WHEEEEEEEL OFFFFFF FOOOOOORTUNE!!!!
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!
So for this fun and exciting Christmas 2013 event, EA has chosen to give us additional goodies and prizes in the form of a Wheel. Everyone likes to spin the wheel, right? I know I do. Everytime I go to any event, I just gotta grab a hold of that thing and SPIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN it. ( I blame the Price Is Right.) Well now everyone has a chance to spin the wheel too.
Introducing the Krusty’s Non-Denominational Holiday Giveaway Wheel! To start off, you first need to collect ONE GOLDEN COIN (poor Homer, he hoped it was a Chocolate one).
This can be done many ways. You can reach the 250 Gift Card Personal Prize and receive the Egg Nog Bar. Once every 24 hours the bar will generate one Golden Coin. I also have found that if you purchase the Elf Home(instead of waiting to hit 6000 Gift Cards to get one for free) and set the Elves free, they will go collecting presents and bags in the nearby buildings. They also seem to find Golden Coins. WOOHOO!!
Also as you collect the bags/presents from your town and neighbors, you may also have good luck on picking up some extra ones here and there as well.
Now, once you have that one coin…you will see up in the top right hand corner an icon of the coin and the current count of how many you have collected. All you have to do is click on that icon to enter the Holiday Prize Wheel screen…and SPIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN away.
Now for the prizes…MANY of you want the Christmas lights all over your house and buildings. THIS is where EA has tucked those particular goodies for you.
Prizes:
Christmas Simpson Home
Christmas Purple House
Christmas Cletus Farm
Christmas White House
Christmas Brown House
Christmas Pink House
Christmas Blue House
Christmas Muntz House
Christmas Skinner House
Christmas Orange House
Christmas Willie’s Shack
Christmas Krabappel Apartment
Christmas Van Houten Home
Christmas Flanders Home
Claus Co
Helter Shelter
Snow Monster
Mr. Plow
Plow King
Homer Snowman
Bart Snowman
Lisa Snowman
Marge Snowman
Grandpa Snowman
Maggie Snowman
Snowball Snowcat
Santa’s Little Helper Snowdog
Ice God
$1000 In Game Cash
Bronze Gift Cards- 50 Gift Cards
Silver Gift Cards- 100 Gift Cards
Gold Gift Cards- 250 Gift Cards
As you collect each prize, a new one is added. This will continue until all the “special” items are won. Then the wheel will just be full of In Game Cash and the 3 levels of Gift Cards. The Wheel Prizes will vary per each player.
Want to spin MORE and not wait? You also can take your precious donuts and use them to purchase additional coins for playing on the Wheel. 1 Gold Coin for 10 donuts, 3 Gold Coins for 25 donuts, and 10 Gold Coins for 50 donuts. Me personally, I would rather save my precious donuts for some of the other cool offerings in the Premium Limited Items. Why buy when you can get them for free, right?
So there yah have it. Just another cool way to earn even MORE free items from the event. THANK YOU EA!! 😉
**Bunny**
I won the ice god earlier in the event, but now I don’t see it in my town or inventory or on the wheel. Did it get removed from the game?
Hmm it should still be there. If not in your town definitely in your inventory. Try hard closing the app abd restarting it. If that doesn’t work you may want to contact EA.
I really REALLY want Claus co. Does anyone know the chance percentage of it? I keep getting money and gift cards 🙁
I haven’t been able to find an exact % on them. Sorry. It is really all about chance.
I’m no longer happy about this spinwheel, I’m mad, it’s a scam, I got the ice God statue, and it gave me cash, again, cash is all I get and only 2 portions of the wheel have it, oddly enough it always falls in the same portion of the wheel even if I spin it 10 times in a row, and even if it falls in another (like the ice God) it still gives you cash, if this doesn’t scream rigged I don’t know what will, Good job EA scamming from your customers, on christmas
Sounds like you may be experiencing a glitch. Sorry. I would suggest contacting EA so they can help resolve it. Details in post below.
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/10/05/where-is-my-character/
Same thing happened to me Laurie. All I seem to get anymore is cash. I think it’s rigged too.
Does spinning the wheel slower give you a better chance if getting the better prizes?
Not for me it didn’t. Lol
Add me mastenbroo814 but I have been able to spin about 10 times and have got 5 house lights, Mr plow and three snow Simpsons can remember the others. been playing a little under a year & this is my first christmass
I spun the wheel today and the pointer was pointing towards Claus Co and it gave me grandpa snowman. I was so mad! I even have the screen shot of it! I GOT GYPPED! 🙁
That’s happened to me more times than I want to remember. Hope the next spin is more in your favor.
I’ve been playing tSTO since it first started and I’m super active during these awesome holiday events but I’ve spun that wheel 50 times and gotten money 46 times, the other times I just got snowmen I already had from last year.
I’m starting to feel like this is the end of me playing entirely. It’s not fun when there are characters, skins, buildings and even other snowmen that I don’t have and clearly have no chance at getting.
I’m sorry that your luck has not been what you would like. It varies so much for each player. We still have 2 weeks left, so I hope it will change for you. 🙂
I’m in the same boat. I average around six to seven coins a day yet somehow manage to miss the last two items. So frustrating.
I found a great article about strategies for the prize wheel! I was getting frustrated winning cash and gifts cards so many times in a row. Then, I tried the “Lisa Approach” and won Maggie snow person and the ice god sculpture!! Check it out…
http://tstogame.com/2013/12/14/prize-wheel-strategies/
So I keep winning prizes but none are in my inventory? Why?
It depends on what you win. The house lights go automatically on the houses, the “skins” go automatically on the characters if you have them, the rest…you should get a pop up telling you the item is in your storage. If they are NOT showing. Try a few basic troubleshooting steps to see if they return.
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/12/02/glitchy-gil-deal/
My Arrow has pointed to the tower 3 times but been on the little dot on the wheel and each time it gives me money over the tower so pissed!!
I’m always getting money when I spin. I would like to win something other then money. I have everything else.
I know the feeling…
To get unlimited amount of tokens, that if you have got all the personal gifts
when you get to the part that homer and lisa are hidding from springfielders, dont tap homer and lisa when they complete the 24, but keep tapping other springfielders to look for them, you will earn 27 gift card each character, so if you have 37 character then you would get 1 token each.
I have been doing it since 2 days now and i am filled with tokens now
great tip
add me Gelikas
I play everyday, level 37
I have been doing the same. Works very well.
I got every single lights for all the houses now I must be super lucky cause so far no luck on the buildings and snow monster!!! EA plz give me the 2 buildings plz
I know the frustration!
I keep getting gold or silver gift cards and even though the pointer points at the clausco building still I got money or gift cards …. EA are you cheating?
It’s happened to me. Thought I finally had the Snow Monster and boom cash! 🙁
What are the gold gift cards from the wheel? I got it but idk what I’m supposed to do with them.
They just add gift cards to your total towards the personal prizes.
Thanks 🙂
I have a comment in moderation on another thread about a Monte Carlo simulation I ran to see how many spins it “should” take to empty the wheel. Having now found this thread I realize that I didn’t account for all of the houses!
Does anyone know which prizes replace which prizes on the wheel?
I particular, there are two “buckets” of snowmen, is it 4 per bucket?
There are three “buckets” of houses, how many prizes are in each?
I’ll have to look into this questions. Get back to ya soon.
According to the files, it is all random. No set one for the other that I see. The % is really crazy. I’ve tried calculating them. They still don’t add up. It’s like EA is missing or hiding info. I’m looking again when I get home. See I’d update helped open more info.
I don’t find the percentage issue particularly weird. It is just as easy to pick a random number between 1 and 10041 as it is to pick a number between 1 and 10000. Generally speaking you wouldn’t want to set the total number of chances as a constant, but would rather calculate it as the sum of the weighted chance given to all possible outcomes. This prevents the possibility of having a “spin” that doesn’t have a value (which could easily cause problems).
The developers were probably tweaking the odds as they prepared the content. It is a lot easier to tweak if you don’t feel compelled to end up at a nice round number!
As for my other questions, there was a post on the forum that stated that the snowmen are split evenly into the two buckets (4 in each) and the houses are split (4, 5, 5). I am rerunning my Monte Carlo simulations at the moment and will update with results!
Earlier today I posted the initial results of my Monte Carlo simulation of the Holiday Wheel. Then two things happened. First I found this post which is much more apropos. Second, I realized that I hadn’t accounted properly for all of the lights – there are 14 sets of lights to win but somehow I had it in my mind that there are only 12.
Since I’m switching to another thread I’ll briefly explain what I’m doing again. The odds for each prize “bucket” have been found in the code. How many prizes there are in each bucket has also been identified. I didn’t go through the code myself nor did I keep track of the prizes in the buckets as I progressed through the wheel. But I found this information in the forums.
My contribution was building an Excel spreadsheet to simulate millions of spins of the wheel. It is essentially a table in which each row starts with a random number. Then I use formulas to calculate which bucket each spin represents and more formulas (referring back to the previous row) to see how many prizes are left in each bucket after the spin. Finally there are formulas to see in which row the final prize was awarded (and what prize it was).
I then wrote a small macro to refresh this table many times and record the results. A pivot table or three later I’m ready to share updated results. Since I am less likely to have my boss walk into my living room at night than my office during the day I went ahead and ran 50,000 simulations this time.
One note, the simulations assume that the player didn’t have any prizes from last Christmas. However, at the end you will see that the holdover prizes are rarely the ones that are the last to be awarded.
To answer the biggest question first, “If I purchase or earn X spin tokens, what is the chance that I will win everything?”
Number of Spins – Likelihood of Winning ALL Prizes
27 – 0.0%
55 – 10.0%
67 – 20.5%
78 – 30.3%
90 – 40.6%
102 – 50.1%
117 – 60.4%
134 – 70.0%
158 – 80.1%
199 – 90.0%
240 – 95.0%
295 – 98.0%
336 – 99.0%
370 – 99.5%
463 – 99.9%
Out of 50,000 simulations:
Quickest Performance – 30 spins to clear the wheel
Poorest Performance – 776 spins to clear the wheel
Average – 117.8 [the average or mean is higher than the median because you can get *very* unlucky]
Now to answer one more question: “What prize am I likely to be waiting the longest for?”
Prize Bucket / Final Prize in Bucket / % chance it is the last prize overall
Housing Lights I – Orange House – 0.4%
Housing Lights II – Skinner House – 0.9%
Housing Lights III – Krabappel Apartment – 0.9%
Snowmen I – [Not sure of the order] – 2.6%
Snowmen II – [Not sure of the order] – 2.7%
Character Skins – Plow King – 9.9%
Helter Shelter – 15.3%
Ice God – 15.4%
Yeti – 24.7%
Claus – Co – 27.4%
A few notes – I have rounded the results to the nearest tenth of a decimal – a Monte Carlo simulation only gives an estimate, albeit a very good one so I didn’t feel that putting a second decimal place in would be legitimate. As you will see below, Housing I and Housing II have the same odds so the one tenth difference in simulated outcome gives a good layman’s understanding of the margin of error in this simulation (HS and Ice God also have the same odds and a one tenth difference in projected outcome).
Assumptions Used
1. The chart below which I found on the forums and which are ostensibly taken from the code are accurate
2. Each spin is independent of the previous spins
3. EA won’t change the odds as the event progresses
4. The player starts with no prizes from last Christmas
This is the chart that I found in the EA forums that is supposed to be from the code itself. The simulation is only as good as the reliability of this chart.
Bucket – No. of Prizes – Chance – Bucket Description
1 1 156 Claus Co
2 4 2022 Houses #1
3 1 168 Yeti
4 5 2022 Houses #2
5 1 225 Helter Shelter
6 5 2022 Houses #3
7 1 225 Ice god
8 4 1348 Snowmen #1
9 2 505 Skins
10 4 1348 Snowmen #2
Note: many people have commented on the fact that the total number of chances doesn’t add up to 10,000 or any other round number. This doesn’t surprise me. I would assume that as the developers wrote the code the initial odds did add up to a round number. As the tested the gameplay they would be expected to tweak the odds. Since it is every bit as easy to pick a random number between 1 and 10041 as it is to pick a random number between 1 and 10000 the tendency is to tweak one bucket at a time and not worry about the total.
Fibi – You are awesome.
My game keeps crashing on the wheel. It worked twice, then last night after I won a snowman grandpa it crashed before I could accept the prize. Now when I start my game it returns me to the wheel (with a really misplaced graphic: no wheel, krusty off to the side cut off, etc) with the Grandpa reward but crashes without me doing anything. If I touch it it crashes, if I don’t touch it: same thing. Any ideas? hard restarting the app (I’m on iOS 6 for iPodTouch) didn’t help. Thx!
Try the basic troubleshooting, if no luck…contact EA. Let them know the issue. I’ve see a few other “glitched out Krusty’s” starting to pop up.
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/12/02/glitchy-gil-deal/
Thanks! Going through those tips got me unstuck! 😀
woohoo!!
So far with the spins I’ve found about 8-9 now all I’ve gotten are 4 1000 cash prizes and 3 snowmen I had from last year and the strongman snowman and the ice god. It makes me want to tear my hair out because my brother has me plow and Claus co already AND He’s had less spins than me 🙁
Just like Vegas there are winners and loser, chain smokers and boozers. Here’s to hoping your luck changes!
You forgot some prizes…
1. House decorations for all (!) 6 existing colors available.
2. Personal House decorations in 7 versions, including Willi’s hut
3. Santa’s Little helper as a Snowman
I like the house decorations and 20.22% of probability to get one is okay. For Plow King/ Mr. Plow it’s only 5.05%… I hope they will also be available for donuts if I am not lucky enough… PLEAAAASE SANTA!!!!
Hi Bunny, will we end up with all the prizes eventually? or will I miss out on some of the “good” present depending on my luck?
It’s all about odds and luck on the wheel. I think eventually you’ll unlock everything but it’s hard to say for sure. We’re working through the files trying to decode EA’s language of odds of unlocking which item when, and as soon as we have it all unlock we’ll be sure to pass it right over to you guys 🙂
Woo hoo… thanks for the hard work Alissa! 🙂
Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, but any word on what happens to the snow people after the event? I missed last year’s event, but I seem to recall seeing somewhere that they melted and went away?
I actually saw them still up in a lot of peoples towns after the event. Usually what happens is people store them in their inventory until the next season.
They didn’t melt. I had mine up in my “Holidayland” section all year. Interesting note: last year, they were pretty much just the heads. This year, they show more of the body, but my old ones turned into the new version (the Homer head turned into the Strongman pose Homer). I was hoping to have one of each, but seems they were all given an upgrade.
I spent my precious donuts for the coins and then I got a task for the lights of house and now all I got is light for he house and this morning I also got a freaking task to collect snowmen ….. Seriously???? I guess I will never get anything out of this wheel
Be patient. Still plenty of time left in the event. You don’t want to rush it too much, or you will end fast and get bored of it. 😉
I want that cute monster and plus I will be working during the holidays and don’t even have time to play the game 🙁 need to get everything fast lol
LOL. I know how the time crunch goes. Sorry. Only way to really guarantee it happening REALLY quick is to use all those precious donuts to buy a TON of coins and spin spin spin. But this is with the knowledge that you may end up just getting cash and cards as those premium items roll off the wheel and are replaced.
I only ever get cash (most of my wheel is cash) when I spin. 🙁 Buying tokens didn’t even help with a few extra tries.
Same thing happens on my B game. All I have left is the snow monster and Claus co and I keep landing on cash. It’s an odds thing like the Downs. I have a post coming later today with the odds break downs 🙂
Admittedly, I had a lot of the items from last year, but except for Agnes’ house lights, I’ve ONLY landed on cash so far. Very frustrating!!
Sorry. I know it gets annoying when you want the goodies and keep hitting the other stuff.
Hey bunny,
I left a comment on another page and saw your response to it regarding Barney/Plow King. The King is on my wheel he was there after I won Mr Plow, and I don’t have Barney. Simply because I haven’t wanted to pay the 20.00$ for him. I’m just a little confused since Devil Flanders wanders about sometimes when I’m using Normal Ned, could it be the same? Also how cool would it be to have a Premium Barney, without spending my fabulous money!
Sincerely,
AlucardsKin
It would be REALLY cool to see him wander about town as a “glitch” for those that do not actually own Barney. Actually, I would LOVE to see images of this if it does happen. 🙂
For now…the skin is just sitting in my inventory in my A game that I did not purchase him in. Lol
But there’s no Christmas Wiggum House..Why?
Perhaps EA forgot to unlock it in the files so it would enter the game? Not really sure. It shows up in the files, but it’s just not in the game. Maybe one of the update glitch fixes will unlock it. Hard to say what’s on EA’s mind when it comes to what is and isn’t in the update. 🙂
Or it could be a Christmas gift from EA 🎅
Also, a possibility 🙂
Wiggums house already has lights when Ralph has a birthday party.
🙂
The wheel is very tempting after a couple of beers!
“Wheel of morality, turn, turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn…” oh wait, wrong show, wrong wheel. ((I miss animaniacs)
(somewhat) serious question: does anyone know what aspect of the corform-o-meter is impacted by the helter shelter and claus & co tower?
Post on that coming soon 🙂 I’m actually working on it now but I can tell you Claus Co impacts consumerism (woohoo!) however…as odd as this is…Helter Shelter does not impact anything. There’s not category listed in the game files for it.
I’ve only landed on in-game cash having spun five times! Is there a trick to this I don’t know about???
You forgot to do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about. Lol
Seriously though…no tricks or methods that I have been able to find. I just know once those prizes start getting replaced with cards n cash, I got mostly cards n cash. Still working on these frakkin files. SOOOO …technical. Lol
I love your new pic, bunny! So cute 🙂
Heyo, this has been working for me..
Set all your characters to do jobs, jobs that end coinciding with your spin coin coming through at the egg nog bar.
If you already have a coin set the population to do five minute jobs.
Anywho, collect everybodys completed missions then go to spin wheel.
Spin and hold your finger over the off button on your device, if it’s going to land on cash turn your device off.
Now due to the amount of jobs collected before spinning the wheel it will not have saved your result, so when you boot back up you should still have the token, perhaps even some unclaimed jobs.
There ,)
I don’t want cash !!
I want the items !!
I’m really stoked, because unlike the Halloween event, it was a struggle to get lot’s o’stuff, this time I’m sitting pretty to get plenty !!
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE !!!!
Woohoo! 🙂
Love the game within the game within the game!
Must admit, though, I was a bit deflated when both of my coins yesterday landed on $1000…
Lol. Me “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The wheel appeals to the gambler in all of us.
ITS A WHEEL! WEEEEEEEEEEE! Lol 😉
Just won decs for purple house”…..well cool
Woohoo!! 😉
This is a win win addition to the game, winning premium prizes for free….be still my beating wallet.
You betcha !!!