Zephyrite Supply Boxes Drop Rate Data (over 250k)

tl;dr As with any festival box, it's financially more rewarding to buy what you need from the TP and sell the source materials.Roughly speaking, you should expect to lose 25-45% of your costs, unless you get extremely lucky, as the drop rates for the pricier items are 50k:1 to 250k:1 (or worse). Without lucky drops, the boxes contain about 7s worth of stuff (after TP fees) compared to purchase costs of 15s - 25s (i.e. expect to lose over 50%, unless RNG favors you).

Summary of Results

Redditor u/Enko63 collected data from 258 282 Zephyrite Supply Boxes, at a cost (to them) of nearly 55k gold (yeah fifty-five thousand gold, ouch). From that, they found about 40k gold worth of materials, including the coveted Festive Confetti Infusion and the more coveted (yet better supplied) Invisible Boot Box. Including the low-rate items, their return on the original investment was -25.74%.

Interesting Drops

• One confetti infusion (250k:1)
• Other infusions: 8 (over 30k:1)
• Monocles: 8
• Catcher & Spore skins: 552
• Tokens: 722 608 (these were converted to Heavy Crafting Bags, to turn them into gold)
• Quartz: 111 187

Additional Analysis

Here are a couple of things not covered by the original post:

• Enko could have saved nearly 30% by spending one of the cheaper materials, instead of Ecto
• Ignoring the pricier drops, the value of the boxes is around 7s after TP fees.
• Depending on the mat you use, the boxes cost 15 silver to 25 silver each.
• Using the cheapest option, Enko's return on investment would have been 15%, including the Confetti Infusion.
• Without the infusion (and using the cheapest option), the RoI would have been -50%. Using Ecto, without the lucky drops, the RoI would have been -64%.

Sources & Links

• Original Thread: https://redd.it/clypv0
• Data, sorted by drop rate: https://imgur.com/9rxAj6D
• Data, sorted by net value: https://imgur.com/ZFf4rxr
• Original poster: https://reddit.com/user/Enko63

The statistical analysis is strong with this one.

Lol 1 in 250k sorry, what the fuck is this - a joke?

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:Lol 1 in 250k sorry, what the kitten is this - a joke?

Scam. the only point is to get mats/gold out of the system or drive the player into buying gems.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:at a cost (to them) of nearly 55k gold (yeah fifty-five thousand gold, ouch).

For science!

@"ProtoGunner.4953" said:Lol 1 in 250k sorry, what the kitten is this - a joke?

If the drop rate were any higher, the item would quickly drop in value and be useless to attract people into spending on the lotto ticket. The entire point of RNG boxes (that you can buy) is to make things exciting. Having a tons of 5-10 gold drops ends up being dull.

People forget just how many people are playing and just how many of these boxes get opened. 1:250k is "ridiculous" if only considering one's own drops; it's substantial taking into account 200-800k players opening a minimum of a dozen or two boxes each (not counting the original poster of the data, who obviously opened enough for all of us). Without any hard data, it wouldn't surprise me to see that tens of millions of these boxes were opened.

Let's say, conservatively, that 100K people play per day, and each opens 2 boxes (which would be pretty low). That would mean 1 Confetti Infusion is acquired per day. Doesn't seem so rare when viewed like that.
I'm not saying it isn't rare, very rare. But, depending on how the information is presented makes a difference to the way it is perceived.

Droprate is hilarious. Lucky drop never happened to me since game came out so XD

Just bought them for achievements. Usually I don't try to get more than needed for achievements. I guess this is a nice try to get crafting mats prices up - by people trading them for boxes instead of selling them. (Lower supply on the market. It also seems the cost are relatedt to the TP prices of the crafting mats. Meaning not the hightest tier - which actually is cheaper at TP - does need a less amount ... but more in fact.)

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@"ProtoGunner.4953" said:Lol 1 in 250k sorry, what the kitten is this - a joke?

I considered this of course, but still in my opinion I think it is ridiculous. There should be no items that rare (dropwise). Same with these items occurrence as loot from Chak Gerent event etc. They should be like worth 100g - 1000g and not 10'000g (or even higher if you check non-ingmame markets). Of course all this is relative. What is a lot of money? What is too much, too few?

% is not so low because not everybody should have it, % is so low that some players invest their paycheck into gems.i really dont care about things with such low drop chances but so i can focus on the fun stuff of the game.

long story short, a carrot on a stick so long you can't even see the carrot

No item should value above the TP's gold limit. Since this has occured the drop rate needs to increase or the gold limit to sell it needs to increase. It feels sloppy the way it is currently.

Those boxes were designed to eat the over abbundance of materials on the TP, seems like they are doing their job. 1/250k isn't low odds when one takes the game's population into account - as others have noted. I've scored numerous "very low" chance rewards in games I've been a developer on while testing in a production like environment. In GW2 I've gotten a precursor as a world chest drop as well. One must take the view of the developers when analysing data like this, especially when the boxes were designed to steer the game's economy as a whole.

They were a better mat sink last year, too many of us have caught on.

@"Hashberry.4510" said:They were a better mat sink last year, too many of us have caught on.

The sinks worked this year, too. It's just that people invested in those mats starting 4-5 months ago. Silver Ore, for example: it spiked due to the new legendary ring and then dipped back quickly, reaching its earlier peak again in July. And tons of market supply was lose as the FotFW drew closer (22 million down to 17.8m) (last year, it was 19.6m peak, down to 13m this year).

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19703-silver-ore

I think the problem is that the oversupply on the TP is so huge that a single festival isn't nearly enough to have an impact that lasts long enough.

and I thought my 5k boxes were a lot ... :grimace:

I'm totally fine with the design of festival boxes being a material / gold sink, it helps drain away excess materials on the TP the the liquid gold in the economy

anyone else watch Teapot's latest stream? he said that he lost 90% of his investment :lol: :lol: :lol:

skip to 21:19

@crepuscular.9047 said:anyone else watch Teapot's latest stream? he said that he lost 90% of his investment :lol: :lol: :lol:

If he lost 90%, he overspent in acquiring the boxes and somehow failed to monetize what he got in return.(That said, since Teapot is one of the smarter streamers out there, I'd imagine he did it deliberately for the memes.)