They redistributed the keys in order to offer a less awful experience to players. So everyone and their dogs can get an average number of keys. BUT, once everyone during every gnome week start getting keys and more gems…
They can still catch up. 4 weeks in campaigns is no more than 4-5 days normal play. (Depending on the player)
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I’m seeing a lot of opportunity for whales and people who play incredible amounts (and/or with maximum efficiency) to get a lot more stats.
While the gap with casual and/or free players becomes ever bigger.
Are you trying to kill GW and prevent it from being a zombie?
Not to mention that this makes keeping other modes balanced, as in giving everyone a fun experience but also a reasonable chance to earn the maximum rewards, even more impossible.
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It mostly boils down to lack of direction, amplified by lack of communication.
Picking one example, the patch introduced kingdom upgrades 16 to 20 and kingdom power levels 21 to 30. Kingdom power levels are gated by kingdom upgrades, kingdom upgrades are gated by Books (and Imperial Deeds).
There are two ways to obtain Books:
1.) Crafting, for 50 Deeds and 500 Jewels. Considering that one needs 30 Books to fully upgrade each kingdom (for a grand total of 51000 Deeds and 510000 Jewels), this crafting recipe might as well not exist. Even if all players suddenly were to receive 100 Deeds as daily login gift (to make this a two year goal), there still wouldn’t be enough Jewels to even get started.
2.) Campaign rewards, for the Free Pass and Elite Pass. Free Pass rewards don’t actually exist for the current campaign, players just get back a small fraction of the resources they need to pay to participate in the campaign. There’s reasonable concern this approach will be extended to the new resources hard gating progress, meaning where Elite+ Pass owners might get Books and Imperial Deeds, Free Pass owners would at best get Writs (worth 1:50000 of a Book, disregarding extra crafting costs required on top).
Getting back to direction and communication, back in the golden days of Gems of War Sirrian was around to excel at this. For the above changes there would have been:
- A rough design vision on how long it should take players to reach upgrade level 20 and power level 30 for all kingdoms.
- An explanation how players are supposed to craft Books, along with some numbers showing that this is viable for reasonably active players.
- A drill down on current and future Free Pass, Elite Pass and Elite+ Pass rewards, especially in regards to resources hard gating account progress.
- Some closing words that Gems of War is still not “that type of game” that only allows players spending money to reasonably progress after a certain point, along with a list of measures how the balance between players spending money and players spending time is going to be maintained to counter paid for Campaign Passes so increasingly tilting the scales.
Any chance there might still be someone around less confused about the negativity on this update? And possibly willing to pick up the scepter dropped several years ago, even though that might require an heroic effort?
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i know, but it’s “easier” to explain it that way instead of “we are lazy and we wont” 
besides, i’d like to treat the current campaign as “test” one - devs got some feedback already (QOL, rewards), they might put other rewards in next camapaign, we will also see how next GW will be affected by campaign artifacts etc.
might just be a placebo, but I’m rather enjoying getting up to 83 mythstones with Kingdom Level 16 over the old 71-75 rate.
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Probably four or five years I’d think. Long-long term goals.
Yes.
Incorrect, the Vault Key drop rate for Gnomes hasn’t changed and in addition to the Gnome drops you also now get a guaranteed Vault Key for completing the tracker. So this has significantly increased the number of Vault Keys everyone will earn on average if they play during a Vault weekend.
You’re welcome 
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add another 20% mythstone bonus (these should stack right @Kafka)
and you get 92-97 from a single run (at least on those, where you get KL 16)
@Kafka Please reveal the droprate for the epic vault keys. I just used 30 normal vk so that’s 90 gnomes but no epic vk?
from the patch notes.
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So 90 gnomes with no success is extraordinary bad luck? Or were they removed from possible rewards from normal vault key rewards?
You might be misreading what was written. Epic Keys drop chance is 10% chance of all (normal and epic) Vaul Key drops.
That means, that 1 out of 10 Vault Keys will be Epic one. But you still need to roll Vault Key to drop (which is pretty low anyways).
With extreme luck, it will drop from the 1st gnome. With extreme bad luck, you will drop more than 20 of Vault Keys before seeing Epic one and that’s without Gnome Tracker extra keys, which are enforced to be standard Vault Keys.
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I used 25 vault keys on Xbox, I don’t think I saw even a normal vault key drop from the vault. Could be unlucky, could be xbox. Probably just unlucky.
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Not sure, what the chances of dropping a Vault Key are… They are pretty rare anyways.
When it’s gnome weekend i sometimes have gnomes falling like leaves from trees on September, but none of them drops a Vault Key. Other weeks i might do few battles, encouter like 20-30 gnomes, and get 4+ Keys…
Sometimes i get a bunch of Keys in a weekend. Sometimes not even a single one.
RNG so much…
I tracked this when Gnomes were added originally.
It works out to about 1 in every 1000 gnomes will drop a vault key.
This is not including Gnome Weekends.
A guildmate scored an epic key already, I guess they should go buy a lotto ticket.
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There has to be a copyright issue involved, because using the term Vault Gnomes would sidestep 95% of the confusion in one go.
It would confuse people even much more, since Vault Gnomes aren’t the only ones that have treasure bags. Every gnome that pop into the battle as battlecushers do is carring that bag and is valid of dropping a Vault Key. Last weekend soul gnome game me one, and Mecha/Glory gnome got me the second one.