Then they are sending a pretty clear message, I’d say. Hopefully, they actually consider the ramification of fixing a long lasting “bug” and have a long term solution at least planned before they do. This has come back to bite them before. I just know they can’t have a plan at this point because they have already stated they weren’t aware there might be a problem until last week, and they won’t even be investigation into whether or not there is a problem for about two weeks. Guess that means they don’t think it is that important one way or the other?
The lower rarity treasures will be the hardest hit. The fewer of those you use now, the closer your projected “fixed” xp and current xp will be… but you’ll lose some in nearly every category.
Yeah, something I considered might be happening. However, while not done all that recently, there has been extensive sampling of other chest style drop in the game, many of which were done in lots of 50 or 10. There was no indication of this error at that time. Current drop rates for most chest types tend to “feel right” anecdotally, and, if you are on a losing streak, using a binomial probability calculation will generally show you aren’t that far off (I’ve seen some what would be <0.1% cumulative probability occurrences reported dealing with chest drops, but few and far between).
But also on this for every other random chest style drop (I’m not 100% sure on this one since it was never stated specifically, but we have been assuming) drops are calculated by first pulling a random number representing chance of category, then another random number for chance within the category, and so on, until an item is reached. For example, when opening gold keys, to get to an “Orc” card, you need to roll “troop”, then “common” then “(whatever the id of orc is from the list)”). It is possible the same algorithm used for other types of chests drops isn’t the same one as for portals. Meaning portals could use the same methodology but have an error where one of the numbers in the chain isn’t actually a new random number assigned.
I believe there is a simpler explanation here: different server files are actually being used.
I recall a similar issue with a kingdom being left out of tributes a while back: Blighted Lands does not give tribute - #11 by Sirrian
The basic probably was when they updated into using a new set of tables and didn’t clear the old ones out. On cursory inspection, everything looked right, but actually two different tables were being used.
This transition might have occurred when they implemented the drop tables in the first place. They used to send out data to the client that could be intercepted that contained sets of drop rates that were allegedly “outdated and incorrect” (even though the parsed data lined up with both what is being reported and what is being experienced on all normal chest types, and was used to catch multiple times when troops were inadvertently left off drop tables). However, if true, this means at some point at least two different versions of the same droprate table existed. The datamined versions of portal drops were posted here when delves were released (!) Spoiler Alert (!) -- [Any Details Provided are Subject to Change] (Part 1) - #6843 by Lyya, and line up exactly with the current stated drop rates.
Wishful thinking, but it could be that these rates here were the “outdated and incorrect” ones the whole time, and that file is still kicking around and somehow is the one being used to configure the display rates. And nobody noticed because all the other display rates were the same as the actual rates the whole time. Meaning the rates we are experiencing are the correct ones, the display rates are wrong.
I agree this would be the least-damaging and simplest short term fix. I still think long term the way that portals are interacted with (the ‘value’ of a chaos shard dropping sharply once you pull all troops from a faction to mythic) could be done in a way that incentivizes always trying to push forward a bit softcaps, rather than just treating the soft caps as hard caps as I’m sure most people do.