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153

I’m not upset they nerfed it. I am upset that something that actually made the game fun now and was rebuilding community was taken away because we figured out there could be a pattern if the first door you opened WASN’T a trap.

Mind you there still was that first pick of either 4 or 5 to be a trap.

I actually didn’t mind getting the trap sometimes. BUT every day just doesn’t seem right.

More so there was no bonus for using a team that countered the trap (that would have made it fun too ) and still within the boundaries of rng - after all that forced me to build teams to handle multiple traps.
There was nothing for beating the big dragon.

And the way they come behind to nerf it just reeks of being petty.

4 Likes
154

“The trash can is empty.”
“There’s a switch inside! Press it!”
“The trash can is empty.”

Knowing that door X could never contain room Y was never “RNG manipulation”, when that was apparently an intended part of its design. Even at worst it’s still only like “counting cards” in casino blackjack. (Which itself was useful enough for that industry to find ways of nerfing it, e.g. playing with double decks and reshuffling played cards back into the deck faster)

And I actually sorta like the idea that each door could have slightly different probabilities, and players are challenged (or at least allowed!) to figure out an optimal route over time. Otherwise you may as well just replace the doors with chests/keys for all the functional difference it makes.

4 Likes
155

You might be, because the grind is absurd.

Let’s say you don’t want to spend gems to buy Dragonite. Assuming you hit level 20 you’ve getting 120 Dragonite per Perfect run. At 10% chance of a perfect run, you’re getting 36.5 perfect runs per year (4380 Dragonite).

Given that duplicate dragons can happen, you need to (on average) open 14 Dragon Eggs to get the set of 6 (7,000 Dragonite). The weapons cost another 2k and Diamantia another 1k for a total of 10k. That is 2.28 years of daily Dungeon runs. If you spend 300 gems/day that is 139 days of daily runs and 41,700 gems.

These detected patterns increased the odds of a perfect run from 10% to ~17%. That is still 1.34 years of daily Dungeon runs, or if you spend gems 124 days of daily dungeon runs and 37,200 gems. Even if you manage to never draw a duplicate dragon (which will be accomplished by only 1.54% of players) it will still take you 75 days and 22,500 gems.

Notes: All of my calculations assume level 20 rewards, and I think the average player is getting about 5 levels per month. All of my estimates are under-estimates. This is also on average, meaning that some players will get the dragons in fewer than 14 eggs, and some will take many many more. Because there is no limit to how many duplicates you can draw there is no maximum to how long/how many gems this might cost you.

Given that you have one attempt per day, and the player odds increase of only 7% this is hardly wrecking their economy. There is no way to convert dragonite to any other resource or transfer it to another player, so once you get the new content it doesn’t affect anything else in the economy.

So, here’s what we know:

  • They chose to implement a rigged odds system for dungeon
  • They announced other fixes at the same time dungeons were updated (37 days ago)
  • Some announced changes still aren’t fixed (improved daily deals ala Forge Scrolls I’m looking at you)
  • The rigged odds became known and used by the player base approximately 1 week ago
  • They immediately prioritized fixing it after returning from vacation to make it worse for the players
  • They stated that can’t give us anything to improve the situation for a bare minimum of 3 months (and they tend to run behind, not ahead of schedule).

This wasn’t the infinite recursion of GAPs that were available immediately upon release that really would have ruined the economy and needed to be fixed right away. Giving players another month with this system would have netted an average of 2.1 more perfect runs per player, which is hardly game breaking (that’s not even a whole dragon egg). The 80 Dragonite (worth less than a single perfect run) handed out is just a slap in the face.

More importantly, this directly attacks the efforts of the most dedicated players that actively support the community. They have never in the past directly moved to invalidate the work of the guide writers or data collectors in all the other aspects of the game, so it is no surprise that it feels very personal to all of them, and all of us who contributed.

It turns Dungeons back into the grinding “you’re going to lose 90% of the time, with no way to improve your chances” that wasn’t terribly compelling when it first came out.

29 Likes
156

By the way, they most likely intentionally released this on a Friday so they can be out of the office during the initial backlash and hope some people will “old news” this by
the time they get back in the office so they get to deal with a much smaller outcry when they get back.

21 Likes
157

So, I decided to re-calculate my math, and turns out it’s a better than 7% odds improvement for the players. I underestimated the improvement of the Excluded Room + Orphaned Doors calculation:

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That means that players using the latest version of the assist were getting a 15% boost. (25% over 10%). However, the time and/or gem cost to complete the content is still high:

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image848×194 7.99 KB

Leaving this in the game for 30 days would give players on average 4.5 perfect runs extra per month (roughly equal to 1 dragon egg). The improved version of the tool has only been live for 2 days (not even a whole week), so mostly we’ve been operating at 5% extra efficiency (Excluded Rooms only, 15% vs 10%).

I really don’t think that players finishing this content without spending gems in just under a year instead of over 2 years, or players spending gems getting to save 8k gems and 28 days necessitated an immediate action.

6 Likes
158

This, so much this. Maybe give out bonus Dragonite if you don’t trigger any traps but give a set amount out per battle, along with shards and diamonds. Also let Dragoniite and Cursed Runes should be part of the daily deals and adventure board as opposedd to minor trait stones mid to end gamers don’t need, or those god awful “Kingdom Helpers” that don’t actually help your kingdoms. (Seriously? Ingots for weapons I don’t have aren’t going to help when I’m Pet Blocked or Mythic blocked from powering up a kingdom.)

@Hawx: Agreed, hell thhe wholeerework was a terrible idea, the old way was much better and less annoying.

1 Like
160

Patterns in the Dungeon mode - noticed!
1.5 year without brown or red Tower of Doom - completely ignored!

Nice work. Keep going.

17 Likes
161

After giving this some more thought, the kneejerk reaction makes me think three things were not (fully) understood by the dev team:

  • The patterns resulting from the ruleset they had come up with.

This also implies that little actual testing and analysis was done (by the programmers/paid testers) and that this was another ‘good enough’ implementation. It would have been trivial enough to write a minimal standalone version of the dungeon generation ruleset and come up with an automated test for it that ‘plays’ the dungeon and use the resulting data for analysis.

  • The grip they have on the economy.

There is no need to economically punish someone when you can arbitrarily raise or lower wages, inflate or deflate and introduce or remove currencies. There was no need to upset people. Just come up with any arbitrary dragonite sink and everyone wins (you included). You, as developers, literally have it backward.

…unless you believe something dramatic has happened and you feel the need to act immediately. This leads me to:

  • The impact the discovery of the ruleset, or part of it, would have on the dragonite economy. Not understanding the dragonite economy as a whole.

Unless there’s some kind of exploit instantly giving you thousands of dragonite, the dragons will take many months to complete - no matter what.

So what’s the point of completely removing the guts of the dungeon system on a Friday, less than a week after discovering a rule ‘saving’ you as many gems in a month as the excellent world event guides do every week…?

Even with the tool, you’d have lost 70% of the time. Even if there were more undiscovered rules, daily dragonite income can not exceed a fixed maximum.

Will I be allowed to see future events and troops 3 months from now? I mean… almost everyone with an interest in the game organises their resource expenditure and acquisition around knowing when which troops and weapons will be released or rotated in and out.

Why not randomise World Event scoring every day?
Or runestone locations?

A dungeon ‘rework’ that was meant to introduce more gameplay elements was demoted to a glorified slot machine as soon as those gameplay elements were discovered.

Another failed attempt at game design, testing, analysis, implementation, and community management.

Congratulations, I hope your financials continue their downward trend, because at this point, I can’t help but say you deserve it.

32 Likes
162

Guys, I see so many nice but useless proposals, they won’t consider anything you say, the only language they understand is money language!
Stop spending money for this game! Hurt their finances and they will listen!

4 Likes
163

Very Much This.

As it stands right now, an equivalent implementation would be being told the order of battles for the day, and whether we got Dragonite or which traps/altars are active for each battle…

Players’ only real choice: Upstairs, Stay, or Downstairs
:person_facepalming: :vulcan_salute:

9 Likes
164

Congratz, it was still rigged though.
Someone else answered they didnt get a perfect run at all and I have only seen you saying that you got a perfect run doing that combination.
But if you have gotten perfect runs using door 1,2,3,4,5,6 then other have too, but most havn’t.

3 Likes
165

So, 2 days in and back to gritting my teeth and playing the Dungeon as a daily obligation; back to seemingly-endless streaks of failed runs that I have no control over; back to feeling pointlessly frustrated at the start of each day.

I’d like GoW to delight me more; the way Gnome-a-Palooza did. But the devs seem to be leaning hard into frustration as a game mechanism – because Dark Souls, and players loved that, right? – without realizing that frustration only works when there’s an opportunity to overcome it by improving your skills.

I fear the upcoming and as-yet-unspecified Halloween event is going to be yet another random grind and, gah: give us something fun to do, please. Try delight rather than disappointment.

6 Likes
166

today mine was the left 4 doors. I can never get a perfect run. My first time playing it was when I saw the update message and I still never got a perfect run but was rewarded the next day with 50 dragonite why?

167

Are you doing the campaign? There was dragonite in the rewards.

168

I’ve had two. From what I can tell, it wasn’t impossible, just much more unlikely that other paths :rage:

169

Honestly, if I wasn’t lurking this topic I would have reacted to yesterday’s notification the same way, i.e. “I don’t know what you’re talking about but thanks for some free Dragonite.”

Also, we Switch players JUST got the 6.5 update Thursday, literally just one day before the servers got the fix.

172

How many others in your Guild are participating with you?

(This is coming from a “guild of one” who generally caps out at the tier 1 offer, if any)

173

if it helps: (sarcasm)

174

Interesting how they had time to “fix” (rig differently, probably) dungeons but not World Event scoring.

We opted to not aim for 12 because f that.

7 Likes
175

This world event is extremely low scoring. Our guild has a mandatory buy up of Tier 3 and we normally close by Friday. Its Sunday and a few have bought Tier 4, Tier 5 and I myself Tier 7 with a score of 2k and we’re still not closed