I tracked my results for this event a little
too closely. As always, the big question is: "Can a player complete the set/evo without using diamonds?"
Setup
I completed the event across each of the 8 main worlds.
- The quests reward a total of 3,857 SK
- The daily log-in quest rewards 690 SK (23 days x 30 SK)
- The quest milestone rewards give a combined 300 SK
- The ground-spawn objects can be expected to give around 25-30 SK a day, depending on your activity and luck so 575-690 SK total (23 days x 25-30)
- This totals roughly 5,500 SK for the event
- This doesn't include the email bonus -- we'll come back to that at the end
- This doesn't include the ashen phoenix -- we'll come back to that at the end
The below table shows my SK stats. I had an average of 5,519 SK across worlds, with a 95% confidence interval 5,506 - 5,532. These is a surprisingly narrow range, and it makes me suspicious that the ground spawn values are not completely random.
Value by World | A | W | F | K | E | S | C | H | Average |
---|
Total SK | 5,523 | 5,516 | 5,504 | 5,514 | 5,488 | 5,550 | 5,534 | 5,520 | 5,519 |
Ground Spawn | 676 | 669 | 657 | 667 | 641 | 703 | 687 | 673 | 672 |
Method
Now it's time to spend this haul, right? No, before we start clicking away, we need to decide on which of the 3 prize options we're presented that we want to take. Each prize costs a different amount of SK and rewards 1-3 Grand Prize Currency. To optimize for the grand prize set, we should always be choosing the prize that has the
lowest SK cost per GP Currency.
But some prizes also offer bonus SK as a reward, so shouldn't we factor that in? You betcha. We can calculate the expected amount of Bonus SK offered in each prize as the chance of receiving the bonus times the amount of bonus SK. Then, we can recalculate our SK cost per GP Currency earned after subtracting that expected bonus SK from each prizes' SK costs. This new value tells us what we should expect the average SK cost per GP Currency to be including the bonuses.
The long and short of it is this: we should prioritize choosing the rewards in the following order: 23, 75, 22, 79, 29, 58, 48, 60, 33. There are some strategic edge cases where it might make sense to deviate from this, but this approach is good enough for now.
SK Cost | GP Currency | SK per GP Currency | Chance of SK Bonus | Bonus SK | SK per GP Currency (after bonus) |
---|
22 | 1 | 22.0 | 0% | 0 | 22.0 |
23 | 1 | 23.0 | 12% | 30 | 19.4 |
29 | 1 | 29.0 | 12% | 50 | 23.0 |
33 | 1 | 33.0 | 11% | 40 | 28.6 |
48 | 2 | 24.0 | 0% | 0 | 24.0 |
58 | 2 | 29.0 | 13% | 80 | 23.8 |
60 | 2 | 30.0 | 9% | 120 | 24.6 |
75 | 3 | 25.0 | 6% | 150 | 22.0 |
79 | 3 | 26.3 | 6% | 200 | 22.3 |
Results
After a lot of clicking, following the priority described above, my results are in the table below. The columns contain how many times each prize was selected per world, with the number of bonus chests won in parenthesis. Three of the eight worlds completed the set with 260+ GP Currency. The final average score was 257, with a 95% confidence interval 243 - 271. I think it's worth pointing out just how wide these results can swing given your luck -- the highest score was 292, and the lowest 230, for a range of 62. That's the difference of 3 Grand Prize rewards starting from the same SK!
Prize Count by World | A | W | F | K | E | S | C | H | Average |
---|
23 SK | 32 (4) | 36 (9) | 26 (4) | 45 (8) | 36 (4) | 31 (3) | 40 (2) | 25 (2) | 34 (5) |
75 SK | 39 (2) | 49 (7) | 48 (3) | 37 (1) | 42 (1) | 39 (1) | 36 (1) | 41 (3) | 41 (2) |
22 SK | 19 | 27 | 16 | 14 | 10 | 7 | 10 | 16 | 15 |
79 SK | 35 (5) | 25 (2) | 23 (2) | 28 (3) | 22 (2) | 24 (0) | 28 (2) | 26 (1) | 26 (2) |
29 SK | 3 (1) | 1 (1) | 3 (0) | 0 (0) | 2 (0) | 1 (0) | 2 (0) | 2 (0) | 2 (0) |
58 SK | 1 (0) | 2 (0) | 0 (0) | 2 (0) | 2 (0) | 1 (0) | 0 (0) | 2 (0) | 1 (0) |
48 SK | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
GP Currency Earned | 278 | 292 | 258 | 260 | 246 | 230 | 244 | 248 | 257 |
So how lucky or unlucky did I get? One thing we can look at is how much GP Currency did I earn per 100 SK spent. To be precise, this is per 100 SK spent of my
starting currency, not what I ultimately spent after bonuses. This post is already too long, so for now take my word that this is a good approach. We can then compare how I performed with the average expected currency per 100 SK, found by combining the prize counts with the information from the table in the Method section up above. If we earned more GP Currency per 100 SK than expected, I was lucky. If not, unlucky.
You can see the results of this in the table below. In general, I was slightly unlucky on average, I was very lucky on worlds A and W, and very unlucky on world S. It's worth pointing out here that this "luck" concept measured here is only accounting for how lucky I was with bonus chest rewards -- it's not accounting for luck associated with which prizes are offered. This explains why world F somehow got luckier than world K by about 1%, but still ended with slightly less GP Currency. Regardless of bonus SK luck, the 23 SK chest is significantly more valuable than the others, and world K opened that chest much more often.
Value by World | A | W | F | K | E | S | C | H | Average |
---|
Currency per 100 SK | 5.04 | 5.31 | 4.70 | 4.72 | 4.48 | 4.16 | 4.44 | 4.49 | 4.67 |
Expected Currency per 100 SK | 4.65 | 4.66 | 4.65 | 4.72 | 4.69 | 4.69 | 4.72 | 4.64 | 4.68 |
% Above Expected | 8.2% | 13.9% | 1.2% | 0.1% | -4.5% | -11.4% | -5.9% | -3.2% | -0.2% |
Wrap-up
Based on my experience, I would say that a player not spending diamonds has about a 50% chance of completing this event without spending diamonds. Wait! What about the email bonus (100 SK) or ashen phoenix (114 SK fully evolved)? In my case, the extra SK would have been worth, on average, about 9-10 more GP Currency, moving me from a 3/8 completion rate to 4/8.
But we don't just have to use my 8 cities to make this judgement. If the average player has 5,600 SK (5,500 from the Setup section plus 100 from email) and every 100 SK is worth about 4.65-4.70 GP Currency, then the average player should earn just over 260 GP Currency. If half the players are lucky, and half the players are unlucky, then that leaves us around a 50% likelihood to complete the set.
I'm not a statistician, of course, so I welcome challenges to any of the logic I've laid out!
Recommendation
It's not my business to run, but it's awful lot of clicking and paying attention over the course of a few weeks to earn all the currency in the event. If Inno wants more than ~50% of players who complete the event to win finish the set without spending diamonds, I would recommend that they increase the offered SK pool by 100-200, and change the bonus SK math to be less swing-y. Whether they want they or not is a business decision, not a design decision, but either way, they should be clear in their communication to the player base.