One hundred trials later...

Since the drop rate for Incarnate trial components was adjusted in the April 26th patch, I've been collecting data on every trial I've run. A little while ago I finished trial #100, for an average of 1.28 trials per day, and I want to share the information I collected. The raw data is here. In total, I ran 48 BAFs, 28 Lambdas, and 24 Keyes.

Component Drops

We know there is a threshold of activity below which a player only gets 10 threads, and above that they get a Component. Assuming that there's only one threshold (you either get threads, or a component of random quality), we can gather drop rates from it. And my numbers are...



For me, over 100 runs, the drops heavily hinted at 10% Very Rares, 20% Rares, 30% Commons, and 40% Uncommons. The drops were somewhat streaky, though: I got three Very Rares in a row, and two Rares in a row twice.

Note that I was using two characters to run trials, and one of them got 8 Very Rares, and the other got 2, both running a very close number of trials. This is a prime example of the RNG being random; all comes down to luck. I went 30 runs without a Very Rare, and a the moment it's been 19 runs since my last Very Rare.

Completion Time

I measure the time from the first "radio transmission" to the moment the final AV is defeated. I don't use zoning into the map as a starting point because then the opening cutscene time would appear in some runs but not in others, screwing up the data; also, not everybody zones in at the same time. The first speech bubble gives me a good consistent point in which to begin measuring.



BAF: The fastest BAF run took 13:34; the worst, 35:33. Don't ask about that one. It was a horrible, horrible situation and I swore to never speak of it again. The average time to complete was 17:45; the median time, 17:09.

Lambda: The fastest run took 19:33; the slowest, 34:06. The average completion time was 25:08, and the median, 24:26. While it is longer than BAF, it's not that much longer; and usually, at least on Freedom, people run both back to back.

Keyes: Oh boy. Keyes. The fastest run took 31:46, and the slowest, 54:20; the average time to complete was 41:19, and the median, 41:15. If run with people who know exactly what to do, sub-40 minute times are the norm. If you have to explain things to people, better schedule an hour for this trial.

I sorted the data in order to show the "time trends" better:



The worst BAF runs will still be faster than the best Lambda runs (I'm still not talking about that extremely bad run that soils the graph) and the worst Lambda runs will be faster than the best Keyes runs. It's no surprise that broadcast in Pocket D sees a lot of "looking for anything but Keyes".

I just knew that someone was going to do a chart like this eventually

A break? From CoH? What kind of treason is this?

The run-time dichotomy is a big thing imo.

Such that I think that perhaps it needs to have it's reward readdressed, such as a better reward rate [ie, more likely to get Rare/V.rare whatever] or an increased number of awards [it takes twice as long, give it double awards].

Very interesting...

Kudos on all of the work putting this information together

Very cool, Leandro. Thanks for taking the time to put this all together!

-Buxley

Nice work.

Math work follows that probably has some errors: if the numbers are really 10% for a Very Rare, it means that in 10 runs you would only have around a (9.^10) 35% chance to not get a V Rare. If those odds are real, then in terms of a single Very Rare, it is actually better strategy to run the BAF over and over than chase Empyreans. If you took an average amount of time to run each of the 3 trials every day based on these times, a Very Rare in Empyraen would be worth about 84 minutes of mission time across 10 days, or the equivalent of 14 hours of playing trials (not including set up time). If you ran the BAF 40 times you'd have a less than 1% chance of not having your V Rare within 11 hours, and some chance of getting more than one. Of course, you can do both.

However, this also means that after 40 runs around 1% of players will not have found a V Rare. Multiply that by the number of people playing and you've got your conspiracy theories right there, and some (IMO somewhat justifiably) annoyed players.

I'm still curious whether team performance changes the odds and in what way.

Seems like, from a casual glance at the charts, that the information you've gathered is exactly what people should have expected to see. Over enough runs, the drops find their norms, just like a good, weighted table drop should do.

Why are uncommons more common than commons?

That has been my experience too.

Awesome, awesome information, Leo. Thank you for all the hard work and analysis.




And for you, you know who you are, who just have to come in here and dance around making worthless vacuous waste posts--for God's sake, can't you just stop your mouth from moving for ten seconds?