**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
The theory that’s presented in the paper I linked, is that the near miss effect exist. It is not a subjective theory, it’s been proven. What is subjective is the perception of the users that they can influence the outcome, when they cannot because it’s been design this way.
So you agree that the subjective perception that people can influence the outcome is real, and that’s the psychological mechanism used by Kabam and most game companies.
If you refuse to see it, nothing will, but I suggest you read up on Near miss effect and the psychology of gambling as well as Gâcha games mechanics.
Shards on other the hand is another thing.... they become a crystal assigned to a crystal pool when you trade the shards in for a crystal.
There is wide speculation on the supposed effect that the way you draw the Cristal in the socket matters. It doesn't. The pull is done on the server.
In fact if the game crashes, stops or disconnects while the crystal spins, you find the character in your collection at the next login.
I’m not saying the game is sentient. But I am saying that the reel falsely represents what’s really happening.
I’m saying the crystal reel is designed to create the illusion that you almost got something. Which stimulates dopamine the same way as actually getting something. That’s why it’s described as an emotional rollercoaster sometimes. The effect goes away when one switches to pure popping.
Another example of gaming the dopamine system are the current mutant events, where one rewards 250 points and the other 300 points. As soon as hit a milestone in one, you’re nearly there for the other, and it keeps you playing.
Dr. Zola
Maybe another question to ask is whether the ‘spinning’ reel is curated to place more desirable champs next to those least desirable.
BUT
@Kabam Vydious made a post a while back stating the crystal is determined as tku enter the screen. The reel is just for fun.
Maybe Vydious can reply here and state the same as I can’t find that post anymore.
There aren't two different behaviors. There's just one behavior. Randomly choose the drop based on the drop tables when the crystal is opened. When the crystal is technically opened is different depending on player actions, but that is irrelevant to the crystal opening systems.
Not only is this the most reasonable way for these crystals to work, it is how the vast majority of lootboxes work in every game everywhere. Nobody predetermines lootbox contents when they are first generated because that would require saving a lot of extra data for no reason. It doesn't matter to the game servers if they roll at crystal formation time or at crystal opening time, but if they roll at crystal formation they then have to save that data until the player opens the crystal. That just doesn't make practical sense.
We also have unambiguous proof that crystal contents are not determined at crystal formation time. Basic crystals that are formed then kept for months or even years can and do drop champions that did not exist when the crystal was formed or awarded. This is literally impossible if the crystal's drop was predetermined at formation or award time.
Absolutely no one cares about the notion that the crystal might be different based on when it is opened. The crystal's content only need to be generated randomly. It doesn't matter when that random result is generated, and it doesn't matter if that random result "would have been different" given different circumstances. Random is random.
This is basically a colloquialism. When someone asks what can influence an MCOC champion crystal drop, we we assume the question refers to influences that allow the player to skew the results into a direction they would prefer. Any change that is itself random is essentially no change.
We could say that had the game been launched on December 11, 2014 instead of December 10, 2014, everyone's crystal results from then until now would have been completely different. This is a true statement, but in a more meaningful sense this is also saying something completely meaningless to the players of the game.
It is more likely that the design rule for the reels is designed to display results absent odds altogether, so that everything that can happen shows up with equal probability, to show people what is possible. When this is applied to a champion crystal, the higher rarities show up more often than they actually appear in crystal drops, which makes them seem more likely than the drop odds state. But when this happens with something like the TB daily crystal, you get 90% of the displayed results be 5* champions and everything else be much less common because each 5* champion is a different "drop" and is being individually displayed equally among all other possibilities. There's 150+ of those, and only a few of everything else, so they take up a lot of display slots.
That doesn't look like the work of a designer trying to exploit the "near-miss" reel phenomenon. That looks more like a very simple display rule that has never been changed since the beginning of time, and only coincidentally sometimes operates in a way that makes rare valuable things seem more likely to drop, and sometimes does the exact opposite.
The hero u get is the same
The hero u was gonna get is when you open it
Can I have what a lot of ppl here has been smoking
Kabaam has already said this was the case
It is definitely not random. The reel showed 209 portraits, including the drop. There were 30 different champions (including the drop). That's basically impossible if the reel was showing all possible drops randomly.
I wouldn't say it is the most hype set of champions either though. It seems ironically random:
Agent Venom
Annihilus
Ant Man
Black Bolt
Black Widow DO
Dr. Strange
Electro
Gambit
Hulk Ragnarok
Hyperion
IMIW
Kamala Khan
King Groot
Magneto Now
Mangog
Medusa
MODOK
Moleman
Nightcrawler
Sabertooth
Scarlet Witch
She Hulk
Silver Surfer
Starlord
Stryfe
Symbiote Spiderman
Tigra
Venom the Duck
War Machine
Warlock
Gambit was the actual drop. He dropped between Sabertooth and Starlord. This is just one crystal, but while it is definitely not random, it doesn't look like anyone explicitly intended to load the reels either. Maybe the crystal reel works differently now than in the past, and maybe it does some sort of prefetch to save resources (i.e. the crystal picks about thirty champs randomly and loads them into the reel, so the game client doesn't have to dynamically burn more graphics resources with 200 portraits in the spinner.
I'll try to investigate further, but watching crystal reels frame by frame is making me go blind.
PS: I recorded a second 4* crystal and while I haven't gone frame by frame on it yet, it very obviously contains a different set of champs in the visual reel.
If I wanted to study it properly I’d conduct two experiments:
1. Spin 500 cavalier crystals. Record the result along with the two champions/rarities either side. Use tier lists to assess whether or not a near miss occurred and rate its quality - some of these judgments may be subjective but generally there is some agreement over what constitutes a good pull. Calculate whether or not the frequency of high quality near misses is different to low quality near misses e.g. Doom sandwich and Juggernaut sandwich should be equally frequent if there is no intent to exploit the effect.
2. Same as above but spinning 500 basic 6* crystals. This experiment removes the rarity variable and only considers desirability.
3. Same as above but spinning 500 featured 6* crystals. This removes the rarity variable but introduces the new vs old variable and should prove whether or not new champs have different drop rates to old champs within the featured crystal.
I’d do it now if I were a whale 😆.
another way to test it (not scientifically correct, but easier to test), would be to open x amount of crystal including items with different drop rate and compare.
For example:
1000 Arena crystals (no matter the type, since the drop rates are the same), and see what comes on either sides of the drop, and how often, then check that against the actual drop rate. That would give a picture if some items are over represented in the reel or not.
Even though I have no evidence of it, I would be very surprised if a successful mobile gaming company such as Kabam wouldn't to some extent use well documented psychological mechanism in their game design decision. That's not having a tin foil hat, as I think most online mobile company operating on loot box model and gacha uses the same method, because it works.
When Herc will be available in the basic pool, you can pull him from that “old” nexus. The crystal is just the gate to the (in this exact moment) crystal pool.
But maybe i totally misunderstood you haha, have a nice weekend
For example, take lottery scratch-off tickets.
If on Day 1, there were 10M tickets made, and 10 1-Million dollar winners... then your odds of getting a Million Dollars on one is at its core on any single tickets: 1 in a million.
but... what if a month goes by. Some of those tickets are sold. Do we know how many? No? Do we know how many of the Million dollar tickets are left? Well... depends on how much research we do. But reality is... without more information... we really don't know what our odds are of winning.
Maybe all 10 were already sold, and our odds are 0. Maybe all 10 are left, 5 Million were sold, and our odds just doubled to 1:500,000. We don't know.
That's easy to understand... but now to the question of spin or pop. This gets into how random is random.
again starting with lottery scratch tickets... they are usually sold in a line, in numerical order. They are typically ordered in such a way that there are guaranteed to be certain numbers of low-level winners, with maybe 1-slot for a high level winner. They aren't going to put say all 10 million dollar tickets in a row, sold from the same store, possibly to the same person who just went in and dropped $100 on some tickets all at once. Thus the fact that you "hit it big" on a ticket really does mean that the odds of you hitting it big on the next ticket, or even any one ticket in that sheet, are effectively zero.
So... does this relate to MCOC? If I hit pop 10, how does it work? Will MCOC pick 10 random numbers, and independently decide whether or not each one is a "winner"? If so, then I would argue... no, the 10 events are not independent. Computers are virtually incapable of making an independent random event, and most often will use the milliseconds of an event + some complicated math functions to "look random" and in the long term, generate "valid drop rates", however... If at 14:12:01.123456 seconds you hit the button... I would argue you are not going to get 10 truly independent events. Yes, you can find repeats in random numbers, and your first event picking the digits in question should find a "fairly random set", in that it isn't something you can predict and game around... but is it truly independent? Well, that depends on just how good of a random number generator is chose, how large the seeds and exponents and modulo divisors are in the calculation... and unless Kabam is prepare to provide that algorithm... I'm going to say that at best "we don't know", but the most likely answer is... no... they aren't purely independent events.
Will the difference be significant? Again Don't know without the algorithm, but I suspect the answer is probably not.