Talk:Shiny Orb
It seems that putting it in your inventory will keep it from exploding. I've encountered these several times where I pick it up and throw it between each kick, and I haven't had one explode on me. Can anyone confirm this, or is it just luck?
I had some fun looking at this. The description is slightly inaccurate (at time of writing). It's pretty close, but I think we could more accurately say "The orb outcome is like casting a 26-sided die, with 1 side yielding an explosion, 1 side yielding $200, 1 side yielding $100, 8 sides yielding $10, and 15 sides yielding $20. Starting on the fourth kick, each time the orb is kicked, the outcome of one number is changed to an explosion; on kicks 4 through 18, a $20 side is replaced, except for kicks 8 ($200 is replaced) and 13 ($100 is replaced); then when there are no more $20 sides, $10 sides are removed, until (on the 26th kick) there are no more non-explosive sides left and the orb must explode."
This is slightly different from what was described in the article (equivalent of drawing 20 without replacement).
So it is pretty easy to determine the odds after n kicks that the orb will explode on the next kick.
| Number of times kicked before | Probability | Expected value of next kick |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | $20 |
| 1 | 1/26 | $26.2 |
| 2 | 1/26 | $26.2 |
| 3 | 3/26 | $24.6 |
| 4 | 4/26 | $23.8 |
| 5 | 5/26 | $23.1 |
| 6 | 6/26 | $22.3 |
| 7 | 7/26 | $21.5 |
| 8 | 8/26 | $13.8 |
etc.
If you'd rather just have a rule of thumb, I'll spare the graphs, but I ran some Monte Carlo trials on this:
| Kick | Probability |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0 |
| 2 | 3.8% |
| 3 | 7.5% |
| 4 | 18.2% |
| 5 | 30.8% |
| 6 | 44.1% |
| 7 | 57.0% |
| 8 | 68.6% |
| 9 | 78.3% |
| 10 | 85.8% |
| 11 | 91.2% |
| 12 | 94.9% |
| 13 | 97.3% |
| 14 | 98.6% |
Risk tolerance is situational, and in a lot of cases this won't matter at all (if you're going to heal anyways, for example, and you have more than 25 HP, just kick it until it explodes). But this might be informative if HP and gold are both tight. In my opinion a pretty good play is to just aim to kick it 7 times for a 57% chance of explosion, as the expected value of the next kick plummets after than (as the best $200 outcome is removed). Threehamburgers (talk) 08:44, 25 February 2022 (UTC)