Wednesday, August 12, 2015

50 Packs Means What

It's been a while since statistics so it's nice to find someone doing this for me…



Out of 50 packs, about how many of the 130 cards should the average person get? And how much dust would 50 packs get?

TLDR: 93% of commons, 62% of rares, 21% of epics, 14% of legendaries and 1100 dust, equaling a total value of 18245 dust

Almost forgot to answer the original question from the title: 89 unique cards out of the 132.

I assumed that TGT has the exact same rarity distribution as GvG, plus 9 extra commons (1 for each class), which makes it: 49 commons, 37 rares, 26 epics and 20 legendaries. I also assumed that you don't care about golden cards, so you only keep golden cards if you don't have enough non-golden copies of the same card. Sadly, I don't have the time to properly analyze the data, so I just averaged it all together. (I could sort the runs and show some values for the top and bottom 10%, maybe in a separate post later.) So the average result is:
  • Commons: out of 49, you have both copies of 43 and a single copy of 5, that equals 93% (I'm sure that single card missing is the best common of the set)
  • Rares: out of 37, you have both copies of 17 and a single copy of 12, that means no copies of 8, equaling 62%
  • Epics: out of 26, you have both copies of 2, and a single copy of 7, no copies of 17, equaling 21%
  • Legendaries: 3 unique legendaries (duplicates have been auto-disenchanted), it was 2.8 on average, so it's 14%
  • Dust: from duplicates, you ended up with 1100 dust
  • Total value: 18245 dust, which equals 365 per pack. This is the crafting cost of all the cards summed up plus the dust from disenchanting. (This slightly differs from the sum of the previous values, because of the rounding errors.)
I hope the information was useful for you. I'll maybe do a proper analysis with confidence intervals and all the fancy statistics, if I have enought time for that, sometime later in a separate post.
Good luck actually opening your 50 packs! Cheers!

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Hearthstone Brawl: The Masked Ball



Spent a couple of hours on this Brawl to get my dailies done and assemble a decent deck. Starting out I needed to get two Rogue wins. Initially I built a deck with a number of minions to exploit the free summons. Cards like Defias Ringleader, Haunted Creeper, and Violet Teacher. My first game scared a Priest away when coined out the Defias:


During the second game I realized I was doing it wrong. Many of the summons (Spectral Spider or Violet Apprentice) did not cost the required two mana to trigger a free card. While a little disheartened I thought my Hogger would finally shine since it summons Gnolls which "cost" two mana. Alas it appears that only "played" cards would trigger Brawl since when my Gnolls were killed they did not summon Wisps or Target Dummies.

There is a way to exploit the Brawl effect. Turns out it is like a hidden Death Rattle which means Baron Rivendare is suddenly relevant. An enterprising Hunter caught me by surprise with this. Turn six he had a Piloted Shredder on the board. He then played the Baron followed by Feign Death. Suddenly I was facing a full board:


Thankfully I was able to remove the Baron immediately and had enough board developed to stabilize. But imagine the havoc Sneed's Old Shredder could wreak! Something to consider.

While I needed to get some Druid wins in I ended up sticking with the Druid to play. The Druid's ability to ramp into large minions is especially potent with the Brawl effect. Sadly I don't have the cool trees (Ancient of Lore or Ancient of War) but there is plenty of other heft to get by with (plentyother, heft, et cetera)

Did learn a couple of things.


The turn one Emperor Thaurissan sure seemed powerful. Yet keeping and using the two Innervates along with the coin ended up draining any hope of tempo. Naturally the Priest drew into SW: Death by turn three and nothing that I had drawn into the cost reduction helped me. The biggest lesson came with Poison Seeds. You pretty much guarantee a loss for yourself by playing it since each dying minion summons a new one to go along with a bunch of free treants.

What I ended up doing was "taunting into ramp": Decklist. Start with small taunt minions to stall early aggression. Then follow up with some more taunt in the mid-range, like Belcher and Druid of the Claw. End the curve with high-mana, high-value cards as finishers. Spells were either buffs or removal along with Nourish for the ability to choose between draw or ramp.

There's a bit more tuning to do. The deck is light on draw so each card needs to be high value or more draw should be added. There are too many spells—which don't synergize with the Brawl power. Need to go either removal or buffs. Really wish I had more giants. *sigh*

Nozdormu continues to win me games. With the focus on getting taunts out he's actually surviving and messing with people.


This ramp druid had me beat until I managed to get the roping going. He tried to use Savage Roar on me but the animations must have slowed him down. Was giggling to myself for a while after winning that game. Definitely love that about the Brawl games… being able to use cards that don't fit into "normal" constructed play.

The free pack was okay:


Destroyed all of the commons but I did need the Perdition's Blade. While I enjoy Rogue the decks I've played with never encouraged me to make it.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Had to be Done

Guild leader of a social guild provided some instructions on how to get into the Russian side of Skyforge. Sometimes I reward effort with effort...



Thursday, June 4, 2015

Initial World Hall of Fame Games

Just noticed a press release and subsequent hype for "2015 World Video Game Hall of Fame Inductees." Apparently "The Strong® welcomed six games into the inaugural class of its World Video Game Hall of Fame™"
  • DOOM
  • Pac-Man
  • Pong
  • Super Mario Bros.
  • Tetris
  • World of Warcraft
I completely agree with the recognition of all of these games except the final one. *lol* Despite my love of WoW it should not be the MMO representative. Ultima Online and EverQuest are far more deserving.

On a side note… who the hell is "The Strong®" and why are they qualified to hand out world titles?

Please Stand By


Finally! All of the hints and suppositions do get old so it was exciting to see this pop up on Twitter Tuesday. Fallout 4 is reality. About damn time too since the Skyrim team has been done for years (release was 3.5 years ago and Dragonborn was out 2.5 years ago).

Really enjoyed the initial trailer. Then learned more about it from the guy over at Curse.com. Fallout New Vegas was really novel since I know Vegas so well. Boston will be a completely foreign setting for fun and exploration.

I'll definitely be picking up the game on release. Hell, even considering using GMG's 23% voucher to pre-order. But I will try to ignore most of the hype. It's frustrating to have questions that won't be answered til day one:

  • Will FO4 be a "mile wide inch deep" sandbox like Skyrim?
  • Is the Papyrus scripting engine from Skyrim used in FO4?
  • Does the engine still use the ancient Gamebryo meshes and textures?
  • When will the G.E.C.K. be updated for FO4?
  • Did you have time to implement V.A.T.S. or, as in Skyrim, are the data structures there but unused?
  • Are you railroading any of the main quest-lines or are they all finished? (re: Skyrim Civil War)
  • Are the number of gear slots reduced again?

*lol* I'm definitely not the typical gamer.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

The Definition of Botting

Yesterday the ban-hammer was brought down on a number of accounts. I've heard numbers as high as 600,000. Also heard that some are temporary six-month bans while others are permanent. Blizzard themselves didn't release actual numbers or violators so I'm not sure how accurate they are.

Apparently is was largely prompted by abuse from a botting program called HonorBuddy:


I admit I have used a botting program before. It must have been five or six years ago now, but it was fun. A program called Glider. You could write fairly detailed programs to kill mobs, harvest reagents, etc. As a coder I found it amusing—yet I did get caught and lost two accounts. Glider was pretty underground though. Something as brazen as this Honor Buddy was bound to get busted.

Yesterday afternoon Bashiok tweeted something that caught my eye:

Now that's interesting. That is not the publicly accepted definition of botting. Even recently I have loaded up two instances of WoW and uses AutoHotKey to do things. This is not botting. I am not leaving the computer unattended to automate activity in Azeroth. Yet from Bashiok's terse summary apparently I am—according to Blizzard.

Interesting. And they are apparently enforcing it this narrowly as the crazy boxer PreparedWOW has been banned...


I'm guessing Blizzard wants to make it look like they're serious about maintaining the integrity of their online world. Personally I think pushing content faster would be more effective.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Vanity Pet Ladder, Skin of Teeth

Spent a lot of time summoning vanity pet, clicking level stone, summon vanity pet, click level stone, ad infinitum. I'm sure others are, too. Managed to cover a lot of ground and I'm currently, barely, at #5 on the server. The dirty Ravenlight is gaining ground. *sigh*


Must say I have enjoyed the Twitter integration that 6.1 brought. There were a number of times that I would intend to tweet something. Procrastination coupled with distractions and those tweets went forgotten. Now I just crop an image the best I can then move on.


This was todays bit of fluff. None of these spontaneous tweets are that creative or amusing… but at least I'm actively contributing Internet flotsam.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Sid Meier, Lite

After my so-so interest in Civ: BE I didn't let myself get too interested in Spaceships. I did watch some of the initial stuff on Twitch but haven't made it back. Yet.


The biggest criticism I've heard is that there isn't much depth and the voice-overs are lack luster. That might not bother me. Might be fun to have a space experience that you can tackle in one sitting.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Warcraft Fan Art

I've seen a number of exceptional fan renditions of game art. But never something like this...


Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Vanity Pet Ladder, Continued

After a week I've somehow managed to maintain my lead on the dreaded Ravenlight. *snicker* Was chatting with her over the weekend. She hasn't had a chance to level new things so I've widened the gap further. In fact, thanks to almost 1000 Pet Charms I'm now up to 6th on the server.


That set of charms I used to level. Buying Mystery Bags ended up getting me nearly twice the number of levels Flawless Battle-Training Stones would have. Still have over 2000 charms left which I intend to use on Rare Stones. Warcraft Pets says I have 17 Poor, 23 Common, and 54 Uncommon Pets. Ninety-four stones will cost 1410 Charms. That will be a lot of clicking. *sigh* 

Once done all that's left is the leveling from daily rewards. Wonder where I will peak.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Vanity Pet Ladder, Redux

Had to capture this immediately since it won't last. It's been a week since I gleefully reported passing Shian on the PvE Pet Ladder. Now, thanks to Raiding with Leashes III: Drinkin' From the Sunwell, I have passed Ravenlight!


It's only a five point lead so it won't last. Raven hasn't had time to hit the old instances and her daughter always helps. But at least I'll have a couple of days in the sun. *snicker* Sadly I was only able to get six on my own. Had to blow over 30k on the Auction House to round it out:


Will be getting a few more points. I had just over 3700 Pet Charms so I'm going through all the highest level unique pets and getting them upgraded to Rare. If there enough charms left I'll buy level stones to get them all to 20. Should be a good baseline.

Not sure the push was worth it… but K'ute is damn cute…


Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Vanity Pet Ladder

Since Warlords hit I've put many, many hours into leveling Battle Pets yet only yesterday did I finally pass my first rival, Shian. Sadly my second rival, Ravenlight, remains a killer.


My lead over Shian is tenuous at best. She has a lot more pets than I do and could easily pass me with some leveling. Catching Raven is more realistic yet I have many sub-Rare quality pets to upgrade.

Yet the bulk of the work is complete. My average unique pet level is now 20.7—thanks to the fantastic menagerie XP. Only one month ago that number was down around 13. Thankfully I managed this big push since 6.1 comes out next week and the massive XP will be nerfed.

From here on out the free level stones from the daily Big Bag of Pet Supplies will raise that average. I will use the Pet Charms to buy Rare conversion stones since they no longer de-level your pet in 6.1. Slow process but a natural one.