I’ve been wanting to crunch some hard numbers for awhile … let’s see. In Friday’s post it was confirmed that this event draws cpu teams from two different “encounter tables”:
Encounter table A:
Inari is not included in this table
5 possible teams (selected equally at random) scoring 3 - 7 per battle
Expected yield: 5 per battle
Inari encounter table:
Equal distribution between 6 teams
Expected yield: (35 / 6) or ~6 per battle, or roughly 1.2x as much
Assume optimal play, i.e. every new battle gets a 50% chance of being drawn from either encounter table (per Friday’s official post). On one hand, because Inari only appears in one encounter table, we could say that it only appears “half as often” as the other teams, so yielding twice the rewards is … actually fair?
But if Inari’s location is currently occupied by something else which you are NOT battling, obviously your chance of encountering it is zero because it’s THAT location specifically that needs to get re-rolled.
This might also explain discrepancies between different players following the “same” strategy: Say that the map has nothing but Spirit Foxes available to battle. It happens. One of them appears in Inari’s location (thus, will perform an “Inari check” when defeated) and another (of the same level) is in a different location (and can not trigger an “Inari check”). If one user pick’s Inari’s Spirit Fox while another picks the non-Inari Spirit Fox, suddenly these users are on technically different sequences from each other, so fixed RNG seeding no longer applies between them.
I wouldn’t mind the secret rules if there were actually some hints in the lore provided during the event. Hit 0 inari battles, (with other battles with Inari in them), but overall it didn’t impact the grind. I’m a little surprised that there is so much reaction from people over something that impacts so little.
I want the devs to try new things. I hope they try something like this again and execute better.
Platform, device version and operating system:
PC/Mobile
What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
I was expecting Inari battles to not spontaneously go missing in the “This Fox Rocks” world event.
World events guarantee the same sequence of battles for all players. The Inari battle in the current world event is supposed to show up as battle 19 and 41, among others. This only seems to work for a few players, most don’t see any Inari battles at all.
See also this official response in regards to the event configuration. The Inari battle is just supposed to be rarer than usual, the development team doesn’t seem to be aware that some of the guaranteed battles are disappearing entirely.
This post basically confirms that the Inari battle is broken:
Chance for Inari to show up is supposed to be 1/12 = 8.3%. Applying math, the chance for Inari not showing up in 128 battles is (11/12)^128 = 0.0015%, or 1 in roughly 70000 players. This is not what players are experiencing, there are a whole lot who play that far without ever seeing Inari.
This bug has bumped the buy-in cost for players from tier 1 - 2 to at least tier 4, for at least 400 extra gems. The community would like to see this addressed.
After some further analysis the event seems to work like this.
1.) There is a secret location, called “INARI LOCATION”, it doesn’t always offer a battle. It is currently unknown whether this location can move around.
2.) As long as this location doesn’t contain a battle, there’s a 50% chance it receives one after each fight. When it spawns, the chance for each type of battle that can show up is the same, including Inari.
3.) If the battle in the Inari location isn’t the Inari battle, the game won’t ever provide an Inari battle until this particular battle has been cleared. This means intentionally going into a low scoring battle, something the event rules don’t even hint at and that players have been taught the past years to avoid.
See this bug report for more details. As much as the community has figured out you need to fight EVERY battle showing up at this specific location of the map as soon as possible. The location may temporarily be empty, in those situations just pick any other battle.
As long as there is any other battle available at this location, Inari won’t ever show up. This screenshot shows poor @AMT falling into the hidden trap, like many others:
Yes, this qualifies as severe bug, it’s secretly rigged somewhat similar to the recent Dungeon issue. No, the people in charge haven’t yet come around to admitting that this can’t possibly have been working as intended.
Inari has a 1/6 chance of appearing in only one location on the map
Said location, when not already present, has a 50/50 chance of spawning after any battle
(cumulative probability so far: 1/12 or 8.9%)
If that location spawns (Inari or otherwise), it remains there until actually battled (normal event behavior)
If that location spawns without Inari, any OTHER battles are exempt from probability analysis because the game isn’t even rolling for Inari at all
Here’s how your analysis should be working:
Rotate through all available battles until Inari appears
Upon defeating Inari, ignore every other battle on the map, focus solely on the new battle that appears and farm it over and over.
Inari should now appear approximately 8% of the time (~12 battles).
I’ll agree on it being an interesting idea, but entirely opaque / even counter-intuitive for the end users. Competitive players tend to go after the highest scoring battle, and if Inari’s spot on the map is present but occupied by a low-scoring battle, that player has no way to know that THAT is the ONLY battle that will actually prompt an Inari check.
It is actually an interesting idea for specific locations on the map to have different “encounter tables” from each other, but this was a really, REALLY poor way of doing it.
Oh man… Thanks for breaking breaking it down so clearly!
It’s a lot better than the one I wrote, which I try to make it similar to official one.
The battle against Inari is a rare battle that may show up only in a secret spot on the map, won’t appear anywhere else, and only one of them will appear at a time.
Not the best, but better than what we got, you know? It’s a kinda interesting how a single sentence can solve all the issue we had with World Event this week.
It admittedly doesn’t quite fit, I don’t believe there was any intent to cheat players.
Longer version. Events get played for the reward tiers, it’s a guild effort, there’s usually some target the guild wants to achieve. Players get shown the scoring rules at the start of the week, then have to decide on how much event currency they want to purchase. It’s an advance payment, so you have to trust in the scoring rules being correct, there’s no option to back out again later on and get your money back. When the scoring rules, after much prodding, close to the end of the event, turn out to be very significantly off, players currently have two options:
1.) Call it a loss, take the much fewer rewards than they initially paid for. Guild is unhappy.
2.) Grit their teeth and pay up extra to receive the rewards they initially paid for. Guild is unhappy.
Which, from player perspective, has the same outcome, being cheated out of money/rewards/effort. I’m kind of struggling to find a more suitable word than “rigged”, what would you propose?
…and this, admittedly, does not apply to me since generally I don’t even spend Gems on events, so my perspective is fundamentally different to begin with. I just play events until (a) I run out of Sigils, (b) hit a desired reward tier (with the next one too far away to care about), and/or (c) I get bored of the event entirely.
A - if there is NO secret spot currently on the map, you can fight any battle you want and the game will roll an “Inari check” (aka. 50% secret spot spawns * 1/6 Inari appears in that spot) to determine the next battle that appears.
B - (most) world event battles stick around until actually fought, but there can only be 1 secret spot (with or without Inari) on the map. So if the secret spot IS present on the map (and especially without Inari) but you are fighting other battles, the game is not actually rolling a new “Inari check” because the secret spot that Inari can appear in has already been rolled and is just waiting there (menacingly?) for you to battle it.
C - Unless you recognize the secret spot for what it is, you don’t actually know which battle (either (A) any of them, or (B) one of them) will cause a new “Inari check”, but if you rotate through them all you can guarantee that (at least) one will.
