Randomness has always determined a lot of micro-level success or failure in MPQ. Everyone’s had the game where the AI cascades 60 AP on their first turn and you lose almost no matter the team composition. This kind of random event causes you to lose a fight you should have won or win a fight you should have lost; in turn, that might cause you to unexpectedly reach or fail to reach a certain reward.
But in a day of MPQ, there are many hundreds of these micro-level opportunities. Up until the release of 5*s, large-scale success was much more meritocratic, dependent essentially on how much effort you were willing to put into the game.
With the release of 5*s, this is no longer the case. Macro-level success or failure is now largely determined by random chance. Luck causes a significant portion of the player base to fall behind or race ahead irrespective of merit. In other words, the same effort now produces significantly different outcomes at the top level of play.
To illustrate this phenomenon, I propose a new metric, Chance to Catch Up, which measures your odds of maintaining parity with a theoretical mirror player who has the opposite luck as you. If you are in the bottom X% of outcomes, find the success rate of your mirror counterpart at the top X%. Then, assuming that the next set of draws for your mirror are average, determine the likelyhood of you catching up to them. If we crunch the numbers using this metric, we can see that they’re pretty dismal.
Let’s take a look. For 100 LTs drawn, the bottom 20% of players will pull at most seven 5*s. The top 20% will pull 12, a difference of 5 covers. For the next 100 LTs, if the top 20% player pulls the average 10% rate, the bottom 20% player will need to pull 15 covers to catch up. He or she only has a 7.26% chance of doing so or better. Effectively, a large subset of players will be permanently behind, even though they are identical in every other respect other than RNG.
What about players with extraordinarily good or poor luck? Let’s use me as an example. Since the Champions release, I have pulled a total of two 5*s for 87 LTs, putting me in the bottom 99.4% of outcomes. My mirror counterpart has pulled 16 covers, for a differential of +14. In the next 87 pulls, my CCU (rounded to the nearest hundredth of a percent) is 0%.
A high level of inequality is fundamental to the current random draw 5 system. In the few short months that this system has been in place, it has already begun to indiscriminately create distinct classes of winners and losers without any consideration of hard work or smart play. The losers will continue to be losers, exacerbated even more by a depressed ability to achieve higher placement rewards. This isn’t just a concern for the small number of players with extraordinarily good or bad luck; it affects the many tens of thousands of players with merely above-average and below-average luck too. This is a system that is and will continue to be offensive to any notion of fair play, which far overshadows any of the laudable efforts the developers have made to improve the fairness and longevity of this game.*
I have added the mirror-player and CCU metrics to my MPQ Luck calculator (Dropproxy). Feel free to play around with your own data. If you’ve been unlucky, see how likely it will be for you to catch up. If you’ve been lucky, consider how easily you might not have been.