Due to how relevant this is to the economic side of the game, I decided to place this in the market section as it's the most fitting and relevant. This is also my old sales and giveaway thread, so that should explain the first page of comments.
In response to some e-mails, I decided to share my Unique Variant system with players. For those of you that know me, I am no longer an active player, but I have run some analysis on rolling statistics in Spiral Knights. My data shows that rolling is instance dependent and can be slightly manipulated to make Punch pay out more VH UV’s.
I charged some folks with publishing our findings, but since that hasn’t happened yet (and it sounds like people are still getting ripped off by “merchants”), I’ll let the community have it and come up with their own conclusions. Here is data from 625 rolls I have run: http://tinyurl.com/SpiralKnightsRolls
Pay attention to the havens these are rolled in, they pay out differently than English havens due to the sparse population, how they reset often and the amount other players roll in them. My understanding is that these are modulating factors, though I can't make a solid public comment as to the *how* these affect rolling.
Here’s a summary of how likely I am to get a UV with my system:
Low Variant: 49.4% (309/625)
Medium Variant: 22% (138/625)
High Variant: 18.7% (117/625)
Very High Variant: 9.76% (61/625)
Compared to other people’s rolls and the current wiki data, I am roughly twice as likely to roll a High or Very High variant, which makes a big difference in bulk, and basically can completely subvert a market.
Anyways, I hope you guys can work with this data. It usually costs me from 8-12kCE to roll a VH UV of my choice which I can fence for 16kCE or merchant for 18-28kCE depending on the weapon / demand. I hope this helps other players if they are on the fence between considering paying for UV's or trading items.
Yo, Tamer. Free bump for you.