Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-26388545-20180403163318

I've often wondered how Firemonnkeys sets the bar for required upgrades. Do they have a meeting and hash out a number; do they have a set percentage of full upgrade cost they go by; or do they just spin some wheel and go with whatever number it lands on?? Sometimes it seems like the latter!!

Averages are always interesting to me. Sometimes they give some perspective. I looked at every Limited Time Series (LTS) and Special Event (SE) since update 5.4 and charted the figures. Once I entered in upgrade costs required to win and full upgrade costs, I could get a percentage of upgrades bought vs fully upgrading. This could tell us something about monkey math.

For LTS a range certainly appeared. The percentage of full upgrade cost moved with the cars full upgrade cost to some degree. The higher the full upgrade cost, the lower the percentage. The average cost is 38.38% of fully upgrading, with a low of 24.7% and a high of 60.87%. The big oddity was the most recent LTS, Spada Codatronca Barchetta The percentage was way out of line! No other LTS was even in the 50's let alone 60's.

Special Events are a different story, as they depend heavily on driver skill. The numbers I used are mine, because I'm me ;-). My average for SE was 12.46% lower than the LTS at 25.92 with a low of 9.56% and a high of 45.16%. Again, the oddity was the most recent SE Road Trip, which required a notably higher percentage than the other SE I charted.

Road Triphad many people upset. It was hard and it seemed like it needed more upgrades than usual. Well I looked at the math and it's true! As a percentage of fully upgrading, it was the highest in my study! However it's not horrible if you spent 265 on upgrades to win it, as that's the average win cost.

What's interesting is looking at the actual cost of winning cars in LTS vs SE. For me these numbers are almost equal! For others the numbers could be far apart.

What is concerning is the most recent events in both LTS and SE. The percentages in both the Spada Codatronca Barchetta Championship& Road Trip where the highest seen in my study. Is this a new trend or a 1 off?? Time will tell. However racers should be aware of this change.

Here are the numbers; 

NOTES:


 * "% of Full Up" numbers were rounded off to the 2nd decimal place using standard rounding methods.
 * I have purposely left the Veyron Community Challenge out of LTS numbers because it is an anomolly. It wasn't a true LTS as much as it was a "Community Challenge". I expect they wanted a lot of involvement so they kept it to R$. Even FM didn't consider it a true LTS; "We're introducing a new twist on the Limited-Timed Special Events, dubbed Community Challenges." Hopefully they do more of these, as R$ only cars are nice!! However they haven't done one since V5.5. 