Tag: math

Heart Hunting in The Arcana: Should you gamble?

  

TL;DR Do you need at least two hearts to win? If so, ALWAYS GAMBLE!!

Honestly, I haven’t had the time to play The Arcanamuch at all, but I think its Heart Hunter mini-game is super cute. It’s also deceptively complicated! You’ve got six turns to chase around these little characters and collect at least four hearts from one of them, right? But midway through, NIGHT FALLS, STAKES RISE, and all of a sudden you have the opportunity to go all-or-nothing, getting either 2 or 0 hearts from your target character in one spin! So should you go for it??

The answer: YES (assuming you need more than one heart, that is). But how do I know this, you ask?? I asked my boyfriend, who, despite being hundreds of miles away currently, somehow managed to both understand what I was asking AND write a computer program to answer the question (!!). 

Let’s say you’re on turn 4 or 5 and you want at least 2 hearts from someone after two turns (this turn and the next). And, you’ve walked to the same spot as them! Here are the four ways you can “win” (aka get at least 2 hearts in the next 2 turns):

  1. You don’t gamble this turn (and get 1 heart), and the next turn you manage to travel to your target’s location (nabbing another heart)
  2. You don’t gamble this turn (and get 1 heart), and the next turn you travel to Faust’s location and she gives you your target’s heart
  3. You try to gamble this turn and WIN (getting 2 hearts, yay!)
  4. You try to gamble this turn and LOSE (getting 0 hearts), and the next turn you manage to travel to your target’s location, gamble, and WIN (getting 2 hearts).

Turns out, it’s possible to write a computer algorithm that can pretend to play millions of instances of Heart Hunter and guess the percentage of times you’ll successfully get two hearts! ^_^ Without further ado, here are the estimated percentage rates of “winning” if you DON’T gamble:

And here are the percentage rates of “winning” if you DO gamble: 

You see what I’m seeing, friends?! Apparently you’re almost twice as likely to get two hearts in two turns if you DO gamble! I’m also kind of surprised that your chances of winning are a little smaller if you’re in the center. I always thought that was the best location!! Haha.

To summarize, basically, you should always gamble if you need the hearts. Guess this is one instance where the house doesn’t always win! 💕

Disclaimer: everything in this post assumes:

  • Faust has a 25% chance each of giving you an Asra, Julian, or Nadia heart, or seeing a Goat??.
  • Faust has an equal chance of showing up in any location.
  • All other characters move 1-4 spaces in a turn, with equal chance (except they never walk backwards).
  • If you gamble, you have a 50% chance of winning/losing

No idea if any of this is true! ^_^

MidCin/IkeSen story events: a guide for semi-lazy people

MidCin/IkeSen events can be stressful. You’re 200 points short of finishing a story, your entire friends list stopped being active a week ago… it happens.

But I have good news for you! I’ve been experimenting quite a bit, and it turns out that MidCin/IkeSen events are actually really low stress as long as you’re not a completionist. This guide is for people who plan to be active throughout an entire event. If you’re one of those Day 3 ditchers…can’t help you, sorry! Haha.

The trick

It’s really simple process:

  1. Wait until the Lucky Time midway or 2/3 through the event to start making friends/reading the stories. Until then, just shore up those Ballroom points/Glamour/whatever it’s called nowadays as much as possible. In MidCin’s last event, there were 4 Lucky Times, and I started friending/reading during the 3rd Lucky Time, about 9 or 10 days into a 14 day event.
  2. Use the “similar friends” feature to make friends. If you’ve waited until the middleish Lucky Time to start, chances are, similar friends will be more or less as active as you for the rest of the event! This makes things really fair. I tend to like sending requests to people my score or higher by a little bit (less than 1k), and I will accept requests from people whose score is at most 500 less than mine. But you do you. Go ahead and spam those friend requests at this point – the goal is to fill your friends list as much as possible. Read stories, send out friend requests…rinse and repeat until the event is over!
  3. (MidCin only) Don’t continue past the 1st episode of your first route until it’s Lucky Time. MidCin gives sorbets (aka 100 stamina replenishers that “melt” after a day) when you 1) enter the event, 2) reach the first checkpoint, and 3) reach the first ending decision point. You’ll want to use these sorbets during Lucky Time. You can use the first sorbet during your 2 hour long personal Lucky Time. Wait until another Lucky Time to start reading the stories, and you’ll be able to use the other 2 sorbets during a Lucky Time as well. In total, this is a 3000 point boost!

If you’ve done this right, your friends list is going to be a lot more “even.” No more worrying about inactive friends. No more wondering how many event stories you’re going to be able to finish! This strategy takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation.

(Seriously though, you’ll want to avoid accepting friend requests from people who send you requests when their score is wayy higher than yours (especially in the beginning of the event!). 90% of the time, they stop playing the event after just a few days.)

But how many points do I need to “finish” an event?

It totally depends on the event, but you can do some math and guesstimate! Let’s use MidCin’s “My Promise to You” event as an example. There are five characters, and finishing up all Premium routes takes 93750 points (in general, doing all premium routes will require 20-25k points/story, I’ve noticed). We start out with 5 friends, and by the 5th route, have 4 sets of 2 additional friends (from the 4 previous routes), so 13 friends in total. Each friend contributes 20% of their points to your score total. Assuming all your friends more or less have the same score as you, they basically add 13/5 = 2.6 times your personal score to your score total, so your total score would be 3.6 times as much as your personal score. So to get the 93750 points needed to finish all Premium routes, you need 93750/3.6 = 26,042 personal points.

Like I mentioned earlier, MidCin gives sorbets that, if used correctly, give you about 3000 free points (I also like to use the non-expiring stamina items that IkeSen give you at different checkpoints). So in reality, in MidCin’s last event, you need to do enough Ballroom Dance lessons (or use enough items) to have about 23k points.

This event lasted from 9/2 to 9/16, so 14 full days. There were 3 Lucky Times, which double the points you get, so it’s more or less the same as having the event last 14+3 = 17 days, give or take. So to reach 23k points, you’d need to generate about 23k/17=1352 points each “day”, assuming all your friends are as active as you, to get all the Premium stories in this event. Clearing out your stamina first thing in the morning, right after school/work, and right before bed, for example, would net you 1500 points/day – totally doable.

In general (aka, during the last few MidCin/IkeSen events), I’ve noticed that you’d need to successfully use up at most 15 hours’ worth of stamina points to finish all Premium event stories (using the trick I mentioned above), and all 24 hours’ worth of stamina points to finish ALL event stories (which I’ve never gunned for because I value sleep and my free time, lol). So think about how active you usually are, and that should give you an idea of how many stories you’d be able to finish using this strategy!

Overall, this strategy definitely isn’t for everyone. If you’re not consistently active the entire event, it won’t work. If you always send friend requests to people with way higher scores than you, that’ll obviously give you a higher score total (but take wayyy more time and might not be successful, and I, for one, have better things to do with said time). But if you’re like me, and you just want a low-stress way of enjoying MidCin and IkeSen events, do consider this strategy! At least personally, it’s worked great the last 5-6 events. 🙂

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started