Summoning and randomised rewards

Randomised acquisition is the defining mechanism of the genre and the one most often misunderstood, in both directions: players expect guarantees that were never offered, and they also assume unfairness where the published numbers fully explain what happened. This entry describes how the draw works, what a published rate does and does not commit the publisher to, and which Australian bodies deal with the parts that are about consumer rights rather than about mathematics.

What a draw actually is

A summon consumes an item — a shard, a scroll, a token — and returns one champion selected at random from a defined pool. Three things define the draw: the pool, which lists what can appear; the rarity distribution, which states how often each tier appears; and the within-rarity selection, which is usually uniform across everything of that rarity in the pool. A game may publish all three, or only the second.

That structure explains the most common complaint in the genre. When a pool contains several dozen champions of a given rarity, obtaining that rarity and obtaining the specific champion you wanted are two very different events. The first may be reasonably likely; the second is the first multiplied by the chance of picking one particular entry out of the pool. Players who track the first number and experience the second are not being deceived — they are reading the wrong figure.

Independence, and why it feels wrong

Each draw is independent of the ones before it, unless the game publishes a pity counter that explicitly makes it otherwise. A run of poor results does not make the next draw better, and a good result does not make the next one worse. This is a mathematical property of how the draws are defined, and it conflicts directly with how people intuitively read sequences, which is why "I am due" is such a persistent feeling and such an unreliable one.

The practical consequence is the one worth keeping: there is no number of attempts after which an outcome becomes owed to you. Where a game does publish a pity counter, it is a genuine commitment and appears in the game's own information screens. Where it does not, no guarantee exists, regardless of what a community post asserts.

What an average does not tell you

Communities in this genre circulate figures like "about eighty draws on average". Such a figure is an expectation across an enormous number of attempts, not a prediction about one player. Half of all players reach the outcome before the average and half after — and because these distributions have a long tail, the half that falls after is spread across a much wider range than the half before. An account that takes two or three times the average has not encountered anything anomalous.

This matters because the average is what gets used, informally, to justify a budget. A player who decides an outcome is worth a certain amount of spending, reasons from the average, and treats that figure as a plan, has planned for the median case and not the realistic range. The honest version of that reasoning is: decide what you are prepared to spend in total, spend that, and accept the result regardless of what it is — because the alternative, continuing until the outcome arrives, has no defined cost.

Why games are built this way

Randomised acquisition solves a design problem and a commercial one at the same time. The design problem is content longevity: a roster obtained by choice is completed, and a completed roster ends the collection loop. The commercial problem is that a fixed price for a fixed item caps revenue, while a randomised draw does not.

Stating that plainly is not an accusation. It is the model, it is disclosed in the games' own store screens, and a player who understands it can engage with it deliberately. What deserves attention is the surrounding structure rather than the draw itself: the time-limited event that adds a deadline, the bundle whose components are difficult to price individually, and the resource that is granted in an amount just short of what a draw costs. Each of these is a well-understood pattern, and noticing them is most of what "playing deliberately" means in this genre.

Where this sits in Australia

Two separate questions come up, and they belong to different bodies.

The first is classification. Classification decisions and the consumer advice attached to them, for games distributed in Australia, are made and published by the Australian Classification Board, including how games containing purchasable randomised items are handled. The Board's database is the authority on what applies to a specific title, and this site does not restate a classification for any game — check it there. Games with purchasable randomised content are not suitable for children, and a household decision about a young player is better made from the Board's own consumer advice than from a summary.

The second is consumer protection. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission administers the Australian Consumer Law, which prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct in trade or commerce and sets out the consumer guarantees that apply to goods and services supplied in Australia, digital products included. If a game's advertised odds, advertised contents or advertised availability do not match what is actually supplied, that is a consumer protection question and the ACCC's published guidance explains the route.

A third body is worth knowing about even though it is not about the draw at all. Scamwatch, operated by the National Anti-Scam Centre, collects reports on the approaches that cluster around games with valuable accounts: offers of free premium currency, third-party "top-up" sites, and account sales. None of those are part of any publisher's own systems, and all of them are common enough to be documented.

Common questions

The mechanism that determines how often you can draw at all is the resource economy, which is covered in progression and game modes. For the vocabulary used above, see drop rate, banner and duplicate in the glossary.