Talk:Emerald Dragon/@comment-60.248.19.9-20120530053550/@comment-4775325-20120530072144

Always interesting to see some maths used here on the wiki. The 4% odds used by the OP is the same number arrived at by members of the wiki's external forum after testing. It represents the odds for the NBC, and according to the same testing the EBI has the slightly better odds of 7%. What the maths don't take into account is gem usage, even without making in app purchases players earn between 5 and 11 gems daily from the colosseum and friend gem exchange which means over a 2 week period even if a player started with no gems they would be able to earn somewhere between 70 and 154 gems to use. Averaging the 2 you get 112 gems which speeds up around 9 attempts giving you 65 attempts. When you incorporate that and the higher 7% chances when using the EBI the odds are better.

Backflips business strategy is not a bad one, the players who don't buy any gems and get angry are not players that Backflip can make money from anyway. They are not trying to anger a minority of their customer base by having them fail to get an Emerald but instead to scare the majority by making them think they might not get an Emerald (even though the odds are in your favour people don't want to risk being one of the minority who fail and so they buy gems).