From the Mouths of Addicts: Holiday Wheel Spin Tips

Hey Howdy Hey Tappers!

Welcome to the first From the Mouths of Addicts post where YOU get to sound off on anything and everything in the world of Tapped Out!  This week’s post is all about Holiday Wheel Tips & Strategies from our amazing readers here at Addicts!   These are tips and tricks that some of our readers have found work for them* and they were kind enough to share their advice for all Addicted Tappers struggling to get the last few prizes on the Wheel!

With less than a week to go to secure all of those coveted prizes let’s take a look at some of these strategies submitted by our amazing readers:

The first Holiday Wheel Strategy comes from reader therealfrza:
“Ok, I’ve figured it all out. At least as things stand on January 07th 2013.

First of all, the percentages that people have offered for landing on certain spaces are not correct. How do I know? I drew cash or cards on over 20 spins in a row while having both Snowmen, Plow King, and Claus Co spaces still needed. This is beyond unlikely. (especially given that I had hit Helter Shelter, Ice God, and Yeti with FOUR snowmen still to go plus the others, including some decorations). You can do the math if you like, it defies reasonable expectation.
So I started experimenting moving the wheel and setting it first. I have been able to start going through the snowmen now after landing on Claus Co. even before them by accident. What I do if I want a certain spot is set the wheel 4 spaces clockwise from the prize, dead center, and spin the wheel *lightly counter-clockwise. So far, it hits it every time.

Now, I’m not saying there isn’t or hasn’t been an *element* of chance, or that things may or may not have changed along the way, or that this method works with *every* prize, but it is clearing the four snowmen (2 in a row now after 20 misses since adapting). I do not pretend to know the programming, it may obviously be more complicated than that. Experiment if this doesn’t work for you. What I am saying with confidence is that it is not completely random, and there is an element that you control. Hit me up @therealfrza on twitter if this works for you. Thanks.”

Now here’s J.R showing a little creativity over the wheel frustration:
“A haiku in honor of my frustration with the wheel… (although I definitely will never complain about getting free stuff!)

I spin the prize wheel…
Hoping for Claus Co to come!
Nope. Just the money.:

Our next Wheel Tip comes from one of our frequent Addicts, CGuy:
“Alright, my time opened up.

As I said, the Ice God is cool. When was the last prize that netted a permanent 2.25% Bonus that you get for free????

The Yeti is cool, but he just wanders around.

Here is my strategy that seemed to work. I positioned the wheel directly across from the $1000s. Then I did the gentlest flick possible. It seemed to work, and I ended up getting all the prizes by the 20th (Full disclosure: I did purchase a set of 10 free spins before I realized that I didn’t need to)

Now the question is what I do with all my Gift Cards?????

I quickly realized that spinning the wheel now is pretty much useless. $1000 is .01% of the money I currently have, and winning Gift Cards only gives me a chance to win… $1000!

So right now I am saving them up in case EA adds something to the wheel for the New Years. I have about 30 spins saved up at this time (and I am 1000 Gift Cards away from 100,000 total!)

If not, I will probably spin them off on the last day.

Overall, not worth the (F)rustration. It was a free gift from EA. Even if I won none of the prizes, I didn’t spend any money to try to reach them.”

The last Holiday Wheel Tip comes from Fibi, all about the Odds of the Wheel and Prizes:
“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.

Gooey Goody Gumdrop 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.”

UPDATE FROM THE WOOKIEE: One of my buddies on TOuk shared this just today.

*These are tips that some readers found worked for them.  Keep in mind that results may vary.

Looking for more info about the Holiday Wheel?  We’ve got you covered!  Check out these great posts from Bunny & Wookiee:
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/12/14/holiday-giveaway-wheel/
http://tstoaddicts.com/2013/12/29/wheel-of-fortune

Well that’s it for this edition of From the Mouths of Addicts!  A big thanks to our amazing readers for submitting their Tips and Tricks (and humor) about the Holiday Wheel and hopefully their advice will help you clear the wheel of all of those coveted Wheel Prize items!  Have any of these Tips worked for you?  Have you collected all of the Wheel Prizes?  Still frustrated with the wheel?  Sound off in the comments below, we can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

Once a week (at least) we plan on showcasing your words for the world, and TSTO Community, to read!  Here’s your chance to sound off on anything and everything in the world of Tapped Out.  Simply send in your posts to our Addicts email account: TSTOAddictsblog@gmail.com (many of you already do) and we’ll do the rest!  We’ll pick (at least) one post to be showcased here on Addicts every week.  So send us your posts…we can’t wait to see what you have to say!

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