Portal Drop Rates - the Why, the How, and the Solution

Could we please get an explanation why the effective drop rates are now suddenly much worse than before, massively nerfing treasure yield?

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Wow, this is a surprise. And here I was wondering where all the treasure troops went from my chaos portals.

Definitely shades of the Cedric Medal fiasco. Given that they went radio silent in that episode as well, I’m guessing they’re working on a fix. In the meantime, save those chaos shards and guild seals!

This stuff was discovered at the end of the business day in Australia. It is now the start of the next business day. The radio silence is probably because nobody was in the office to test or fix anything.

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Office hours are back in effect, and I’m here to tell you that this is something I have flagged with everyone’s detailed break downs to our developers at large. We are in a lot of meetings with 505 this week which may mean that our response to this is a little delayed, and for that, I apologise.

As soon as I have a definitive answer on what we will be doing I will share it with you all. I am sorry for the inconvenience, and I’m doing what I can to get to the bottom of this ASAP.

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If portals were dropping more than expected treasures it would already be fixed.

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Waiting and seeing I guess. I’m so grateful this was released after the weekly faction assault, that whole thing would’ve been ruined with the current drop rates.

This is demonstrably untrue not just in general, but in this specific situation. The portals were dropping more than expected treasures for a very, very long time. The problem was only with the displayed rates, but in the process of fixing that they’ve managed to change the actual rates too.

I think an issue that makes the “if it were benefiting players it would already be fixed” line not work here is players don’t universally want treasures or troops: some people, like me, don’t rush to hit 500 ASAP, so I don’t have an abundance of shards and I’m not in a hurry to mythic everything. So “too many troops” is actually sort of working in my favor. One day it won’t be, but that’s not going to be soon.

iirc, and this is a while ago, I believe the UK? was bringing in that all random drop tables HAD to have a correct and accurate representative data set of what was available in that loot box after the issues that happened with EA.

Im not sure if it has been fully introduced as law yet, but was discussions a while ago (earlier this year) in the gaming communities about it.

We are taking the time to start working on a further fix now.

We were calculating the drop rates on the 70% to 30% split, but the actual rates were closer to a 55% to 45% split. As such, the rates in-game now look different from what the community originally observed, due to us changing the rates to their intended 70% to 30% split.

We will be changing the drop rates to the following:

Common 3.55%
Rare 11.45% <---- This one is lower than current, but higher than the “old” version.
Ultra 7.5% <---- Everything from here down is the same as was displayed before (in the “old” version).
Epic 4.2%
Legendary 2.4%
Mythic 0.9%

I’ll let you know when these changes go live.

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Uhhh…

It was 45% troop/55% treasure. Changing it to 70% troop/30% treasure means a colossal nerf to treasure troop rate (the one that matters, if we want high-level delving to be a thing), regardless of what the exact breakdown of the 30% is.

If this change stands, there’s no incentive for the average player to try and gather treasures for hoard level.

These statements are fundamentally at odds.

For those that missed it, here is the calculation based on explanation of the bug and massive sampling that is very likely the “true rates” we were getting for since delves existed:

Anything that is not these rates, or at least close to these rates, would constitute a change.

The rates shown here:

Are not significantly better than “stated rates” from since the tables went up. You only shifted some common treasure into rare from the “stated rates”. “Stated rate” treasure yields an average expectation of 21.075 hoard xp per pull and … whatever this is supposed to be yields an average expectation of 21.6825 hoard xp per pull. “True rate” treasure yields 30.225 hoard xp per pull. Thats not even close.

The only way treasure xp can be “about the same” with a 30% treasure distribution would be a sizeable buff to higher rarity treasures. The only way treasures can be “about the same” as before is for their total rate to equal about 54.2%.

Edit: clarified “hoard xp”

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Yeah I’m gonna point out that the obvious solution is to change it to 55% treasure/45% troops, or at least just 50/50. That keeps things the same as before. Anything else is going to really, really hurt.

As it is, I can’t get enough treasures to have any reasonable hope at faction team runs - and that’s at 300, since I’ve given up on the idea of doing 500 until further updates. I’m just trying to get a level 300 run done on each delve before I progress past that level.

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This is infuriating. A 70-30 split on troops-treasures is not at all the way things used to work. The things I actually want to type probably involve violating forums guidelines, so I will leave it at that for now.

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I think this combined with the arrival of new guild guardians says exciting things for the fate of F2P players.

I’m going to start hoarding Guild seals now.

First of all, thank you for keeping us updated throughout the process.

Please don’t change the rates to what you’ve stated here. As others have pointed out, this is a massive change to what we’ve experienced since delves were introduced, and it was repeatedly promised that the treasure rate would remain unchanged/not be nerfed.

I spend a lot of in-game resources raising hoard levels to do pure faction delves. This is a gigantic step in the wrong direction, drastically increasing the shard cost of raising your hoard levels. It’s definitely a demoralizing change, and it doesn’t have an upside.

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The “line” totally does work in this case too. The current rates see a huge nerf to expected high lv treasures. If say we were instead getting 10% sacred treasures I guarantee you the problem would already be fixed. If fact it would have been fixed yesterday.

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There have been many many cases in the past where beneficial bugs get fixed within minutes or hours of discovery unlike the unbeneficial ones which take days/weeks.

This is only partly true. We were getting higher than advertised amounts of low lv treasures that are almost worthless but as for legendary and mythic treasures we were actually getting the advertised rates.

With the new advertised rates (and supposedly actual rates) the high lv treasures droprates have been cut almost in half.

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Since delves came out, they have been an end game goal, with 1 reoccurring complaint - 500 Pure Faction is too hard.

Potions were added to make events in general easier for mid game players, and had the side effect of making delves easier when released or during Tuesday event. We were told its not the solution.

Levels 11-15 were added to the game, giving a 50% buff to faction teams IF it was linked to that faction, with the kingdom bonus also being there for using kingdom based teams (doesnt help half the pure faction teams much due to using multiple copies). This was locked behind deeds so we cant instantly do anything, and instead have to wait months to finish delves, but still requires a lot of luck, RNG to go our way, and insane hoard levels.

Now, you finally acknowledge that there was a bug with the drop rates, something that was clear to everyone that paid attention to them and said you would fix it and keep it at what it was we were getting.

Instead, you decide we get too much, and then nerf it massively so that we get even less of the treasures we need to increase our hoard levels, which is the only way that we can beat the 500 pure faction teams, as that was the only solution that was given to us.

Now, I understand this may seem like an attack on Salty, and please do not take it that way as it is not intended, but was the community even listened to?? You took what we wanted, what we were reassured we would get, and then said we dont need all of that, here have half and kept half for yourself.

I have been playing this game consistently for 5 years, been at end game for a significant portion of that time, have been in top level guilds competing and have defended the game a lot over that time frame from frankly idiotic decisions where it seems like the player base was not listened to.

From here on out, do everyone a favor, and do not listen to our feedback. Every time it is listened to, it is then twisted into a different version which screws us over even more.

Now to wait for the 27/30 GW change that has some condition on it as well that makes it useless to everyone, and 0 benefit at all and nothing like it was intended.

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