PAD Conspiracy Theories

Ever felt that some hidden forces in the game were preventing you from progressing? Maybe getting 30 angelits in a row when you need 1 devilit, or rolling 7 Kali Regalia Kaworus before getting 1 Rei Myr?

Here are some conspiracy theories about the REM in PAD!

Please note that none of the “information” within this article is intended to be used as proof, grounds for accusations or refund demands, or as the truth. Take this article as a more satirical or thought inspiring article in terms of what is possible rather than anything serious. In the above paragraph I mentioned a 30 to 1 ratio of Angelits to Devilits. This is something that can be misconstrued from the truth because the number of Devilits required in evos overall outnumbers the amount of Angelits required in evos overall (I used my box as a base with the Padherder Materials counter to see how many Devilits and Angelits I would need to complete evos for all my current cards) so that just goes to show that a Devilit drought might not be anything more than a higher requirement for one and not on the rates.

Rolling REM

Ever feel like you’re always missing that card that you want from the REM? That might not be coincidence!

#1 Mastermind

Let’s say you have a bag with 10 balls in it. You pay every time you reach in to get one of the 10 numbered balls (1 being the most common, 10 being the rarest). However a duplicate of it is then added back into the bag after.

Let’s say you have 1 to 7 and are missing 8, 9, and 10. If at this point you’re still spending to try for 8,9,10 then the person you’re paying can reasonably assume you’re going for one of 8,9,10. Of course the person charging you isn’t dumb and knows that jackpot 10 is the best possible thing to get. A lottery ticket gives the best prize when you match ALL the numbers. So after spending a significant amount they give you 8,9. At this point if you’re still reaching into the bag the person selling you the tickets for this knows with almost absolute certainty that you want 10 when you have more than enough of the other 1-9 to tide you over forever. Think of it like the board game Mastermind except it’s the algorithm trying to determine what you want instead of it being you trying to determine what the other party wants. (Click here to play a web version of the board game, lots of ads so use adblock)

Seems reasonable so far? There’s one more level of complexity that can help determine what a player might want from the REM.

Let’s say you have 3 bags now instead of 1, 14 balls each and 21 balls total. They’re split up such that you have 3 series of balls, A, B, and C as follows: A#1-7, B#1-7, C#1-7. Just like the last example, 7 would be the rarest and 1 would be the most common. Bag 1 has groups A and B. Bag 2 has groups B and C. Bag 3 has groups A and C.

You start paying to pull from all 3 bags until you have 5/7 from each A, B, and C. So you’re missing 6 and 7 for all 3 of the series.

Now suddenly you stop and only pull from bag 2, groups B and C. From here we can assume the value of B+C > A+B or A+C. That means that both B and C are more valuable than A to you. If A6 and A7 together were more valuable to you than either B6 and B7 or C6 and C7, you would logically pull from a bag that featured series A but you as a player stopped pulling from the bags featuring series A. You’re targeting either B or C at this point.

So the person hosting this now knows that you want one of (or all of) B6/7, C6/7. After some more spending they give you B6. Now what? If you keep pulling in Bag 2, they now know that B6 > A6/7 to you. If it was the other way around you’d change to pulling from Bag 3, A+C.

Now the conspiracy theory here is that Gungho does this on a large scale by recording what godfests you roll in and how many rolls you do in the godfests for which pantheons and featured GFEs for the day. If you have 4/5 from the featured pantheon and are rolling it’s because you either want one of the featured GFEs or the last remaining pantheon card for that day. So the specific mix of cards from a godfest day is the “bag” while any set of featured cards or available cards could be considered the “balls” that you are receiving.

They might even incorporate factors based on the teams you run and what you have so far. Someone only runs Myr? Make cards like DQXQ, Sun Wukong, Kanna, Paimon more rare. Someone farmed 3 Dios? Make Liu Bei more rare.

Remember that this is just a conspiracy theory and is not founded on data.

#2 Chinese Conspiracy

There are some rumours that Chinese PAD shut down because of the law that passed where app developers must publicly disclose the rates for gachapon games.

If you login to PAD right now, you won’t find any mention of specific % chance for ANY rolls or even drop chances on anything. And you won’t find it on the website either. This is not a mistake but intentional because it can give false hope to someone who doesn’t see the rates that they can get something extremely rare. This is just simple psychology. On the other hand, if you post the rates and say they made it 1/100 chance to get X card and someone rolls 200 times without getting it, you can bet they’ll complain significantly and cite the 1/100 chance. That they “deserve” the card given how much they spent for that specific card.

It simply makes more money to just hide the rates (especially if you manipulate roll rates by player).

And this is exactly why the Chinese server shutting down was called into question by some of the player base. Why did the game suddenly shut down for that region when a law was introduced regarding making rates visible? Are the rates that bad or were they being manipulated enough to warrant closing a whole server?

Considering that the Puzzles and Dragons games account for 88.2% of their annual revenue, I do not see the strategic value in closing a server in a market that invests heavily in IAP. (Link goes to Gungho Financial Report on Fiscal Year 2016 where they discuss the issue of “all your eggs in one basket” deal however there is no breakdown of revenue by region)

So given all of this, conspiracy theorists have definitely developed more ideas surrounding Gungho as a means to argue other points (such as point #1, 3 or 4 to follow).

Gungho has released the rates following Apple forcing all apps on their store to release the rates in game.

#3 Account Seed

Account “RNG” seed?

Is is possible that luck is tied to an account? Have you noticed how some people just roll 6 star GFEs every second roll and you don’t even have a single one after 50 rolls?

It could be that the REM generates your result using a random seed that was generated on your account creation. And it could be the original seed where actual RNG plays a factor and after that it’s not really random in the background and only perceives to be random because, say, it factors in time with your seed and you can only roll one roll at a time, hence, you’ll get different rolls with the same seed.

I’ll leave a personal anecdote here. In the 10-stone GFE only REM, I rolled 12 straight five stars. From JP data, the rates were roughly 15% for a six star. Now that doesn’t sound great, the chances of this happening are 14.2% if we use the JP data as reference. Others too faced similar disappointment such as popular streamer and partner, Mantastic who I believe went 1 six star in 22 rolls. Meanwhile, others were reporting rates of 50-75% six star rates over a span of 20 or more rolls. However, anecdotal data of such small amounts should not be used as proof of a conspiracy theory, after all extreme results are still always possible. If you have two standard dice you can roll a 2 or a 12 even if the possibilities for both are far less than rolling a 7.

So some believe that luck is tied to an account because some people that roll a 12 (best roll) will repeatedly roll that 12 but if you’ve ever played Monopoly you probably had that friend that rolled multiple doubles in a row to keep moving in a single turn.

#4 Activity

For this conspiracy theory we’ll assume the main factor is activity related to PAD.

There are a lot of ways to look at this. For example, in spending habits and play time. If someone plays 4 hours a day and spends consistently then you can test their tolerance for bad luck. Yukizgames rolled 33 packs for GKali and didn’t get her (I believe he rolled a few more and got her in the end, after making the thread… maybe Gungho reps saw the thread). And understanding this tolerance means understanding how much money you can squeeze out of someone. Generally there’s some level of commitment to the game and this can be determined by partially by play time as well.

Have you ever played a game that offered welcome back bonuses?

The REM can be used in a similar fashion where the “better” cards are at higher rates for people that have a decline in activity or that are inactive. The F2P, P2W game Warframe had 75% off coupons as login rewards and a large portion of the community seemed to believe that staying in 0-2 day brackets yielded better rates for this coupon compared to the top 7+ day bracket (back in the old system). The game Smite has returning bonuses for players that have not logged in for a period of time.

So it’s fairly common practice that returning bonuses exist. Some may be less obvious than others (explicitly stated or not) to get returning players back into the game. And especially in a game like PAD with such powercreep, it is conceivable that returning players are given “meta” cards so that they have an interest in starting to play actively again (which increases the chances of them spending).

If you ever decide to IAP and you see you get great rolls, there’s a decent chance this will influence your later IAPs, usually for the better (in terms of Gungho’s ledger).

To summarise, someone that plays more and spends more might get worse rolls than someone that spends less and plays less because the system knows the earlier person will likely still have a high commitment to the game while the latter situation presents an opportunity to hook a new player into the IAP circle.

#5 Social Media

Social media is becoming the basis for most marketing now. You can post a picture of something and thousands of people see it. Gungho NA uses Facebook for the announcements of their new events and this is quite smart given that their entire player base uses Facebook and those players can instantly share it to their PAD groups that they’re in (if any) or see it on their news feed.

Similarly, posts from players can end up spreading quickly and getting seen by a lot of people.

If you’ve been on the subreddit you’ve probably seen something along the lines of “rolled once, got the best 8 star seasonal!” during a seasonal REM (and if you haven’t, stay tuned because PAD Academy is making a return and you’re sure to see those posts about Orochi / Athena / Kali). That subreddit has 23k users subscribed. That’s a lot of potential viewers. Similarly if it gets shared in Facebook groups, Discords, etc.

An 8-star seasonal is roughly 0.5% for an individual one which suggests around 200 rolls on average for a specific one. (JP Data)

Getting that specific one on the first roll is a 1/200 chance but what that really does is give others hope that they can get similar situations. That maybe in 10 rolls they’ll get the 8 star they want which is 1/200 chance. Remember from the psychology portion that omitting rates will help sell? It plays a role here too. It makes it easier for players to hope for an outcome.

So what’s the conspiracy theory here?

That Gungho will give better rates to newer players and this would have a two-fold effect. The first is that new players would spread this “false” (in the end it is still a real possibility but I call it false given the abysmally low rates from data) hope to others by showing them or talking about how they got X rare card in some small number of rolls and in turn push others possibly to IAP to try for a similar outcome. The second is that it might hook newer players into the game if they have rare cards.

Conclusion

Remember that this article is not written to be proof or fact. The theories written here are just that, theories (unproven / untested).

Have your own conspiracy theories?

Make sure to share them in the comments!