"Hatching eggs for shinies. Gift opening (7km) vs pokestops (2/5/10km)"

#PokemonGO: I'm surprised no one has done this analysis before. I wanted to know: is it in your best interest to open gifts and fill your inventory with 7km eggs or roll the dice with 2/5/10km eggs. I used the silph road egg probability tables to calculate the expected value of shinies after 1km. For each egg hatched.​p(shiny) = p(mon hatch)*p(shiny)​To calculate expected values per km:E(shinies after 1k) = Sum(Egg distance*p(egg type)*p(mon hatch)*p(shiny)) over all egg types and mons​For the gift opening there is, of course, only 1 egg type (7km) with a p(egg type)=1​Anyway performing these calculations based on the current egg pool, and using the known shiny rates (1/450 for the majority, 1/50 for babies, 1/65 for pineco/sycther/aero/feebas **( SEE FOOTNOTE), 1/75 for absol, 1/35 for mawile) I obtained the following results.​Shinies per 1000km (assuming permanent incubator only):Only spin stops: 0.82Only open gifts: 1.64​Or in other words you would have to walk 1217km to find a shiny if you only spun stops and used one incubator but you would only have to walk 611km to find a shiny if you only opened gifts. Of course if you use 9 incubators then you can divide those values by 9.​This analysis is for any shiny but its possible to add your own value functions. I added a simple value function for myself which is 1 for a shiny I don't have and 0 for a shiny I do have. For me personally I'd have to walk 2594km spinning stops but only 888km opening gifts. If you set your value function to be 0 for CD shinies and 1 otherwise then you have to walk 1414km spinning stops and 611km opening gifts. Even if you are only looking for half of the baby shinies then the opening gift distance is still ~1200km and only then begins to become comparable to spinning stops.​The bottom line is. At the moment if your goal is shiny hunting then its highly likely you are better off opening gifts than spinning stops unless you have more than half of the baby shinies (but even then it is still possible that spinning stops will still require you to walk further to get a shiny that you want than opening gifts).** I am unsure, exactly, about the shiny rates for feebas/scyther . However even if these mons have the normal 1/450 rate it isn't going to meaningfully affect the outcome of the calculations given the small individual hatch probabilities. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://bit.ly/2HbiVU5