Note: I’m still working this out. Microsoft Excel to the Rescue!
GIVEN THESE (NOT UNREASONABLE) ASSUMPTIONS:
PORTALS
* There is an idealized and dense distribution of 9 Portals available on a College Campus.
* They are placed in a perfect octagon, with a central “Hub” portal.
* There are no other portals in this portion of the world.
HACKING
* Friendly Portals grant 2 Resonators 33% of the time and 2 XMP Bursters 33% of the time. 33% of the time they give nothing.
* Enemy Portals grant 1 Resonator or 1 XMP Burster 25% of the time, and nothing the rest of the time.
* The levels of items dropped are proportional, i.e. an item of each level drops every 1/X times, where X is the level of the Portal.
* If a Player is higher level than a Portal, 50% of the time the Portal will drop an item 1 level higher than the Portal’s level.
INVITES
* Player 1 cashes their invite on the 1st day of the month.
* Player 2 cashes their invite on the 4th day of the 1st month.
* There are no other players in this part of the world.
Here’s how the scenario plays out as each player collects gear.
By the time Player 2 collects enough XMP Bursters (on Day 8) to do 8000+ points of damage (enough to take out a single L1 enemy-held portal, if there are any left at that point), the opposition has a stockpile of 65 L1 XMP Bursters and Resonators with which to take the Portal back ASAP.
From what it seems, it appears to me that how much stuff you get from an portal (enemy or friendly) and whether you get stuff seems to be linked to how recently the portal has been hacked (by anyone). The portals which are close to where I work, which is also close to a subway stop, are much more likely to return “no items returned”. *However* if I hit the portals in the mid-afternoon, when there are fewer people going to the subway, it’s much more likely that I will get items, and indeed many more items. This afternoon, there were 3 enemy L5 portals near where I work, and when I made the rounds, from one I got four L4 resonators, from one I got a L4 resonator and a L6 resonator, and from the other resonator I got nothing. This morning from another L5 portals I got a an L3 resonator, a L4 resonator, a L4 XMP, and a portal shield.. In general the portals seem to give out more resonators than XMP’s, but I’ve also gotten 3 or 4 XMP’s from a single hack, especially from resonators that seem to get less activity.
That being said, I’ve also gotten only one resonator, or only a resonator and a portal shield from a hack, but I’ve experienced quite a bit more variability that you’ve cited.
One other thing I’ve seen is that it’s very rare that a L4 portal will drop a L1 resonator or XMP; the bulk of the items dropped by L4 portal are L3 and L4, with L5 rarely, and similarly, for a L5 portal, are L3 and L4, with L2 and L5 much less frequently. So I’m not entirely convinced of the model of a 1/X distribution of objects for a LX portal; it doesn’t match with my experience.