Farming Calculator Showing Probability?

"RancorRider;c-1215540" wrote:
Hey, good that you mentioned me !

I can't say for the other websites, but I collected 4374 attempts, with 1460 shards, for a 33,38% drop rate.

As for the calculator, it uses 33% ; and if it can't guarantee a perfect result, it never falls very far from the reality !

What are your thoughts ?

I guess my question/suggestion wasn't clear. I am not talking about the probability of getting a shard when I do a cantina node. The accepted probability for that seems to be 1/3 (or approximately 33%, as your results suggest).

I am talking about, if I farm the cantina for however many days, there is no guarantee that I will have any particular number of shards. (I could farm for 37 days and have no shards, or I could have 763 shards - a shard every single time I play. Neither result are likely, but they are both possible if the game is fair.)

So the calculator gives me an answer, like 37 days. What can I expect to happen if I actually do the farm? At the end of the days, will I have 250 shards? (Answer: not necessarily). If you had 10,000 people farm that node for that many days, how many of them would have that many shards? (According to my calculations: some number close to 10,000 x .64, i.e. 6,400) So about 2/3 of people would have their character to 7 stars, but 1/3 wouldn't.

A hot topic lately has been "Will I get Old Ben to 7 stars before the Commander Luke event ends." If the calculator estimates so many days, how likely is it that I might farm away and still be disappointed due to "bad luck," (or "bad RNG," or whatever name you want to give to things not working the way you would like)?

For some, it is a bother to have to go find a binomial probability calculator, plug the numbers in, and get the result. Many others may not think to ask the question, or know how to find the answer. But I suspect that even if they are a bit hazy on their probability, they have some idea what it means to say that 1/3 of the time, people who try this farm still won't have what they want after their investment.

I think it would be a handy and possibly educational feature to add to such a calculator.

"The lottery is mostly a tax on people who don’t know math." -- Bill Nye

Actually doing the calculation can result in some numbers of large magnitude as intermediate results, so while it is just basic arithmetic, one may need to use some care to avoid overflow/underflow, use alternative ways to calculate approximate results, or just pre-calculate the basic results for common cases, and use a lookup table.