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Chances of you landing on dragon rider skill for Nightfury
If I open up 10 boxes, RNG, do you feel I have the chance to get one?
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In those 10 boxes, you never got 1 dragon rider skill?
To further expand on that, you can open up an upwards of 1000 boxes, and receive anywhere between 0 and 1000 dragons.
The storefront shows 5 potential prizes in a Nightfury box (we're not going to worry about amounts right now):
Nightfury riding skill
premium alkahests
extensive alkahests
masterwork alkahests
spellbinds
= 20% chance (1/5) of getting Nightfury
So far so good, right? But wait - there's more!
Opening a lootbox displays 4 mystery prizes. That compounds on the previous 20% from the above calculations, adding another 25% (1/4) chance of you picking the right box:
1/5 * 1/4 = 1/20 --> 5%
Okay... so... now here is where things get out of control - you'll notice in the storefront that each of the alkehest prizes and the spellbinds has quantities attached to them. With that knowledge, let's assume that each quantity is its own prize:
Nightfury riding skill
75 premium alkahests
200 premium alkahests
100 extensive alkahests
200 extensive alkahests
150 masterwork alkahests
250 masterwork alkahests
300 masterwork alkahests
75 spellbinds
150 spellbinds
200 spellbinds
= ~9.09% (1/11) chance of getting Nightfury
Ouch. I'm not Batman, so this does not look like a fair fight in my eyes.
But wait - there's more! Remember what I said about actually opening a lootbox?
1/11 * 1/4 = 1/44 --> 2.27%
Oh! I forgot something - given the number of prizes available before opening a box, and given that there are only 4 mystery prizes to choose from, there's a chance that Nightfury won't be in the pool of potential prizes. This means that makes the numbers look more like this (I think):
at best --> 1/5 * 1/2 * 1/4 = 1/40 = 2.5% chance of getting Nightfury
most probable --> 1/11 * 1/2 * 1/4 = 1/88 = 1.14% of getting Nightfury (hope you got a rabbit's foot somewhere...)
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Now... as I said, I know not of the finer machinations behind the loot boxes, so all that up there could be complete hogwash. But if all that is right, then that should give you a better idea of your odds of obtaining that which you seek.
Addendum: One single outlier I can think of to counteract all this: if you're one of the lucky few who has the opulence to try, try again if at first you don't succeed, then feel free to disregard all that above and go nuts. All the same, good luck, and may the Force be with you.
...well, at the very least, I don't think the four mystery boxes actually do anything concrete other than being a sort of visual trick to make people feel like they have some say in the matter. To actually program it such that they "really" do anything would be way more work than its worth technically. Most likely, whatever box you click, it's still just a random roll.
That being said, I think most evidence gathered over time suggests that the odds of most lootboxes are somewhere around the 3% range, and of course it's unbound so you could do much worse (or better). So I don't think your overall conclusion is so far off. The odds for these dragons may be slightly higher than 3% given the price, but it's not going to be a very high chance, and there are no guarantees. (If you look at other games that use "gacha" like this where they list the rates, the prize rate tends to be somewhere between 2% to 4%, so the rates here actually aren't so unusual.)
Someone I know said he spent $200 worth of EMP on dragon boxes and didnt get one.
This is pretty much how it works. Those 4 choices are all the same regardless of which one you pick. Some years ago on the old forums someone stripped away the "? covers" on loot boxes to show that each of the 4 choices are all actually the same so the box predetermines your item regardless of what you choose.
Selecting the boxes is to slow people down due to gambling issues.
Maybe, but I think you could also argue that the selection process also increases people's gambling tendencies because they feel like they can get lucky, and create narratives about which box to choose. (And, well, it's not really that much of a delay.)
Now, I do think it slows down the rate at which people can open boxes so that people aren't just slamming the server too many times at the same moment (since this is probably pseudorandom at the end of the day). That said, this may not actually be a requirement.
wow. first i thought, that's a pretty [filtered] thing to do, but then I thought, well, at least if the prizes are all the same, then I won't feel some feeling like that "i wonder if i chose the 3rd tile instead, I might have got the item"
as i've always wondered, how "close" i was to getting the item but choosing wrong tile, but if this is the case, then well i won't feel as bad in a way. but i suppose this goes the same for mwa boxes. that is, if this is true.
BHS literally said that themselves back in the Player Conference on June 12 2016.
Later on Nexon TERA site, they posted GM Note, summarizing/adding on to the questions in their (inclding BHS probably) own words.