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RNG, But Also Not?? Feels Sketchy.
Jake303AoS
Member Posts: 361 ★★★
What's the deal with the "guaranteed" pulls in the featured crystal tab (that we all love so much 🙄).. It's supposed to be, from my understanding, legally, RNG, yet they can guarantee you pull a certain pull within so many crystals? Feels sketchy, like if they can manipulate your pulls that way, who's to say they can't also prevent you from pulling something? Not saying they are of course, but something about it just rubs me the wrong way..
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Just two sets of RNG.
You're overthinking it.
Again, I'm not saying they're doing anything sketchy, I'm just saying it feels sketchy. They're advertising a guaranteed pull within a specific amount of attempts, which means they'd have to manipulate the "RNG" to deliver that. It would feel less sketchy if they just said "hey, we'll send you this champ if you don't pull it within x amount of crystals", but saying you'll pull it from the crystal with x amount of tries, sounds to me like they can control what you can (or can't) pull from crystals. Aka, sketchy.
Before this, you had X% chance to get a certain champ (6*, 7*, featured, whatever).
Say you open a crystal and get a 5*, boo sad face.
Open a new crystal, same odds, as before, nothing changes.
Now here is what happens with the new system, you have those exact same base chances for each crystal, just like before.
Say you get a 5* champ, boo sad face. The following happens:
6* counter goes up by 1.
7* counter goes up by 1.
Featured 7* goes up by 1.
Open a new crystal, the following happens:
Does featured counter = 120? If yes, you get the featured champion.
If not, does the 7* counter = 25? If yes, you get a 7* champion.
If not, does the 6* counter = 3? If yes, you get a 6* champion.
If not, then you get a random champion based on the exact same odds as the very first crystal and the process repeats.
If you get a champion that fits one of those three categories, either by chance or through bad luck, that counter goes back to 0.
They are not in fact changing the odds of the crystals at all, these counters are not part of the crystal themselves and the reward isn't from the crystal, it is from the counter selection.
So again I say, the only "sketchy" thing about this (and I don't think it is sketchy personally) is that this kind of bad luck protection (present in so many games) encourages more gambling because there is a known point that you will get the desired reward. If you buy 120 crystals you are guaranteed to get the featured champion if you didn't manage to get it before that point just from the normal RNG. Before this feature, without that guaranteed point, many people would probably stop log before the 120 point because the bad luck felt bad.
Visually it looks like it comes from a crystal sure (although remember that the wheel is just a visual and not actually the RNG happening).
It would make way more sense from a code stand point to simply do the check as I described and when one of the 3 counters is met show you a wheel with the reward or it just pops up like any other crystal if you pop instead of spin.
It would take more work to go into the actual code of an individual crystal and manipulate it.
Imagine there are 4 buckets.
a) only has 7* featured champ
b) only has random 7* champs (non featured)
c) only has 6* random champs
d) the crystal itself with the full range of random RNG
Your champ is chosen from the appropriate bucket based on the counters.
Just trying to explain in a different way there.
If you're going on the idea that they CAN, they always could. You either trust them or you don't, and if you don't, no conversation here will change your mind.
Your bucket analogy is dumb.
You just have to believe that they are not doing this. They are not gonna expose their code to have you feel safe.
Kabam does not “manipulate the odds” to cause the crystal to generate a particular result. Kabam keeps counters to track how long it has been since the player has had a particular drop, and if that counter reaches a threshold they simply redirect the drop from the original weighted random reward table to a modified one that excludes the lower tier rewards, so that the player is guaranteed to get rewards of a certain type. This is literally no different than when you open a PHC and there’s a low chance for. 4* champ. That happens with random weighted tables, such that if the RNG determines you’re supposed to get a 4*, the game directs the random result to a reward table that only contains 4* champs. This guarantees you actually get a 4* champ as intended. The mechanic for guaranteeing higher tier rewards when the player doesn’t get one for a certain number of drops is a trivial modification of the way all the random crystals already work. They just require tracking more data.
I can guarantee you no one at Kabam “chose” to drop the reward normally instead of, say, sending the modified reward using in-game email because that thought never crossed the mind of any of the designers. And if you gave me a million years to consider all possible objections to the pity crystals, I probably still would not have come up with this one.
It's all rigged
The reel is just for show so they are doing it on purpose hoping some dude falls for the bait and keeps buying more crystals.