[X] My Assistant

Well this is another good reason we didn't merge the Research ideas from Ask the Experts thread with Ponyverse. It helps to separate out the joke or semi-serious replies which would confuse a person asking questions. Some decent points were made though. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Ahh yes, the pot calling the kettle black (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

Yup I'd often go off on a tangent with overly serious/detailed replies in Ask the Experts that are eventually not answering a question, so that was another good reason to make a new thread for that kind of stuff.

There is "do not want" button, so mostly this is not true

Even if you choose "do not want" you increase the size of the betting pool, so I believe it's still true. I'm not sure on all the details of how ticketing and prize selection works.

But on that subject, should mouisaac have bid 18000 out of 70000 tickets on the first helmet? Aren't his chances supposedly capped at 10% of the betting pool, so he should have bid 7000 tickets? I can see why he bid on the second helmet now; it's hard to resist that kind of temptation when it's 10 times cheaper. Also since he collects peerless, if you have two copies you can wear one and see the other in your equipment list.

His comment about spitting reminds me that in one of the Blue Water Splash comics there was a swimsuit girl who enjoyed going into the school water tank to pollute the water supply. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/heh.gif)

But on that subject, should mouisaac have bid 18000 out of 70000 tickets on the first helmet? Aren't his chances supposedly capped at 10% of the betting pool, so he should have bid 7000 tickets? I can see why he bid on the second helmet now; it's hard to resist that kind of temptation when it's 10 times cheaper. Also since he collects peerless, if you have two copies you can wear one and see the other in your equipment list.

No, chances are not capped at 10%. The doubling effect of the Golden Lottery Ticket is capped at 10% of the pool.

The wiki description isn't clear and the in-game description seems better: In addition to normal tickets, you can also spend a Golden Lottery Ticket to add 100 tickets and double your effective ticket count at the time of drawing. This will not increase the effective ticket count past 10% of the total purchased tickets.

I assumed that meant your total effective ticket count can never exceed 10%. If it can't exceed 10% with a Golden Lottery Ticket, why should it be able to exceed 10% without one?

But anyway, assuming there is no straightforward logic to this, you're saying I could buy up 90% of the tickets manually and thus have a 90% chance to win?

...

You got the point. Tbh I'm still very far away from being able to fill my whole inventory with shining stuff.

From my very limited past exp I can tell it can def go over 10%. I think it just limits the effect of GLT. Else GLT would be too powerful. GLT can only double your effective ticket count up to 10% of the total, so assuming I'm the only one that used a GLT at that old helmet lottery, I would only receive a +100 ticket bonus, but not doubling my chances from roughly a quarter to half. It's mostly useful when you have a really big pot, remember you can only possess 20k tickets on any instance of the lottery, so in cases like this you would normally only be able to possess a small portion of the total ticket counts and you can make use of the full potentials of the GLT. However, it doesn't seem useful at all when many people also uses GLT at the same time and from my own experience, my previous 10-ish GLT spent gives me nothing in return. Nothing. Not even the consolation prize. It's not easy to win a pot with a total count of 500k+ tickets ngl.

I did already expect that though and I don't think that's enough to prove that buying over 10% of tickets does anything. The reason is that people can opt out of the winning prize, which will be commonplace except on the highest value lotteries.

For example if I bought 10% tickets for something and almost everyone else opted out but me, I might actually have 50%~99% chance to win. This doesn't necessarily prove that if I had bought 50% of tickets that my chances would have been better still.

I did already expect that though and I don't think that's enough to prove that buying over 10% of tickets does anything. The reason is that people can opt out of the winning prize, which will be commonplace except on the highest value lotteries.

For example if I bought 10% tickets for something and almost everyone else opted out but me, I might actually have 50%~99% chance to win. This doesn't necessarily prove that if I had bought 50% of tickets that my chances would have been better still.

Of course, no one here actually knows how it works. As far as I know, we can't rigidly prove it's fair.

And I can't really tell because I always buy more than 10%, and anyone opts out should favor me. However, I just don't win that often unless I put in a third or a quarter when something like Illithid comes up that I like or earth walker staff that I'm missing. IMO it doesn't make sense to cap at 10% after a cap on the number of tickets you can buy already (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif) And say only 2 people play the lottery, how the hell do you cap at 10% (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/unsure.gif)

As I said, I'm just saying from my past 800 lotteries plays, I win more often when I put much more than 10%, like 25% or even 40%. There are many factors as you mentioned but I feel like if it is the way as you described we would have many more complaints arising early on.

say only 2 people play the lottery, how the hell do you cap at 10%

Good point, maybe I'll assume from now on then that the 10% limit is only for GLT. Still, it's somewhat self-defeating to buy much more than 10% of the tickets unless you really want something, because you are essentially bidding against yourself.

For example if something has a 1000 ticket pool, then I could bid 20000 tickets and get it for sure. In this case the effective purchase price of the item is 20000 tickets.

But if I just bid 1 ticket or 100 tickets, the total purchase price of the item is still around 1000 tickets. I just have to rely on a bit of luck, but in the long run if the system is fair I should win my share of these.

Good point, maybe I'll assume from now on then that the 10% limit is only for GLT. Still, it's somewhat self-defeating to buy much more than 10% of the tickets unless you really want something, because you are essentially bidding against yourself.

For example if something has a 1000 ticket pool, then I could bid 20000 tickets and get it for sure. In this case the effective purchase price of the item is 20000 tickets.

But if I just bid 1 ticket or 100 tickets, the total purchase price of the item is still around 1000 tickets. I just have to rely on a bit of luck, but in the long run if the system is fair I should win my share of these.

You don't really play lotteries anyway (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

Well, I saw many pots that went for an extra 20k because some random guy wants it badly (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) btw I do enjoy relying on my own luck, I used to play jackpots that work exactly like this, but you take the whole jackpot if you win, not some random stuff. So I can toss $1000 and you toss $1, then I have 99.9% chance of taking $1001, and you have slightly less than 0.1% to take $1001. (for simplicity sake ignore fees) If you don't have enough chips, the truth is you probably won't make the flip and I would have taken every penny from you. However, it's also very common (as the games are probably being played million if not billion times each day) to see people win with less than 1% chance, sometimes even 0.001%. It's not likely, but is almost guaranteed to happen in the long run, as you have said. I once lost $300 to a guy with 5 cents. We all seen people win the lottery with 1 ticket. But you don't see the same person winning with 1 ticket over and over again that often. You can either rely on the stats that say you are likely to win with 90% ticket count or your own luck that you believe you'll win with 1 ticket. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

The last update to the lottery system was 0.85, on June 22nd 2017.

This is the lottery data analysed from June 23rd of that year. Therefore these numbers can be considered accurate in all columns since that date.



Top winners of 2019:



Edit: the 'email protected' guy mentioned in these is .@_@.@_@. - lucky guy won prizes in the PHOH, PTWD and PSWD auctions!

Some other notes:
There have been 577 unique prize-winners in 2019, and 2623 unique winners since the inception of the lottery. (Technically this may be slightly off: people with email addresses for names get suppressed as 'email protected' - not sure why, it's not present on the lottery pages - so it's possible a few got merged together, but there are very few appearances of this so I think it may potentially only be one guy anyway. The amount of unique users is pretty small.)

This compares to some of Frotag's other data - 291 unique sellers in Super's auctions in 2018 and 2019 combined - as a potential measure of how many people are actually playing the game (as opposed to just dawns + lotteries on star-level, H@H or uploads income) and to what extent. Maybe later I will ask for the same data to be combined with Kedama's auction sellers, and perhaps analyse the distribution there too. (Who are the all-time 'winning' sellers in auctions by the amount of money they've made, and how many equips total sold? for example)

This post has been edited by lestion: Nov 4 2019, 16:35

question for community:
what do you think about re-auctioning?
by re-auctioning, i mean buy an item at auction, and after a while send it again to auction

question for community:
what do you think about re-auctioning?
by re-auctioning, i mean buy an item at auction, and after a while send it again to auction

I personally don't think it's a bad thing, everyone is entitled to run a virtual business for virtual money, so long as it's not in the auctions rules where you buy it from (you still could, but would probably lead to a ban) . Especially for players who originally bought it to use, once they find better, I don't think it should be right to disallow them from reselling. I'm not sure what the point is solely to re auction though, unless you think it'd make more in a different auction?

This post has been edited by Ubershank: Nov 7 2019, 16:47

question for community:
what do you think about re-auctioning?
by re-auctioning, i mean buy an item at auction, and after a while send it again to auction

Most people here would consider this unethical, but I do not think it is. There are a LOT of people who really, really hate resellers here, though.

I don't see any problem with it if you originally buy something to use, then re-auction it once you find an upgrade

This post has been edited by mustardpie: Nov 7 2019, 16:52

question for community:
what do you think about re-auctioning?
by re-auctioning, i mean buy an item at auction, and after a while send it again to auction

I see no problem with that. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

By the way, I've done it a few times. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/heh.gif) This was at the time I was still assembling my Power Protection, Power Balance and Shielding Protection sets.

I bought the pieces at auctions and shops. Most of them I didn't use right away because many pieces were over 100 levels higher, and in some cases I bought a new piece whenever I found something better, so I got repeated pieces. After a while, when I already had the sets assembled, I sold most of the repeats at auctions. What didn't sell, I sent to the bazaar.

question for community:
what do you think about re-auctioning?
by re-auctioning, i mean buy an item at auction, and after a while send it again to auction

I would suggest that this is done modestly. If it happens occasionally, it's not a problem. Don't set a higher start price than you paid - preferably lower, to show that it was a mistake to buy the item, and that you're not doing it for profit.

for a record:
i asked about re-auctioning not because i'm going to do it

I am atm worried about people auction something that is selled by a person that would never ever sell them something when they actually had controll over it. So all i will say is, i see it more or less in the same category as reselling aka can be okay, can be fucking greedy. And now i will grumble again because of a certain person. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/dry.gif)

I got a crystallized phazon, but it seems no WTB thread wants it.

I got a crystallized phazon, but it seems no WTB thread wants it.

I thought that there were several. You could always send it to me for 200k if you don't see anything better.