Hello Maplers, this is my (Exile) commentary on Gachapon:
Despite the recent release of a Gachapon poll in order to gauge community opinion on how we should handle it, there have been enormous amounts of contention around the issue. Amidst this storm of memes, heated discussion in Discord, and misinformation, I am writing this post to demystify the details and explain the nuances of our planned release of vanilla Gachapon. I do hope that some of the information and logic in this post will serve to make people think harder about their decision in the gachapon poll, the feature itself, and how it effects the game and the community.
1. Gachapwned: What we forgot about vanilla Gachapon and why we never felt its impact (in old versions):
As we all know, a chief concern among community members with Gachapon is the concept of "pay-to-win", which in essence describes the ability of someone with too much money to buy into gachapon and use it to get an unfair advantage. But pay-to-win aside, even more people are worried about the fact that Gachapon is a method that introduces rare and powerful items into the game in a way that is totally unrewarding, and that barely qualifies as real or challenging gameplay. In other words, even if everyone were to get an even amount of Gachapon, and the system were totally balanced, it makes Maplestory a less rewarding and meaningful game to play by devaluing players' achievements and mitigating the importance of actual game content that provides these rewards. Even to those who are advocates of Gachapon, this is a clear issue, so I want to start by sharing some vital information about our future implementation of the system - statistical and qualitative findings that will force us to revisit this concern about gameplay from a more knowledgeable perspective.
When the heated debate first started a few days back, I began to look at item probabilities to assess the nature of old Gachapon, and I found that vanilla Gachapon rates were so low that it would take an enormous amount of Gachapon for the server as a whole to generate a single instance of one of the rarer items. The rarest items had a probability of roughly 11/1000000 to 67/1000000, meaning that for a top tier item, it would take roughly 10,000 to 90,000 tickets for a chance to get one (as an aside, please excuse my math on discord! I was off by a factor of 10, in case you were scratching your head at these figures). However, this is not the entire story - there are multiple rare items with these kinds of probabilities, which begs the question: if all items on the drop table are extremely valuable and rare, then wouldn't every ticket yield a rare item, even if it the chance of getting any unique item was very low? Exactly how many great items does gachapon actually spit out? What are the chances of getting any valuable item instead of a valuable item? To understand what Gachapon really outputs we to analyze the probability data as a whole:
First, lets take a closer look at how probabilities are calculated - if the chances are really as simple as we think they are in the data, than the total probability of obtaining any item from gachapon is 1 (obviously). In other words, they are simply calculated by generating a random number between 0 and 1. We begin our analysis by taking the data for only one Gachapon NPC, to keep things simple, and summing the probabilities of all items. The result:
Meaning that the raw probability values in our data do seem to be accurate, and that it was just calculated by comparing a random float to the actual probability value of the item. The fact that 0.68 is roughly on the order of magnitude of 1 serves as a sanity check: our algorithm of simply generating a number of 0 and 1 seems correct. So we know the probability of getting any item is roughly 68%. What does that mean for the other 32%? We can only assume that it gave absolutely nothing, or the dreaded food stamps (or, in older versions, presumably just random food). We'll call this 32% junk, because, well, it is, and move on to the other data: how much of the actual item probability is populated by rare items?
Before we continue, a quick note on calculation: I will be switching between fraction and decimal format as I see fit. This will improve readability by expressing probabilities as items per million.
First, we need to strictly define some terms. We'll call exceptional items items whose probabilities are less than 100/1000000, rare items items whose probabilities are between 101/1000000 and 400/1000000, uncommon items items whose probabilities are between 401/1000000 and 900/1000000, common items items whose probabilities are between 901/1000000 and 1600/1000000, and very common items as everything else. Notice how the ranges for each item "type" increase linearly - I have done this because the rates tended to grow like this in the data I saw, and packing them into constant intervals would result in a huge number of intervals with no (or meaningless) data. Now we see what weights each category has within the 68% chance of obtaining a non-junk item by summing the probabilities of items in each category. These are the total probabilities in graph form:
From this data, then, we can learn exactly what the probabilities are for getting an item in each category, and most importantly, that the probability of getting an exceptional item is roughly .4%. Thus, it requires 250 tickets for a single exceptional item, and so it becomes clear that it is brutally difficult for anyone to get their hands on any exceptional item through Gachapon alone. Moreover, the chance of getting a specific exceptional item from Gachapon is low. With a total of 59 exceptional items, the average probability of getting a specific one is .007% - or, 1 for every ~14,000 tickets. The chance of getting a specific rare item (total of 374 items) is .02% - 1 in every ~5000 tickets. It is the large number of rare items that leads to such a high total percentage, but the average probability for each item is still very low.
With the entire community voting and donating lots of money every day, it would be a long time before the server as a whole would be guaranteed access to any exceptional item they actually wanted from Gachapon alone - for 59 items, it would take a rough total of 826,000 gachapon tickets for one of each to enter the game. These high-tier items are therefore so rare that it is hard to say that Gachapon has any significant kind of role in the game's economy, and in devaluing the work of players who are legitimately clearing content for items - in a vanilla-Gachapon MapleStory, the rare item output from real content would outweigh that of Gachapon so much that the system would not have any bearing on the rewards given by mob drops, quests, and bosses that would be cleared daily (if not hourly, or even by the minute) by players. Perhaps Gachapon's underpoweredness is what earned it the nickname "Gachapwned".
Despite the recent release of a Gachapon poll in order to gauge community opinion on how we should handle it, there have been enormous amounts of contention around the issue. Amidst this storm of memes, heated discussion in Discord, and misinformation, I am writing this post to demystify the details and explain the nuances of our planned release of vanilla Gachapon. I do hope that some of the information and logic in this post will serve to make people think harder about their decision in the gachapon poll, the feature itself, and how it effects the game and the community.
1. Gachapwned: What we forgot about vanilla Gachapon and why we never felt its impact (in old versions):
As we all know, a chief concern among community members with Gachapon is the concept of "pay-to-win", which in essence describes the ability of someone with too much money to buy into gachapon and use it to get an unfair advantage. But pay-to-win aside, even more people are worried about the fact that Gachapon is a method that introduces rare and powerful items into the game in a way that is totally unrewarding, and that barely qualifies as real or challenging gameplay. In other words, even if everyone were to get an even amount of Gachapon, and the system were totally balanced, it makes Maplestory a less rewarding and meaningful game to play by devaluing players' achievements and mitigating the importance of actual game content that provides these rewards. Even to those who are advocates of Gachapon, this is a clear issue, so I want to start by sharing some vital information about our future implementation of the system - statistical and qualitative findings that will force us to revisit this concern about gameplay from a more knowledgeable perspective.
When the heated debate first started a few days back, I began to look at item probabilities to assess the nature of old Gachapon, and I found that vanilla Gachapon rates were so low that it would take an enormous amount of Gachapon for the server as a whole to generate a single instance of one of the rarer items. The rarest items had a probability of roughly 11/1000000 to 67/1000000, meaning that for a top tier item, it would take roughly 10,000 to 90,000 tickets for a chance to get one (as an aside, please excuse my math on discord! I was off by a factor of 10, in case you were scratching your head at these figures). However, this is not the entire story - there are multiple rare items with these kinds of probabilities, which begs the question: if all items on the drop table are extremely valuable and rare, then wouldn't every ticket yield a rare item, even if it the chance of getting any unique item was very low? Exactly how many great items does gachapon actually spit out? What are the chances of getting any valuable item instead of a valuable item? To understand what Gachapon really outputs we to analyze the probability data as a whole:
First, lets take a closer look at how probabilities are calculated - if the chances are really as simple as we think they are in the data, than the total probability of obtaining any item from gachapon is 1 (obviously). In other words, they are simply calculated by generating a random number between 0 and 1. We begin our analysis by taking the data for only one Gachapon NPC, to keep things simple, and summing the probabilities of all items. The result:
Meaning that the raw probability values in our data do seem to be accurate, and that it was just calculated by comparing a random float to the actual probability value of the item. The fact that 0.68 is roughly on the order of magnitude of 1 serves as a sanity check: our algorithm of simply generating a number of 0 and 1 seems correct. So we know the probability of getting any item is roughly 68%. What does that mean for the other 32%? We can only assume that it gave absolutely nothing, or the dreaded food stamps (or, in older versions, presumably just random food). We'll call this 32% junk, because, well, it is, and move on to the other data: how much of the actual item probability is populated by rare items?
Before we continue, a quick note on calculation: I will be switching between fraction and decimal format as I see fit. This will improve readability by expressing probabilities as items per million.
First, we need to strictly define some terms. We'll call exceptional items items whose probabilities are less than 100/1000000, rare items items whose probabilities are between 101/1000000 and 400/1000000, uncommon items items whose probabilities are between 401/1000000 and 900/1000000, common items items whose probabilities are between 901/1000000 and 1600/1000000, and very common items as everything else. Notice how the ranges for each item "type" increase linearly - I have done this because the rates tended to grow like this in the data I saw, and packing them into constant intervals would result in a huge number of intervals with no (or meaningless) data. Now we see what weights each category has within the 68% chance of obtaining a non-junk item by summing the probabilities of items in each category. These are the total probabilities in graph form:
From this data, then, we can learn exactly what the probabilities are for getting an item in each category, and most importantly, that the probability of getting an exceptional item is roughly .4%. Thus, it requires 250 tickets for a single exceptional item, and so it becomes clear that it is brutally difficult for anyone to get their hands on any exceptional item through Gachapon alone. Moreover, the chance of getting a specific exceptional item from Gachapon is low. With a total of 59 exceptional items, the average probability of getting a specific one is .007% - or, 1 for every ~14,000 tickets. The chance of getting a specific rare item (total of 374 items) is .02% - 1 in every ~5000 tickets. It is the large number of rare items that leads to such a high total percentage, but the average probability for each item is still very low.
With the entire community voting and donating lots of money every day, it would be a long time before the server as a whole would be guaranteed access to any exceptional item they actually wanted from Gachapon alone - for 59 items, it would take a rough total of 826,000 gachapon tickets for one of each to enter the game. These high-tier items are therefore so rare that it is hard to say that Gachapon has any significant kind of role in the game's economy, and in devaluing the work of players who are legitimately clearing content for items - in a vanilla-Gachapon MapleStory, the rare item output from real content would outweigh that of Gachapon so much that the system would not have any bearing on the rewards given by mob drops, quests, and bosses that would be cleared daily (if not hourly, or even by the minute) by players. Perhaps Gachapon's underpoweredness is what earned it the nickname "Gachapwned".
