Quote Originally Posted by Nyalia View Post
I tried to do further analysis to see which affects per-sector rating (and thus bonus exp), Favor, Retrieval, or both. But, I'm running into the issue where all the stats are loosely correlated with each other. A ship with higher Favor often also has higher Retrieval, and vice versa. There's a clear correlation between higher favor and higher ratings. The data suggests that retrieval might also correlate with higher ratings, but that is less clear. Trying to isolate a variable by, say, only looking at the retrieval ratings of ships with exactly 80 favor is running into an issue where the vast majority of ships with 80 favor also have 80 retrieval. So, there aren't enough datapoints with the same retrieval value other than 80 and exactly 80 favor to compare it to the 80/80 set.

So, I have no idea...
Honestly, I think the only way to test it at this point is to wait till we have a whole host of level 50 capped ships and specifically rig down our ships with all bronco but one component and start recording data separately. This is the only way we can get control over the inputs that isn't constantly shifting and keeps our data clean and separated.

Unfortunately, this also means that it's virtually IMPOSSIBLE to use any of this information for things like sector unlocks which seems to be the hottest topic at current.