What to Expect When Opening Lotto Tickets

Cut to the results...

Open 'em All!

In a recent game update, we were given two simple but impactful features:

• The Points ceiling was raised from 9.9 million to 99.9 million.
• Lotto tickets can be opened in any amount between 1 and 100 at a time. Previously we could open 1 or 9 at a time.

Additionally, any Points acquired past the Points ceiling would be kept in the Inbox for up to 90 days, allowing you to claim them later once you've used up some Points. Cool stuff.

Naturally, this led to some people wondering if Com2Us had changed the odds for Lotto Tickets. There were reports on Reddit of tickets paying out much less than before, followed by opposite reports of tickets paying out more or the same.

Luckily, this is not an unknowable factor. Com2Us has the odds for Lotto Tickets published on the Chance page in-game. The odds have not changed. Going further, because we know the odds of opening any single Lotto Ticket, we can determine the expected return from opening any number of tickets. This means we can verify that the returns we're getting are actually in line with the odds that Com2Us has published.

For those curious, I've included the odds tables here.

How can we determine our expected outcomes?

Rather than determining the expected returns using mathmatical theory (something I'm not particularly strong at), I decided I would just build a simulator and use that to generate the numbers. There are two majors benefits to this.

First, the simulator is basically doing the exact same thing that the game is doing. It generates a random number and uses that to determine what outcome you receive. Personally, I find this a little more satisfying than a theoretical process, even if the outcome is essentially the same.

Second, we can run the simulator thousands of times and inspect different real outcomes. The average of all the outcomes should closely mirror the theoretical outcome. But we can also look at the crazy outliers to see how likely it is that opening 100 Tickets results in significantly more or less return than expected.

Results

For each lotto ticket type, I simulated opening 100 tickets 1,000,000 times. Here are the results:

Average

The most important value here is the average value. This is basically the number you should expect when opening 100 tickets. In fact, most of the time, your returns for opening 100 lotto tickets should be within one standard deviation (listed below the average).

For example, if you pop open 100 Bronze lotto tickets and get 169,420 Points, you're completely within the normal range of expected returns.

Lowest / Highest

The Lowest and Highest values give you an idea of the most extreme 100-ticket outcomes out of all 1 million simulations. Take these outcomes with a pebble of salt. In smaller sample sizes (i.e. 1,000 sims instead of 1 mil), they are usually much closer to the average outcome. But, as we increase the number of simulations, we increase the odds that one of those sims will hit the jackpot multiple times (or never at all). That seems to be the case with the Silver Highest outcome.

Thanks for reading!

I hope this data-dive was useful to you, and maybe gives some peace of mind when you open lotto tickets in the future. If you enjoy these kinds of posts and would like to see more, please let me know via my Contact Me page , by messaging me on Reddit , or by suggesting it in my next Patreon new-feature poll. And as always, please consider supporting me on Patreon . You'll get exclusive access to some awesome features on the site and also help me create new content and features going forward!