Ever since they were introduced, people have been criticizing that crafting a Gem Dragon egg is extremely frustrating due to the lack of “duplicate protection”. The statistical average to get a full set is about 15 eggs, but (due to the nature of RNG) our actual results vary wildly – some people completed the set within single digits’ worth of crafts, while others are pushing 30 or even 40 eggs without that elusive last dragon (whichever one it is). I myself needed 19 eggs to complete the set of Gem Dragons, which isn’t bad (statistically speaking) but certainly didn’t feel good to get not just duplicates, but even a few streaks of them.
So, among the many ideas to address this “pain point” here’s one idea that I don’t think has been suggested before:
Every Gem (and Cosmic) Dragon is necessarily assigned a Kingdom, right?
Allow specific Gem / Cosmic Dragons to be craftable via Soulforge during their respective Kingdom weeks. e.g. if it’s a Drifting Sands week then Topasarth will appear as a SF recipe; if it’s Whitehelm then Solarithus is available. And so on.
The only catch is that the recipe for crafting a specific Gem/Cosmic Dragon uses Dragonite instead of Diamonds. (Did you know Dragonite is actually priced cheaper than Diamonds?)
For example:
The standard SF recipe for a weekly Mythic is 4000 of Diamonds, 10 Celestial traitstones, and 20k in Souls.
So, an equivalent recipe for a specific Gem Dragon might be something like 4000 Dragonite, 10 Celestial traitstones and 20k Souls. (Yes, I’ll agree that such a cost may feel overpriced – e.g. the cost of 8 eggs plus change to craft just one specific Dragon? – but that’s a separate discussion.)
Accordingly, with 12 such Dragons scattered across 40 Kingdoms, we could expect one to appear an average of every 4 weeks.
So the Dragonite cost for the guaranteed dragon would be ~8 times the cost of a random draw from the Egg?
If you’re pulling eight eggs at random, hoping to get one specific dragon, the odds that it won’t come out in those eight draws is (5/6) ^ 8. Which, if I’m doing my math correctly, means you have roughly a 76% chance that the one specific dragon will appear at least once in eight draws.
That would imply a fair chance to get the missing dragon(s) though. As for now, how do we know that the system isn’t rigged and dragons are blocked until you’ve paid a specific amount of gems or dragonite for dupes?
Sure, we could debate the exact “pricing” all day long (4000 diamonds is super expensive as is), but we DO have users going beyond 8 eggs just for that last dragon (e.g. esslee needed 9 eggs for the 5th dragon and 16 for the last, both of which were about triple the expected values), at which point even this example would have been a savings.
By “isn’t” are you asking us for positive proof of a negative? Nah, that can’t be right…
But when we aggregate as much (user reported) data as possible we get stuff like this:
Notice, for example, how there appears to be a 6-egg difference between 4th and 5th dragons obtained, when the expected value should be 3 eggs. Some of this can be attributed to incomplete/missing craft data (e.g. if you had 4 colors after 5 eggs and craft a batch of 3 more eggs, and now you have a total of 5 colors from 8 eggs, then did that fifth color dragon occur at egg #6, 7, or 8? We don’t actually know, which slightly skews your data)…
Have you been actually tracking your craft data? No?
I sympathize that it “feels bad”, but emotional arguments are not logical/rational arguments.
Also, I updated my above chart with deviations from average, though this is necessarily calculated from each user’s cumulative totals and does not strictly correlate to the drop rate per new color obtained.
I was referring to the data in the chart. If everything was “realistic”, there would be minor deviation to what we see as a result. And why do you assume I was acting on an “emotional background” alone rather than referring to actual logged data, which can be used to back up that this deviation shouldn’t be as big as it is, if “someone” (not calling anybody out) had put more attention to detail?
Anyway. We have been told that there would be an alternative method to craft dragons bosses in 2023. Now we’re here in 2024. Nothing happened.
We’ve been told, recent changes have been for “fun purposes”. Yet again less people are having fun than before.
We’ve been told that pathfinder troops have been the biggest problem which led to more people quitting than everything else. Yeah right (putting on my best Dr. Evil impression).
So please excuse me if I interpret all of these debatable data, which we’re told to believe as facts, differently than I am supposed to.
Originally I was supposed to play a game and have fun with it. But if it were so to this day, I wouldn’t write such essays on the internet instead, proclaiming my dissatisfaction.
Peace out. Amen. Good luck. Best wishes. Life goes on. Bla bla bla.
I doubt that targeting a specific dragon will ever be implemeented.
Introducing a hardcap, ot the other hand, would still make players spend their resourses (gems and verses) on dragonite.
Honestly, the only reason i DONT buy dragonite from the dungeon/merchants, is because most likely it would be going toward my 18th copy of a dragon i already had instead of one i didnt. Knowing that every purchase of dragonite would ACTUALLY bring me closer to the goal would encourage me to get there faster. Not having the 4 copy cap is ridiculous, and i would LOVE to hear their reasoning for why it isnt implemented. Getting 7 Emeraldrin before my first Rubirath really rubbed me the wrong way and there are many people who had it much worse than i did.
Well as long as we’re speculating … the key design factor is of course the actual implementation of it serverside. Compare the acquisition of Guild Guardian troops – they stop dropping from Guild Chests after having all 12 ascended to Mythic. Before that, the server must necessarily maintain two drop tables for each level Guild Chest (one with Guardians and one without), or more likely a separate drop table for the Guardians specifically, and a two-stage RNG check for whether it should consult the Guild Guardian or (Lv.#) Guild Chest drop table. (There might also be an oversight in this system – I’ll experiment with it more tomorrow) And obviously that system couldn’t be applied here, not as-is, because it only tests for the full set, not individual Troops.
I might be personally more in favor of a “semi-protection” rule: for each Dragon Egg crafted (Gem or Cosmic alike) the server rolls the drop table twice, and if the first roll is already part of your collection then it gives you the second roll instead. This would ensure you’d never have less than a ~30% chance of acquiring a new Dragon, and could expect to have the full set by an average of 10 eggs, but the necessarily unequal drop rate between different dragons (relative to your collection) would add complexity to what is otherwise a simple RNG lookup.
Or (as speculated in a previous topic), if the drop table could be tweaked for an improved chance of a specific Dragon on its matching color day (say, daily dragon gets 25%, others get 15%) then we could strategize a specific day to “target” a specific dragon, and statistically acquire the full set by an average of “just” 12 eggs.
A strict hardcap (after 4 drops of a specific Dragon) would of course establish a hard limit of 20 eggs without completing the set. Trying to guess an expected value from that is … a bit more complicated…
the way guardians work in guild chests is it rolls the 50%/50% for guardian or other, if it rolls guardian it gives you one that you dont have mythic/4 copies. It is 2 layers, but when one is removed from the pool, its percent is spread to the others, it could work the exact same way for dragons.
“They” continuously gave the reasoning, despite not directly adressing this exact thing:
“rng is fun.”
It comes down to above (questionable) statement, which can’t really be called “reasoning”.
“The players” called exactly that as highly problematic when the dragon eggs were released and gave the solution of the x4 cap to be implemented. If completely unlucky, you’d still have to craft 21 eggos to get a full dragon base set, and you could argue that this is “enough effort made” and you then clearly “had enough fun”. So while knowing about how the situation is perceived by “the players” - through experience I might add - you could say with the release of the cosmic dragon eggs “the devs” have (again) proven that player feedback is worth next to nothing and with exactly this topic just got disregarded. As explained, a solution to make things just a bit more fair and predictable for everyone, while still maintaining a rng part that for some reason is so highly valued by “the devs” would be easy to implement and this completely logical restriction also “wouldn’t hurt the economy”.
Pure Speculation:
It either wasn’t even a internal discussion topic or other things like inexperience in playing the game (on high levels) made it difficult to grasp and understand the problematic situation. I could be wrong though, therefore this is just speculation, as mentioned. I could imagine someone being incredibly unlucky, as f.e. screenshot above (or even worse situations!) forming the opinion that this is a completely delusional toxic setting (and behaviour!) to not even acknowledge this as a gigantic problem - but since I was a bit more fortunate with “only” 16 pulls to get a whole cosmic dragon base set that “clearly can’t be what I’m thinking” and I have to state that explicitly as to not be held accountable for it and get forum vacated again.
