The spawn rate was most assuredly not perfect as people were getting 100+ gems in an hour. That was completely economy-breaking and the nerf needed to come and quickly as well.
However.
I feel that the nerf, as it happened, isn’t really well thought-out. While some spawn nerf was justified, making a new feature of the patch basically non-existent again is not very smart (especially since not everyone was here for the few minutes where Gnomes did spawn).
It would, in my eyes, be far better to make an adjustment to what the Gnomes drop. Making the 20 gems and Vault Keys rarer while increasing the not-so-special rewards like souls while still letting Gnomes happen would keep things motivating for the players.
I was working on a post saying pretty much the same thing (but with a lot more words) but it looks like you got it covered, so I’ll put my TLDR thoughts here. The RNG double/triple blind leaves enough room so you can see the gnomes, but not have them break the economy. Having a gnome be a once in a week experience for normal play, then having said gnome give you a handful of gold or souls is more embittering than anything. And its not like I’m going to run down the street screaming with joy when I hit the now lottery-odds of getting 100 gems or a handful of keys - as an individual super high rarity event, this is not in the least impactful.
Basically, what was hoping for from this feature was a way to actually occasionally see some increase on the resources that actually matter through actually playing the game, even if slowly, so it felt like I could get off the treadmills of just playing endless dailies/weeklies every now and then if I had some extra time and wanted to play it might actually mean something in a mode that isn’t treasure hunt. Not it might have a chance of a shot that it could mean something.
Also this. Quadruple check things like this in the future.
Someone working on a post saying the same as me but using even more words is scary… and not what I’m used to. Normally I’m the one using 100x the words others need to get the same thing across.
I’m agreeing with all of the rest you wrote. Just wanted to toss that out.
Thank you Dev for finally putting with the traits on a card - WHERE to find the stones I love @Lyya’s grid but I play a lot on my phone…this makes it easier
Yeah it’s brutal they nerfed them already. We have 30 people in my guild 2 of which were lucky enough to be on playing and talking about gnomes in our discord channel. Guess how the other 28 are going to feel when they finally get on later…
Edit: Back to the economy comment I’ll grant you there is one in the game in so far that there are resources to manage by individual players however I don’t care if player A has more than me due to some random drop rates. The game isn’t going to break with gnomes popping up every 100 matches or so. I don’t consider this game having an “economy” in a traditional sense where we purchase and trade things between players as in most MP games where anyone would consider they have an “economy” I’ve played.
Unfortunately, this really is the only topic about 3.3 until something else comes along (Raid/Bounty/Invasion aren’t active yet). Especially since now the players feel really slighted by what just happened.
I’d be a lot happier if they kept the gnome as is, and just increase vault key drop rate during vault event. At some point I’d like to own a Cedric/Valvraven/Treasure Gnome…
This is more of a general observation. I know this particular trait will be fleshed out more, however for the moment I noticed it is on a lot of cards that I rarely see in PVP, GWs. This is a great way to revive dead content: the majority of troops that fall by the wayside as early as mid game. I don’t know if that was the intention, or how it will play out over time, but I would love to see more innovation like it!
Just wanted to say THANK YOU for adding the kingdom name to cards. May not be visually appealing, but I really appreciate being able to easily tell what kingdom a card is.
I’d also like to request getting back the ability to see what troops you’ve already selected during Arena. It’s hard for me to remember what each troop can do, so not being able to check isn’t great.
I like a lot of things that changed, but it’s mystifying how troops broke and random things like “oh we broke the weekly event lol” slip through time after time.
Does anyone think for a second when raids open up they’re going to work? Would you like to buy some snake oil from me? It’s a $2 value, discounted 80% to $4,999.99. DM me for paypal deets.
It’s nice when a giant content update comes with… content. It’s not so nice when the only thing you get is a lot of “maybes”. It’s even worse when the things you had don’t work anymore. It tends to sour the changes that did improve things. You forget them pretty quick when you start thinking the things you don’t like about the game aren’t ever going to change.
Because “economy” basically means “how much a resource is worth”. And if the resource “gems” gets devalued to a point where everyone can obtain 100+ in an hour with ease, then gems are not worth as much anymore as before. As gems are the currency you can buy with real money, devaluing gems by flooding the gem economy with more gems than usual means that the devs will not make enough money from gem-sales anymore.
If gems are worth less, then chests are worth less, then mythics are worth less, then mythics are more common, then less people buy things with RL money, then the devs make less money. And this is already a game which is very kind to players when it comes to free premium currency and F2P gameplay in the first place. Keeping this balance which is already very generous to players - compared to most other games - intact by not tipping it even more is very, very important so that the devs can make enough money to pay their bills.
You know, if they realllllly wanted to make money, they’d ask their publishers to lower the price of gems.
$100 to get just enough gems to open 50 VIP chests for a chance at a Mythic? Even if you do get a Mythic, there’s a high probability it is a duplicate… Yeah, I kinda see it as gambling, basically.
On Xbox One, we got a weekly deal where we could pay $5 for 1,000 guild seals and 4 guild keys to the rest of the guild with a fair value of VIP points to go with it. For the first time in a long time, prices actually made sense to spend money on!
How much value do you put on a Mythic? $130 if Sunday Dungeon packs are bought each week? * 24 Mythics +1 new Mythic each month?
Those are all really good points but my understanding was this game was 100x more generous before I really started playing and yet it’s still here today so why didn’t it self implode back when gems were falling from the skies in the early days. I’m VIP 11 and many in my guild are similar or higher and none of us buy gems except for one member once whey they had the double gems event a while back. We all buy things you can’t get with gems for the most part PtGII, Ring of Wonder death knight armour etc.
I don’t think Gnomes coming in every 100 matches would break game and very few people were getting 100 gems an hour. From Tacets thread of Gnome reporting I saw zero people claiming that. (myself I played 450 matches over 2-3 hours and got 1 vault key, 5 gems and 20k gold far from impacting even the very basic “economy” of this game)