We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

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Karasume
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We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Karasume »

I'm going to cut right to the chase and quote my original post. I apologize for spamming this section so much.
Karasume wrote: December 11th, 2018, 7:35 pm 1. Value: Any Pokemon left up as a reward in our current system is doomed to be devalued and hoarded. Legendaries, while not quite so Legendary here, are still supposed to be harder to obtain than normal Pokemon. The current Raffle invalidates that notion tenfold. You only kinda earn it the first time, and then you either don't care anymore or you hoard them.

2. Economy: Because of their stunted value, Legendaries such as Xerneas and Yveltal are like pennies. Latios and Latias are undoubtedly less valuable than most other Legendaries as well. As Legendaries are part of the National Dex, it stands to reason that they'd be more sought-after than Shinies and Special Dex pokemon. This means that Legendaries are the most valuable commodity for completing the National Dex. When you devalue them, you kill off the market. This is doomed to happen if you "remedy" the raffle by rotating in different pokemon. You'll have a market where people can't really use Legendaries to get what they want, because they're mere pennies. You'll be stuck with a market where the only commodities are Shinies and old Special Dex promos. This is a problem, because the National Dex is the most substantial goal. Without Legendaries being of higher value, the main goal becomes infinitely easier to obtain. How will you nurture a breathing economy when you make the main goal so easy to obtain?
Part of the point of the suggestion was to trim a "daily chore" feature which also damaged the value of certain adopts. Adopts would go up on the raffle, not be changed, and quickly diminish in value. However, the implementation of the current Lottery gave birth to an even worse demon.

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After the very first Lottery drawing, this many Volcanion adopts were generated.

As it is now, the odds of a 3-match are much too low. People have a lot of money, and the Lottery is quite literally the only thing to spend that money on. As such, even more promos will be generated and subsequently devalued worse than the raffle could ever have accomplished.


On my thread, the prize list was as follows:

5: Guaranteed shiny
4: Promo
3: Egg slots
2: Pokemon
1: Money


Prizes 1, 2, and 3 were non-intrusive to gameplay, while prizes 4 and 5 were good prizes, all while not being terribly common. Currently, Prize #3 is the problem, because it's so common that in the first drawing, 194 Volcanions were generated. This is much worse than the Raffle.

Let me break it down further. With 59 different cards to draw, no repeats, and a max of 5, you have a 1 in 350 chance of getting a Volcanion. If a user spends $100,000 on Lottery tickets (10,000 tickets), then they may get 28 three-prize draws. They could get more. They could get less.

Consider that users have been stockpiling money for literal years, it becomes a problem. And before you even say that this is part of the process of money dumping:

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This is after the #1 user dumped enough money into the Lotto to win 84 Volcanions.

My suggested fix? Remove Volcanion from the #3 prize asap. Then, tweak the #4 prize so it's a promo egg, which has a chance of hatching as a shiny, similarly to CE promos.

There are many other less intrusive prizes to offer as the three-match prize. Egg slots may not be the best idea. But a promo should not be there. Not when every 350 tickets (a mere $3,500) has a high likelihood of rewarding one. A lottery is a lottery. Not everyone is a winner.
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Tango
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Tango »

I do agree with Karasume. I love that the lotto is exciting now but I was somewhat horrified at the flood of legendaries that were dished out on just the 1st one. People went a little overboard on buys it seems ^^;

The reduced odds of winning is a welcomed change, the prize structure actually being something you can get something back out of as well, but almost everyone has the legendary now after just the 1st try. I imagine the legendary isn't there to stay forever, so as a special event it's nice to see. However it's far too easy to get as Karasume illustrated even if it is a special event (which it could not be I'm just guessing). Guess the Number accomplished this better.


The plates are also a bit of a problem. They are quickly going to overflow. Just as a quick fix for the next draw it would probably be good to have something like Shiny at 5, Regular Volcanion at 4, Plates at 3, then just money for the bottom 2.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by KiraNear »

I do not agree with this - not every user is as rich as the ones of the list. I need weeks to months to get enough money for breeding, and I can imagine that I'm not the only user on this side who can't buy so many tickets for so much money. When you put the legendary on a higher price it will be harder to get it for the users with little money (and/or clicking aka money making time).
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Tango
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Tango »

The Lotto is based on luck, and as mentioned not everyone should be a winner every single lotto. There's also more than 1 lotto. There's 2 draws a week and you don't need to be in every single one in order to have a reasonable chance at winning something.

As it stands you can pay $500 in one lotto and have pretty good odds of winning a Volcanion. Now what? You're done after 1 go. The Lotto's here forever. On a Tuesday you can make $500 in ~125 clicks, which is only 2-3 people's clickboxes so like 5 min of clicking once a week to play the lotto once and probably win a promo after a couple goes if you're not lucky on the first.

Decreasing the odds but not increasing the cost to play is the only thing that will make Volcanion (or any future promo) retain value beyond the 1st lotto between those with $70+ million and those of us with $50,000. Looking at it now it almost instantly ruined the value. There should be some challenge to getting something.
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Yasha
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Yasha »

I totally agree with Karasume, but I can also see KiraNear's point. I propose this two solutions:
A) maximum number of tickets you can buy per draw (e.g. only 100 tickets per user)
B) maximum number of Promos you can get per draw (this was proposed before, e.g. only one Promo per draw and user, with highest match being the priority)

Both solutions would not hurt the newer users with less money, but would diminish the number of Adoptables per draw. However, Solution A would be counterproductive for the lottery being a money pool, therefore I favour solution B.

Also, I quite like the idea of getting eggs from the lottery. Maybe we can, without changing the chances of winning for now, change the prizes as follows:

5 matches --> Shiny Volcanion (and only the Shiny, not the regular one in addition)
4 matches --> Volcanion
3 matches --> breedable egg (means: eggs, which can only be obtained via breeding like babies or starters)
2 matches --> more money
1 matches --> money
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49ER
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by 49ER »

The person who has the most money got it by winning the grand prize jackpot in lottery at least twice that I know of. And when you have that much money, it is almost unlimited how many tickets you can buy. It is not so easy for people who don't have a whole lot.
I still think getting 4 to 5 matches is very difficult, if not impossible. For more than a year, I was buying 150 tickets for every single drawing, and an additional 100 each and every time I won $1000.00 on the ground. And in all that time, I never won the grand prize and I only got one 4 number win. I think I got 2 or 3 million for that win, which is the only reason why I have more than 2 million now in my account.
With the new drawing, I purchased 500 tickets, which I thought was a lot, but was a paltry sum compared to others. I only won 2 normal volcanian for promos and some money. Nobody won a 5 number combo, even with all those tickets bought, and only 5 shinies were won.
Personally, I would like to keep the prize structure to have the jackpot money for 5 numbers. I know it has been a loooong time since anyone won it, anyway. As far as getting a breedable egg, we can do that anyway, without buying massive raffle tickets, I spent 5000 dollars to get two 3-number wins, so I prefer to spend it in daycare for less.

Unfortunately, anything that is done is going to benefit people who have the resources, no matter how you set it up. If it is made harder for the high money people to win, then it impacts the low money people much more. Hopefully the prizes will keep rotating more often, or I believe people will stop buying tickets, or at least significantly reduce how many they buy. Like maybe after a week or so, put in Arceus, for all the plates we are supposed to be getting.

Perhaps another idea, if it could be coded, would be to just set limits on how many of the promo with your OT you can win. Like maybe 5 to 10 normal volcanian, and 1 to 2 shiny, something like that. Then once someone is at their limit for the Volcanions, they could still buy tickets, but they would only be able to play for Shiny, if they don't already have it, or the money.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Tango »

Someone won the jackpot last year didn't they? I remember it happening not too long ago. And I must be crazy cause I could've sworn last time I looked before the last draw there were less than 59 options to choose from so I thought the odds had dropped but now I look and it's the same ^^; That makes me a smidge less in favor of making the promo less accessible to those with less disposable moneys, but I still think this needs to be fixed.

Also, despite it not being listed there must be a monetary reward for the higher match wins in addition to what's listed cause I have an unaccounted for +$1,000 from the lotto (unless that was just part of the bugs). The Jackpot could still be the money pot + something else; the idea of a shiny doesn't need to completely replace it.


We're not as worried about the rich having an advantage -- we're aware that's just a thing. The only part we're complaining about is how this new lotto system is much much worse than the same problem with the Raffle. The point is to have something somewhat sustainable for more than a couple weeks. Currently this isn't. Sure only ~5 shinies came out of the 1st raffle. Now extrapolate that to the average for every lotto draw, two times a week. By the end of next Friday there could be more available Volcanion shinies than shiny Zygarde. It's not a matter particularly of fairness, it's a matter of retaining value.

As per the previous thread posing this new lotto system I'm still in favor of some kind of limiter for the number of promos winnable. After that limit is hit there's just a monetary gain or something so you still get a win for the tickets but then VA isn't flooded with adopts.

Volcanion's only been available for not even a full 3 days and it's already being put on trade for a single mega evolution...
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49ER
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by 49ER »

Yes I was just buying tickets and the number of number options has increased from 47 to 59. That is going to make it MICH harder to win. Maybe even prohibitively so, we will have to see. They had decreased it to 49 a couple years ago, and people have won the jackpot, in one case, at least twice by same person. I think 4 number wins paid about 25 percent of the jackpot amount. It never says how much exactly so I have never been sure, I did get the 4 number once.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by FairyPrincessCynthia »

Here's the statistics according to my research. For the sake of simplicity, we'll call the different Pokemon balls.
59 balls in the machine.
5 balls are picked. (non-repeating numbers)

The odds of 3 matching are about 1 in 350
The odds of 4 matching are about 1 in 18,542
The odds of 5 matching are about 1 in 5,006,386

Conclusively, the potential issue is the promo in the third slot.

Proposal 1: Use the Christmas Present system for the third prize. It could be money, which is the most common win chance, it could be a random evolution item, which is a pretty good prize but a bit rarer, or at the rarest chance, it could be a Volcanion.

5-match: jackpot
4-match: volcanion + shiny volcanion
3-match: money (most likely), random evolution item (medium likely), volcanion (rare)
2-match: money + arceus plate
1-match: money

Proposal 2: Remove Volcanion from the 3-match ticket and replace it with a money and random evolution item prize. Remove the guaranteed shiny Volcanion from the 4-match ticket but keep the normal one a guaranteed win, and have it be a chance that the Volcanion won from the 4-match ticket is shiny.

5-match: jackpot
4-match: volcanion (shiny volcanion chance)
3-match: money + random evolution item
2-match: money + arceus plate
1-match: money

Both of my proposals would drastically cut down on Volcanions without affecting the ticket price, (which doesn't affect the richest users at all), and it won't hurt the odds of winning anything else.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by 49ER »

Remember that for Monday's drawing, there were 47 numbers, not 59. The odds of winning were higher then. Changing it to 59 will drop it a LOT. Also, if the chances of winning a 3 number is 1 in 350, then it would cost 3500 to win one of the legends. AND no guarantee that you would win it. 3500 is a lot of money to some people. i paid 5000 on Monday and only won 2 normal ones, no shiny. And that was with the better odds.
The Legendaries have always been intended to be obtainable to all users when they are released. Some are more difficult than others, the shinies are definitely harder to get, and you have to wait for a long time after a contest is over before the legendary prize gets an official release, but they were never intended to be prohibitively ungettable.

My suggestion is that we wait til the drawing tomorrow and see how much the 59 numbers skews the odds of people winning them.
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Karasume
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Karasume »

I like the idea where a 4-match gives you a promo egg, which has a chance of hatching a shiny. But the idea that you can only get a certain # of adopts in a single draw before being given a different prize is okay. It's rather unorthodox, but it's not a bad idea. I don't like the idea of a money payout, personally. With how common the 3 match is, and assuming the money reward has to be greater than the 2-match reward, it'd be safe to say that the Lottery would be doing a poor job at being a money sink. 1 in every 20 tickets gives you half of that investment back already, and that's only accounting for the 2-match prize. With the 1-match prize, and assuming the 3-match prize would also give money, the Lotto would do a terrible job sinking money, worse than it already does now.

The only reward I feel would be somewhat worthwhile that also wouldnt be super intrusive is the prize of basic adopts, which are already flooding the site with their population. Even extra egg slots would be broken (imagine Eleve being able to adopt 96 eggs before hitting the limit).
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by 49ER »

I really would not want to play the lotto to try for extra egg slots. I honestly feel that there will be more tickets than for Monday purchased for tomorrow but with less Volcanian winners. Of the big winners, only one person declared how many tickets they purchased, (5000), and won 20 plus a shiny so 20 wins. That was 1 in 250. It cost 50,000 to buy them. Now it is 1 in 350, and in the same scenario, the shiny would not likely be won. I only wish I had gone all out on ticket buying while getting them would be easier, lol
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Karasume
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Karasume »

So there were only 49 cards available on Monday?
That's still a 1 in 201 chance, which is 57.5% of the current chance. With the current odds, that means instead of 194 Volcanions going into circulation, it would instead have been about 111 (rounded down), which is STILL too much for one drawing.
Last edited by Karasume on January 24th, 2019, 7:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by 49ER »

It was 47 Karasume. It had been tweaked down from 51 or 52 I think, prior to them having prizes. So it is now raised to a possibility of 12 more numbers, which is significantly. I am sure it could end up being tweaked again, depending on how it goes after this upcoming drawing.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Karasume »

Then that's a 1 in 178 chance (rounded down), roughly 50.8% of what the current chance is, meaning that instead of 194 Volcanions going into circulation, replacing that chance with the current chance, it would have been 98 Volcanions (rounded down).

It's still too many for one drawing. :/
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by 49ER »

According to FairyPrincessCynthia, the odds of 3 number is 1 in 350. But I doubt we will be told how many tickets are actually sold in any lotto.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by FairyPrincessCynthia »

I did use a lottery probability calculator to determine the variables since I couldn't figure it out on my own, so the odds listed are quite solid.

Those odds are a per-ticket, non-accumulative basis. The numbers I gave are the numbers one should reasonably expect. Although... Like shiny hunting in an actual Pokemon game, your odds could be much better or much, much worse than the statistics say they should be.
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Karasume
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Karasume »

In this recent lottery drawing, I spent in the mid-300k ranges in Lottery tickets. Not only have I received almost my entire investment back (I got 320k back), but I've also generated 92 Volcanions.

Also, more than 300 Volcanions were generated in this Lottery.
Spoiler for Before:
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Spoiler for After:
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Not only is the chance of Volcanion entirely too high, but the return is also too high. You barely lose any money playing the Lottery.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by 49ER »

I think the money thing is a mistake that Yankees is working on a remedy for. He is also reworking the prize structure. And obviously, if people are buying 100's of thousands in tickets, there will be more prizes given out. It does not mean we should make it even harder for people who cannot afford to buy a whole lot.
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Re: We need to fix the Lottery. Now.

Post by Karasume »

There's always the aforementioned idea of putting a hard limit on the amount of adopts you can win, which would be replaced by a backup prize.
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