This is all true. I’m a pessimist so my fallacy is that every time I pull poorly, the “evening out” is someone else is getting all the good pulls, lol. I know that past luck has no bearing on the future and that other people’s luck in no way impacts my own. But I still choose believe it anyway.
Okay to end these speculations and theories.
As I worried and angered myself with the past openings of ~60 LTs with no 5 Star pull.
I went ahead and complained to customer service.
I received the dreaded and familiar email saying something along the lines of, “Apologies for your pull rate, IT is ABOVE AVERAGE, this explains your drought in LT pulls.
I at least tried to deal with CS. Now days later I opened at least 12 more with out success.
I contacted CS and explained that this is such a sad moment for a player reaching close to Day 1000. Email replies with, “Aplogies and the REASON for no 5 star pulls is because you have pulled many successfully and now the game is BALANCING you out with unsuccessful pulls.
There you have it, the game recognizes how many 5 Star pulls you have gotten since Day 1 and the game will eventually decide your fate on wether you get one or not.
If you haven’t gotten any in a while, it’s okay to expect many in your future. Sounds like a fortune cookie saying…~1:7?!? Don’t believe that statistic ever!
P.S. Today marks a day in history, for me, finally opening a LT with success! Guess what, it was Loki WITH BONUS CABLE! Huh…would you look at that…what are thee odds…
Is that the exact reply or did you type out the above based on memories?
I have the emails, I merely emphasized what was said. I do not want to disclose the exact messages because CS may have a non-disclosure parameter.
I find it surprising that they replied with this reason:
(Not exact wording)
“Aplogies and the REASON for no 5 star pulls is because you have pulled many successfully and now the game is BALANCING you out with unsuccessful pulls.”
That’s not how probability and the binomial distribution works. The CS team isn’t made up of statisticians nor were they the ones who did the programming, so I wouldn’t take their explanation quite so literally. As others have said before, pulls are independent, meaning a good streak in the past doesn’t make a bad streak in the future more likely or vice versa.
That said, I’m sorry you’ve had such a terrible streak, and I do hope the devs consider implementing a streak breaker. That would make everyone a lot happier, I’m sure.
With streak breaker in place, I’m afraid there might be some balancing in such a way that no player will be able to get more than 1 5* every 7 pulls. In other words, no player will be able to get 2 or 3 consecutive 5* pulls. Would that be a good tradeoff?
Sounds like there is a lot of denial around here.
Look for every 3 months of pulls, the game keeps track of how many 5 Stars you receive.
So “quarterly”(3 months) you have a track record. And in this track record the game “recognizes” your “pull rate” and defines the player as: BELOW, AVERAGE, or ABOVE AVERAGE.
Based on this, your pull rate can change. Now what happened to me, opening ~60 tokens with no success, happened because of my “past 3 month track record” of “unbelievably high” pull rates!
Therefore the game balanced me out by giving “unbelievably low” pull rates for this quarter.
Do you have any non-anecdotal evidence that this is happening?
Yes, please. What did they actually say? Find it hard to believe they would let this kind of thing slip. Maybe the new guy/gal is about to get called to the carpet!
If this is in fact true, well… cat’s out of the bag, as it were. Balancing bad pull-rates with good, no issues there. Balancing good pull-rates with bad? That I have issues with. Big time.
Why waste my time telling you all this. I’m a person who believes in what’s fair and pulling so many tokens, staying up all night to gain CP, and completing PVP(575) and PVE(MAX) I had a breakdown. Why would I keep playing this game if it’s not giving what I want!
Therefore I complained to CS and tried to create a solution here in the forums, “A Token Pull Statistic” for us players. Non-anecdotal? I don’t have to do this for any of you or explain, I’m being as clear as possible without the devs having to step in and close this thread.
I have my emails from CS and if one day you find yourself in the same position I was in, go ahead and take the same initiative I took. Many players have dealt with a token pull drought. I just happen to explain myself in order to help you all and to help myself figure out if I want to keep playing a game that really doesn’t give me anything, other than mild enjoyment.
Speaking objectively and with precaution, I have explained it as simple and discretely to you of my situation with my pulls rate and got my answer. Take the information in or don’t. I’m near Day 1000 and was just really wondering why I was in a 5 star drought.
Feel the same way right now. Totally in the same boat as you on pulls and I’ve been keeping an eye on this thread more than any other on the forum over the last several days. I’ve long suspected that there is mild tweaking of pulls going on (heck, why is that so surprising, really?) but I’m a conspiracy theorist at heart.
Forgive the questions. Part of it probably stems from disbelief. Not that you’ve misinterpreted but that D3 would unwittingly divulge this information. If it’s true, you’ve caught D3 with their hand in the cookie jar. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it morally reprehensible, but it’s certainly morally ambiguous. A breach of trust, IMHO.
Anyway, the questioning isn’t meant to offend and the skeptisim isn’t directed at you personally.
When cable dropped I opened 82 LT’s. During that time I had two major droughts, one was 23 and the next was 21. I ended up with something like 12 5*'s out of 82 pulls… but with 2 major non- 5*streaks.
I haven’t pulled an 5* in a week or so, with probably 20+ more tokens opened. Then last night I got back to back 5*'s (2 kitties woo hoo).
I firmly believe that everything evens out over time. If you are not getting your 5*'s right now, you will hit a point where you do … and then you will hit a drought again 
If this is true, then that’s the biggest news I’ve heard in a while on this forum. I hope it’s true. It would make the game more fair. We know that they track 5* pull rates, so it’s important to them. I believe it’s plausible that they could have added limits on pulling legendaries.
@Brigby could you ask if it is true that your 5* pull rate is adjusted based on your pull rate history?
For example, if your personal pull rate goes below 12%, then they increase your odds until it reaches 13%; if your rate is above 16%, then they lower your odds until it reaches 15%. It wouldn’t be difficult to code, and it would allow variation within an “acceptable” range.
Of course, if this is true, then the probability argument is NA.
Yesterday I got two back-to-back 5 stars as well, breaking my long drought.
I for one am way more comfortable with legitimate rng than doctored “randomness”. I hated when they announced the limits to AI cascades, and I would be upset if they are manipulating pull rates behind the scenes here as well, for better or worse.
Cable was my first hoard and I did track every pull. The only thing i can deduce from it is that you have to save up enough pulls for the 15% rate to even out. You can see what i mean with my data below…I got nothing for 20+ pulls a few times and other times i got 3 5* in a row.
total pulls = 220
003 - Kitty
006 - Cable
010 - Kitty
012 - Loki
019 - Cable + Bonus - Kitty
024 - Kitty
029 - Loki
036 - Cable
046 - Kitty
049 - Loki
050 - Loki
051 - Cable
074 - Loki
077 - Kitty
082 - Cable
085 - Cable
088 - Kitty
108 - Kitty
109 - Kitty
119 - Kitty
134 - Loki
135 - Loki + Bonus - Kitty
139 - Loki
151 - Kitty
162 - Cable
184 - Loki
187 - Loki
190 - Kitty + Bonus - Cable
200 - Kitty
205 - Cable
206 - Loki
207 - Kitty
208 - Loki
218 - Cable
In the end, i pulled 34 out of 220. My percentage was 15.45%.
And my bonus 5* rate was 3 out of 34 (8.82%) which is slightly better than the 1 in 20 (5%) average.
Now I am curious what happens if you don’t pull at all for Three months…
After pulling more than twenty consecutive 4-stars a few weeks ago I started tracking my pulls by screen-shooting the results. Don’t know why I didn’t do that before because it’s the easiest way to keep track. Suddenly the 5* came back. This week was very frightening as I pulled FOUR 5* in row. That makes me believe that the 15% drawing rate evens out in the end. Some times you have good times, some times you just want to give up because you see no purple tokens.
I have been tracking pulls since shortly after 5’s entered the game. I need to update recent history, but after about 2000 pulls, my worst streak to date is 0/46 (right when Gambit entered, he’s still not finished). My cumulative rate through early September was 12.72%. There is no balancing out of pulls over 3 months or whatever, each pull is random. Honestly I don’t think they would even care some player had a 5% rate over a year, as long as the overall rate for all players met their acceptable rate.
BUT: Remember when the devs spent time to make AI cascades less likely in PVE? Mostly because (probably new) players felt like the AI was cheating, even though the game is randomly selecting each tile all the time?
You know what feels far worse than losing a random match to insane AI cascades? Tracking your pulls and seeing you are falling far below what you think you should be getting, even after years of pulls. Knowing your rate requires you to determine that on your own, so it’s a bit harder to be on top of it, but as I’ve said many times, a streak breaker is still overdue and would be a huge QOL improvement for people who are climbing into the 4/5 tiers.
I suppose the reason they “fixed” AI cascades is because it can impact a person on their 1st day or playing, but it takes a long time (you’re hooked by then) to figure out your 5* rate stinks and isn’t getting any better.