je vois même pas d'article :/
je vois un écran noir
Fellow redditors!
Some of you may remember a post doing the rounds on here a while back, about a researcher opening packs for science. That’s me! So, I’ve now opened €3800 worth of packs and have published my findings and views on the whole thing at GREF 2018, a conference for the European gambling regulators.
I thought it was a good idea to share the raw data with everyone here, so that anyone who wants can have a look at them and see for themselves how it all panned out.
Here’s the gist of it:
Starting in February, ending (for now) in may, I’ve spent 453650 Fifa points (worth approx €3800 when purchasing bundles of 12000 points only).
I’ve opened 651 packs and catalogued every single item, and checked the value of all items agains fubtin.com at the time of opening.
In total, I pulled 9961 items, of which 6992 were player cards, and 4483 were rare gold cards
70 “in-form” cards (TOTW / TOTS / Hero etc) were pulled - mostly ones of little value, with a couple of notable exceptions.
0 icon cards were pulled.
That’s right, 0 icon cards were pulled.
The “top 9” rare gold cards, rated 91-94 (Cristiano Ronaldo), were pulled exactly 0 times. That’s right! 0 times.
By comparing the distribution of pulled rare gold cards in terms of their rating, it was evident that cards are not drawn “randomly” from the category “rare gold cards”, but are skewed towards less valuable ones. About 10% of rare gold cards in FUT are rated 85-89, and about 1% of rare gold cards are rated 90 or more, but only 1.6% and 0.02% of packed players were from these rating brackets, respectively.
As a curious example, I compared the three famous players I’m aware of that also have younger brothers who are slightly less famous but still have rare gold cards: Romelu/Jordan Lukaku, Paul/Florentin Pogba and Eden/Thorgan Hazard. The famous brothers were packed, in total, once (Romelu Lukaku, no surprises there), whereas the less famous younger brothers were packed 14 times in total (3, 6 and 5 times, respectively).
I also calculated the "return to player" (RTP) from the packs, as a measure of what was typically returned per spent fifa coin. I did this by totalling the value, according to futbin, of every card in a pack, and dividing this by EA’s asking price for the pack. So, a pack containing cards worth 50.000 coins, and with a cost of 100.000 coins, has an RTP of .50 (or 50%), whereas a pack with cards worth 200.000, and with a cost of 100.000, has an RTP of 2.0 (or 200%).
Across the 651 opened packs, the average RTP was .58, or 58%. However this average is slightly skewed by a couple of rare instances where packs contained something very valuable. A better indication of what could typically be expected from packs is probably the median (or middle) RTP, which was 38.9% (e.g. 38900 from a pack sold for 100000).
OK, this is already long, so I’ll stop here for now. Here’s a link to the complete dataset. You can use it freely, but please credit me (Rune Mentzoni, University of Bergen, National center for gaming and gambling research). I do, however, reserve the right to publish academically on these data - so don’t steal my paper in preparation I’m sharing the data because I feel this is information that is relevant today, but less so whenever the manuscript preparation + peer review process is done with.
For any journalists or youtubers who want to do anything with this stuff, feel free! I’m also available for comments or answering questions - I’ll respond to as much as I can.
And here’s a link to the data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R12Nlw5m5GwBaYH1IPpJl_3QYSO4oV3vH0Lry5DonBg/edit?usp=sharing
Edit: The term return of investment (ROI) was inaccurately used and a bit misleading. Thanks to u/saruptunburlan2 for pointing this out. Replaced it with the term "return to player" (RTP), defined as percentage returned to player per spent coin.
Also, CRISTIANO, not Christiano. Thanks to whoever pointed that out too
