Made this for the subreddit, thought I'd post it here also.
In table form:
No. of crates (USD) | Chance of win | Chance of No Tank |
2 crates ($9.99) | 9.75% | 90.25% |
6 crates ($50) | 26.49% | 73.51% |
12 crates ($100) | 45.96% | 54.04% |
18 crates ($150) | 60.28% | 39.72% |
24 crates ($200) | 70.80% | 29.20% |
30 crates ($250) |
78.54% |
21.46% |
Some thoughts:
- Unlike some crate offers, there is no secondary mechanism which secures the tank with X number of crates. Conceivably, you can spend forever and still never win.
- Your chance of winning the tank doesn’t get above 50% until 14 crates.
- Therefore the 2-crate deal plus two 6-crate bundles will give you a 51.23% chance of winning the T-22 for the bargain price of $109.97 USD.
- You can spend $250 on 30 crates and still have a greater than 1 in 5 chance of winning no tank at all. This is a mug’s game.
My recommendation: NEVER BUY CRATES!
But, if you absolutely must have a go, the one-time 2 crate deal for $9.99 offers the best value. And you won’t feel sick if you lose.
Every time there's a post like this, there's someone who pops up and says "This is wrong, percentage chance is always the same no matter how many you buy!" This is both true and not true.
To explain I'm going to shamelessly steal an analogy from someone else.
- If you have 1 covered basket with 1 red ball and 9 white balls and you put your hand under the cover to blindly grab a ball, you have a 10% chance of getting a red ball.
- If you have 100 such baskets, you still have only a 10% chance of getting a red ball .... true, but only on a per-basket basis.
Remember your objective is to own the tank once leave with a red ball.
Imagine you go to a Fair with your girlfriend and for some reason, she really wants a red ball. You really want to get one for her but there's only a 10% chance, right? But it turns out that you get to choose between two tents.
- Tent A has 1 basket.
- Tent B has 100 baskets. You get to try them all!
Do both tents offer an equal chance of leaving with a happy girlfriend? At this point it should be intuitively obvious that Tent B, with 100 * 10% chances, offers a vastly better chance of leaving the Fair with a red ball (probably more than one, but not what we need) than Tent A. Binomial probability is a way to put a number on that chance. You can read more about that here.
Attached Files
Edited by HugGigolo, 16 August 2019 - 07:07 PM.