Gnome-a-Palooza reward formula

Community Content
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Since the official announcement is rather vague about this, current community research seems to suggest this handling:

1.) “Speed”

Take the time between the server sending your battle setup and the server receiving the battle result. If this is less than 50 seconds, your gnome rewards get scaled down to [seconds taken] / 50.

Example: If your battle (including loading times) takes 10 seconds, you’ll receive 10 / 50 = 20% of the full gnome reward.

2.) “Easy”
Take your team score and the opponent team score. If yours is higher, your gnome rewards get scaled down to [their team score] / [your team score].

Example: If your team score is 15000, your opponent team score is 3750, you’ll receive 3750 / 15000 = 25% of the full gnome reward.

Whenever “Speed” and “Easy” both result in a reward reduction, the more severe one applies. In the examples above it would be a 20% payout instead of a 25% payout. Reward quantities can’t go below 1, so as long as a reward type shows up you’ll always get at least one of it (e.g. vault keys and diamonds).

Jewel Gnome always drops the full 20 jewels, which is likely a bug that will eventually get corrected. Daemon Gnome drops a far lower ratio of chaos shards, the reduction missing for jewels probably ended up there in some way by accident. If GaP ends during a battle, full gnome rewards are given.

The upper gnome reward limit for a GaP is 15 x 60 / 50 = 18 full gnome team rewards. You get the closest to this hard cap by playing each battle for exactly 50 seconds, against a team that is at least as strong as you. If you go faster you’ll receive less, because you’ll be spending more time between battles.

Configuration is server side, meaning subject to change at any time.

TL;DR: If you are in it for the vault keys, play as fast as you can, during vault events only. If you just want the gnome rewards, play against tough teams and drag out your battles to as close to 50 seconds as possible, finish quickly if there are only gnomes you don’t want the rewards from.

Edit: Various refinements. Credit to @Cairnso, @Shadowfeld and @Dust_Angel for providing data.

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Amazing. Less than a day.

Thank you and to everyone who contributed in the testing :heart:

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So much for being tuned around the 1% of the 1% doing 6 battles per minute.

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On that: is there any reason to not be in it for the vault keys? At least for running gnome-a-paloozas during Vault weekend when the vault key drop rate is higher and when we also get the pity keys for killing N gnomes?

Vault Keys have value – each one multiples to 4x gnome rewards, although these are not strictly equivalent to regular gnome rewards. But is the value from getting more vault keys worth the cost of getting reduced rewards from the gnome-a-palooza? My gut feel is yes, but can we quantify this?

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It depends on what you are looking for, the reward pool isn’t quite the same. Personally, I’d go for vault keys, and only on a vault weekend, I suspect almost all other players feel the same. However, there might be situations where you rather want a pile of glory, or even souls, those can’t really be obtained well from the vault.

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It was the 1-battle-per-minute part we should have paid attention to :slight_smile:

The “speed” part of this also, I think, puts the lie to the claim in the original post that the 6-battles-per-minute player would still earn more from gnome rewards than the 1-battle-per-minute player. Not so; the 6/minute player will be getting 1/6th the rewards per battle as the 1/minute player.

(And in reality it’ll be less than this, right, because there are time overheads to fast play. The 6/minute player is going to be spending more time between battles at the explore screen clicking into the next battle, more time post-battle skipping the rewards animation, and less time in battle, than the 1/minute player. And it’s the battle time that the speed scaling applies to.)

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So according to these geniuses you should only be playing 1 battle per minute? These devs really are a complete joke.

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So, basically everyone that will ever craft a GaP will at some point be affected, because it is ludicrous to think that someone would (at least before this nerf) craft a GaP and then not complete a single battle within it the 15 minute timer in less than a minute on that or any future GaP. And the “1% of players” referred to the obscure fact that only about 1% of players have ever even crafted a GaP?

Called it.

Also wait…

If loading times are included in the reduction calc, how is it ever “worth it” to do fewer battles closer to the 1 minute mark?

If you clear battles in 15 seconds with load times and get 25% rewards, but do it 4 times, you’ll get 100% of the rewards for that minute. Menuing between battles and rounding might take you down to, lets say, 85-90% (even if we account for a full two seconds on average per menu and 4 BpM) of what you would earn versus doing 1 battle per minute with the same menu timing. But you’ll also get four times the vault keys and four times the gnome kill count on your vault key counter.

If load times are not included in the reduction calc, the front end fake loading bar included at the start of every battle takes about 4 seconds. So our previous example (4 battles per minute) would only get 73.3% of the rewards (before menuing) and 1 battle per minute would get about 93% (before menuing). That is a huge difference, and if this were the case, some people might consider actually playing slow battles if this were the case. But if we count the entire fake loading bar plus trait fires and the victory animation (everything between clicking To Battle and your rewards being displayed) as part of the battle time, I don’t see any scenario where you’d want to intentionally slow yourself down. Just think of it as an incidental resource drop reward cap for those 15 minutes.

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If you factor in the standard battle rewards you’ll probably end up with more “gem value” by doing 6 battles per minute, so it’s not entirely wrong. There’s some gold (doubled due to GaP), a traitstone, some champion xp, a few souls. I suspect that’s not really what most players are after when running GaP though.

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It seems to be the time between the server sending your client the battle information and the server receiving back the battle results from your client. Which would include the client side battle launch animations and half of the communication roundtrip. Getting shown the loot and moving forward to the next battle is likely not taken into account, so you lose out a bit when playing more battles.

One prominent data point was 38 glory from a glory gnome in Explore 1 (credit to @Cairnso). The lowest amount a glory gnome can drop regularly is 200 glory, this was less than 20%, you won’t be running enough battles in a minute to stack that up to 100%. This might need some further refinement when more data becomes available this weekend.

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My biggest problem with this nerf is that it’s based on 6 battles per minute as being possible, which it isn’t.

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My biggest problem with this nerf is that it punishes a player for having sometimes spent years grinding for a high team score via Kingdom Upgrades and all that entails, and in other cases putting together a cool deck that can beat enemies easily.

Progression rewards punishment.

That is an awful game design, and sadly I am now quitting the game I once highly enjoyed. You may say well it only affects GAP. For now, yes. In time, I would not be surprised to see this system implemented into more game types. The devs seem to be on a path to burn the game down in favor of the almighty micro transactions.

I remember when Gems of War was a great free game, that had an excellent balance of being free to play and progress vs pay to win. So much in fact that you actually wanted to support the team creating it, because there are few true ‘free to play’ games that didn’t always shove pay to win in your face.

Now, when your team is too efficient, it’s a “how dare you spend all those hours grinding, slowly building up your account to finish a battle quickly!” Strip the rewards!

I doubt any devs will see this, but this isn’t how you keep people playing your game. Take it from someone who has played for many years on multiple accounts/platforms, and supported you financially along the way.

At least I mostly enjoyed the time while it lasted, it’s just too bad it had to end on a sour note.

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I have the same conserns. Getting blame for my high level and higher stats. For too fast playing.

And this game already punishes me outside GAP. The gold rewards from pvp are significantly lower for high end players. I think this is one reason why less and less play pvp.

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Shouldn’t that 60 be 30 at most? Kafka stated 2 battles a minute wont be affected.

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Raise your hand if you’re getting tired / whatever bad word you want to use instead of tired …

… About a match-3 game forcing people to do this much math instead of having simpler goddamn functions and/or explaining this for us.

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Can somebody create a poll if they can do 6 battles/minute during GAP. If yes, what team. I can’t do it with 2 ironhawks, SS, and DD. Greed version will always be slower

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To reach 6 battles per minute you need Dust Devil/Ironhawk x3, no gnomes (so no troops above 20hp), controller, full dedication, no lag and a little bit of luck (because even with all of that maximum speed varies in range 5.8-6.0 battles per minute).
Sister Superior or Greed - it’s an additional cast, you can’t reach max speed with that.

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Can you use 3 ironhawks in GAP? Outside GAP, I do. But I never tried during GAP.

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You can use whatever you want in GaP, there are no restrictions :grin:
It’s not so effective though - any gnome with more than 20hp will ruin your speed.

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They’ve completely switched gears from focusing on putting out a great game that was a breath of fresh air compared to all the F2P trash out there, to leaning into FOMO and the psychological tricks casinos use to separate money from addicts.

The problem is the vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t use this forum, or any game site or social media for that matter, so they’ll probably keep making money, at least for a while.

The dark side is more profitable. Gotta keep those shareholders happy!

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