There is a lot of interest in the community about how you earn supply drops in this game. Mostly players want to understand the system so they can earn more of them. It took me a while to figure this out, but now that I am looking back on it, the system makes perfect sense. Now like all thoughts on this I could be wrong, because I don't have the source code to the game. However, I do have some experience programming and I hold a degree in mathematics. These conclusions are drawn from tracking my own supply drops over the last 6 weeks. I wrote down a number of different variables from my own playing and I found some very consistent results.
I am not going to post all of my data here. It would take about 6 hours to put it into a table along with the statisical analysis of it and about 1% of the whole community would actually understand it or really care. So, I am just going to summarize the conclusions here. I began tracking how long it took me to earn a supply drop, what game modes I was play, how I was performing and a number of other variables. The main theory about supply drops is you earn them based on your play time. However, my own data directly contradicts that. There is not a good mathematical relationship between the amount of time I play between supply drops. In other words, sometimes it takes me 15 minutes to earn one and other times it takes me 40 to 45 minutes. Another popular theory is that it has to do with your score per minute or the number of games you play. Both of these don't have a good statistical fit for what I observed either. I couldn't find a good relationship for any particular reason I was getting supply drops and then I stepped back and looked at the problem a different way and it started to make sense.
I began to think like a programmer would and it dawned on me. When you program something you want to keep your code design as simple as you possibly can. The more complex of a system you program the bigger the chance is that it will have bugs. Some of you might be familiar with Occum's Razor in science, "Given all the possibilities for something happening, the simplest is the most probable." I started noticing I was getting care packages more often when I was playing hardpoint, and domination over the other game modes. I was trying to level quickly and playing the objectives very aggressively. When I was doing that I was getting a supply drop every 2 to 3 games. When I was playing free for all or tdm the supply drops were coming slower. I also went through a 3 prestige period where I was chasing camo and marksman challenges on the really bad weapons in the game. My KD was averaging between .25 and .35 and I was suddenly getting a major increase in the number of supply drops I was earning.
I started analyzing this data and I finally found a good fit for it. What is really going on behind the scenes is you have an experience counter for supply drops. Every time you earn a certain amount of experience the game gives you a supply drop and resets the counter so you can start earning your next one. I am not sure what the exact amount is, but it's someplace around 20,000 to 40,000 xp. The reason I cannot nail this down is there is a catch. Every time you die in the game and you didn't commit suicide you also get experience towards your next supply drop as well. I am not sure how much, the game seems to weigh dying higher than getting a kill in calculating this experience. There is one other major factor supporting this fact. Have you ever noticed in the game when you get a supply drop you either just killed someone, completed an objective, or just died.
The death aspect of the system makes perfect sense. If supply drops were simply based on your earned xp, then the good players would earn them quite frequently and the bad players would hardly ever get them. Having deaths count towards the supply drop experience balances out the system so that the weaker players get an supply drops as often as the good players. However, it seems weighted so that the weaker players get more so they can better compete with the pros. That makes sense from a game balancing standpoint. Finally, you have the issue of rapid supply. That is basically just a double xp that only counts towards earning supply drops.
If anyone has the game code or any more relevant data on the matter I would be interested in discussing it with you here. I hope this has been somewhat insightful for most of you. As always thanks for reading.
