Eventually or Soon™ a new gnome will be added to the game. Great right? The more the better? Not exactly.
Everytime a new gnome gets added, a player’s chances to find a pet gnome drops by 30 matches. When Pet Gnomes were first added the drop rate was 1:60 matches… When a new gnome gets added it’ll be 1:180. Thus making it 1/3 as available as when first introduced.
Unlike any other Gnomes. Pet Gnomes are the only ones that can trigger a pet rescue (except for the 24 hour events.) Every other gnome gives a resource that can be found in other areas of the game.
This issue is exasperated by the fact that every time a new pet gets added to the rescues. Your ability to find the pet you need is also lessened.
I’m not sure what the count is for pets available in rescues. But let’s say it’s 60. And your one Snow Bunny short of making it mythic. When the new gnome gets added you’ll have a 1:10,800 chance of triggering a Snow Bunny pet rescue in a PvP or an Arena match.
Given the changes to the game with 4.6 motivating folks to not play PvP. And prior patches motivating folks not to do arena. Both coming well after Pet Gnomes were added to the game.
It definitely qualifies for rebalancing.
Some possible solutions for the issue:
Triple the basket awards available in the shop and from winning the pet battles. Pet Gnomes are 1/3 available as they were originally introduced. So therefore their “rewards” should now be 9/3.
Give Souls and Glory gnomes the ability to trigger pet rescues. (given that for most end gamers it’s disappointing to trigger a glory or a soul gnome.)
Increase the Drop rate for all gnomes. Make it 1:15 matches all the time and during vault weekends just adjust the ability to get vault keys. (Given that the rewards have been nerfed naturally by the inclusion of other pets over time they won’t need to be adjusted at all.
Why this effects you the player:
Pet Gnomes are the only gnomes required to level up your kingdom stars. (Sure there are Cosmetic and Faction pets, but I don’t believe the intention was for either to be relied on to get kingdom stars.)
Gem justification:
Personally I’m much more likely to spend gems when I’m a few pets short than when I’m 10-15 copies from Mythic rarity. Because the Factions have become such a gem sink. I’ve decided to not use gems on pets anymore due to me being months away from Mythic Rarity anyway. Just 2-3 months ago I was using at least 4k gems a month towards pets. That’s unsustainable… Even for a player who is happy to spend money on the game.
If I knew I was only a week or days away from making my pet Mythic. I’d be much more inclined to spend gems. You can’t expect your players to use gems on cosmetic pets and natural rescue pets. Otherwise, you’ll be spending time and money to code cosmetic pets that no one (outside of a few whales) end up wasting gems on. Pets are a nice addition, they shouldn’t be a huge gem sink. If your plan for pets is to make it PTP (pay to pet) then keep on keeping on. You’ll turn off a lot of players that way. But at least I said my peace and now if no resolution is done within a reasonable time frame. You’ll then make it clear that PTP is the plan moving forward.
Please let me know if any of my math is off. I’ll happily edit the post to make it more factual outside of my pet estimate of 60. I clarified already that I was guessing at a count.
Yes. I was alluding to this in another thread today but this spells it out more clearly.
Pets need an overhaul because they trickle in so slowly, even if you’re spending money the concept of using them for kingdom power feels like an unreachable goal. I’ve caved and spent gems/money on pets before, but now the goal feels so distant I don’t see the point.
Let the whales spend on deeds and badges/medals. Pets have had their time as the carrot.
I am glad this was posted i 100 percent agree this needs to be addressed i liked the idea of soul glory gnome trigger as it stands now the days a event pet is up you cant even trigger a pet gnome and even on the days its not we have to wait a hour to do another. Where as adding a new gnome will make it even more difficult to get pets as the number of pets grows getting ones you need gets harder and harder what are there now 34 kingdoms and we need 31 copies of each and some kingdoms have 2 pets. Thanks for the work you do Salty Khellendros
I can wait on mech gnome would rather keep the current ones until we hear something dont be so quick to wish for something until you understand the implications
Nobody fully understands them, except for the developers.
Also, the Mecha Gnome is already in the game files.
I haven’t proposed anything new that doesn’t exist yet.
The ability to find the pets you need gets worse every passing day as the pool of pets and gnomes grow. I really hope the devs have some future solution in the works other than us desperately pouring gems into the store for them.
Something I’ve been wondering about pets for a while - does it seem to anyone else that the daily pool of possible pets might be limited? For example, one day we might see Whelp 3 or 4 times, then the next day it’s Snow Bunny, etc. It’s made me wonder if the possible pets on any given day are limited to only a few possibilities.
I realize this may only be noticed by very active guilds that have rescues running most of the time. If it’s true, it would make @awryan’s numbers worse than they already are.
You think the gnomes are weighted? It’s possible. But if it is, cool, make pet gnomes appear 50% of the 1:30 matches.
Only the 1:30 drop rate is disclosed from to devs. Outside of rarity of troops in chests and chaos orbs. I doubt they “weight” stuff.
Drops Souls or Vault Keys with a higher chance of earning a Vault Key than a Pet Gnome
Jewel Gnome
Drops Jewels, Diamonds, Shards or a Vault Key
These are in approximate order of rarity."
From the last sentence I presume this is intended to mean we will see Treasure Gnomes the most often on average, then Pet Gnomes etc. I wonder if this is actually the case though?
When gnomes first released was it just Pet and Treasure? I can’t remember. But if what you say is true then with the addition of Glory, Soul and Jewel we would be seeing SIGNIFICANTLY less pet gnomes. I just don’t feel like we get only 1/4 the pet gnomes now that we used to get.
Something has seemed “off” to me about Pet Gnome appearance rate for quite a while now.
A few months ago I could easily find them and trigger 10 pet rescues a day given enough grindage.
Recently they “seem” much rarer, could be just unlucky RNG though.
I am in the top 10 of PvP players on PS4 every week, so activity level is fairly constant.
One of the more recent streams, Salty did say that the devs are aware of the issue and are considering ways to address the problem. If I remember right, a potential solution was to allow the player to choose from a pool of possible rescues when one spawns was being considered (absolutely nothing concrete yet, though).
If there isn’t a QoL light update for the holidays, the next update after 4.6 should finally be the big PvP update as there are no more legacy systems that are left to convert after 4.6 launches. If the standard PvP gameflow is altered then, I expect the pet rescue solution (whatever it may be) to be implemented with that update.
Well that sells it for me. My apology folks. My taking the drop rate and multiplying it by 6 is clearly wrong because Fleg doesn’t feel like he’s seeing 2/3 less pet gnomes since they were released.
Hopefully he isn’t just basing it off the amount of pet rescues his guild gets each day. Because there’s no way to track how many pet gnomes each member is actually seeing.
Yeah, the wording in the game guide is misleading I think.
We have no real idea of how the weighting of each Gnome appearance is.
I see useless Soul and Jewel Gnomes just as often as the others
Khellendros
