Recently, I've been studying the distribution of coats in starters and bred Meeroos. I was thinking about putting together some long report with graphs but decided it would only cause eyes to glaze over. So I'll take a shot at describing what I've seen and what it means to players.

First, I'm going to use the word "curve" a lot. There are lots of curves. The mathematical term for the one I'm referring to is a "power curve". You can sketch one yourself: take a piece of paper and draw a light line from the top-left corner to about one inch in from the bottom-left. Draw another line from the bottom-right to about one inch up from the bottom-left. Now, connect the two lines with a swooping curve so you're coming down from the top-left, swing to the other line and end up going off the bottom-right.

At the top-left put a dot and label it "Wine". Move right a bit and down to meet the curve: label the next dot "Fawn". Keep moving the same distance right and down to the curve to add more dots for "Red" "Sierra" etc. The names don't really matter right now.

The left edge of our piece of paper is the chance that a coat will appear. The bottom edge are our coats, even spaced.

What we see is that the "more common" coats have, as we move down from the top-left corner LARGE drops in probabilities. But, at some point, we come to the curvy part where the odds start coming closer and closer together. Eventually, we're up to the "more rare" coats headed to the bottom-right and the chances of them appearing are almost equal.

So, what does this mean? Well, when you start out, you have LARGE chances of getting the most-common. But eventually, you get to the mid-range coats like Amber and Highland. Those coats have a relatively low chance of appearing, we're still far more likely to see the more-common Fawns and Wines. This is where people get stuck. Why? Because to break past the curvy part into the long, flat, straight, everything-equally-hard lower right, more rare coats we have to get lucky. But, once we're down there, everything is pretty much the same so progress suddenly take off and .. ZOOM!!! ... with almost no effort at all we're clicking off the most-rare coats.

Anyway, I hope this helps people to understand where I think the issue lies when attempting to progress into the more-rare coats. And why, if we don't want to depend upon luck, we need to purchase those mid-range coats but, once we've worked past them, things seem SO much easier.