I'm pretty sure there is a very large amount of gold coming in every single day in cRPG-land. This post is a lot longer than I originally planned, so I'm breaking it up into two parts, recalculating the multiplier distribution & how much gold this actually amounts to.
THE BORING PART:Previously, the distribution of multipliers was calculated to be something like:
0.5 0.25 0.125 0.0625 0.0625
for x1, x2, x3, x4, and x5 multipliers, respectively.
Those calculations assume that each round, a team has a 50:50 chance of winning, and that the probability of winning each round is independent of the outcome of the last round. While at the time, it seemed like a reasonable assumption, and significantly reduced the complexity of the calculation, I don't think it's actually right.
Basically, it boils down to how the autobalancer works. I'd love to get some statistics on this, as it would make my calculations more reliable, but anecdotally, this is what I've noticed: On a given map, in the first round, there's about a 50:50 chance of winning. Perhaps the same on round two, after the autobalance. After that, teams don't shift around much, and whichever team wins round two
tends to win the next several rounds, until map change. Occasionally the other team will band together and fight back with a better strategy, or a new group of players come into the server, or the teams are balanced absolutely perfectly, but most of the time, they favor one team or the other, and the favored team wins.
What does this mean? It means that this:
0.5 0.25 0.125 0.0625 0.0625
is not correct.
If we assume instead that round one and two are even (50:50), and then that the following rounds are, say, 65:35 for the winning and losing teams of round 2, we get something much different:
0.5 0.175 0.11375 0.0739375 0.1373125
THE $$$ PART:This distribution means about 11.8 (96.875 to 108.678) gold per minute more, on average. It would take the 'break even' cost of gear from 34598 to 38813 gold.
Now, not everyone uses the 'break even' point, obviously, many are above and many are below, but in my own personal experience, more are below. Say people, on average, tend to use ~80% of the old sustainable build cost to determine what gear they use (27678 gold). Assuming there are about 200 players active at all times, this amounts to a whopping 8.98 million gold per day coming in to the crpg economy
after upkeep.
Disclaimer:
All the numbers, aside from upkeep break and repair percentages (and I may not be right about those, 4% & 7%?) are estimated. Just so I remember, esitmates made are: win probability for a given round, average number of players on at any given time, and average cost of gear per player. Distributions were found by performing one hundred iterations of five rounds using probability matrices, starting with an initial distribution of [1, 0, 0, 0, 0]. Not factored into this are alternate accounts or the fact that many players, when on a losing streak, switch gear to avoid wasting gold.
edit: typo