In addition to being an avid Destiny player, I am a PhD student in statistics. I was curious about the probability of dedicated raiders finding enough raid gear to hit level 30, so I investigated.
I found that if a player were to complete the raid every single week for over nine months straight (a total of 40 times), they would still have a >2% chance of not having enough armor pieces to hit level 30 (and this is assuming they already have an exotic). If you took a sample of 500,000 players doing this (given how many people have already done the raid, I think this is a conservative estimate), over 11,000 players will complete the raid 40 times without ever being able to hit level 30.
Assumptions, upcoming changes, and possible solutions are addressed in the report. I would skip over the methods sections, unless you like conditional probability problems, in which case go for it. If you guys want, I can post the excel file with the matrices as well. Please excuse the lab-style format; it was the template I had on my desktop at the time.
Let me know what you guys think!
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//***UPDATE***// 17-NOV-2014 //***UPDATE***// Hey guys! Thanks for all of your support and interest in my work. As long as you guys are interested in this kind of stuff, I'll keep investigating! Many of you have expressed curiosity about drop rates and the number of people running the raid, saying the numbers I used are too big or too small. I want to give you all the chance to see what the results would look like with your own numbers! I am trying to upload an excel file with an automated output table. All you would have to do is input the numbers into yellow boxes and you could instantly see the effect on the final results. Unfortunately, the forum doesn't appear to have an option for file upload/download. You guys have any ideas for how to do this?