Statistics: Key yield per mission type

[InterAction_studios]

I’ve now collected enough statistical data to be able to tweak the key yield for each mission type. I have some ideas of my own, but I’m not making any changes yet. I’m first sharing this data with you in order to get any insights and suggestions about which missions you think should be nerfed/buffed. When commenting, bear in mind that the goal here is not to equalize the key yield for all missions – some missions (e.g. Darkness) are naturally harder and they deserve to have a better key yield.

Mission Type	Average keys per hour	Boost
RETRO	1116	2
SUPERNOVA	1004	5
METEORSTORM	991	5
KEYRUSH	991	1
COMETCHASE	861	5
SUPPLYDROID	386	5
DARKNESS	278	4
INVASION	243	3
BOSSRUSH	229	0
SQUAWK	219	3
CI1	67	0

[InterAction_studios]

And since numbers don’t tell the entire story, here are the relative frequency charts.
Mission type is shown at the very top-right. Averages are at the bottom. And, yes, some guy managed 2258 keys per hour .

[1galbatorix1]

Well, we can clearly see that except CI1, all mission types fall into one of two categories:

• Very key efficient missions with ~900 keys per hour(Retro, Supernova, Meteor Storm, Key Rush and Comet Chase)
• And poorly key efficient ones ~250 keys per hour(All not mentioned in first category)

If we look at the graphs and raw statistics we can clearly see that there is a gap at around 500 keys per hour. We have no middle ground between very efficient missions and poorly efficient missions. I think this has to change in some way or another. First thing that comes into my mind is pushing those two groups of missions closer to each other. For example 400 and 800. And then moving some missions to the middle ground of aroud 600 keys per hour. (This is just a thought, I didn’t do maths or anything this time)

Today I don’t have much time to think in-depth about it, but I think that designing rewards depending on the difficulty of mission type and its accessibility, is a good idea to start with.

[anon27929001]

I think that all the efficient missions aren’t affected at all by difficulty when it comes to keys,so a 0% difficulty wave with tourist on is worth the same amount as a 100% difficulty wave with ssh on. They all seem to drop a fixed amount of keys,which is an issue(except key rush,possibly? Not sure how much that is affected).
This can be abused by playing the easiest possible missions of these types to get lots of keys.
It definitely needs to be fixed.

[Fractorial]

Can the “Unoriginality Penalty” be applied to key bonus as well? I mean one could just repeatedly play the same mission (which bears a huge key bonus) over and over again to earn so much keys.

For each 16-wave retro mission, I got 180+ keys without skill modifier constantly.

[InterAction_studios]

Huh… you’re right. Fixed in v.29 Bug

Key drop rate does depend on skill, but the reason it’s not affecting certain types of missions (e.g. Comet Chase, Retro) is that most of the keys drop in-between waves, and their number is fixed independent of skill.

But if you look at Invasion missions, then the difference between Tourist/Rookie (Red) and SSH (Purple) is clear.