Holy hell the *dont hit the center bucket* challenge AINT easy, it's grinding.
Yea assuming buying no upgrades it takes about 20 drops to rack up 100 points on average. Utilizing the 86% deflector in the best possible spot (peg 3 or 4 on the bottom layer, there's still exactly a 20% chance any given ball makes it into the center bucket. So we're looking at (0.8 ^ 20) * 100 = 1.15% of clearing the challenge. Which isn't all THAT unlikely in the grand scheme of things, but I assume the early challenges shouldn't require "winning at a slot machine" levels of luck.
Interestingly, adding a second deflector to the challenge so you can place one on both pegs 3 and 4 drops the center bucket odds to 8.75%. This drastically improves the overall odds of clearing the challenge to 16%. Could be fun to leave it that way as a soft tutorial for peg deflectors, though reworking it entirely works too. I just really like the idea of a challenge making use of deflectors to maximize chances of winning.
I hadn’t run the math myself. 1% is pretty abysmal haha.
I agree about it being useful to introduce peg deflectors, but it’ll definitely need to happen later (which I suppose defeats the purpose of introducing it, but I digress). The final challenges here should be closer to like a 30% win rate roughly (with the boss being lower). Alas, there isn’t a great way to rework this particular challenge without losing its appeal, so it’ll get bumped to be an orange challenge and in its place, I’ll have some entirely new one. I plan to update this next week, actually.