For those curious.
By the way, they never reimbursed Yasmine’s Chosen attempts. The official line was that this same issue did not occur with Yasmine’s Chosen, but it was also admitted that they didn’t have logs going back that far and didn’t have any way to compensate. Not having logs going back that far means they themselves had absolutely no way to verify if Yasmine’s Chosen was or wasn’t in chests, but somehow they knew the issue probably didn’t occur with Yasmine’s Chosen, so I guess its a good thing everyone just trusted them on that at the time.
After a different, unrelated drop issue about a year later was (again) correctly called out by the data sent to the client, it was unceremoniously removed under the grounds that it was “old and inaccurate” despite getting updates pushed consistently as the chests contents changed and constantly being used to call out drop issues.
FYI, I have at least one DM exchange where I brought a drop error (a minor change I just happened to notice, but I paid them the courtesy to not have it blow up publically) to the attention of the devs quietly citing these logs, they admitted and fixed the error (it was apparently an issue with how the new tool they used injected drop rates), and thanked me for bringing it to their attention. Well, a certain dev I later added to the conversation verified explained and fixed the issue, as my original point of contact stated directly and unequivocally to me that they had not changed the drop rates and then explained to me how drops work and then ignored my follow up attempts. I’m not going to name names here because this part is irrelevant, but this is the same sort of procedure I’ve gone through with many different participants any time drop rates are brought up.
Now, I know that the data sent to the client was not ever “proof” of drop rates because this data wasn’t actually used to roll drops, but there was a ton of circumstantial evidence to support that they were both generated by the same source (case in point: there is no universe where a dev would manually continue to update this unused list correctly week to week for years through all of the various minor drop rate changes, and even through big intended changes like when event keys finally switched from “mostly kingdom” to “kingdom only” this list remained accurate). I know that, if this tool, for example, existed during the delve portal drop rate fiasco, it probably would not have correctly reported the “true drop rates” either because in that case the mechanism for rolling the drops was malfunctioning and the data fed to generate said drops was technically “correct”, ie,. it would have received the same data being sent to the client to be shown in the drop rate box, which was incorrect for delve portals for over a year.
Just pointing this out because after all this, it took us months after that to even get a drop rate box in game at all (which is subject to some pretty unfortunate rounding on some of the displays that is very much statistically significant), and it was readily admitted to be a CYA measure in a dev QA. We continued to have drop issues after this (most of them being something being in chests when it shouldn’t, having varying resolutions from “yeah just keep the thing” to “heres 2 VIP keys but lose the thing no wait I mean actually lets trade it for another thing of the same rarity and keep the 2 VIP keys” to “what drop error?”). And after all this there is still no way for players to do their due diligence and check, in game, if something is on a drop table or not, and what kind of odds they have to pull it. There also used to be a countdown timer to show exactly when the next chest change would be that was also removed.
As an aside, I’m not even sure if this is still a thing or not because I don’t generally do a lot of event chest pulls, but in the past if an event troop was in both the glory pack and event keys at the same time, it was given triple weight over other troops in the event keys. Meaning if the event troop is epic, on average you’d pull 3 of that epic per one of every other one. This was confirmed by a dev on the forums here at some point as being a thing (good luck even finding the post, I believe it was by Nimhain), but it is still not nor has this ever been properly communicated in game.
So yeah, you should probably not let this one slide.
I hope people get to trade their Archproxy drops for Weaver drops eventually, but the ultimate outcome of this either way needs to be to have the tools in place to make sure that:
- A “misunderstanding” like this can never happen again, by having an extremely visible notification about every time chest contents change and a way to check exactly what the drops are at any given time.
- Any “misunderstanding” (ie, a contradiction in any official source such as forum news/in game event news, etc) and actual drop rates contradict has very unequivical evidence of what it was supposed to be so no weaseling can happen of “well actually this was intended and nothing we said before explicitly contradicts we wouldn’t make this change, and not tell anybody”. Given the circumstances of “Weavergate” even if the drop tool in game could unequivocally state that weaver was not in chests, it is still a problem that there is years of precedence of everything functioning one way, all official help articles gave no indication there would be a change, and there was. However, if the players could have at least done their due diligence and seen before they spent keys that weaver wasn’t there, such a situation would be far more amenable to a compromise. That and far less people would have been affected because the information would have spread faster because of it being in game.
Again, the mistake isn’t that it happened, its failing to correct the circumstances that caused it. Here we are, years later, and players still can’t check what is and isn’t in chests at any given time and we can no longer even tell the next and last time contents were changed, and most resources are worded just vaguely enough to not give any relevant information. Intentionally keeping people ignorant of drops and then blaming them for being ignorant as “it was working as intended all along” (and anyone on this forums having seen the last few years of bug reports at least knows how much weight those words carry) just simply won’t cut it here. This, or something like this, will happen again, so long as the circumstances for it remain.