Special spin statistics

[drolly]

Dear fellow frustrated Arena grinders, let me present this to you:

» THE SPECIAL SPIN FORM «
aka, "I've had it with these lovely special spins in this lovely Arena!"

Because there are increasing complaints from many players - myself included - about how the special spins give them the 9001st Lobotomizer instead of the rare card they were farming for, I decided to set up a spreadsheet to collect data about everyone's experience with them. Similar to the Oracle and False God drop rates spreadsheets, you can fill out the form every time you managed to get a streak of consecutive wins. The poll asks for the following:

• the Arena league you were farming
• the cards you witnessed while spinning
• the card you got
• whether you needed it (i.e. whether you already had 12 total or 6 upgraded instances)
• whether you broke a pair by respinning (because then your result has to be excluded when calculating the odds of getting an arbitrary rare card)
• roughly how many of the 27x12 rares you have (in order to classify your farming progress)

I'd be happy to see some contributors and will extend the spreadsheet to get actual results from the collected data like the frequency of weapons, old and new shards in the spins. Any suggestions are welcome, of course.

Link to the poll
Link to the spreadsheet (read-only)
Results v0.1 (14 July 2012)

[Absol]

Grammatical fix:
"Which rare cards occurred showed up in your spin?"

For newbs: every rares will show up more or less evenly. And if player don't break pairs while spinning, then the rares will be won evenly.
For vets: there will be more shards needed (= not already have 6/12) than weapons because weapons can be farmed off AI3. Maybe around 70% shards needed.
As for what shards and weapons will not be needed, i'm guessing that 1st gen shard (SoD, SoG, SoR) will not be needed. For weapons, they will be Lobo, OE, and maybe Titan.

Anyway, this looks nice.

[drolly]

Grammatical fix:
"Which rare cards occurred showed up in your spin?"

Fixed, thanks. Help with English language is always appreciated.

For newbs: every rares will show up more or less evenly. And if player don't break pairs while spinning, then the rares will be won evenly.

This is why I added a question to separate newbs from vets. Players with more than 100 or 200 rares will likely own most of the weapons already and go for the shards instead. Maybe I could ask the players if they intentionally broke up a pair, thus lowering their chance to win something at all. I do that regularly to increase my chances of winning a shard I need.

[fsk]

Also, a bit on special spin strategy would be interesting.

If you spin a pair of a rare you don't need, break that pair.
If 2 reels have a different rare you need and the 3rd doesn't, spin the 3rd reel.
Respin the reel that has more spins left first.

If you follow that strategy, and you still need n rares, what are the odds of picking up a rare you need?

[drolly]

Added the question about breaking a pair. If we want to calculate the chance of winning any rare from a special spin, these entries have to be excluded. However, breaking a pair is allowed if you can't respin the third reel, of course; the poll mentions that.

Furthermore, I'm silently assuming that everyone follows the strategy proposed by fsk. If you didn't, start to do it today and rejoice at immediately higher winrates

[Asinickle]

Wow, I assumed I had under 50 rares, until I counted over 100.
But glad you're doing this! Something about statistics is just great. 

[Dak]

Oops I made a mistake in my first contibution, I have between 200 and 299 rares (not between 50 and 99) sorry 

[drolly]

Oops I made a mistake in my first contibution, I have between 200 and 299 rares (not between 50 and 99) sorry 

Fixed, thanks for mentioning it here and your contributions. Furthermore, I changed your name from "Dak71" to "Dak" in your first two entries.

I hope that I'll be able to extend the spreadsheet soon™ to get some "real" statistics; stay tuned.

[Boingo]

Will you be presenting the findings/statistics on this thread at some point?  I'm curious.

[drolly]

Will you be presenting the findings/statistics on this thread at some point?  I'm curious.

Of course, I'm planning to do this, now that we've already got over 130 entries. First of all, thanks for all those who are contributing, keep up your dedication! I want to add a second spreadsheet showing useful summaries and correlations but at the moment I can't find the time to do it. Meanwhile, have the results provided by Google as a little treat:

Arena league	Successful spins
	89 / 133
Weapons seen	Shards seen
Other rares seen	Number of daily responses
Spins with broken pairs	Useless cards won
21	20

[Absol]

Good work, drolly.
I expected the rares seen to be more or less equal, since they all have the same probability to show up, but eh.
It's interesting to note that SoR, SoSe and the third gen shards all have significantly higher appearance rate, excluding SoB.
I can understand the SoR and SoSe high appearance rate because they are needed for Instosis and Speedbow, respectively, but i don't understand what's the deal with SoB.
It is also interesting to note that the majority farms Plat as of now instead of Bronze (which might or might not be involved in increased Bronze gold prize), with both Gold and Bronze tied. And so, the Silver league is the unpopular League as of now.

[fsk]

There's a small sample size.  Those variations are probably due to luck and randomness, rather than anything else.