Thoughts on saving challenge tokens?

[WeeNaoise]

But that’s not right. The probabilities of each of the outcomes is not equal – the odds are massively stacked in favour of coins. If you don’t believe me, keep records and run the maths to see how unlikely the outcomes would be if there were equal probability of each outcome.

By way of example, the odds of blowing all three spins and getting coins three times is 1/10 (0.6 x 0.5 x 0.333). The odds of doing that three times running would be 1/1000. Yet this seems to happen to me often. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I got gems on the 3 SRs – poor even on the SR, AC and BP spins.

[Optimus_Pig]

The ABT Facebook group recently concluded a statistical test of some of the most popular “high yield” lab recipes.

Of the six they tested, results for (35) 1xDG, 2xBP and (84) 3xSR both displayed a statistically significant deviation from expectation on first round spins.

(35) had an result of 13% 3xSR, despite having an expectation of 20%
(84) had an result of 24% gems, despite the fact that gems occupy 2 out of 5 slots.

[Francis Crawford]

@WeeNaoise,

The (pseudo-)random number generator works a lot better for me than it does for you, evidently.

The number of times I get stuck with coins after my third spin is probably around the 1/10 that you accurately calculated it should be.

[jman]

I didn’t get enough tokens to unlock windblade, but my thought is any remaining tokens after buying accessories that seem useful I’ll just let sit there and gamble that they’ll roll over. It’s not like you get a a decent amount of coins for those remaining tokens so it’s justifiable to me.

That’s my 2 cents worth.

[sukerman13]

@weenaoise, as i have mentioned before,its all about probabilities… when you leave things in chance, means that some times you win and sometimes you dont…maybe the maths seems to be not in our favour, but we still have to play/spin… personally,i have won more gems than lost….but this is just me,anybody may play as he/she wishes…but with this strategy of mine,i always win many gems than loose.same thing as @franciscrawford said !!

[WeeNaoise]

And I am telling you that the probabilities were altered a few updates ago to make it very rare to win anything other than coins on the high yield spins. Numbers are my thing and I can tell that these probabilities are not equal even by feel because they are so far from it.

[Francis Crawford]

@WeeNaoise,

And I’m telling your experience is not in line with everybody else’s.

For example, I just broke down 4 sets of 3 SR this morning.

2 of them gave gems on the first spin.
2 of them gave gems on the second spin.

Maybe there’s some bug in which different players consistently have different seeds for the RNG. Maybe you’re just unlucky. Maybe your observations are wrong.

But in any case, what you’re posting in this thread is simply false.

And by the way, I’m pretty good with numbers myself.

[Optimus_Pig]

I’m holding onto my last 850 tokens. Chances are that these tokens will end up being wasted, but no big deal.

I’ve already got over 50 million coins anyway; also the best you can get with 850 tokens is 62,000 coins, which I can easily make up in less than a day’s worth of harvesting.

[sukerman13]

@weenaoise, as also @franciscrawford mentioned, it is up to how lucky you are… of course math always tell the truth and the odds are against us due to many coin slots, but again, personally i have won more gems than lost… of course, every player have different opinion.. only today, i have won 160 gems and lost 45, only by the 3 spinning of SR’s….
well @optimuspig,i do not think that these tokens will be seen again…i know it is not much due to the large stash of coins you have,but probably you’ll never see them again in any future event ( or at the oncoming one, which will be here till the end of the month as stated in the update of the game… )

[Optimus_Pig]

I know it’s a gamble, but no more a gamble than any time I hit coins in the lab and choose to respin, lol.

[TriPolar]

OK, so I’ve been pretty much out of it the past couple of days. I didn’t see this big debate over rolls until now. @sukerman13 the strategy you mentioned is pretty much what I use. I know I need to cutdown on my re-trys, just sometimes the physical odds look too good to pass up, especially if I’m on a bit of a roll. Depending on how many SRs I have, dictates how I make processor’s iron vs gears & chips.

Personally I never retry if the gem prize is less than the cost. With the few exceptions when I really need a chip or SR to keep it going and I have enough of the other materials to make up for it.

The 3xSR spins that I mentioned was not a regular occurrence. It was just for the times that the first spin hit coins, the the 5gem spin hit coins. I have noticed (feels like) the next spin usually ends up on coins as well. I just started keeping track of my own spins. Hopefully it will lead to some guidance soon but with the constant changing/evolving of the game…from soft updates to full rollouts, I think (like with the missions) most statistical data trend analysis is only probably truely valid for a couple of weeks before things change regardless of how minor the changes are.
Recently, iron has become pretty rare for me, in relation to any of the other materials so, I limit my usage of them in spins.

[TriPolar]

When it comes to the mathimatical odds of something happening, unless something is 100%, it will include it’s opposite. Perfect example is any lottery system, the odds are that you will probably never win in your life time. Yet somebody always (usually really) wins. They defied the odds!

Strangely enough, I came on here tonight to say that I’m going to gamble by not using nearly 700 tokens. Then in here I find that I am not the only one. Although I only have around 20mil in coins in contrast to the other veterans in here. I also don’t see a real risk in not getting more. If there is a chance that Rovio changes plans and let’s them carry over, or there is a blunder (as if there is a flawless track record). Those tokens would be worth more to me in another event. C-Minor kind of ticked me off… On the original run I wasted a couple hundred tokens on coins. Those same tokens if I didn’t spend them, would have been extremely helpful for the encore.

By the way, didn’t they say a double competition… So shouldn’t that really mean that there will be 2 going on at the same time!? Or one massive heap of an event?? There’s a difference between a double comp and 2 comps ran independently… I know it’s giving them a lot of credit to pull off something like that but it is possible that they can beat the odds..

[Francis Crawford]

I’ve played multiple games in which players at various times felt sure that the RNG (Random Number Generator) was broken. I can’t recall such beliefs ever holding up as evidence accumulated over time.

It’s certainly possible in theory; for one thing, RNGs aren’t truly random. But I don’t recall a case where it happened in practice.

[Pampeans]

Rovio has finally hit on a revenue generating business model by offering Tfs and accessories through these challenge contests. By what I can see in this forum, people are clearly willing to spend money on gems to win the contests, perhaps much more so than in regular game play. Allowing people to stockpile and carryover tokens from contest to contest would defeat that purpose. Not saying Rovio wouldn’t do that, but it will be interesting to see if they do.

[sukerman13]

@tripolar, as you said ” Personally I never retry if the gem prize is less than the cost ”, exactly the same for me !!
now, if they are going to do another event, they have to start from the beggining. i mean that if they were going to let us keep the previous tokens into the new event, they had to tell us !! i had some hundreds of tokens and because i knew that i would loose them, i exchange them with coins… it would be very wrong if they were going to do that, they SHOULD have informed us. i wouldnt like to start an event from the beggining and some others had a start with 400-500 tokens…. any information about when the new event starts by the way…?

[Francis Crawford]

@Pampaens,

You raise an interesting point — do people pay money for gems?

My gem total went down ~100 gems per day in the recent contest — ~200 spent vs. ~100 gained. That’s pretty much all I spend gems on, so I don’t need to buy them. But do other people buy gems?

[Optimus_Pig]

Went 3xSR three times this evening. Went net -45 on gems after re-spinning twice on all three and not hitting gems on any of them. Oh well, c’est la vie.

[TriPolar]

@sukerman13 Not to argue with you my friend but you mean the same people who had the fiasco with in C-Minor?? As well as the much praised start of Error the Windblade??

Personally, all of the people who used their tokens early in C-Minor #1 (like myself) got screwed. I emptied out the tank of tokens at the having to burn them on coins, only to find out that they would only make it up to the people who had tokens left. Had I waited or left them unspent, my SoundBlaster would actually have an accessory on his shoulder and my SoundWave would have a bird instead of a mini cannon. Yes we were all taken care of properly for that one with full advance notice of being able to earn more. Instead of just an opportunity to cash out. If I sound a little bitter it’s not towards anybody around here, it’s just because it was a s#ity situation for me. Exactly what you said you wouldn’t like happen to you, happened to a few of us. For some it didn’t matter to other’s it did.

Just like the way this one started… The leaderboards were practically non-functional. This time I was fine with it because I was in 1st place. So I just had to get my daily’s. Others tho not too happy with it… I believe that there is an entire thread dedicated to the topic.

Again, my original point you never know what can happen… So in my case what’s worth more a couple hundred thousand coins, or something more useful in another event… On purpose or by accident.

Not to beat a dead horse but how often do they warn us about changes a head of time? I’m not saying they never do but it isn’t as much as people may think. #1 examples are the mission rewards and the lab. If you actually keep track, those trending numbers change almost by weekly. I have the data from my own missions for a couple of months to prove it. Still building on it and building on the spins, just have to add more details to it. Order of entry, time of day, day of the week and method of entry into the lab. Yes, streak do play a role in true randomness but not as much in unbalanced randomness.
By the way, if anyone has any other ideas for data that can be recorded, please let me know…

{and he drops the mic on the floor as he picks up a weapon to blasts another eggbot!! “Save piggy island!!!”}

[TriPolar]

@optimuspig that’s been a familiar occurrence for me with going after that 3rd attempt (2nd re-spin).

[WeeNaoise]

@optimuspig – the good news is that the probability of that happening is only 2.7%. Therefore your experience, just like mine and TriPolar’s, is a statistical outlier and is balanced by Francis Crawford and Sukerman’s never ending run of success on the old lot machine.

When I was at school, there were a couple of people in my year who swore blind that they never lost on slot machines – except when anyone was watching lol.

[Optimus_Pig]

Well, I went after 3xSR three more times this morning, and only hit gems once, for a net result of -25.

As I said in an earlier comment which everyone seems to have ignored:

The ABT Facebook group recently concluded a statistical test of some of the most popular “high yield” lab recipes.

Of the six they tested, results for (35) 1xDG, 2xBP and (84) 3xSR both displayed a statistically significant deviation from expectation on first round spins.

(35) had an result of 13% 3xSR, despite having an expectation of 20%
(84) had an result of 24% gems, despite the fact that gems occupy 2 out of 5 slots.

So it’s been proven that the odds on first spins for 3xSR are off. I would not be surprised if the odds on the first and second re-spins are off as well.

[Optimus_Pig]

It would also not surprise me if Rovio periodically tweaked the odds of labs spins.

There’s no reason to believe that just because a particular result occupies 1 out of 5 slots, that the probability of hitting that is going to be 20%.

It’s no different from slot machines. Just because cherries occupy X number of spaces on the tumblers, doesn’t mean that actual underlying odds of them turning up is going to have any relation to that.

[Francis Crawford]

@Optimus_Pig,

Unfortunately, your “So it’s been proven …” claim is incorrect.

“Statistical significance” is not proof, even if we assume that the data is wholly accurate.

I’m not at all claiming that there’s any proof the other way — you may be right in your guesses that either the choices are non-random by design or that the RNG is broken. But one small trial with different reporters for different parts of the dataset, resulting in a p < .05 does not a strong proof make.

[Optimus_Pig]

@franciscrawford

Strong enough. I mean, it’s certainly stronger than the non-statistical impressions that you’re self-reporting, right?

Why is your personal experience with the lab more valid than that of the many others who report otherwise?

[nemisispig]

Has anyone recorded whether their playing online or offline when using the lab,as I find it is more random offline then when I use the lab connected through Facebook. These are just my findings though and not a statistical fact.