Sunday, May 6, 2012

Beating a sliced horse

Slicing is back to normal!

The most recent patch notes (for 1.2.2) note:
Premium Slicing lockboxes now yield the correct amount of credits.
But there is no way I'm just going to take that note at face value. And neither are the forums - several threads are dedicated to discussing whether the patch corrected the issue. To help sort out the issue, I collected data on another 400 grade 5 and 6 missions since 1.2.2, and reran my earlier analysis.

As shown in the first plot, the average earnings of all missions have reverted to their pre-1.2 levels. Premium (green) lockboxes now properly earn more than their white counterparts:
Note: this doesn't mean that every single time a lockbox comes back, it'll have a profit. Most of the grade 5 rich missions I run are losses - they're only profitable because crits return blue boxes which are extremely lucrative, and more than make up the loss. In general, any particular slicing mission can be a loss: several missions in a row can lose credits. Its only in the long run that slicing earns credits.

[EDIT:  realized that some folks are curious about 340 mission discoveries post 1-2.  I haven't seen much, if anything, in the way of differences from my earlier post on the topic.]
Now hopefully they leave slicing missions alone for a while...

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