The Flesh Horror Battlecrasher

[Fleg]

They won’t disclose droprate because then it can be proved not working as intended.

[Jonathan]

@Neight

Sure, there will still be a couple of people who will not get the math

Tbh, I really think the devs should appreciate just how good other players are at explaining things for their peers. It’s something we already do in spades, both within guilds and in general chat spaces – largely due to a lack of obvious info. This collaborative infrastructure is already set up, albeit probably in decline – so I say use it. Word gets around, for better or worse.

[ALP]

Got “The Devil” on 15th and 33th fights.

[ANGI]

2 devils today in the first few minutes, then nothing.
it is a hard cap devs, though you won’t ever admit it.

[Fourdottwoone]

@Kafka

This is a brand new mechanic/feature/event type we’re trying, so as with all new mechanics we will review how the event went before we go ahead and use this sort of mechanic in future.

Just wondering, there wouldn’t happen to be another Gnome-a-Palooza nerf incoming, by applying this sort of mechanic to verse gnomes or vault keys?

[Grundulum]

I was reading just the opposite: that battlecrashers in the future might have a chance to drop Tarot cards directly, rather than gating them behind Vault Keys.

I wonder three things: (1) how many weeks of play it takes a theoretical F2P player to earn 8 Orbs of Power via collecting Chaos Orbs, (2) how many Vault Keys it takes to pull a given Tarot card, and (3) the average number of Vault Keys earned by the top 1% of players during a Vault event cycle (from start of one event to the start of the next event).

I suspect right now the odds associated with (2) are so terribly low that it is faster to earn Zuul’Goth than it is to get a Tarot card and unlock any of the other mythic troops.

[Fourdottwoone]

@Grundulum

I was reading just the opposite: that battlecrashers in the future might have a chance to drop Tarot cards directly, rather than gating them behind Vault Keys.

That would indeed be amazing. Unfortunately, I currently can’t even remotely convince myself this might possibly happen, not without some heavy monetization attached.

@Grundulum

I wonder three things: (1) how many weeks of play it takes a theoretical F2P player to earn 8 Orbs of Power via collecting Chaos Orbs, (2) how many Vault Keys it takes to pull a given Tarot card, and (3) the average number of Vault Keys earned by the top 1% of players during a Vault event cycle (from start of one event to the start of the next event).

I suspect right now the odds associated with (2) are so terribly low that it is faster to earn Zuul’Goth than it is to get a Tarot card and unlock any of the other mythic troops.

I wonder how many people at Infinity Plus Two would understand the math involved. I suspect it’s zero, given a recent community driven hard-cap analysis and the speed at which at which they have apparently fled to avoid coming in contact with it. Yes, I know, overly pessimistic outlook and such. However, one thing this game has taught me well is to brace myself for negative impact, it’s almost always going to be worse than expected.

[Qoob]

@Grundulum

I wonder three things: (1) how many weeks of play it takes a theoretical F2P player to earn 8 Orbs of Power via collecting Chaos Orbs, (2) how many Vault Keys it takes to pull a given Tarot card, and (3) the average number of Vault Keys earned by the top 1% of players during a Vault event cycle (from start of one event to the start of the next event).

(1): One vault weekend, given enough playtime; I think around six to twelve months otherwise? GaP sped this up immensely.
(2): Current numbers look like about 1 in 200.
(3): 1000+.

[Shoombry]

Was this fixed on Steam? I got flesh horrors with Devil drops pretty quickly on Monday and Tuesday, but nothing since. Today I’ve played several hours and the only battlecrashers I’ve had are normal gnomes and the Soulkeeper (or whatever the other one is called).

I don’t recall having seen an update pushed for this recently, and verifying my game files didn’t update anything.

/Update: FINALLY got a Flesh Horror. It only took PvP from 15 to 6 plus 6-7 complete explore loops to have my first show up since Tuesday. At least it is there.

[Snooj]

@Grundulum

I wonder three things: (1) how many weeks of play it takes a theoretical F2P player to earn 8 Orbs of Power via collecting Chaos Orbs, (2) how many Vault Keys it takes to pull a given Tarot card, and (3) the average number of Vault Keys earned by the top 1% of players during a Vault event cycle (from start of one event to the start of the next event).

I think it took @blindnighto, a F2P player, 10 months. …It took me about the same and I paid.

Before GAPs, it would have taken an absurd amount of $$$ to speed up power orb farming.

[Aragorn1]

It took me several hours to get a single Flesh Battle crasher today. It was the first I had seen since Monday when I got two. So none Tuesday like everyone, none yesterday and 1 today. I saw about 10 of the soul Battle crashers while doing PVP and Explore.

[ANGI]

today again:
2 devils really early on, then nothing.
yes, yes i know it’s not a hard cap devs, really isn’t. you are talking BS devs.

[Fourdottwoone]

@Aragorn1

It took me several hours to get a single Flesh Battle crasher today.

Did you leave your game open over daily reset, possibly in the pvp/explore mode entry screen? The safest way to ensure you’ll get your limited Flesh Horror battles is to restart your game client.

[Aragorn1]

That’s a good thought but I’m on Console and turn it off every time I’m finished playing

[mitamata]

It’s close enough to the end of the event for me, I have all the Devils I care about, so I want to comment on the battlecrashers part of the event. I haven’t ready others’ feedback, sorry if this is a repeat.

@Kafka

At the end of the event we’d be glad to hear how you felt about it, was it fun? Did it feel good? Did you want more rewards (I mean judging by the comments I’ve seen that’s a yes), if you have insights into why the amount you received didn’t feel like enough we’d love to know why you feel that way, do you like battlecrashers in general? What makes a good/bad battlecrasher event for you?

I think the event, as designed, was good. And the rewards were good. It gave us a card (and enough copies to ascend and complete collection) that would otherwise be either paywalled or near impossible to get through the Vault, which I was very happy to see, I thought that was quite generous. And the weapon it can craft is very nice

The event, as presented to us, was less great. Bugs aside, the way the communication was handled felt duplicitous. It felt like you were trying to trick us into playing more in the hopes of getting something we were unlikely to get. I don’t think you lied in the event description, but you were not being fully transparent.

@Kafka

The Devil is a Legendary Troop so we obviously can’t give a copy guaranteed for every battle, so if you didn’t like how this event ran but you like the concept of the event, then what sort of compromise would you make? ie. have a higher battlecrasher appearance rate but use a common Troop instead for the reward? Actually set a cap on number of battlecrashers you can see in one day? If so, how is that better than having the chance to find more if you play more but at a lesser chance? (ie, this current way is potentially rewarding people for playing more than other more casual players, while still allowing our casual players to participate and earn the reward too, but also stops the most hardcore players from getting 500 copies of a special legendary Troop that will normally only be available from the Vault).

Side point: there is no difference between 9 copies of The Devil and 500 copies. 9 copies is enough to ascend to mythic and have 3 extra copies to have a total of 4 The Devil at mythic rarity. Anything after that is nearly completely useless, especially to the kind of player who plays enough to have been able to collect the 500 copies.

But yes, if it allowed for clearer communication and better set expectations, then I would add that cap.

For me, the only issue (bugs aside) was the lack of transparency. If you had said: “We balanced the battlecrasher so that everyone will be able to get 2 of The Devil per day without too much effort. Some might get lucky and get more than 2.” … that would have been great. I’m sure some would have complained “why only 2?”, but you can’t please everyone and I think most would think “14 legendary cards!? Niiice!”

But if that’s an issue and you can disclose that for whatever reason, then I would have preferred to see “There is a cap of 2 The Devil drops per day”.

I say this because at projected 14 copies of The Devil for the event, that is more than any player needs. If it was a different kind of resource (something we needed more of, like writs or diamonds), then just clearly setting expectations would be my preferred way to go.

One last point from me: I wish you would do a better job communicating things in game. I have a guild where most members don’t visit forums or use Discord, they had no idea what was going on with the battlecrashers. I relayed all the information I found, but there are many more players like that out there that had NO idea because they didn’t have anyone to tell them. You have the global mail option, use it even if it’s just to say “there’s an issue, we’re working on it, more details to come”. The compensation after is nice, but up until then, most players were in the dark.

[ctenn2ls]

Mita, I think you hit on a very good suggestion in making more use of the Mail feature for these kinds of communications. There’s your in-game solution for expressing gameplay rules, scoring, caveats, abnormalities, etc. in a way which reaches the entire playerbase within the actual game platform that doesn’t interfere with formatting/size/space design limitations. It can and should be used for much more than the occasional me culpa, but as a direct line of communication with ALL players.

I get that you might run into issues communicating in different languages, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good in this case. It would be much better for more people to get that information in-game via the Mail feature than without.

[Cooookie]

I remember this

A sad sad day.

[ANGI]

what can i say: only 2 devils today!
i know there’s no hard cap

[Maisie]

@Kafka

At the end of the event we’d be glad to hear how you felt about it, was it fun? Did it feel good? Did you want more rewards (I mean judging by the comments I’ve seen that’s a yes), if you have insights into why the amount you received didn’t feel like enough we’d love to know why you feel that way, do you like battlecrashers in general? What makes a good/bad battlecrasher event for you?

As we’re near the finish then:

• Yes, this was a fun event with an interesting new mechanic: battlecrashers → troops → craftable recipe. More like these!

• Mostly feelgood but a little soured by (a) poor communication on the Flesh Horror encounter rate and (b) the event being broken for almost 24 hours on Tuesday. In other grindy events – for example Arena weekend – the gap to the next reward is transparent. In this one the “decreasing chance” was opaque, and in practice was so steep that pretty much all players here never encountered more than two per day. Grinding blind is no fun and the cheery “some players [may] possibly find 3 or more without too much effort” in your update felt like gaslighting: that was clearly not the experience that players reporting here had.

• The amount of rewards was actually fine! Fairly easy to get 2 Flesh Horror encounters per day without too much grinding and that provided easily enough copies of The Devil to (a) craft the weapon and (b) ascend it to Mythic. (Although that said, I do agree with the pushback on “stop hardcore players from getting 500 copies”: as others have noted, what exactly is the problem with that? the incremental value of a copy past the “4 copies at Mythic” is very small.) Again, it was the communication on how many rewards were (practically) achievable that was the problem.

• In general: love battlecrasher events. It’s a little thrill seeing a crasher come in – the same thrill that made Gnome-a-Palooza’s 4x gnome crashers fun. Would like more battlecrasher events, would like more varied battlecrasher rewards. (Souls are the least useful reward for end-gamers but much more useful for early-gamers so IDK.) Totally down with the mechanic of rare battlecrashers dropping rare items; just be clear about the chances of encountering them.

@Kafka

The Devil is a Legendary Troop so we obviously can’t give a copy guaranteed for every battle, so if you didn’t like how this event ran but you like the concept of the event, then what sort of compromise would you make? ie. have a higher battlecrasher appearance rate but use a common Troop instead for the reward? Actually set a cap on number of battlecrashers you can see in one day? If so, how is that better than having the chance to find more if you play more but at a lesser chance?

• Don’t drop a common troop, please; that’d be useless to endgamers who are already swimming in hundreds of copies of common troops. Totally OK to have rare battlecrashers dropping rare troops.

• You keep saying there wasn’t a cap, but most/all players here did experience the incredibly steep drop rate decline as a practical cap of 2. Yes, it would be nice to reward players who play more with more rewards; that clearly did not happen here despite the news post and your update dangling the chance of it.

• How to improve this – and I do think this needs improvement, not “compromise”? Twofold.
  Firstly, make the decline a little less steep so there’s more of a practical chance for players to encounter 3 or even 4 per day. Imagine how differently this would have gone if there were occasional excited posts here announcing “just got my 3rd Devil”: people would be motivated to play more, rather than demotivated to play any further than the 2nd encounter. Secondly, clearly communicate the rate so that players know what the returns from further play would be. For example: “the chance of encountering a Flesh Horror is halved after each one defeated”.

In summary: a good event marred by a badly-constructed drop rate paired with poor communication.

[sylverscale]

@Maisie

Don’t drop a common troop, please; that’d be useless to endgamers who are already swimming in hundreds of copies of common troops.

The idea probably was new common troops that can be obtained only from the battle crasher in time to finish the event.

But I agree, I prefer otherwise hard to obtain troops over some we’ll be flooded with later on.