Here's my paranoia:
I don't think that enhancers are related to reload, number of shots, or just calculated by a random factor, but to dmg/pec.
I did my calculations having in mind several factors, from which MU was the most important. As we all know, enhancers have their own tt. A tt that no one really cares about, thinking it's just something that's meant to be more than zero. However, I have noticed the tendency of a certain stable MU over time, which means.... 'it is how it needs to be'. What I mean with this is that...if crafters would want to do a monopoly over a certain item, they would buy all mats (or at least a huge amount of them) and sell enhancers on the price they dictate. And yet, it seems they cannot.
Beside this, if you look the the demand and offer (the simplest rule of economics) you will notice that no matter how big they fluctuate, the price remains within some parameters. Which leads to my paranoia stated above. Because on a normal market, when demand is huge price is high and when demand is scarce, price is very low. For example, if Auktuma drinks few beers more than enough one night and forgets to press 'stop' on crafting some enhancers, he could flood the marked with a certain type of enhancer, thus making offer too big and price would drop. But since this is not happening regardless of his eventual crafting spree, I started to think about how tt of enhancer and their mu are related.
So I came to the conclusion (not sure if I'm right...just personal impression here...) that everything has to be /pec. Heal/pec, dmg/pec, depth/pec etc...
Let's take an easy example. An item that I've recently bought. Fap-90. It has 7 pec/use for 40 heal. The one I bought has 3 tiers unlocked already. So that would mean that using 3 eco enhancers, it will have 15% less cost on use, which means 6.087 pec instead of 7 pec/use. *for easier understanding I will round it up at 1 pec/use*
So 1 pec less/use, from 3 eco enhancers on fap-90.
Now, medical eco enhancers have a preset tt of 0.6 ped (60 pec). Their mu is 150%'ish. So on a 150% mu, they cost 90 pec each. That makes it 2.7 ped for all 3 of'em = 270 pec. So after I will use the fap 270 times, the enhancers would have only payed for themselves. That number of uses only means the price of enhancers+their mu has been payed. However, after 270 uses not all 3 enhancers brake, which means that any heal I do after the first 270 heals and still has any enhancer there alive and kicking, is a heal done with 6 pec instead of 7, thus making me use 1 pec less/heal. Let's say that 1 brake after 270 heals. I will still have 2 for a decent number of heals, which means I will do an eco of 0.7 pec instead of 1, then 1 more brakes and I'm left with only 1, so I do an eco of 0.3 pec/heal untill that one brakes too.
But if you backup and see the bigger picture on a bigger scale, the fact that after 270 heals I have payed enhancers tt+mu from the eco they bring within themselves, means that the actual eco starts from there up until the point when all 3 brakes, becoming a smaller eco over time, when they start to brake one by one.
And knowing how hard eco enhancers brake on a fap, this means it's not bad to save some peds if you use the fap many times/day.
Now, the same thing happens with weapon dmg enhancers. How so? Well, their tt is related to what they do, multiplied by mu....a much bigger mu than the one from the example above.
The dmg enhancers have 80 pec tt, and with a mu of ~300%, they cost 2.4 ped each (240 pec).
As I've known ever since I joined PE, MA was never driven by randomization, mathematics, calculations, fast reload, or number of uses, but by *place name here*/pec. Anything/pec. They care about economics. So as everything cost, everything must be met on it's base cost.
I am much to used with calculation on the old style, so I will not use the new type of 'effective dmg', but the old dmg/pec matrix. The one which meant imk2 is 4.72 dmg/pec, Karma Killer - 4.13, Imp21 - 4.30 and so on.
In my opinion, MA rounded this on 4 dmg/pec. Which means that for each 4 dmg the enhancers bring to gun's benefit, it 'decays' 1 pec of it's tt+mu (not a visible decay, but a server registered decay that count its uses/benefits). That's why smaller dmg guns have their enhancers last longer, while bigger dmg guns have their enhancers brake faster. Because 1 enhancer on ml35 provides 8.1 dmg, which means 2.025 pec from those 240 pec (price of enhancer+mu), while on opalo only brings 0.8 dmg, which means 0.2 pec.
Of course this would mean that from those 240 pec cost of enhancer+mu, if placed on a ml35, it would last for a number of 240/2.025 = 118.51 total shots until brake. But this doesn't happen because gun doesn't shoot max dmg forever. This calculation is on max. For example, if you use an unamped ml35 that has 1 enhancer on it, that's 89.5 max dmg. But the max dmg is rarely met. It is all calculated around average dmg and the potency of enhancer into boosting that average dmg.
On this example, if the hunter is above lvl 100 proff and sees ml35 10/10 and 40.5-81 on dmg, without enhancer on the weapon he makes an average of 60.75 dmg and if he puts one enhancer on the weapon, he will see it 44.55-89.1, thus making an average of 66.825 dmg. So on a longer scale hunt, the minimum dmg of the weapon is pulled upwards by the enhancers boost, depending on how many enhancers you use, making the average dmg bigger (which translates into that 'effective dmg' eco that I can't get used to).
But the dmg enhancers work exactly as the fap-90 example. They have a number of pecs which needs to be met to make the enhancer pay for its cost and then every shot extra is a shot that the hunter benefits from...
For example, 5 dmg enhancers = 1200 pec on a mu of 300%. From those 1200 pec, each shot uses a number of pecs (or even under 1 pec) that pay for the random dmg done on that particular shot (if the shot was actually boosted by the extra dmg provided by the enhancer). It's like a pool of pecs, from which an invisible hand pulls them out accordingly to what they deliver. So in the end they pay their price...if calculated on a bigger scale, over time.
The amount of average dmg is small though, that's why they brake fast on big dmg guns and they last longer on small dmg guns. Because the average dmg increase on Opalo consumes such a small amount of pecs from that 1200 pec pool (the cost of 5 enhancers+their mu), compared with how a ml35 eats those pecs when using a much bigger average dmg increase.
But in the end, it is all reduced to dmg/pec.... Or how I said earlier - *place name here*/pec... meaning anything/pec.
That's why they have a preset tt and that's why the mu is stable no matter of what crafters and traders do... The price is held on those numbers so that everyone pays the correct price. Because if a dmg enhancer is 500%, then its price will be 400 pec instead of 240 pec, so then we need to pray that it doesn't brake until the 400 pec were payed, or else we start doing bad eco hunts...
And last, but not least, that's why MA keeps price from falling, because if it would fall, then we would all do eco hunts, eco healing, eco mining, eco everything...
If the price remains within some numbers, we move along inside a certain parameter that makes those 4dmg/pec be 3.5dmg/pec, or 4.5dmg/pec...depending on what price we buy them.
But no matter of what we calc, or how we analyze this, the randomization only counts when the price was met. When we pay for the tt+mu, then begins our luck - for those of us who's enhancer didn't brake...and the eco counts until the enhancer brakes. From that moment on we benefit, using that tool with a lower price for a reduced random number of times until enhancer eventually brakes.
That's why there is a number of 10 total tiers. Because decimal calculation is perfect here. For example, when you calc enhancer cost+mu on a gun with 10 dmg enhancers, you don't just have one in mind, but all 10. So the factor that make us profit a bit, is the number of enhancers still holding after they had all payed for themselves while hunting, by providing the extra dmg for which they burn the pecs from their tt+mu. Because if you fire a certain number of shots and reach the point when you have payed for all 10 of them, but only 4 or 5 brake along the way, you still have 5 to benefit from until they brake. And yes... MA made it so that after that point they don't last much longer, but there's still a decent amount of time in which the hunter uses his weapon with a bigger eco than if he didn't had any enhancers at all. That eco is dropping rapidly considering he had already reached the critical number of shots (as the enhancers start to brake), but is scaled in correlation with that decimal factor of the ten tiers. Meaning that if your're left with only 5 enhancers after you payed all 10 by using them, you fire 100 shots with 5 enancers, 1 brakes, then 100 more shots with 4 enhancers, another one brakes, then another 100 shots with 3 enhancers and so on... That's why sometimes enhancers seem to hold on for a long time and then all of a sudden many of them brake in a short period of time. Because they're the ones left after we payed for the whole bunch of them...
Because in the end (returning to the fap90 example), I am glad to use it 270 times only to use the eco provided by the 3 enhancers just to pay for them, knowing that each heal done after that will make me use 1 pec less.... until all 3 of them brake. And that's exactly the same for hunters or miners too. If we calc tt of enhancer+mu + number of enhancers used + dmg of gun + your average dmg (if you maxed it out, or if it's sib), we will ~know at what point we will start to make pecs for our own eco....and that's always after we 'work' for MA... First we pay the price of the enhancers and only after that we get to deal with the randomization factor that decides how many times we benefit from that ehancer boost.
Sorry for the long comment. I rarely can hold myself from talking this much.
I guess I had to pay for my enhancers first and only then I started to talk less and less, until I finally stopped...
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