My interest and how I am using the data...
I have no connection at all with this study, but I am a real live scientist and an old one at that. I hope to show you that I have both scientific understanding and an independent interest in these results.
I am that 1 in 40000 player who has not had a single sacred shard drop for 42+ days now. If you think I am fabricating that just put me on ignore because I can do nothing to convince you otherwise. I did the math and I understand that if there are 40000+ people opening UNM chests each day then the most likely explanation is that I am special. But it has made me curious.
I needed to find the probability of a sacred dropping to see just how unlucky I could be.
A while ago some other authors published clan boss drop tables that were data mined from the game code, which most players accepted as it agreed with their instinct. The authors were entirely credible and I accept their work. However, they did not disclose how to obtain the data so I could not repeat it.
I found this bot report which came out about the same time I started looking for some aggregated clan boss data. This bot data seemed credible because it also confirmed the data mined probabilities. It also showed this curious bimodal distribution of data.
I have not seen anything else even approaching the size of this data set for RSL. I expected the discussion to show further insights from people looking at the data. However, instead, I see a bunch of criticisms and what if's about the data that are not even backed up by alternative analysis of the data. There is no other data presented by anyone else that this data disagrees with. Some of the comments seemed to discredit it solely because it was Russian. I took offence to this, since two of my previous research topics (General relativity and Sea Ice Growth have had excellent and significant contributions made by Russian and East Asian researchers.
I have not looked at the full distribution of drops or the books. I only consider a simple Binomial distribution for zero sacreds dropping after n chests to test against drop probabilities. Basically just what the authors reported regarding sacreds. I thought maybe this would show a significant overabundance of people getting zero shards. Unfortunately for me, this was not backed by the data. This does make me feel special though.
My next step is to use the implied bimodal distribution of Epic books from UNM drops to see if this implies a lower probability of shards dropping. Not conclusive I know but it would change my odds from 1 in 40000 special to 1 in 10000 unlucky, and I would then expect to see others in my situation.
Now if you bravely read this far and are still interested, you could make one of two comments. Firstly if you have a similar long run of zero sacreds that is ongoing then I would like to hear from you. Secondly, I would like to estimate better how many players obtain one and two of the top chests from UNM each day. My clan is ranked > 1000 and only 2 of us get a top UNM chest. So my best limit guess is most maybe 1000 clans of 40 players getting a chest or 40000. But this is wild speculation. Can someone with a numerical clan rank share how many chest drops your clan generates per day? Is my 40000 chest drops wildly out compared to 10000 or 100000...
Best Regards
PS please don't tell me to contact customer support. You know it takes many days for them to respond especially after big changes going on recently. I have asked them to confirm the last time I got a sacred shard drop and also a list of how many other shard drops.