KPWHYS

I saw this great video clip illustrating binomial distribution  and was reminded of a lengthy discussion I had with an engineer colleague while designing a distribution balance for loot drops. I wanted to implement a chance floor mechanic so players would not get too unlucky and he was miffed because he thought it redundant, as "everything regresses to the mean in the long run anyway". It was difficult to convince him and he had to build a simulator before understanding my point. If you set something to drop at a 20% rate per attempt, the long term average would be 5 attempts per acquisition but there would be plenty of individuals who had to make 10 attempts or more. At the extreme, given thousands of individuals, there would probably be some whom had to make 20 or more attempts to acquire said drop. The user population is unlikely to feel this when an "attempt" is very short and frequent, like a 2-3 second kill on an enemy mob with hundreds of instances in a l...

I've been working on RNG drop and specifically loot box design a lot more in recent years and I began to wonder on an essential question -- why are loot boxes so widely used in F2P games?  As a psych major, when I first started working in F2P back in 2007, I thought of loot boxes as effective purely because variable rate schedules are more effective in reinforcing behavior . This is the same mechanic that makes gambling a compelling activity, and the usage of this design is probably at the heart of all complaints about F2P games being predatory. As I was working on a loot box drop rate though, I realized I had missed an equally basic and powerful aspect of loot boxes: pricing.  Many contemporary F2P games which have loot boxes at their heart like Overwatch, AFK Arena and Empires & Puzzles often price a single loot box in the ball park of US$3. If a particular item within the loot box has a drop rate of 5%, it would take an average of 20 rolls to acquire one,...