Hi Kyria,



Thanks for the thoughts. I'm glad you found the data useful. Let me address some of your questions.



1) I agree that often shinies are caught soon after another. It's happened several times that I went 1000+ encounters without seeing a shiny, then after finally finding a shiny, I get another shiny within 100 encounters. However, I'd like you to keep this in mind. If the shiny rate in the friend safari truly is 1/512, then by the type of distribution the data should possess (binomial), you always have nearly a 20% chance of finding a shiny within the next 100 encounters. That's a pretty decent chance. So if two of your five shinies came very close to each other, that was a statistically like event. Currently, 18.4% of my shinies occurred in less than 100 encounters.



2) You noticed that many of the day's first shinies had more encounters than the second. The trials for all of those first of the day shinies started before midnight, and then ended when a shiny was found. So I recorded the day when the shiny was encountered, and not when the encounters were started. This would make it more likely for midnight to occur during a long run of encounters. For example, if I start the bot at 9pm and it takes 1000 encounters to find a shiny, it would end at 2am (it does 200 encounters per hour), making that 1000+ encounter shiny be the first shiny of the day. In addition, sometimes I wasn't really awake when I reset the bot, so in the morning when I entered the data, I usually guessed that midnight occurred during the longer runs.



3) I like your ideas about what could affect the shiny rate. I had thought of the online/offline presence of your friend, but I hadn't thought of the other two. The online/offline presence would be easy to test, and I'm working with someone to hopefully test this. I think your idea of catching/defeating/escaping has some potential. We know that catching the Pokemon resets the fishing chain, and we know that defeating Pokemon via Pokeradar increases the shiny rate until 40. I'm not sure how this would apply to the friend safari since there is no apparent chain other than running into Pokemon. What are your further thoughts on this? How do you envision this applying to friend safari?



More coming soon on an update of the data and the results of my tipping trials, so stay tuned.