Why am I winning 0% Shuttles?!?

[SSR] GTMET

So I'm trying to tank Terran empire missions so I can run a bunch of 10 minute missions for one star emblems. Unfortunately despite the fact that I am using level one crew with no matching traits to the shuttles and they displayed success rate of 0% I have won three of my last eight shuttles. Is there something about the shuttles that I don't understand because it sure looks like the displayed percentage is not coming close to matching the success rate.

Data1001

Yep. Welcome to my world.

I did that with Section 31 shuttles for several weeks. Had successes on maybe 10% of the shuttles, despite them all being at 0% projected success rate.

Bottom line, I guess, is that 0% doesn't really mean 0%. I would suspect that it's actually built-in to the system that a few of those will succeed in order to help players who are actually trying to succeed on a mission with terrible crew.

Pablo Pawly

The actual success or failure is calculated using Bistromatics. Which means the outcome is in no way related to the percentage shown.

[10F] Belle'Anna

I don't send them out at 0% usually 16-19% and I do get a surprising number of successes. Much as I get as surprising number of failures at 85% plus. I normally take off 10-15% of displayed rate at higher levels, so I suppose adding 10-15% at rock bottom rates will even things out.

Paladin 27

If Terran (or federation, or kca, or section 31). happens to be one of the factions in the event this week I may try the pass two/fail two strategy continually at the start and run a few hundred of their shuttles. if it works maybe we should be doing that every faction event for the basic items.

Data1001

Paladin 27 wrote: »

If Terran (or federation, or kca, or section 31). happens to be one of the factions in the event this week I may try the pass two/fail two strategy continually at the start and run a few hundred of their shuttles. if it works maybe we should be doing that every faction event for the basic items.

From what I've heard other players saying in this recent thread of mine, that likely wouldn't work, since apparently event shuttles have no bearing on the difficulty level (and corresponding length) of non-event shuttles for the same faction.

Paladin 27

I’m wouldn’t try to lower the non-event shuttles. Just keep the starting difficulty of the event shuttles where it starts while I run a bunch of missions the first few hours of the event. Then after that play up to high difficulty missions.

[SSR] GTMET

Paladin 27 wrote: »

I’m wouldn’t try to lower the non-event shuttles. Just keep the starting difficulty of the event shuttles where it starts while I run a bunch of missions the first few hours of the event. Then after that play up to high difficulty missions.

I normally wouldn't, but since this thing is running for 3 more weeks, thought it would make sense to do that. Any other time I would do exactly what you suggest, although I will need to really work the math to ensure I can still jump start it up to 4 k when ready to engage the event

Nicole K

I don't know what's up with the 0% passing, but on the others I'm pretty sure the statistics are actually accurate. At first I didn't think so, so I made a point of keeping track of 50 faction missions that were exactly 75%. I knew that if I had enough samples, I would feel confident that the advertised percentages were accurate. So every time I had a faction mission that had 75% chance I wrote the outcome in a chart. I have 3 shuttles and a fairly good crew so it took me about a month to get 50 missions completed that were exactly 75% predicted chance of success.

When I finished the 50th mission I had 35 successes and 15 Fails. However, if I only looked at any 5-10 missions it didn't look like it was very accurate. It would either look like I was very lucky or had very bad luck. It was only when I had a large enough sample that I actually began to see that over time I was getting pretty close to 75%. I'm almost positive had I kept tracking them it would have only gotten closer to 75%.

Astrometrics

Data1001 wrote: »

Bottom line, I guess, is that 0% doesn't really mean 0%.

Ah, eh, this is an old problem, and we know the answer.

If you look at the formula that calculates the success rate of shuttles, you will discover that if your AverageSkill is zero then the probability of success is 1/(1+exp(1.75)) ~14.8%. This doesn't depend on the difficulty - it is always like that.

So sending out shuttles with crew of no skill will always assure a 15% chance of success. This also means you can't lose a shuttle mission by default.


The bug isn't in the way the RNG determines the success rate - the bug is in the visualization. It just displays 0% by default, and it is wrong.


There is something wrong, but it's not in the maths behind the system. It's in the UI.

Captain_Who

Don't feel bad, I've tanked 40 shuttles so far, succeeded 8 ^_^, and I'm still pulling 5 gold trainers, so not noticeably closer to 10 minute shuttles.

Does anybody have a shuttle difficulty chart like we do for faction events?

Capt. Reynolds

Every once in a while someone brings up the 0% shuttle success rate of a shuttle that comes back successful.
This is one evident example where the display rate differs from the actual success rate. These two have to be calculated using the same formulas and data, no exceptions. If that is not the case it needs to be fixed.

During the early release of starbases that provided wrong bonus to some fleets, also Shan pointed out that the display rate differed from the actual rate and in that instance she assured that the problem would have been addressed.
I hope it will be fixed soon as well as lowered the difficulty level of missions for 2750 and 3500 vp to be consistent with 4000vp missions and not to block new players to overcome those thresholds.

Going back to farming specific 0* items, I agree with Paladin 27 about farming them only during faction events and not by trying to lower the difficulty level outside the events.
knowing that one success is +1 and one failure is -1.5, to keep running the same difficulty level missions you have to keep the rate at 3successes/2failures. you can open at the same time 5 missions, try to succeed the first 3 and fail the next 2. Or open 10, succeed the first 6 and fail the next 4. They have to be in this order. Of course, if you accidentally succeed one of the designed to fail ones... then you'll have to open, run and fail another mission to go back to the previous vp missions.

Clanof

Captain_Who wrote: »

Don't feel bad, I've tanked 40 shuttles so far, succeeded 8 ^_^, and I'm still pulling 5 gold trainers, so not noticeably closer to 10 minute shuttles.

Does anybody have a shuttle difficulty chart like we do for faction events?

It takes a long time if you're pulling 5 gold trainers. But once it drops it drops fast. Like I spent almost a week straight tanking section 31 shuttles and was still getting gold trainers, but then once I dropped down to purple trainers it only took a few more failures to knock it right down to 30 second missions.

Clanof

And it's totally worth it to do, I've got about 100 basic holoprograms from running a bunch of 30 second Section 31 missions.

Enders

As an improvement for the next version of the game, Shuttles need a Difficulty slider to choose to go after lower value items such as 1* Emblems

Captain_Who

Thanks for the heads up Clanof. I'll keep on keeping on. At this rate, I might just drop all the important factions to 0 and just keep the useless ones like Hirogen, Dominion, and Klingon t full difficulty for trainer farming and 3* clothing and microprocessor.

You hearing this DB? We're forced into goofy work arounds because there's no difficulty selection for shuttles and "common" item drop rates are rubbish. And please, don't "fix" it by turning "basic" and "common" parts into rubbish drops at all levels.