User blog comment:Nmtan/Review Waterfall & Mud Dragon Ratio/@comment-11259553-20130814062455

Interesting to see your results NmTan.

I ran 200 trials on June 15. I had run a decent sample of trials the day before but wasn't paying close attention to the ratio or number then. It was a test just to see how fast a new player could level using breeding rather than Farming for the XP engine for the article. I wrote the article and didn't note the ratio, but it seemed close to 1:1. (If it had been otherwise, I probably would have noticed and started keeping track because that would have been of interest to me.)

Then the next day I ran the same test on the same account, 200 trials, and got 5:1. I made the comment because at that time I had recorded the result of every breeding, and so assumed I must have just mistakenly thought it was 1:1 the first trial and/or that the sample size was too low.

I have since run trials with level 10's in regards to seeing how common Plankton are, and while doing so saw the same 5:1 ratio between Mud and Waterfall. Not a large sample size though (~50) since it was on 3 accounts and ended when I got the Plankton on each.

I am currently running another trial with Colossal + Mud to try see whether War can result from that combination and if so what the ratio might be. So far I am seeing about 7:2 in favor of Mud, no War so far, but it's a small sample size still. I will update later when I have more data.

Your test I assume was early in July. You have enough trials that it's pretty clear that the ratio was 1:1 at that time. I have enough trials that it's pretty clear that the ratio was well in favor of Mud at the time of my testing the second time.

Your results make me suspect my initial ballparking of the ratio of Mud to Waterfall on the first test was actually correct.

The ratios are so far out of whack and the number of trials so high that there must be another factor involved that we're missing. I would guess that SP are changing ratios on at least some updates. I know they changed the breeding time of a lot of the Water element hybrids around that time. Perhaps the ratios are somehow linked to breeding time and this brought Mud back in line with Waterfall. Though I'm not sure how I could explain the results of the latest tests I'm doing in that context if it continues to hold up.

It would make sense from SP's end to do something like that to keep people from being able to nail down the breeding system. Changing the ratios would be the smart way of keeping people off balance with the breeding system, since there's only a handful of players that are going to run a huge number of trials to try to figure it out, and even they are unlikely to do so from update to update. Most players will just have a few trials at most where the margin of error (and difficulty trusting others' results without proof) can explain away anything.