They choose to go with the word Celebration as well. I am not gonna believe ever that this was intentional. People doing 1000s of battles (wasting their time) just to maybe see one Cursed Gnome - if they are lucky…
This is not how you would want to run your game. This is madness.
This reminds me a lot of an appearance rate issue two months ago, Devil battlecrashers being hard capped at 2. The community tested this extensively, nobody ever got a third battlecrasher, even after several hundred thousand combined attempts. And yet we received this response from you after reporting it:
I’ll be frank here, I don’t believe you. The Cursed Gnome rate is broken. It hasn’t been looked at by anybody. You are just making up a story it’s actually working, like two months ago. In your defense, you probably couldn’t get hold of anybody from “the team” and tried to defuse the situation by posting something. It’s not really helping though, players are wasting hours upon hours grinding on a wild gnome chase that has next to no chance of success. Being honest might not be received uniformly well but it would at least restrict the collateral damage.
The funny thing about data analysis is that the data will always tell you something worked, depending upon how you phrase the question to it. The top 2% of grinders probably have found more of the Cursed Gnomes. But look around!
This team seriously needs a player experience advocate.
As a player, I consider myself to be middle of the pack. Not one of the hardcore 2% grinders but far from casual too.
Six days I’ve played this “Celebration” event, in my usual midrange fashion and I can sum up the results in one word.
Disappointing.
I challenge you @Kafka or @Nimhain to sit down in the players seat for just one hour. Play explore and let us know how it feels.
Data is helpful, but fun keeps people playing.
Data is one thing. But the reality of it is something else altogether.
I won’t waste my time chasing cursed gnomes, and I lost my initial enthusiasm for the update.
The almost free 1 time recipes are great, the rest is a major disappointment.
I would believe that the cursed gnome appearance rate is indeed increased this week, absent any evidence to the contrary. Most people seem to be complaining that the rate is low, which certainly is the case, but this doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been boosted over its baseline.
Presumably, the soulforge upgrade isn’t meant to be completed within this week for most people, but this was not well communicated, and the boosted rate is low enough that most casual players will probably feel put off trying to hunt these gnomes.
I think most people would have been happier to have, say, a guaranteed cursed gnome bait after a certain number of battles daily rather than a boosted rate when the rate is this low, because there would be something concrete and deterministic to strive for in that case.
There was one report on the forums of this happening, though it might have been due to reset shenanigans which carried over to the kingdom pass. As a beta tester during that period, I can confirm that one tester did report getting three devils on one day, though I don’t know anything about the circumstances surrounding that report.
@Kafka , the appearance rate of this gnome differs among the players. I hear that someone already upgraded forge to L20 and crafted troop & all weapons. But alot more (including myself) spending hours of constant farming in the exp1 without single meet of him. The other gnomes appears normally, even verses gnomes. More like that you devs teasing us
Why did you just insult every player in the game. What a joke to tell us everything is working fine on drop rate. So drop rate is to be zero. Cause zero is what nearly everyone gets everyday. Are you seriously not going to listen to anyone ? You are going to lose a big part of your player base feeding us this crap. Fix your drop rate today. Quit making excuses or saying everything is fine. It is not fine. Not even close. Kafka get your head out of the sand and listen !!
It was I.
On the very first day Flesh Horror battlecrashers appeared, I had three of them relatively soon, but none thereafter. Only two on subsequent days and no other person I know of admitted finding three ever - either it was a glitch or extreme stroke luck that nobody else encountered.
Wow. So now we go off topic. Hello your player base is extremly upset and frustrated and you act like it is not big deal. Frustrated player leave. The newer to the game the faster. Already lost guildmates due to update. How can is upgrade my soulforge if each and everyday I see ZERO cursed gnomes. For days. Playing quite a few hours a day. Gets really frustrating and only makes one move on. You do a great update as far as idea and concept. Then complelty ruin it by having the main currency non existing. Why ? Then double up on it and say everything is working as it should ??? Way to really upset your player base. Fix your drop rate period. Fix your game please. Listen
Yes please listen us my guildmates have problem with searching cursed gnome we spend few hours playing game and not having single gnome please fix this and extend event for us
Yup, backed up that none of the other testers found 3 outside of that one outlier circumstance. It’s why after the content was released I tried to set expectations on the forums of 2x per day due to beta testing.
Welp; today being a pet rescue day, if there really was any realistic chance of catching Cursed Gnomes I would be playing the heck out of Explore.
As it stands, though: what’s the point? I don’t feel motivated to play and have pretty much checked out after completing the daily tasks.
Was the 7-day boost supposed to engage players? If so: way to go, total failure.
Not in any way that is noticeable to players it hasn’t. Stop looking at data; start looking at the user experience.
This claim is likely incorrect.
Why? Because you very likely correctly pointed out the accurate culprit at play in one of your posts last week. Citing this post,
The very low drop rates are very likely working exactly as designed. This the exact analogy I would present here. In fact, the base economy in PQ3 significantly revolves exactly around this exact concept.
Case in point, here is a help graphic for a low-level resource in PQ3:
Translations (from PQ3-ese → GOW-ese),
So, in GoW terms, Drakeweed is a resource needed to evolve things from 1-star Green to 2-star Dark Blue.
Where to find this item:
The analogies are pretty much 1-to-1 here to GoW. Drakeweed can show up as a possible daily Adventure Board reward, there is a recipe in the Soulforge to directly create it, and there is “a small chance” to farm one from the relevant explore boss chest.
“A small chance” = technically farmable, in the most technical of definitions, at least Heart of Rage rare. And this is for a very low level resource. Can one drop from the right chest? Sure. You can also pull a Mythic with a single key in GoW. A player shouldn’t ever count on doing that.
Where is the only realistic way to get this resource? The shop, of course, using Gems or real money.
And now, that mechanic has found its way into GoW via Cursed Runes. A currency so rare, that the only reliable way to sanely obtain this currency is to buy the Cursed Gnome Bait once it is available, by design.
Hence, “not a bug”, as super annoying as the monetization concept is.
At this point, I’m left wondering if the PQ3 early access is partially serving a beta test for monetization concepts to import into GoW. If so, there’s likely even more severe monetization coming where Cursed Runes came from. That shouldn’t shock anyone though by now.
Hey folks, we’re still passing your feedback along to the team.
Someone mentioned that the Soulforge may not have been intended to be completely upgraded within this week and perhaps we could have communicated this better.
They are correct, this content is longer term content and we don’t expect most players to finish levelling up their Soulforge quickly. Gems of War has been around for 7 years and we want longer term content in the game so we have goals to work towards in the future while playing too.
The Cursed Gnome appearance chance is low intentionally, however it was raised based on feedback. Hardcore players will always progress more quickly than middle - more casual players. But all of the content is available to everyone. This is also why we do things like have the scheduled 24 hour pet Rescues, so that adventurers who play more casually can still earn all the pets.
We’re hoping to post about another update to Cursed Gnomes today, when we do it will go in the official news section and there will be an in game mail for everyone explaining as well 
Was there a % mentioned in the last boost? This time it’s 50% but to what? Is this more or less than the gone boost? I used to do crossword puzzles, then someone told me to play GOW instead…
It’s not just upgrading the forge - at this rate, stuff that people really wanted for a long time (like being able to craft forge scrolls) is still as much out of reach as before.
I am sure I’m going to play GoW for a long time but there should be progress - not in a few months or years but when there’s new content. Doesn’t have to be all of it at once but I can’t even afford to level up the forge once with the runes I have.
I still only got that one cursed gnome (and two or so in GaPs but since they drop basically nothing… 
) and while I haven’t been farming hard, I played a fair share of battles by now.
If there is no progress, people are just going to give up. Like I did, actually. For now it’s a non update for me as nothing has significantly changed for my game.
I haven’t completely given up hope but would like to remark that devs shouldn’t consider the 1% or so of hardcore farmers that much and cripple everyone to the point of no results just in order to have those few not finish everything in a short amount of time.
Basically this. Nothing to add.
At the current rate the average player won’t even get it upgraded within the next years. Which would be okay if this really were “content”, like delves. It’s just a shop though, offering resources made artificially scarce (e.g. forge scrolls) at truly horrible exchange rates, all gated on top by the very same currency required to unlock it. From player perspective, leveling up the forge isn’t a goal, saving up enough resources to buy something in there in useful amounts is. 99.9% of all players won’t ever get there.
I should probably write something up explaining the math and how ridiculous the result is. I’m not sure I can scrape together enough motivation, this feels too much like a lost cause.
Edit: I really liked the “perhaps we could have communicated this better” part, it makes it feel a very tiny bit less like a lost cause. Then again, I might just be getting numb from all the facepalming. Anyway, here’s the math, plus some more.
It took almost two weeks for “somebody” at Infinity Plus to realize that. Advertising as a “celebration” hidden money in a haystack and eagerly taking great credit for that, when in actuality the “money” is just 1 cent is neither smart nor it shows a respect for players’ time. To do that as a Xmas “gift” brings it to another level of being out of touch with reality… and your own game.
I know, I know… 50 gems in apology should fix it.
