Why disable powerups?

Question

I noticed after playing Temple Run 1 for a while and fully upgrading my powerups that there's an option for disabling powerups. My question is how game mechanics handle this decision, and I have a couple theories:

1. Powerups in general have a constant chance of appearing at specific intervals in a run, and disabling a powerup allows other powerups to occur more often. e.g., constant chance of 10% in general, so 2.5% chance for magnet, invisibility, boost, and mega coin, and disabling one of them allows the remaining 3 a 3.33% chance of occuring.

2. Each powerup has a specific constant chance of appearing at specific intervals, (e.g., 2.5%) and thus the overall chance of any occuring is 10%, and disabling one of them reduces the overall probability to 7.5%.

I can see why disabling powerups would be advantageous in the first scenario if you have a preference for specific powerups, but I have no way of determining which of these mechanics are what's happening. Can anyone verify either of these, or state if there's actually a different mechanic than either of those going on?

Answer 1

As the company updated the game itself, they also released what's the point of it. And yes, your first theory is correct.

In the Android & iPhone/iPad game “Temple Run,” the last upgrade for each of the four powerups costs 25,000 coins. These are listed:

Allow disabling Mega Coin. Allow disabling Coin Magnet. Allow disabling Invisibility. Allow disabling Boost. What do these upgrades do? Should you buy them?

These upgrades give you the option of turning OFF whichever powerup you bought the upgrade for. That means you won’t see it appear in actual gameplay. Once you get the “Allow Disabling…” upgrade, you can always turn the powerup back on if you choose. The Store will allow you to freely switch between enabling or disabling the powerup at no additional charge.

So why would you want to turn any of the powerups off? Well, the Mega Coin for example doesn’t give you all that many coins. For that reason, I disable the Mega Coin so I can get one of the other, more powerful powerups more often.

Also, if you are focusing on one specific objective, for example, the “10k Runner” to run 10,000 meters, you may want to enable ONLY the Boost powerup and leave everything else disabled. That way, all powerups you find in the game will be Boosts, and you can get a better run distance.