extra trait that boosts CXP. Maybe increase everyone's DOff slots as well. I have 200. I'm not really interested in buying more slots but I'd probably resume collecting DOffs if I had more spots.
Howabout if they actually GAVE us slots that were designated for DOffs from each expansion, eh? Like if I had 100 slots that could only be filled by DOffs from the next expansion pack. I don't know about the technical feasibility of that but I think you have to consider that our DOff storage and utilization is fairly much capped.
Or maybe if each of our bridge officers could be assigned their own active duty DOffs and active duty DOffs didn't count towards the crew limit. Or if DOffs could be "boiled down" for personal and BOff traits and we could change rates.
The reality is, I tend to hoard BOffs and crafting mats, whereas I tend to use things I get in lockboxes, either from opening them or buying specific items off the exchange. I just recently looked into selling down crafting mats to get my hands on a Jem'Hadar Attack ship largely so I have something to barter for the new timeships I suspect will be coming to the game later this year or in 2016, based on what we've seen of the Mirror queue.
Let's be real:
If you offered someone $100 on the provision they had to spend it on R&D or lockboxes (all one or all the other), which would they choose?
Now factor in that some (most?) people hate playing the market and the value of things for personal use is oblique. Imagine you could open $100 worth of lockboxes, R&D packs, or DOff packs... and anything the contents of those boxes are used to accomplish is character bound and cannot be traded or sold?
I'll play yer game you rogue. How do you know your math is the correct equation? How did you get your theoretical starting data? Are you a Game Developer who is currently employed by Cryptic Studios and/or Perfect World?
Unless you can answer yes to that question about being a dev, I don't see how anyone can take your original post on this thread as being in any way factual. Using numbers and esoteric language will never be enough to fool all the people here. You might convince some, while not one bit of it even matters. In a few days this thread will be buried under all the new posts to follow. No one will ever stop and say, "Hmm. I wonder what happened to that thread?"
Why not channel your energy into something more useful, like helping a fleet reach their Holdings higher tiers. The good of the many outweighs the needs of the one.
I believe him when he says it said there's a 72% chance of critical success, but I also think either the game was lying about that 72% chance or like someone else said there's a diminished chance of crit success with successive projects and it wasn't shown because they were all at once.
He's either extremely unlucky or the 72% was a lie, by the game not him.
My character Tsin'xing
Neither. At all.
If We said instead that the chance to Fail was 28%... and in 5 tries he didn't fail. Would anyone be complaining about it. I mean 28% chance would be a lie right? Cause according to 1 - ( ( 1 - x ) ^ y ) he should have had a 80.65% chance to have failed at least once. lol (its a joke, just in case)
5 rolls is NOT enough of a number to say anything about the 78%. Cause it is very probable with 78% chance to crit to NOT crit in 5 rolls. Its far from impossible in fact its likely to happen pretty often. If you have 100 people roll 5 in a row. Odds are at least one of them will TRIBBLE out all 5 times. (and the op did crit one so he/she wouldn't even count).
If you are honestly curious about how close the math fits the reported %... you need a larger sample size. Go and Roll 100 and keep track... my guess it would be close to 3/4 just like the number says. Roll 1000... and it will be even closer... roll 10,000 and it will be almost exact.
I crafted 200 superior techs earlier and it took me I think 120 rolls. That is almost exactly in line with the number reported on my screen. You can't judge any stat with a stupid small sample size... cause ya odds are they won't jive.
Well, I can walk you through why I'd look at that what-if. You're modeling outlier behavior. Few people are going to be the extreme in that scenario but few people are going to be motivated by things they aren't personally interested in -- and the idea of gambling to subsequently play a market has "behavioral" taxes in it. So what I'm suggesting is, you create a model "ideal behavior" and "nonparticipatory behavior" and then chart where players fall on a SPECTRUM between the extremes.
I think you'd find lockbox behavior closer to ideal response with more shades of nonparticipatory behavior in R&D and DOff packs and that this accounts largely for a couple hundred million EC price difference in lottery ships whose acquisition cost is identical.
In doing this, you can chart participation enhancement areas as a developer.
He's not really using esoteric language. It's standard binomial probability.
With the success rate he showed, assuming the odds on each were 72%, the odds of only seeing one crit are over one in 1400. That said, he could be that one in 1400.
The odds of seeing 8 successes is around 7.2%.
The odds of seeing 7 successes is around 22.5%.
The odds of seeing 6 successes is around 30.6%.
The odds of seeing 5 successes is around 23.8%.
The odds of seeing 4 successes is around 11.6%.
The odds of seeing 3 successes is around 3.6%.
The odds of seeing 2 successes is around 0.7%.
The odds of seeing 1 success is around 0.08%.
The odds of seeing 0 successes is less than 0.0001%.
However, none of these are impossible and a single attempt is going to be prone to being off by plus or minus 3 or so successes. You're going to need many attempts to claim a pattern.
You're misunderstanding entirely. Like stoleviathan99 said, the chance of only getting 1 crit out of 8 rolls when each roll has a 72% chance of success is incredibly small. It's not impossible for him to be that unlucky but in my opinion it's more likely that 72% chance did not apply to all rolls.
There might be a case for what monkeybone13 said on page 1, that there are diminishing returns on crit chance when you craft multiple items. It may say 72% but isn't.
Well lets stop beating around the bush. NO THERE IS NOT.
If the OP knew anything about stats he would know that 1) His sample size is SMALL and 2) the chances of only hitting 1 + the margin of Error is in the 3% mark... which means that if 1000 people a day are crafting at least 8 things 30 of them have only hit one crit in 8 rolls... as IS EXPECTED by the math.
Trust me I have crafted 10s of thousands of things in STO... and yes a few times I have even recorded a 100 here and there... and guess what every time I did... I was with in 5% of the % the game said every single time.
As easy as it is to WANT to read other things into the numbers... when you get a sufficient sample size things appear to be just fine.
I have upgraded 11 alts personally, using the same method and averaged about 2 UR and 1-2 Epics. When I went the Mk II VR route + the experimental upgrades + a research token, the number of UR's tripled, and the Epics doubled.
Many times nothing happened. Such is the fun of the RNG Gods. Some times I got 2 in a row.
It does work.
Regardless of your luck, it still takes 386+ upgrades for a full ship + ground set upgrade.
My Two Bits