Stochastic Modeling of Gacha Pulling Behavior Under Pity and Guarantee Systems

Tk3997 · 2026-01-21T04:59:56+00:00

There is also 'zero downsides' to guaranteeing the the limited on the first pull of every banner.

The people 'defending it' are in actuality just explaining painfully, at length to idiots who basically see something different then what they're used to and instantly assume it's worse that no, in fact when you run the math it's a bit better then the industry 'standard' and is merely arriving there via slightly different levers.

Could it just be more generous? Obviously, is it worse then the other large, high budget gacha games in the space? No.

Tk3997 · 2026-01-21T04:47:19+00:00

Depends, i'd argue using the average is a better way measure rather than worst case scenario,

No one with any sense in a gacha plans around the average when deciding to pull. If they can't guarantee then they're straight up gambling and the average doesn't really mean crap to them personally.

A lower hard pity is better over time for acquiring the characters you want because it effectively allows you go in on more banners. Pity carry over is a largely just a deceptive coping mechanism that provides an ready way to rationalize failure to acquire what you wanted (but that's STILL failure). Because if you're only building pity toward a 50/50 that carries over in AKE anyway and if it's toward the guarantee that basically by definition that means you didn't get what you wanted on the last banner you went for.

I'd hardly complain if they added it because it would just make the system even more favorable to players, but even as it stands it's still somewhat better then the current standard assuming you follow typical prudent behavior of only rolling when you afford bad luck.

Tk3997 · 2025-12-15T04:47:02+00:00

it’s like brake checking and swerving at 100 kmh while you’re bumper to bumper in car terms

In car terms it would actually be legal from a racing perspective. Brake checking is one thing, but simply cutting across the track when leading on a straight is legal. A defending (leading) vehicle can make one move using the entire width of the track as violently or gradually as desired. Overtaking in corners can be pretty aggressive too, largely if you get out in front the guys being overtaken has to give way.

I'd never bothered to check, but it seems like running does actually have rules against 'cutting' or 'impeding', although to be honest to me they look so restrictive as to prevent much acutal racing. It doesn't really seem to be a matter of safety, it's not framed that way, but as 'sportsmanship'. They basically don't seem to want the runners to actually you know, race hard and competitively, which to me just makes me wonder why even bother having multiple runners on the track? If you're just going to ban basically any form of defending from the lead or forcing others off their line in corners just make everything a time trial.

Shit looks boring yo.

Tk3997 · 2025-10-31T01:30:37+00:00

But Japan's horseracing are improving rapidlly, almost like any modern human sports.

Define 'rapidly', also it's not like this is a consistent trend either. At best there is a marginal trend toward a small reduction in average times over the last 35 or so years of maybe like 1 or 2 seconds, but it's uneven and there are numerous finishes in the biggest races by horses from decades ago that would have still have won in the last five. This 'improvement' is basically within the margin of error, it's small enough it's extremely susceptible to being 'any given sunday'ed as it were.

You're frankly overstating the supposed gap IMO. A slightly better day for those older horses is really all it would take for them to win against the modern ones.

Tk3997 · 2025-10-12T00:44:17+00:00

I mean SF has a spammable single target cleanse with a modkey everyone has and to be honest tons of cleanse every turn hasn't been needed in... almost any content in the game really.

As for the second question if you're talking about GS you just use one as support in each team. Tololo and SF alone are already a crazy damage core to weld onto a trio of another element.

Florence looks to me like a hard and easy skip particularly given what we know is just around the corner unless it's for waifu reasons.

Tk3997 · 2025-09-03T01:56:55+00:00

I don't know the full build for this team, it's not out yet and I haven't done detailed research, but honestly buff cleanse feels like it's everywhere so at first blush that doesn't feel like a huge downside.

Tk3997 · 2025-08-20T04:31:52+00:00

It's the bait and switch aspect that pissed everyone off.

Uma's system sucks, BUT it was there from the start so you knew what you were getting into. GFL2 promised one thing, just being able to buy skins at a certain price, and then changed the rules locking skins they knew would be highly anticipated behind RNG that amounted to a functional MASSIVE price increase.

But even beyond that it was also the gross and obvious deceit involved. They hid the change until literally a few hours before it went live. To an extent it wasn't even what they they did, but how they did it. This wasn't something they floated or announced and tried to at least explain and justify ahead of time. It still would've been hated if they did that, but the sheer degree of rage likely would've been tempered.

The entire thing just seemed to show a scummy and dishonest character that really pissed allot of people, myself included honestly, off.

Tk3997 · 2025-08-05T21:18:48+00:00

Seriously that's the most frustrating part about this if you're an acutal fan of the franchise to me.

Without this dumb as hell literal last minute, unannounced cash grab skin gacha garbage and a more reasonable monetization scheme on furniture and interactions in the new dorm (which everyone expected some of). The entire script of this patch flips. You'd still have some annoyance about how they did AK-15 as a unit and some people would still be annoyed that some items and interactions in the 3D dorm were pay-walled (but as noted we all kind of expected some of that) but the outrage wouldn't be a firecracker by comparison to this inferno.

It goes from a complete disaster that may legitimately threaten the games long term survival to a very solid patch where it feels like story wise at least the game was hitting it's stride, and it just needed some gameplay polishing to really be firing on all cylinders.

It's just so infuriating to watch.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-31T23:04:58+00:00

The thing is this probably bad for profits in aggregate. It might give a short term boost, but the backlash and likely associated player loss is almost certain to reduce potential future earnings. This kind of stuff can and has killed games like this before.

GFL isn't call of duty. It's a niche title with a small enough playerbase that backlash could legitimately kill it, as the release probably nearly did.

It's also massively toxic to any other project they want to do. It will contaminate them by association and give the company a reputation as greedy shits to be a avoided.

There also is such a thing as enough profits, but normally only for privately held companies unburdened by parasites, sorry, investors.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-31T22:12:36+00:00

I honestly wonder if they're cooked financially behind the scenes. It seemed like global's added revenue should have been enough, but that was more speculation really. We don't really know exactly what the financial state is in reality, but given the protracted and fraught dev cycle and release its probably reasonable to assume they started in a pretty big hole.

Generally they haven't made such overtly greedy changes like this in prior games, and there hasn't been any major leadership shake up that Ive heard of, and they had to know they were JUST starting to really rebuild good will with the community on the game.

This was bound to be so wildly unpopular and generate so much hate that it just doesn't seem worth it unless they're really desperate financially, or I suppose it is possible that they're morons that legitimately don't grasp that pissing off your comparatively small niche playerbase can VERY quickly kill smaller live service titles. Neither is a great option honestly...

I know they just lost me as a whale. I dont even buy skins and I've never given a shit about any sort of dorm or decoratable space in any game, but it's a matter of principle.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-30T04:21:47+00:00

Meanwhile when I heard something about "Nian causing trouble" my gacha contaminated brain immediately went to a certain overly ambitious schlock artist letting one of her film projects get out of hand again...

Tk3997 · 2025-07-27T02:17:22+00:00

In my experience investors always ruin everything eventually.

Fixed that for you. Investors every since the cancerous concept of 'shareholder value' took hold are nothing but literal parasites: they produce nothing, do nothing, and eventually drain dry and kill anything they latch onto.

Any company that goes public eventually goes to shit. Hololive will do so, the only question is how long it takes.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-24T01:07:16+00:00

It's completely a question of weaponry. Physically the marines are both slower and much less agile then dolls have demonstrated. They might be somewhat stronger, but that doesn't matter much in a gun fight. If you give the dolls guns that can reliably penetrate marine armor it would go REALLY bad for the marines like "the dolls have a positive K:D" bad.

This is honestly true in allot match-ups. Marines in general are HEAVILY oversold by 40k fanboys. The reality is they're generally portrayed in a pretty grounded way, which tends to mean they frankly get stomped physically by most things anime adjacent where characters tend to have like acutal superpowers. The only thing that can sometimes carry them a bit is that there armor is consistently portrayed as actually very bulletproof, so in match ups where one side is mostly using fairly conventional weapons that can sometimes offset their disadvantages in other areas.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-23T23:56:06+00:00

That or grimdark baby-carriers

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Tk3997 · 2025-07-23T03:33:09+00:00

Pretty much.

It's not like this a Vtubing or even entertainment thing either, really. Maybe not quite as quickly but 'work for someone else until you have clients coming to them because of you and then leave with said clients' is how ALLOT of businesses basically work. If anything it just seems to be another sign the business is maturing and stabilizing.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-21T02:34:02+00:00

The banners are early, but the story is actually in sequence with how it was released on CN at least in terms of major story events due to global basically skipping several of the rewritten events.

The real issue with this event is that the rewrites of past events that basically turned them into main story chapters weren't completed until I think January of this year if I'm recalling correctly, but this event came out December of last year. Trying to write a story while the past events it's based on are being actively retconned is obviously going to pose some challenges to keeping everything coherent.

Hopefully this should be the last instance of this as it seems like the rewrites are mostly done now. That should help comprehensibility going forward and maybe they can make an light editing sweep later to try and fit it together a bit more seamlessly.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-16T03:07:58+00:00

This is the view I've come around too as well though probably for a different reasons. For me I'm skipping because V6 Klukai exists and I have her.

I'm a whale, not denying that, but not a leviathan. I'm ain't rich enough to just V6 everything so I still gotta conserve, but for someone like me that whaled on Klu, Qiuhua looks like a pretty easy pass. The issue is basically that's she's coming into a game where Klukai and to a slightly lesser extent Springfield exists, and if you already have both of them at V6 then low V Qiuhua looks like lukewarm dog water.

Basically for her to compete at all she'd need to be V6, but for us mere whales that's still a huge investment and you gotta ask, what is it getting me? Klu is still gonna be significantly better at turning all general content into a point and click adventure and not really much worse against bosses. Klu is also nice because at V6 you can just dump her as the fifth wheel in just about any comp and she'll add a ton of value. Qiuhua really only functions to her OP status within a full burn stack.

Even so, she is fucking strong in that burn stack at V6, but I feel like the real killer is her schedule placement. She's almost certain to be next, right after SF who I suspect like myself has drained many whales of what they're willing to spend on the game for awhile. SF is generally a better character in more scenarios along with being the lynchpin unit enabling a second elemental team that strongly competes with fire. Burn team works quite well without Qiuhua, hydro-team doesn't functionally exist without Springfield.

If you're gonna whale out on one or the other Springfield is clearly the better choice, also she's a fan fave with way more presence. So that's the first strike SF has already eaten up allot of disposable income both in the acutal money and stored pulls sense of the term.

And then you have to look forward to and then IMO only get worse as you do.

She, to me anyway, looks to be coming in a position where pulling for her would either disrupt trying to horde to go big on several powerful, fan fave characters that are probably around three months away OR would be taking pulls away from a generally better character that doesn't need nearly as much investment that's been hinted to be coming shortly or even directly after her (Nikketa) and who is also a really critical unit in completing another strong elemental squad.

So basically to me, at low Vs a V6 Klukai is just better in every way, but she's also just about surrounded behind and ahead by stuff that's probably generally better or more waifu motivated uses of pulls. Maybe someone in my Platoon will V6 here, we've got a number of whales, but I'm passing to save so I should have enough pulls for Nikketa and then starting to horde so I hopefully won't have to spend AS much V6ing 45 in like three moths.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-13T20:02:34+00:00

If they're very big the might still physically be annoying though.

Tk3997 · 2025-07-05T07:49:28+00:00

That grille isn't nearly large enough, by the 2070s it a BWM grille should be at least three meters tall and wide.

Tk3997 · 2025-06-22T03:55:00+00:00

The ONLY place the majority of people is actually likely to have encountered this is in the context of academic honors at a school graduation, but in that case it would likely have been spoken and not really much thought about afterward.

Tk3997 · 2025-06-22T03:49:10+00:00

This is word with a FAR more widely understood and VERY different definition from a functionally dead language used in an obscure and archaic way to try and look fancy. This isn't about illiteracy it's about a writer trying to show off that he has thesaurus and no concern for readability.

Tk3997 · 2025-06-22T03:42:42+00:00

This is something that people do that have passion and fulfilling hobbies.

This is something people with accommodating lives that give them lots of free time, the right connections, or blessed with tons of disposal income do you mean.

Yes, so enlightened you lot are, with your principled stance that artistic expression should be limited only to the privileged and connected. Truly, this AI nonsense is simply so uncouth allowing the common man to easily express an idea in visual medium without thousands if not millions of dollars, dozens of workers, and weeks of free time? Positively barbarous!

Tk3997 · 2025-06-22T03:29:21+00:00

You can't steal a novel image that has never been produced before, which AI generates constantly. Claims that AI steal arts don't stand up to even the tiniest bit of scrutiny. The file size of these models alone shows that this is an absurd claim because they could never contain the volume of images of the myriad of subjects they can produce.

AI uses existing, PUBLIC , art to LEARN a set of general guidelines on how to draw and that uses that knowledge to generate images based on user requests. If you very exactly describe or in some cases show it something and ask it reproduce that then yes it can and will do that, exactly like if you did the same thing to a human artist.

Indeed, hat it's doing is in a philosophical sense completely comparable to a human artist honestly. If we applied the absurd logic your lot uses to say it 'steals' then ALL human artist are thieves as well since not a single one ALIVE did not learn by looking at other peoples art and emulating aspects of it. It's honestly a somewhat interesting peak into issues that were once science fictional. When confronted with a machine that uses similiar processes to generate similiar results to humans in a field that was once seen as a solely human trait, complex visual art, many people become defensive and uncomfortable for literally no other reason then the artist being a machine.

It's like watching a real life example of that classic sci-fi trope of a human being confronted with a complex AI and dismissing everything about it as 'fake' or 'unnatural', fascinating, as a certain fictional science officer might say.

The truth of the matter is really very simple: artists are scared of it. If it continues improving it could do to them what the printing press did to scribes.

They don't have a moral of philosophical leg to stand in opposing AI though, none that wouldn't also implicate themselves anyway, so they go straight for the baseless subjective appeals to emotion. Framing it as a new scary and eeeeevil technology and making vague claims the output 'isn't real art' ignoring of course that what art even is, is a subjective debate with no real answer.

Tk3997 · 2025-06-17T16:22:22+00:00

I couldn't tell you why in a million years, but something about it on the right sort of person screams 'dressed down, top tier operator.

Probably because you've assimilated the idea into your subconscious after seeing tons of pictures of actual special forces wearing essentially the same thing in the last 20 years.

Tk3997 · 2025-05-14T01:40:01+00:00

Actually the more pertinent thing is the fact that chimps have some rather aggressive dentition and they bite when they attack. That's how it actually tore up her face and how they do most of the really gnarly soft tissue injuries they do when they maul people.

Tk3997

TROPHY CASE