I don't think I am unique in applying 'math' to online games, perhaps my secret is that I play around longer with what kind of math might apply to a 'game' as if it were a 'math problem'. It turns out if you work a problem like this enough, you just might make some decent amount of tokens.
I made a perhaps bold prediction that common land could fall to $5 dollars. I want to do some more math on this, and mention the updates that the SL team have published to the land whitepaper.
So I am going to basically ignore the boost to castles (gaining 1 tract's worth of keep income), and the whole castles/keeps EV as part of the upcoming calculations, but that actually will compound my conclusions below, which TL;DR is that 99%+ of a region's value is contained in relatively few plots within the region.
We got some probabalistic guarantees about drop rate minimums as long as you are surveying 100 PLOTs at a time, so these observations are pertinent for both TRACT and REGION holders.
Let's cross these tables into a probability matrix, using the guaranteed minimums, to get the PLOT quality Expected value (EV) for each TRACT:
| EV(100Plots) | Natural (85%) | Magical (12%) | Occupied (3%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common (75%) | 63.75 | 9 | 2.25 |
| Rare (20%) | 17 | 2.4 | 0.6 |
| Epic (4%) | 3.4 | 0.48 | 0.12 |
| Legendary (1%) | 0.85 | 0.12 | 0.03 |
This all would be x10 for a region, meaning that ~637.5 Common natural plots and 170 Rare Natural Plots gives us around 800 Plots that we can call 'not of much interest'.
Even the 34 Epic Natural plots, with their all around bonus of 40%, seems less interesting than the 90 Common Magical plots which give a 100% bonus to researching the magical secrets of Praetoria only.
Lets do a bonus cross, remember Magical give bonus to Research only, and Occupied give bonus to SPS Mining only.
| TotalBonus | Natural (+0%) | Magical (+100%) | Occupied (+100%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common (+0%) | +0% | +100% | +100% |
| Rare (+10%) | +10% | +110% | +110% |
| Epic (+40%) | +40% | +140% | +140% |
| Legendary (+100%) | +100% | +200% | +200% |
So we can see that the real bonuses are a set of anything magical, anything occupied, and anything legendary'. The total of these three categories from the EV table above is just 158,5 PLOTs for a region. (To this we of course add the 10 castle/keep spaces for a total of 168.5 PLOTs that are worth our time)
That's where I would focus all my effort.
When you analyze the PP system, it is clear that singles don't matter, you need max cards. How many MAX alpha cards do people have? 50? 100? sure there may be a guy or two with 1000, so he has 200 plots covered, but I think most all people, even within the region holder subset, will be out of max alpha (and even max beta) within 50-100 plots or less (250-500 MAX cards). 'A full set' does not go very far.
Untamed give a nice x2 boost, but from here the points fall way off.
Even 5 max Harklaw is just 7500 PP. Compare that to top 5 card teams with 50k, 80k, even as much as 130,000 PP and more.
My 130k PP team is going on my Magical Legendary Plot and hosting my Legendary totem and getting +300% to research the secrets of Praetoria - for 520k PP.
Is it even worth filling out common natural plots with max Harklaws (when stake DEC needs scale linearly), when you need to fill out 69 plots just to equal the production of that single plot (that I didn't even put a Runi on).
To me, its going to be way easier for Region holders to get peasant workers (scholars) to work these plots. They might even pay them to do it (such as a 50% rebate of the taxes they collect).
Let's simplify to the 80/20 rule. Here is my declaration:
(Note: if we use 69x as in my example above its only 98.6% of the value, which is why I think rounding up to 20% from 16.85% is approprate).
If a Plot is prices at $120 dollars, a tract is worth 12k and a region is worth 120k usd. 1% of a tract/regions value is thus contained in 80/800 plots, giving a market adjusted value of $1.50 to the common plots.
I'm not saying common plots won't be worthwhile to work. I am absolutely sure they will be. Just not so much if you have access to better ones.
