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I have yet to obtain a single virus from my usual farming, which is mainly L7/8 portal popups of my faction. Apart from the generally low probability of getting one, are the chances skewed depending on the portal faction & level etc.? If there are any variations, I'd like to try maximizing my chance to get these items.

  • Do green portals have higher chance of giving Jarvis virus among the 2 types (& vice versa)?
  • Does the chance of a virus drop decrease when farming opposite faction portals (similar to resos or XMP), stay same (like keys) or perhaps increase?
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5 Answers 5

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The virus and refractor are impossible to calculate. Thus far we haven't seen any controlling factor as to when or how often they drop. I'm a level 8 player who hacks at least 500 times a day, and have tried every variation imaginable. Fully charged, half, enemy lvl 8s, unclaimed etc and so forth. I've received 1 jarvis and 2 refractory for all my trouble. Yet we have level five players who don't play often, who have 3-4 already. Madness.

Also to the person who answered. Hacking enemy portals give you an increased chance of portal keys and shields, than friendly. Higher reso counts off enemy and xmp off friendly. I've noticed no difference in cubes

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    Hardly impossible to calculate, but we need more data.
    – Roy
    Aug 1, 2013 at 11:55
  • They are not impossible to calculate any more. You now know the exact number of hacks made and you can keep track on your virus hacks easily.
    – Qwerty
    Nov 17, 2013 at 19:54
  • It's not impossible to calculate. Here's how to get some info about it: note your current hack count. Go hack until you get some statistically significant number of adas and/or jarvises (maybe 100?). Note your new hack count. dropChance = numItem/(newHackCount - oldHackCount) where numItem is the number of Adas, Jarvises, or both (depending on what you're interested in calculating). This doesn't yield data about which types of portals have better yields, and it assumes you're hacking many different kinds of portals.
    – weberc2
    Oct 9, 2014 at 19:54
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The only Jarvis Virus I've received so far came from a fully charged level 5 enemy portal. I've heard others who've received the virus claim you get 1 in about 200 hacks but I too would like to increase my chances.

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While it is impossible to figure out the exact drop rates of virus, many agents have gone through the process of collecting their own data set and calculating hack stats. The drop rate for virus seems to hover around 1/500 hacks.

A 33,000 hack dataset and analysis is presented here

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tl;dr 1 virus per 600 to 800 hacks

I have hacked 15 viruses so far and I did 11k hacks.

It might mean that the virus has a drop rate between 1 in 600 to 800 hacks.

Also there are rumours, that the drop of particular items is influenced by the time of hack. E.g. at xx th minute of every hour, there is a significantly higher drop rate of Viruses, etc.

One might also quite often observe that after using a virus, you hack a new one very soon.

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I have a theory, that a portal which have been infected by jarvis/ada, increases its chances to get them. It's a projection to our world, where viruses are spreading as well.

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