Probabilities of Getting a Spotlight Award (and How to Calculate Them)

In case you didn't know, KiloNova posted on the Message Board the other day about how likely you are to get a Spotlight Award (should it be capitalized?) on JetPunk. But it seems that the numbers are gone for some reason. So in this blog I'll calculate the probabilities again by myself, using the latest numbers, and (hopefully) clearly explain how to calculate them.

Note: Scroll all the way to the end if you only need a list of probabilities and want to skip all the math.

In order to calculate the probability of getting a spotlight award, we need to get a few numbers first.

Spotlight awards are handed out at random to all users at level 50 or higher, every day. Users are weighted based on their current level: every 10 levels above level 50, the user gets an extra "ticket" in the random drawing. This means that at levels 60-69 you'll get two tickets, at levels 70-79 you'll get three, and so on.

Based on this, the first number we need to know is how many "tickets" there are in total. According to this page, as of writing this blog (December 20, 2025), there are:

- 15,312 users at levels 50 to 59;

- 8,761 users at levels 60 to 69;

- 3,285 users at levels 70 to 79;

- 939 users at levels 80 to 89; and

- 316 users at levels 90 to 99.

From these figures, we can calculate the total number of "tickets" (which we'll need in later calculations):

15,312 × 1 + 8,761 × 2 + 3,285 × 3 + 939 × 4 + 316 × 5 = 48,025 "tickets" in total.

The next number we will need is the number of spotlight awards given out each day. This is known to be 10 - ten spotlight awards will be randomly handed out every day.

Once we know these numbers, we can get our hands on calculating the actual likelihood of getting a spotlight award over different time periods (a day, a week, a month, etc).

Let's start simple. What are your chances of getting a spotlight award in one day if you are level 50? Ten tickets are chosen out of all 48,025, so the chance is 10 in 48,025 or about 1 in 4,803.

Now you might be asking, how do we calculate the probabilities over longer time periods? You might just say "multiply 1/4,803 by 7, 30, 365, etc and you're good to go", but surprise surprise, it's not actually that simple. In fact, this problem is a textbook example of a Binomial distribution.

In a Binomial distribution, each "experiment" has one and only one of two possible outcomes, success or failure. In our case, there is one "experiment" each day (selecting users to receive spotlight awards), and the outcome could be success (you are awarded a spotlight) or failure (you are not).

How do we calculate the total probability of success across multiple experiments then? The Binomial distribution suggests that you can't simply multiply the probability of success by the number of experiments. Why? Let's see a simpler example first. Suppose you're flipping a coin, and it's a 50/50 chance for it to come out heads or tails. In this case, you can't really say that you are guaranteed to get heads (or tails) over two flips, since they can be both heads or both tails.

Well, if that's not correct, what's the proper way to do it then? It turns out you have to take the probability of failure (let's call it p) and raise it to the power of the number of experiments, and finally subtract that number from 1. More intuitively, you're trying to find out if you'll succeed at least once over a number of experiments (let's call it x) - this will happen if and only if it's not the case that every single experiment fails. The latter has a probability of p^x (p to the power of x). Therefore, the total success probability over x experiments is 1 − p^x.

Once we sort this out, we can continue to calculate the chances of getting a spotlight award over multiple days. In our case, p is 1 − 10/48,025 = 48,015/48,025. Here are the calculations:

- The chance of getting a spotlight over a week with only one ticket is

1 − (48,015/48,025)⁷ ≈ 0.00146 ≈ 1 in 687;

- The chance of getting a spotlight over a month (30 days) with only one ticket is

1 − (48,015/48,025)³⁰ ≈ 0.00623 ≈ 1 in 161;

- The chance of getting a spotlight over a year (365 days) with only one ticket is

1 − (48,015/48,025)³⁶⁵ ≈ 0.0732 ≈ 1 in 14.

The odds of getting a spotlight with more than one ticket can be calculated the same way, with the only difference being the value of p. To make the blog cleaner, I will not explain the rest of the calculations in detail. Here is a table of all the results (all numbers rounded to the nearest integer or to one decimal place):

Table of Results