Our missions rarities page now has an analysis of Radiant Fire Crystals vs. party size, based on 51 runs of 18 distinct missions. As you can read there, we see no evidence that party size affects Radiant Fire Crystals.

That said, we don't mind sharing our data. Here is the subset of our data that fits your experimental design: 13 solo runs of DaN, with the following numbers of Radiant Fire Crystals.

24, 24, 27, 12, 21, 27, 18, 24, 27, 15, 24, 18, 24.

"when in a party of more than one, give numbers for all party members (try not to post about the same run that one of the party members already posted)"

By the way, I recommend against this policy. Within a single run, the payouts to the players are correlated, which is going to super-complicate your analysis. Unless you plan on handling that, it's better to have each data collector report only her individual payout. On the other hand, this correlation I'm worrying about probably matters very little.

i think youre misunderstanding me, if a party finishes a run the screen will say "w got 9, x got 12, y got 27, z got 30", w posts all four payouts, im trying to avoid x, y, or z from posting payouts from the same run, that would add numbers that had already been added and skew the data to what that run has

Yes, it would be disastrous for your data set if multiple players posted the same observations as if they were different. But Donkeyhaute is talking about another problem. He's talking about how, if you take multiple observations within a given run, then they might be correlated --- inter-dependent on one another, because of how that particular run went for all players on that run. And if you were to ignore that, then your analysis would be damaged. But I agree with his final statement, that it probably doesn't matter much.

i wouldnt consider it to be possible

I consider it to be not only possible but probable. But again I wouldn't worry about it, because the correlation will not be strong and its effect on your conclusions will be negligible. :)

its very common where one player can get wildly different numbers to another, such as a run i had a few minutes ago with a 36 and an 18

That has little to do with whether player payouts are correlated. "Correlated" does not mean "identical" or "equal". It means that a relationship exists after uncertainty is taken into account. None of your anecdotes take uncertainty into account. Which is why you're collecting data, right? To get a handle on the uncertainty.

I look forward to seeing what your study produces.

i did just say i took almost every aspect into account, are you saying that the game itself will cause people to get x rads if someone else got y rads?

Yes. For example, did you account for how many treasure boxes those knights were seeing? Anything that drops from treasure boxes, such as fire crystals, is (almost certainly) correlated with the number of treasure boxes that have been opened. As far as I'm aware, every knight in the party sees the same number of treasure boxes (although they might not be the same colors). Therefore the fire crystals that one knight gets is correlated with the fire crystals that another knight gets. Make sense?

Radiants in DaN is something of a special case, because I've never seen Radiants drop before the treasure room, which always has 41 treasure boxes (although the colors vary slightly). And that's why I tell you not to worry too much about this issue.

DaN has the same number of boxes every time in the treasure room

Yes. I said that already.

and from what ive gathered every knight sees the same color boxes that are there

In my experience, that is not the case. But admittedly I don't have video proof, and it's possible that I'm wrong.

even with that it doesnt seem related between a knight getting one thing causing another to get something else

You don't think that the number of boxes affects the amount of box-only stuff that knights get? How wouldn't it?

Knights are "connected" (meaning, correlated) through boxes, yes. This is all in my post #9.

Maybe it would be easier to understand without uncertainty. So let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that each treasure box is guaranteed to produce a certain number N of Radiants. This isn't true, but there is some long-term average, and you can set that to be N, if you're willing to average over many runs or ignore the variability from run to run.

* You do a run of DaN in which the first level has 0 boxes, the second level has 0 boxes, and the treasure level has 41 boxes. On that run, every knight in your party gets 41 * N Radiants, right?

* Then you do a run of DaN in which the first level has 12 boxes, the second level has 12 boxes, and the treasure level has 41 boxes. On that run, every knight in your party gets 65 * N Radiants, right?

The key word in the preceding scenarios was "every". The knights' Radiants aren't independent of each other. They depend on the boxes, and every knight sees the same number of boxes. In this way the knights are connected. Do you see what I mean?

I'm not trying to shoot down your study. I'm just trying to get you to understand some basic concepts that Donkeyhaute was pointing out.

and i dont quite trust lancer knightz data on exact numbers (pointing to the 42% chance of elites in sewer stash)

Do you think that we've faked our Sewer Stash data? No, we haven't. Here they are (with personally identifying information stripped out).

[["Sewer Stash", "6-2", 3],
[1, 3479, 1],
[1, 2922, 1],
[1, 2985, 2],
[1, 3298, 1, "", "2014/01/16"],
[1, 3269, 0, "", "2014/01/19"],
[1, 2962, 0, "eliorb", "2014/01/22"],
[1, 2809, 0, "eliorb", "2014/05/28"],
[1, 2654, 0, "", "2014/09/05"],
[1, 2865, 1, "eliorb", "2014/09/10"],
[1, 3302, 2, "", "2014/09/15"],
[1, 2625, 0, "eliorb, eliorb", "2014/11/15", 31, 1],
[1, 3303, 0, "", "2014/12/13", 35, 1],
[1, 3232, 0, "", "2015/01/04", 31, 0],
[1, 3108, 0, "", "2015/01/05", 28, 1],
[1, 2910, 0, "", "2015/01/12", 34, 1],
[1, 2475, 1, "", "2014/01/14", 28, 2],
[1.4, 2821, 3, "eliorb", "2015/04/13", 7+8+8, 2+1+0],
[1, 2941, 0, "eliorb", "2015/08/16", 11+14+8, 0+0+0],
[1, 3096, 1, "", "2015/12/07", 8+10+8, 0+1+0]]

The first three data are from before we starting recording rarities. Ignoring them, you see that we have found 7 Elite Orbs of Alchemy on 16 runs. That's 0.4375 orbs per run on average.

Now, someone else running the same mission might not get 0.4375. She might get 0.2 or 0.3 or 0.5. That's the nature of measuring a random phenomenon. There's always some uncertainty. There are various ways of calculating the uncertainty, but they are invalid when you have as few observations as we do. That's why we're always collecting more data. To understand the uncertainty.

You're going to have uncertainty in your study too. You will never get "exact numbers", but I will not fail to "trust" your data because of it.

"people who seem to think your data suffers from people posting runs where they do get elites and leaving out runs where they dont"

That is a reasonable suspicion. It would explain why our Sewer Stash orb rate is so high. But it's wrong.

Every one of those Sewer Stash data was collected by either Bopp or me. As you can tell from this thread, we are both much more careful than the average player. For example, we decide before the run, not after, whether we are going to collect data. So the source of bias that you mentioned is not happening. Those data are rock-solid. (By the way, Bopp and I together account for at least 95% of the Lancer Knightz mission data set.)

It's possible that something else in our testing procedure is skewing our results. For example, we're clearing every monster in the mission. Maybe the rates are different if you speed-run? I have no reason to believe so, but it would be fascinating to know, wouldn't it? :-)